The entire family has a cold. It’s been ages since we had a bug in the house, so we’re all swooning around as if we’ve contracted the bubonic plague. I’m the worst of the bunch — I’m not sure I’m the sickest, but I’m certainly acting like it!

Yesterday morning I woke up completely unable to talk. My throat was on fire and a rotten chest cough was making it worse by the minute. I could barely whisper, and even that hurt.

Pretty quickly I figured out that this really put a damper on my ability to yell.

I’m quite a yeller, usually. I’m always hollering at the kids to put their stuff away, or come and eat, or LEAVE YOUR SISTER ALONE, or to pay attention to their homework. My mom was a yeller, and between her and my four sisters, my childhood household had a constant noise level of 140 decibels. The first time I ever took Sir Monkeypants home with me — he grew up in a polite, calm, fairly quiet house — he was overwhelmed at the noise, while I hardly noticed. Having six conversations going on at once over the dinner table, while my mom yelled overtop of everyone to be heard as she passed out the food, was absolutely normal.

This month’s issue of Today’s Parent has an article on yelling, and how it is bad, and how you should try to stop it. Sir Monkeypants has left this article open in strategic locations throughout the house all month long — I think he is trying to tell me something. I finally got around to reading the article yesterday and it doesn’t seem to really fit my pattern, though. It was all about yelling in anger — those blow-ups that come when your kids have pushed you too far, and thus you turn into Scary Yelly Mommy. I definitely have moments like that, but the article’s advice on how to diffuse your anger doesn’t seem to really apply to my need to yell at the kids that I’M UPSTAIRS IF YOU WANT TO TALK TO ME.

My problem isn’t anger yelling, per se, it’s more a general excess of communication. At top volume.

Anyway, the loss of my voice did seem to make for a quieter day (those three hours of TV we watched while we all snoozed on the couch didn’t hurt, either). I probably should try to dial it back some, in general. I don’t really think of my yelling as a problem — probably due to the house I grew up in — but I can see that I’m raising another generation of yellers.

The neighbours would probably appreciate it if we simmered down a bit, there.

I’d love to say I’m going to turn over a new leaf but seriously, it is quite unlikely. I’m a loud person.

But once my voicebox heals…I might just try to keep it down around 100 decibels. As a stretch goal.

Little Miss Sunshine is in a cute phase right now where she repeats everything you say.

At TOP VOLUME, of course, because the Little Miss makes up for her small stature by being the loudest person in our family.

A typical morning conversation around here goes like this:

Gal Smiley: Where did the Captain go?

Little Miss: CAPTAIN? GO?

Sir Monkeypants: He’s watching TV.

Little Miss: TEE? VEE?

Gal Smiley: What is he watching?

Little Miss: HE? WAA-HING?

Sir Monkeypants: Electric Company. I like to beatbox!

Little Miss: BWEAT? BOX?

Gal Smiley: Hey, Captain, do you want to come and play Twister?

Little Miss: TWEESTER?

Captain: Sure, let’s go.

Little Miss: LET’S! GO!

And they’re off.

If I were the last woman alive in a post-apocalyptic world, this street would be a lot quieter.

Of course, my lawn would get really overgrown and weedy. Who would mow it? That’d be a problem.

What’s that kid got? A freezie? Next time I’m putting a loonie in my shoe so I can stop for a freezie when I pass the corner store.

Why is it that the kids at the skate park are almost never skating? They’ll be sorry they wasted all that skating time when the apocalypse comes.

Hey, I passed that couple out walking last time, too! We’re total exercise buddies! Hi!

It’s been years since I saw an Orange Crush. Do they still make Orange Crush?

Thinking of which, it’s been ages since I listened to that R.E.M. album we have. But if I put it on tomorrow, I’ll just have to deal with a lot of questions about who Kenneth is, and what IS the frequency, anyway. Best to stick to High School Musical 2.

As soon as the apocalypse gets here, I’m going to break into the Quickie and take all the freezies I want. Ha!

Then I’m going to find the last remaining goat on earth to keep the lawn under control.

Hey look, I’m home!

Someone get me an iPod. Seriously.

Last night we gave Captain Jelly Belly an at-home allergy test.

(I really hope our allergist doesn’t read this blog — I’ll be in for one hell of a stern lecture.)

We’ve kind of lost faith in the whole allergy testing business. After fighting with our allergist for two years over the Captain’s milk allergy (we said he had one, prick testing said different), we finally got a positive skin test when we convinced our allergist to do the test with real, actual milk, instead of the purified milk protein syrum.

The Captain had been sick on and off for a long time before that diagnosis. For years we’d been searching for the one “magic bullet,” the one food that would be the answer to all our questions. If only we took him off milk, or soy, or wheat, or whatever that one thing was that was making him sick, he’d be magically all better and healthy.

We really thought we had found our answer with milk (he is also allergic to eggs and peanuts). But sometimes he’d still get hives or rashes from other foods, like soy milk, even though he (surprise!) does not test positive to soy in the skin test. All along we have suspected that there is a magic “something” in milk that he is allergic to — not the protein itself, but some sort of additive. Is it a colourant? A medicine that they feed to the cows? The Vitamin D that they add? Again, we were back to searching for that one thing that would solve everything.

This whole testing with actual milk opened our eyes to a new world. Although it is important to know what the Captain is actually allergic to, for future use, right now what we want to know is what foods are safe for him. He only drinks unfortified rice milk, because we know it is safe — and as a result, has no good sources of calcium or vitamin D in his diet. We make him take a calcium supplement, which he hates; he’s always asking if he can drink the fortified stuff or try soy milk, but every time we do try something like that, he seems to react.

Is it a real reaction, cross contamination from something else, or just the Captain having a wonky day? Who knew.

And now…we know. We think.

We took several brands and kinds of milks and popped them all open — rice milk, fortified rice milk, soy milk in two different brands, oat milk, and real cow’s milk. We washed the Captain’s arm well and sterilized six straight pins with alcohol. Then we put one drop of each kind of milk on his arm, just like at the allergist (I used a new, clean drinking straw for each kind to put the drop on), and gave each drop a little scratch with its own pin.

Then we waited ten minutes.

I swear, when I do decide to go back to work I should just open my own allergy business!

Anyway, he got hives in two places: cow’s milk, and one of the soy milks. But not the other soy milk. CURIOUS.

The one soy milk he reacted to contains something called carrageenan, a thickening agent used in almost all milk products and in many soy products, made from seaweed. It could be the magic bullet we’ve been looking for; certainly, like almost any food in the world, if you Google “carrageenan allergy” you’ll find all kinds of people who claim to be allergic. Unfortunately, it seems like there are lots of ways for carrageenan to sneak into foods without appearing on the label, and it’s very hard to test for.

OF COURSE.

But the real positive here is, there was no reaction to the fortified rice milk or the oat milk…so now we have some new options! Options with calcium! Options with Vitamin D!

We’re excited and happy. The Captain is overjoyed at getting to skip his calcium supplement his morning. YAY for home allergy testing, I say.

I woke up this morning — completely hung over after getting up at midnight to register the kids for swim lessons — and realized we only have three weeks left until school starts. That’s just crazy! I feel like this summer has flown by. Between bad weather, planning for Blog Out Loud, and the shortened summer due to the early start this year, we’ve accomplished next to nothing that we intended to do this year. Almost no house projects, almost no day trips. I need to get it together, or we’re going to miss out on the beach, the park, and the pool altogether.

And, I really need to get on that back to school shopping, too. This year we have a Grade 1 student in the house (I can’t talk about it too much or I’ll cry) and we have a shockingly big shopping list to attend to. I feel really new to this school thing, in that I kind of thought that the school was supposed to provide things like notebooks, pencils, and scissors. Apparently not, though. I keep telling myself that the school will take all our supplies and our $20 and then use the actual school budget for fun things like field trips and science kits. They will, right?

Although I welcome the return of the school routine — I like getting into a groove where we do the same thing every day — Sir Monkeypants and I are already feeling a lot of pressure from the fall schedule. Things started with the swim lessons. Last year we did swim lessons on Saturday mornings, and gymnastics on Sunday mornings, and those were our weekly extra curricular activities. This year, we can’t get all three kids in at the same time on the weekend, so we’ve signed up for Thursday evening swim classes, gymnastics on Sundays. Sir Monkeypants has swimming on Tuesdays and I’m booking Mondays and Wednesdays as my own workout nights — that is, unless we decide to sign up Gal Smiley for piano lessons, which she has been begging for, which would have to squeeze into a weeknight somewhere.

We also wanted to do skating lessons, like last year, but the only time we can fit those in is on Wednesdays at 4:30. Sir Monkeypants thought it would be fun to take a Tae Kwon Do class with the Captain, and we could maybe do that Friday evening or Saturday morning.

Plus, we’ll have homework, and we’re still trying to teach the Captain to ride his bike, and we’d like to do something with the Little Miss. and OH MY GOD, my head is going to explode.

It’s just TOO MUCH.

In the end, we decided to commit to swimming and gymnastics only, and to leave the rest of it to sort itself out when we figure out what we can handle, and what we can afford.

But we’ve glimpsed here a small sliver of our future lives, and it’s nutty. Right now, the kids do the activies we pick out for them, and they’re all doing the same thing at the same time. What happens when they begin to voice their own preferences? When they are all doing something different every day of the week? We want our kids to be able to try things they are interested in. But how much is too much? What is the right balance?

Nevermind the managing of the impossible schedule and the cost of all these programs. How will we manage to just find some family time? When will the kids just play? When will Sir Monkeypants and I have time together?

It just seems overwhelming. Anyone out there with older kids who has some tips, let me know. How do you make it all happen?

After my grandmother died, my mother said something that got me thinking. She said, “I sometimes think to myself, ‘Oh, I have to ask Mom that,’ and I pick up the phone and half dial her number before I remember she’s gone.”

At the funeral last week, my aunt (by marriage) said something similar, She said that my Nana had been a mother to her at a time when she’d needed it the most — when my aunt was learning to be a mother herself. She talked about how much she’d valued my Nana’s advice.

I’ve been thinking about these things because it really highlighted for me the generation gap that is forming between me and my own mother. Although I love her and I love to chat with her on the phone about work or the kids or current events, one thing I don’t turn to her for is advice.

Instead, when I have a question, I ask the internet.

The internet has provided me with an endless, massive peer group and for some reason, I always consider the opinions or personal experiences of people who have access to a computer to carry more weight than those of my own mother. My ideas on parenting and on how children should be raised come mainly from blogs, Babycenter, or websites of parenting magazines.

Granted, my mom has some outdated ideas about motherhood. She’s always preaching that babies should be given a spoonful of rice cereal before bed to help them sleep — at the age of three weeks old. She considers the fact that we haven’t even begun to toilet train Little Miss Sunshine to be a crisis on par with the Middle East. And above all else, she’s really grossed out by breastfeeding — she was horrified when I tried it, and when I was still nursing my babies after six TOTALLY GROSS weeks, she pretty much brought a constant refrain of, “Are you going to be nursing those children through TO UNIVERSITY?”

So we don’t exactly see eye-to-eye, and I’m sure it’s been a disappointment to my mom that she sometimes tries to tell me about things that worked for her, and then I completely ignore her opinion in favour of what I’ve read on the internet.

My thoughts on most matters are shaped by the internet. I’m learning to cook from foodie blogs. I’m planning our trip to Disney by reading the Mom Advice section of their website — not by calling my own mom, who has been there at least three times. I’m deciding how to discipline our kids by reading books about child-rearing; I’m making decisions on their diets and their health by searching the web.

I’m happy with our decisions, too. I feel informed, like I’ve done my research and made the best possible choices. I feel independent, like I’ve got this parenting/running a household thing DOWN, and I can take on anything (as long as my internet connection remains up).

It’s sad, though, that my mom and I don’t have the same mentor/student relationship that, I think, a lot of mother-daughter relationships have taken in the past. There’s just so much information out there now, so many different opinions, that my mother’s voice is just one more in the crowd.

Maybe if she had a blog, I’d listen more.

I’m not sure I’m going to turn over a new leaf here and start turning to my mom for advice on all subjects. But I do think I need to let her in a little bit more…call her a little more often…ask her for her opinion before moving ahead. It’ll bring us one step closer, even though we live far apart.

On the ride to Toronto:

Sir Monkeypants: We’ll be there soon.

Gal Smiley: That is so uncorrect.

Sir Monkeypants: That’s incorrect.

Captain Jelly Belly, whispering to his sister: That means uncorrect.

Oy vey, I have so much to blog about, yet so little time. Guess that’s summer for you.

Tomorrow morning we are leaving on a five-day trip to southern Ontario to visit with my youngest sister, LittleSis, and her family. While there I’ll be going to my grandmother’s memorial service — not so fun, but it will bring some closure and it will be good to see my cousins. We’ll also be doing some fun stuff — hitting the Toronto Zoo and the beach for sure, and we hope to visit the Science Centre as well.

So as usual, I’ll be spending all day today doing the Packing Dance, a routine that I’m very familiar with now but still takes hours and hours and makes me into Crazy Mommy.

Heavens! I just realized I’ll be in Toronto for SYTYCD Wednesday and Thursday! LittleSis BETTER watch Dance Show or there is going to be a TV rumble.

Anyway, we’ll be back Sunday night with original and fun blogging content. I promise!