We were away over the holidays in Southern Ontario, visiting the grandparents. While we were away, we got a massive dumping of snow up here – two big storms that dropped I don’t know, at least 30 centimeters in our driveway.

Aside: The van was JAM PACKED with stuff, so I was trying to keep the footwear down to just one choice, and when we were leaving I was waffling between the Frankenboots, which are the key to my survival of Ottawa winters, or my cute little ankle boots that I usually only wear on snow-free days in November and April. Sir Monkeypants said, “We’re going to Toronto, it’s not like here. You do realize that my sister and her husband do not even OWN boots, they just wear shoes all winter long, don’t you?”

Plus, my mother was super keen to take the kids sledding while we were visiting, but it continued to be completely green and sunny and warm in Cambridge, so although she kept saying, “We’re supposed to get snow tomorrow!” cheerfully for like, the 10 days straight leading up to Christmas, it seemed pretty certain that there would be no snow there, ever.

So of course I went with the ankle boots, and of course there was a freakish, enormous dumping of snow in both Cambridge and Toronto, and my feet froze and all my socks were wet and let’s not even TALK about the attempt at sledding in substandard boots, which brought new meaning to the word BITCHFACE.

Anyway! It snowed a lot over the holidays, is what I’m saying.

So we’re driving back home, after a lovely lunch with my littlest sister and her wee tiny new baby, and it’s getting dark, and late. The kids are tired and cranky, Sir Monkeypants’ back is aching from hour after hour of sitting in the driver’s seat, and we start to fret about what state the driveway will be in when we get home. At the least, it’s sure to have a foot of snow in it, with a nice icy wall of snowplow droppings along the bottom.

We figured we’d never be able to get the van in, but we couldn’t leave it out on the street with all the stuff in it and the possibility of more snowplow action, so we tried really hard to psyche ourselves up for the massive shoveling job that awaited us at home. I was resigned to the idea of climbing over snowbanks and wading through knee-deep snow in my friggin’ ANKLE BOOTS, with one sleepy kid in each arm.

And then, pulling into our street…around the bend…there’s our house…THE HEAVENS OPENED UP AND THE ANGELS SANG.

Someone had cleared out our driveway for us! HUGEST. FAVOUR. EVER.

I still can’t believe how awesome that was. I almost cried from relief, and I think I saw Sir Monkeypants wiping a tear away too. We even passed others on our street that were still trying to dig out, and it looked awful, heavy and chunky and icy, and I felt guilty enough about having ours cleared for us that I could have gone help them out, except that we were so exhausted I was barely able to do more than crawl inside, throw the kids in bed, then sink into a coma on the couch 10 minutes later.

Turns out it was our backyard neighbours who cleared it – King and Queen Charming, and their daughter Princess Charming, who is in Gal Smiley’s class. They walked around the corner with their snowblower, and then when the other neighbours around saw them, everyone who was outside at the time came over to help break up the snowplow bits at the bottom, and to help shovel the walkway. THEY SHOVELED THE WALKWAY.

December was kind of a hard month, in terms of faith in humanity and wondering what the HELL was up with the world. But this one thing, this enormous kindness, has turned things around for me, given me real tender feelings towards the human race and the Earth in general and man, I just want to hug everyone and hand out free pie.

It’s going to be a great year.

My book from Blurb arrived!

It’s lovely. The paper is gorgeous and the printing is gorgeous and it’s exactly the way I laid it all out.

However, I have learned a very valuable lesson about book publishing, and that is that you should PROOFREAD. Twice. No, three times. Make that four.

I spent a lot of time checking and re-checking the layout, but I didn’t spend hardly any time reading the text. DUMB. There are at least, I would guesstimate, 30 typos in the book. GAH. Some of them are minor mispellings, but in two cases, a blog post title is missing; in several cases, Sir Monkeypants’ name is missing from the middle of sentence because when I ported my old posts over from LiveJournal, the custom code I used to use to link to his username didn’t show up in WordPress. In other cases I missed some font formatting.

On the plus side, I do find it a lot easier to edit the book on paper than on the computer. After it arrived and I started finding typos, I went back to fix up my Blurb file and found several problems, but I can find even more, and faster, just by flipping through the paper copy.

So you can think of it as a very expensive rough draft, I guess.

I’m not going to rush out to reprint because it’s not a trifling expense, but I think I will reprint it someday. After I’ve proofread it at least 10 more times. GAH.

The books are still awesome, though. I love seeing them, and the best part is how much the kids are loving them – Gal Smiley in particular loves reading the old stories about herself and her siblings.

Kind of wish I’d used fewer swear words now, though. DOH.

The Little Miss is a verbal child, to say the least. By that I mean, if she is thinking something, it comes out her mouth. She must talk things through in order to process them. Brain and voice are connected in a continuous loop, indivisible.

So, I’m sure you can guess, keeping Christmas gift secrets is a bit of a challenge for her.

Sir Monkeypants has got me something for Christmas that he’s excited about. He’s been dancing around here for a week or two, proclaiming his major score. The item in question arrived in the mail a few days ago and he made the mistake, in his excitement, of showing the kids.

Now the poor Little Miss is in a terrible spot.

We spend hours alone together every day. I pick her up from school, and then it’s just the two of us for four hours until we get the big kids. Since it’s December, we’ve been avoiding the outside world; we come home and do crafts or baking or read books together. It’s a lot of time for her to try to have to short circuit that brain-to-mouth link she’s got going on.

The first day or two, she was all, “We have a present for you but I’m not allowed to talk about it so don’t ask me about it, okay?” This, at least once or twice an hour.

Then it was, “There is a box in Daddy’s bottom drawer and it’s a present for you so you should NOT go look at it, okay?” at least twice a day, poor little thing.

Then, out of the blue while colouring, “You know how you like pie? And sometimes you don’t have enough pie servers? And you need more? Is that true?” So I smiled and gave her a hug and told her it was indeed true.

And now we’re at, “Can I just TELL YOU what it is, and you won’t tell Daddy I told you?” And when I said no, she said, “How about just one part of it?” and then I said no, and she suggested, “Maybe I could give you some hints, like I could say pie and then you could guess it and I would nod yes?” and still I said no, and tried to distract her with a book.

But she’s clearly suffering. It is very, very hard for her to be thinking about something and not saying it out loud.

Yesterday I got out the things I had bought for the kids to give to their father and I was going to have them wrap them. But then I thought of the torture it would be for the Little Miss – still 11 whole days to go! – so I have decided to wait.

Possibly until the morning of the 25th.

Poor little bear.

When the Captain was little, he liked to watch sweet little toddler TV shows, like Peep And The Big Wide World and Thomas The Tank Engine. I can still sing the theme songs to both, stone cold. The Peep theme song in particular is a modern classic, and it saddened me when he stopped wanting to sing it all around the house:

When Gal Smiley got to TV watching age, the two of them got into Hi-5, a show which I have encyclopediatic knowledge of. I can sing every song, I can quote every episode, and most importantly, I can discuss the girls’ wardrobe for HOURS. I still care way, way too much when I see a cast member on some other show now. I saw Karla on an episode of Castle a few weeks back. She played an assistant who had to knock on a door to a change room, open it, then scream in horror upon discovering a body. That was her entire part, and I squealed as if they’d scored a cameo by Lady Gaga. I am humiliated, slightly.

As an aside, their Christmas album is seriously one of the best, very poppy and cute and crowd pleasing for kids and adults alike, featuring a nice mix of classics and original songs that are destined to become classics. It’s always the first out of the box when we break out the Christmas tunes.

By the time the Captain turned 6, he started making noise about watching some “older kid” shows, but I wouldn’t have it. Some of his friends were watching things like Spongebob and The Clone Wars, but I didn’t think they were appropriate for the girls so I kept them safely glued to Treehouse and Disney Family and PBS Kids.

Then we went to Disney in 2010, when the Captain was nearly 7 and Gal Smiley was 5 1/2. The only channel we got that showed kids’ programming had The Suite Life of Zack and Cody on a 24 hour continuous commercial-free loop, so that’s what they watched while the Little Miss was sleeping, and BAM, we were a big kid show house. When we got home we DVR’ed the entire Zack and Cody oeuvre and watched every episode 15 times apiece, and from there slippery sloped it down to Good Luck Charlie and Phineas and Ferb, and now we’re on to Lego Ninjago and of course, The Clone Wars.

So all this is to say that poor Little Miss Sunshine, who was just 2 1/2 at the time of the Disney trip, never really got a chance to discover preschoooler type shows. Instead of brightly coloured, slow moving shows with a vague educational component, she’s been raised on a steady diet of tween sitcoms featuring commercials for the BEST BARBIE EVER MOMMY I HAVE TO HAVE THAT RIGHT NOW.

So! Last week I was compulsively searching the TV listings for Christmas specials, because I seem to miss the big favourites every year, so now I check every day to see what’s on. And on a whim I decided to record Dora Saves The Snow Princess, because I thought the Little Miss would like it.

And DOES SHE.

She is INTO Dora. She obeys Dora’s every command. Dora is like a little Latina drill seargent/cult leader and the Little Miss is her willing recruit. When Dora says jump, she jumps. When Dora says to call for the Snowflake Fairy, she calls. When Dora asks her what was her favourite part, she answers with intensity and passion.

She’s a true believer, too. She’s watched it three times now, and every time she seems to honestly believe that if she doesn’t yell “Backpack!” just a little louder, then Backpack won’t open. When Dora achieves success, she beams. I’m starting to wonder if she actually understands how a TV works.

And then! At the end, the Snow Princess offers up a medal of thanks to the key players, and holds one out “for you.” So the Little Miss solemnly bows her head, then puts on one of Sir Monkeypants’ old 10K medals, and then runs to show me that she got a medal for helping Dora. Even more hilariously – the last time she watched it, Gal Smiley joined her, and when Gal Smiley made to bow her head at medal-receiving time, the Little Miss freaked out because Gal Smiley had not helped AT ALL, she had not even JUMPED when Dora said JUMP, and the Little Miss had done ALL THE WORK, and thus the medal was HERS, and Gal Smiley should not be making motions to take HER medal, NO SIREE.

And I was a super mom because I totally kept a straight face while comforting her and assuring her that she would be getting the medal for all her hard work (totally laughing as I type this, though, sorry baby!).

My new little Dora follower has me wondering how much she really gets out of the shows the older two watch. I’m thinking we will have to have a few more episodes of Dora on the PVR, maybe sprinkle in some Wonder Pets and Little Einsteins, too. She’s still my baby!

Andrea over at the fishbowl is hosting a 12 Pictures for 12/12/12 blog carnival today. I’ll be joining in (if I remember, GAH) by taking one photo each hour for 12 hours today. I’ll update this post throughout the day (in fits and starts). It’s going to be an interesting day for us because the kids are here all day – there’s strike action by Ontario’s teachers in our board today, so no school. I’ll have my three, plus MyFriendJen’s two – it’s going to be a busy house.

7:45 a.m.
Advent Calendar activity for today. You’re going to be seeing a lot of that tablecloth.

8:45 a.m.
Kids watching Lego Ninjago while I enjoy a coffee and this week’s Entertainment Weekly.

9:45 a.m.
Working on books as today’s advent activity – this is the Little Miss’ version of The Island of Misfit Toys, part of her book about Rudolph.

11 a.m.
A little late. I forgot – you can see why, I was busy a-pie makin’. This is a peach-blueberry pie for Sir Monkeypants’ Christmas potluck at work tomorrow. I had to use frozen fruit so it’s a little runny and I’m worried about it. Worst case, he can bring it home uneaten and I’ll eat it with a spoon.

12 noon
Making hot dogs for lunch.

1 p.m.
I spent the last half hour playing Dominion (best! game! ever!) with MyFriendJen’s son – it turned the hour just as I put the boxes away.

2 p.m.
MyFriendJen came in for a cup of tea when she arrived to pick up her kids. Bonus pic: Gal Smiley entertained us by showing us videos she’d made on her camera of herself playing on our brand new piano, which arrived yesterday.

3 p.m.
Just sitting down to watch The Polar Express with the kids – this is Frame Number One.

4 p.m.
Still watching the movie – now with popcorn.

5 p.m.
Starting dinner, with pie in the background.

6 p.m.
My dinner – photo actually by Gal Smiley, who got very interested in this project throughout the day and became my primary reminder person and self-declared model. She saw me taking the 6 o’clock photo of my dinner and asked if she could take one too, and hers was better!

7 p.m.
Gal Smiley’s beloved panda slippers – getting ready to get a snack before bed.

That’s it for today – trust me, nothing really interesting happens after this point anyway. All you’d get is black squares representing me asleep on the couch. Happy 12-12-12!

I saw The Nutcracker yesterday with Little Miss Sunshine. It has always bothered me that the Chinese Tea dance, which is my favourite tune in the whole piece, is so terribly short compared to all the other dances and scenes. Why, Tchaikovsky, why?

It’s barely a minute long. Is there any obligation by the ballets putting on The Nutcracker to stick to Tchaikovsky’s original score, note for note? Don’t they have some liberty with the “arrangement” to, say, double or triple the song so it lasts a decent amount of time?

Who’s up for picketing?

Option B as a Fairness Solution: reduce every other dance to be of similar length to the Chinese Tea dance. That would make the whole thing last about 1/2 an hour, which would have saved me an hour and a half of the Little Miss saying, “Is it over now? How much longer? It is over NOW?” Sigh.

And then, when we get home, she tells her father she loved it! Figures.

While I’m ranting, I thought I’d mention that during the drive home on the Queensway I realized how much I hate it when the middle lane of traffic is doing 100 km/hr, but the far left lane is doing 130. I just want to drive at a comfortable 110 to 115, is that too much to ask? Instead, I’m forced to weave in and out of the two lanes, always feeling intense pressure in the left lane to go faster than I really want to, or I have to slow it down and pretend I’m an old man in hat out for a Sunday drive.

This happens more often than you would think. Usually, funnily enough, when I am driving home from a ballet featuring too-short tea dances and a hundred requests for it to be over. PURE COINCIDENCE.

We’ve been working on getting Little Miss Sunshine to stay dry through the night. This is one area of parenting where I have no idea what is normal. Both of our older kids spontaneously started staying dry overnight on their own, one at a freakishly early age, the other at an age well past that of most kids. In both cases we were pretty laid back about it, figuring they’d sort it out eventually, and so they did.

We’re being more active with the Little Miss, though, because she noticed that her older brother and sister don’t have to wear hot, uncomfortable pullups to bed, and she didn’t want to either. It was really important to her, so we agreed to give it a try. Plus, with Ottawa going to every-other-week garbage pickup, it’s nice not to have a bag of smelly pullups sitting around in the summer heat. Oy.

Our strategy has been basically to wake her up for a pee break when we are going to bed. At first we were waking her around 10 p.m., and then if either of us happened to be up in the wee hours for any reason, we’d take her a second time, too. This worked about half the time, but over the past couple of weeks she’s really started to get the hang of things and it’s been going well.

So now, we’ve started trying to wake her later and later each night, to try to teach her to eventually, ONE HOPES, stay dry all night. We’re now up to waking her around 11:30 p.m., and man, I am getting too old for that shit. Sir Monkeypants and I have been rotating Pee Duty on about a two-to-one ratio – he’ll stay up two nights in a row, then I’ll take a shift, then he heroically goes back on. This has resulted in a pretty predictable pattern of Nice Mommy – Nice Mommy – Cranky Mommy, which is unfortunate, especially at this festive time of year, but we are muddling through. It’s worth it for the dream of being totally, completely diaper free.

Anyway, my real point here is that when you go to wake up the Little Miss in the middle of the night, you have to carry her to the bathroom and put her on the potty yourself, where she is guaranteed to pee immediately 100% of the time (she’s a machine!), then you have to carry her back to bed, and in the morning she’ll have no awareness of even having been up. That’s adorable, but really freaks me out is that when carrying her to the bathroom, SHE. IS. HUGE. I mean, legs dangling everywhere and she weighs a metric ton and she can wrap her arms around my neck about 10 times they’re so long. When I’m carrying her, her head is now higher than mine and she has to contort into some circus performer pose to rest her head on my shoulder (which she does, all the while not even waking up fully), and it’s like I’m carrying some sort of mutant monster baby.

She’s only five…and yet, so very grown up.

Despite the Cranky Mommy status, I think I’ll hang on to Pee Duty for a few more weeks, yet.

I’m from a town in southern Ontario called Cambridge. When I was born it was called Galt, and then the province decided to amalgamate three villages, Galt, Preston, and Hespler, into one city. As a result it has three ghost-town downtowns, and one booming big-box area that sits in the geographical middle of the three original towns.

When I was a kid, though, that big-box area was in its infancy and the downtowns were far away and full of ancient gift shops and department stores, and I thought Cambridge was the most boring place on Earth. There wasn’t a mall, we had only a two-screen twin cinema that always showed babyish movies, and the only exciting attraction in town was the roller rink. Cambridge sits at the junction of two rivers, and as a result is a very industrial town, and most people worked in factories then went home at night to watch TV, or maybe took their truck out for a joyride if they were really lucky.

I was BORED.

Gal Smiley has a Grade 3 project to write about any city or town in Canada. The Captain did this project last year and he chose Calgary, for no good reason other than the fact that no one else in the class had picked it. We learned about Calgary together and now I kind of want to go there, although it’s the last place on Earth that the Captain wants to visit, because he is worried I will make him act as our tour guide.

And so I shall, dear, and so I shall.

Anyway! Gal Smiley came home last week and mentioned this project and announced that she had picked Cambridge as her city to talk about. I snorted, because ugh, what is there to say about Cambridge?

(Rhetorical question followed by the sound of crickets.)

So we read Cambridge’s city site, and went to wikipedia. I got out my old photo album from when I was a kid, and we looked at pictures of when the Grand River flooded the whole downtown in 1974, and at shots of my old high school (I think it’s the oldest public school in Ontario), the old mill, the library. I was reminded about African Lion Safari (CLASSIC, we went every year), Reid’s Candy and Nut Shop (best on the planet), all the beautiful bridges and the farmer’s market heritage building where we spent many a Sunday morning. I learned that the old Tiger Brand factory has been converted into the University of Waterloo’s school for architecture, and that there’s a butterfly conservatory there. And of course, we talked about the coming of the Toyota plant, and how that completely changed the face of the city when I was in high school.

It’s been a blast, and the best part is that Gal Smiley is really interested in hearing all my stories. She chose Cambridge in the first place because she knew I grew up there, and Nanny still lives there. She can’t get enough of hearing about me as a kid, which is both flattering and powerfully moving, because I feel like my life and the lives of those I loved will be passed on.

So here’s what there is to say about Cambridge: it’s where I’m from. REPRESENT.

Alert, alert! This is my first ever sponsored post. Probably my last ever, too, because I am way too lazy to follow through on sponsorships in general, and I get pitched now like, 20 times a day, and that’s too much. I used to painstakingly reply to each pitch and ask to be removed from their distribution list, but no one ever removed me, so now I just delete them all without reading. Sorry, pitchers!

But! This one arrived last week, and I actually read it, and actually said yes, due to a very long story which, of course I am going to share with you below. And if you survive the telling of this Very Long Story, you can get a discount code to make your own book at Blurb!

(Or you can just skip to the end and get the code. But then you will miss out on an epic story of gripping proportions. Do you really want to do that? DO YOU?)

So! Back in the fall of 2010 I started thinking that my blog was turning into a significant body of work, in that I loved reading the old stories about the kids, and wanted to preserve that for generations to come. So I got the idea to turn some of my favourite blog posts into a book. I did a bunch of research and even tried out a few make-your-own-book websites, but eventually through my own experiments and other people’s recommendations, settled on Blurb.

Blurb has three book-making pieces of software that you download to your PC, then you make your book, then you upload your finished book and order it. You can either have them automatically generate your book for you from your blog or from a bunch of photos; or you can choose a middle level where they give you text-and-photo layout pages and you fill in the blanks; or you can go totally custom and design each page individually. I didn’t want to keep every blog post ever (um, don’t wan’t generations to come to know just how many hours I wasted thinking and writing about Dance Show), so I chose the middle level.

Then I poured hours and hours of work into making the book. I re-read every post I’d ever made and made a list of the ones to include. I went through thousands of photos from the same period and matched each post with one or two pictures of the kids from the same time period, because even though I don’t put their pictures on the blog, the idea of having a picture of the Captain making a silly face next to a post where I talk about the fact that he is silly was so serendipitous.

Then I gathered all this stuff together on my computer and started copying and pasting the blog posts into the book, then putting the photos into the layout, and it was looking good but…oh, so long.

I started to get really worried about how big the book was getting. I originally envisioned a 50 page coffee table book with the creme de la creme of posts. But the more I read the old stuff, the more I wanted to include – because even posts about mundane things like someone’s tooth falling out, or us having a rough night last night, or someone learning to skate, seemed so charming and perfect and memorable. I was happy I’d recorded our everyday life and I wanted to keep it all.

(Also: newly resolved to make more mundane posts about day-to-day life, YOU’RE WELCOME.)

So I’d already formatted and set up years 2004 through 2008 when I just abandoned the project.

GAH.

Which brings us to the current time, when Blurb wrote and offered me a discount on books for the holiday season, and I was all, HAVE I GOT A BOOK FOR YOU.

I cracked open the software and lo, the book was still there! So I brought it up to date to 2010 (because that was all the data and photos I had sitting around on hand, ready to go) and ordered the book, AND got a discount. It was FATE.

I’d love to be able to show you a few pages from the finished book, but it’s not here yet, and I can’t wait for it because (sadly) the code is only good until December 12. That is not a lot of time to pull together a blog book, but if you really buckle down, and limit it to the best of the best of your blog, and you have digital photos ready to go, then it’s quite possible. You can even use their automatic level just to get something on paper and see how it looks.

Then you can nudge your spouse and say, “Honey, don’t worry about shopping for me for Christmas, I’ve got you covered,” and then you can be all surprised to find such a personal, meaningful book written by yourself under the tree! What a thoughtful gift!

Now here’s the important part: if you make a book, and upload it, then at checkout, you need to enter the code GIFTIDEA to save 25% off the total price. You can only use this offer once, and it’s for a maximum savings of $150 (if you’re making a hardcover book with, say, around 100 pages in it, you’re looking at close to $100 for the base price when you order just one copy).

And then sit back and enjoy those memories for years to come.