I started a post this morning about how we didn’t quite manage to go two weeks into the school year before picking up a bug, when I had to stop writing to take a phone call from the school, letting me know that another soldier had fallen. I had to bundle up the Captain – on day three of being curled up on the couch with a ridiculous fever – to go over and pick up Gal Smiley. The Little Miss was actually the one who started it all – she unfairly and unjustly spent the weekend feeling rotten, only to be declared well enough to go back to school on Monday, poor dear.

While I’ve been stuck at home with sick children I’ve been doing a bit of a fall cleanout, getting rid of old art projects and sorting the Lego into its appropriate bins and tossing out – sigh – so very much stuff. I’ve put the winter blankets on the beds, packed away the sunscreen and summer hats. Yesterday I had to get out toques for the girls to wear to school, and I’m frantically ordering more pants for everyone as everyone is suddenly six inches taller. It’s the usual autumn routine; it’s only a matter of time before I’m back into crockpot soups and afgans.

I’m always sad to see summer leave and fall begin, and but this year I’m doing okay (although the morning lunch-making did reduce me to tears once already, in the 12 short days I’ve been back on the job, which does not bode well). I turned the heat on the in house and dug out my warm slippers and thought about pulling the sweaters out of the back of the closet and it all seemed just fine, just fine thanks. There’s something about September sunshine that doesn’t let you feel sad about the cooler temperatures, just happy to be alive and living in such a lovely country and fully, deeply appreciative of homemade applesauce.

Happy autumn.

Over the summer, we did a lot of reality TV watching, and I’m totally not ashamed of that (don’t look at me, I’m hideous!). We also let the kids watch a lot of it too, and as a family we really enjoyed American Ninja Warrior…

(Aside about ANW: it is not a fighting show. It’s an obstacle course show with amazing feats of agility and strength and your kids will all want to become rock climbers and get into parkour. I highly recommend it – the finale is on Monday on NBC. You will not be disappointed!)

…and also we watched The Amazing Race Canada, Dance! Show!, and Masterchef. We had extensive family discussions about all these shows, who would win, who should win, who would get eliminated this week. There was also some questionable behaviour on Masterchef in particular, so we talked a lot about how to conduct yourself in a competition and how people might react when faced with conflict, so that was good.

Now all of these have ended, or are ending this week, and poor Captain Jelly Belly in particular is feeling lost. He said to us the other day, “What are we going to watch now? Everything is over!” Don’t get me wrong, he loves a good episode of Phineas and Ferb or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but what he really loves is a competition show, where we can all follow along and pick favourites and make predictions.

Happily, football season is starting and he and Sir Monkeypants do a picks-pool thing where they predict the winners every week, and he likes that. But I thought it might be nice to find him another reality show to watch – what would you recommend for a 10-year-old? I personally am not that interested in the singing competition shows; I find Survivor to be too much of a bad model of human behaviour.

We used to watch a kids’ reality show, In Real Life – maybe it will have a fourth season. And we are no longer regular watchers of The Amazing Race, but I’d let the Captain have another go at that one. Any other suggestions?

So it’s been two full weeks now of my carefree and indulgent life as a full-time stay-at-home-mom with no actual kids to take care of, all day long. Whee! It’s been great, but also it is becoming very clear to me that I need some structure in my day.

It is just too easy to fall down the black hole of The Internets and then BAM, next thing you know it’s six hours later and all you’ve done is read blogs and look up things in Wikipedia. Meanwhile, the breakfast dishes are still on the table, I haven’t eaten anything since 7 a.m. and I still have to drive the 800 meters to the school because I haven’t left myself enough time to walk. EEP.

Here are some things I absolutely need to find time for (and yet, have not found time for, despite having six hours a day to throw around):

• Work – I have about six money-making ventures on the go, all with various deadlines
• General household upkeep – including things like dishes, laundry, groceries
• Errands – I need at least one day a week to run around and do things like the library, or natural foods store, or Christmas shopping, etc.
• Exercise – seriously, or I will be dead in two years from complete body atrophy

That’s the minimum. I’d also like to find time for:

• Baking – so my poor allergic children don’t have to go to school with nothing but applesauce and carrot sticks every day
• Personal writing projects – I have about four book ideas I have been “meaning to get to,” as well as making more blog books
• Bigger house projects – like cleaning out every kitchen cupboard, clearing at least one layer of crap out of the kids’ rooms (shhhhhh), cleaning the windows (SHUDDER – they are like little squares of horror, anyone have any tips?)
• Having in-person conversations with other adults – oh, how easy it is to just stay home and disappear into my computer all day long, but then I’m like a freakish zombie/ogre when I finally see daylight
• Volunteering – I’d love to be able to do more at the kids’ school

Progress report so far: Watched several movies, learned a bunch of stuff from Wikipedia, blogged.

FAIL.

So, yes, I feel a schedule is in order. Some work time, some play time, some chores time, in a nice balance.

I’ll probably get around to making one on…maybe Tuesday? or Wednesday? These movies aren’t going to watch themselves, you know.

So yesterday I curled up on the couch, ready to settle in for two glorious hours of Dance! Show! Finale! when, to my horror, I noticed that only one hour had been recorded. It turns out that President Obama (clearly a dance hater) gave a speech about important world crises and whatnot at 9, so the show was aired in two halves, and I missed the second half.

If this also happened to you, Fox is re-airing the finale on Friday night at 8. I’d like to say that I was all restrained and staying away from the internets and stuff, but you KNOW that 30 seconds after I discovered I did not have the ending of the show I raced over to Entertainment Weekly’s website to find out who had won. I hate surprises and I love me some spoilers, so I don’t feel like it will take away from watching the finale when I finally get around to it on Friday night.

In other news, I was making quesadillas last night and every SINGLE time I flipped one of them, I splattered myself with oil. I am down to like, two t-shirts now, because everything else I own has been stained with oil or salad dressing or barbecue sauce or some other cooking/eating disaster. I am at a point in my life now where I need to completely replace all my tops every two years due to staining, and yet, I cannot seem to make the intellectual leap to WEARING AN APRON. Memo to self: put aprons on my Christmas list.

And in further news, our summer/fall of appliance breakage continues. Today I am taking the van in for servicing as not one, but BOTH sliding doors are acting up. Meanwhile, when I brought the groceries home on Sunday, I asked the kids to help me put them away, and two days later, Sir Monkeypants discovered a very cold, wet box of spaghetti propping open the door of our downstairs freezer. OOPS. So later today, assuming I can have the van back to drive home and don’t have to hike through the thunderstorms we’re having, I will be cleaning out and defrosting the freezer.

Oh, the life of a stay-at-home-mom is SO GLAMOROUS.

I just got back from the dentist’s office, where we spent 10 minutes comparing our trips to PEI this summer (TOLD you everyone from Ottawa was there), and then 10 minutes talking about our kids’ first week at school, then 3 minutes replacing the world’s smallest filling. I love my dentist, she’s just so incredibly nice and friendly, and also, so gentle I could practically sleep in the chair.

Sadly, however, my hygienist, while being a super, super nice lady, is a little too aggressive with my teeth, I find, and often after a cleaning I am sore afterwards. Right now I have an aching tooth that has been bothering me for six weeks, since (bingo!) I had my last cleaning, but the dentist today couldn’t find anything wrong with it, just general inflammation. You know how Elaine on Seinfeld got a reputation for being a “difficult patient” and then no doctor in New York would see her? I’m on like, my fifth dentist in this town and I am not interested in changing, but I do wish switching to one of the other hygienists – all five of us in the family have a different hygienist – wasn’t such an awkward etiquette issue, you know?

Also, it is REMOTELY possible I am an overly sensitive Problem Patient. But I DOUBT IT.

(Sideline to this post: discovered that I have been spelling “hygienist” wrong for the past 40 years. MY LIFE HAS NO MEANING.)

In other traumas, Sir Monkeypants and I started watching Orange is the New Black last night. It’s an excellent show, gripping and engrossing and compelling, and yet, SO FREAKING HORRIFYING. I would definitely be dead after three days in jail. Dead from the stress alone. I now live in complete fear that I’m going to randomly touch a stranger’s bag in a store and end up with cocaine on my hands and have to go to prison. THEY DON’T LET YOU BLOG FROM PRISON. Dead, I tell you. Three days max.

(But I wonder if they have a good dentist. Hm.)

Gal Smiley brought home a note from school yesterday from her teacher, asking parents to email her so she can put together a class news distribution list. Then she signed the note with her full name, like “Jane Smith,” and her email address is also “jane.smith@theboard.ca,” which left me with quite the quandry. Should I address the email to “Madame Smith”? Or perhaps “Ms. Smith”?

I have real trouble referring to the kids’ teachers by their first name. Sending an email saying, “Hi Jane!” seems way too informal, especially considering we haven’t really ever met yet. But we’re both adults, so if I did meet her, wouldn’t I call her Jane? The rules-follower and brown-noser in me just can’t do it, though. GAH.

Once I had settled on, “Hi Mrs. Smith…” as an opening, then I had to work on writing out, “Here is my email address” by sounding nice, and helpful, but not TOO bubbly, because that would be weird. And I struggled for ages on how to say, “And could you also add my husband to the list, here is his email” without implying that there was some sort of odd custody arrangement I was trying to work around.

At least I signed my own name correctly…I think. How is it that one can reach the age of 42 and yet be so socially inept?

I think it is my own ineptitude that made me be all freaked out about the first day yesterday. Just like last year, things went very well for two out of three (ain’t bad!), but crappy for the third. This year it’s Gal Smiley who has been cut off from all of her friends, and I mean seriously ALL her friends. GAH. She was brave-facing it yesterday morning which is THE WORST, and I consider it a personal triumph that I didn’t just come home and cry.

She makes friends pretty easily though, and her teacher seems really great, and when this happened last year to the Captain he did adapt eventually – it took a few months but by the end of the year he’d developed some awesome best buds, all of whom are in his class this year again.

So I’m clinging to the idea of a happy ending, assuming the Gal’s teacher doesn’t blacklist her for the crappy/weird/awkward email her mother sent in. GAH.

So I don’t want to give a complete travelogue here of our trip out to The Island (we’re all down with the lingo now), but I did want to just endorse a few awesome things that were awesome and need to be Officially Awesomized.

(Please note that none of these places have paid to have their name associated with me or this blog. In fact, if I’d given them the option maybe they would pay to be not associated with this blog, given my last post about the F-word.)

Awesome Places To Stay

We broke the drive to PEI into two chunks, making it to Fredericton for the midway point. There, we stayed at the Amsterdam Inn, and it was FAB. So clean, the staff was super friendly and helpful, and a full (included) breakfast was served in the lobby in the morning, so we could hit the road all the more earlier, without having to eat fried crap first thing. But the best part was the room itself: a family suite, which is a room with a queen sized bed and a small attached room with bunk beds. Since we have three kids, we had a cot added to the queen-bed room and there was still plenty of space for luggage and walking about. The kiddie room has its own TV and a Wii, and in each family suite the kid room is hand-painted on all four walls and the ceiling with a theme – we stayed in the space room on the way there and the Big Top Carnival room on the way back. There’s no pool or anything like that, but if you are looking for a comfy, clean, cool place to crash overnight, THIS IS IT.

Coming back, we stayed one night in Moncton as well. There’s an Amsterdam Inn there too, but we were going to have a half-day of time to kill so instead we stayed at the Delta Beausejour. Why? This:

It’s a super fun water slide, right in the hotel! It’s not the biggest thing in the world, but it is plenty speedy and twisty, and the shallow landing trough means even preschoolers can be comfortable checking it out. I think it’s safe to say that our afternoon at this hotel was one of the kids’ favourite stops – many thanks to my friend Glenda for recommending it. Warning for families with three kids: their official policy is four-per-room-max, which means they will NOT add a cot to any room. But if you can squeeze your five-person family into either two queen beds or (in our case) a king and a pull-out couch (Sir Monkeypants and I shared with the Little Miss), they will look the other way. We all agreed the cramped sleeping conditions were worth it for the pool.

Lastly, our cottage on PEI itself was the Hampton Sands Beach House, and it was gorgeous. It’s a five-year-old rental cottage that’s very modern inside – like a house, but right on the beach. It can sleep up to 8 in bedrooms and also has a pull-out couch in the living room, there’s two full bathrooms, a lovely kitchen, and included satellite TV and internet access. But by far the best part was this:

This beach, literally right outside our front door. AWESOME. At low tide, there was nearly a kilometer of sand to dig in; at high tide it was warm enough to swim. We found tons of shells and sea glass, saw a wide variety of birds, caught crabs, and spent hours just watching the waves. Location-wise, it was about 15 minutes from the bridge, about a half hour into Charlottetown (but the COWS was even closer, thank God) and about a half hour up to Cavendish.

Awesome Day Trips

Karen of Sassymonkey wrote me an epic email when she found out we were headed to PEI, because she grew up there. She recommended a lot of great stuff, one of which was a day trip to Basin Head Beach. We probably wouldn’t have gone otherwise, as it’s way out on the most north-easterly tip of the island, about an hour and a half’s drive from our cottage. But we did go, and it was so, so worth it. It is a) a beautiful, white-sand beach (with, supposedly, “squeaky” sand when you walk on it but we couldn’t hear it ourselves), with b) gorgeous ocean with tons of super-fun waves, and c) a bridge over a narrow channel that you are absolutely NOT EVER allowed to jump off of, but everyone does it anyway and they even have a lifeguard posted there, so that’s just about the worst example of rule following I’ve ever seen. But OH SO FUN. Bonus: just up the road is the East Point Lighthouse, which is cool, and in the nearby town of Souris is another lighthouse that actually lets you go outside on the ledge when you get to the top.

Part of the reason we picked PEI is that the Little Miss is all into Anne of Green Gables right now, so of course we spent one day in Cavendish, where you can see the actual Green Gables house that inspired the story (and also spend the day at the lovely and very family-friendly Cavendish beach). We also saw the Anne of Green Gables musical in Charlottetown, and saw all the usual historical/touristy things in town. There’s a cute thing you can do with your kids in Charlottetown – start at the Information Centre which is down at Peake’s Wharf, and pick up an Eckhart flyer. Eckhart is a little mouse from a book, and statues of him have been places at key spots downtown. We had a great time looking for the statues (by following a set of clues), and got to see all the sights as well without having to force the kids to follow us around.

Lastly, we spent a day on the way home in Moncton so we could go to the Hopewell Rocks, which is the site of one of the biggest tides in the world, creating the famous flowerpot rocks through erosion. We were afraid the kids would find it boring, and they were a little cranky when we arrived at low tide and found that the sea bed is awfully mucky (but fun! What kids don’t like to get mucky? SHEESH.). But when the tide started to come in, we were sure to be at the very bottom of the access steps so we could see it slowly creeping up around our feet, which led to some pretty excited squealing. Make sure you check the tide times for the day you’ll be there, so you’re sure to have plenty of time to see both low and high tide.

Awesome Places to Eat

I’d love to recommend some places here, but sadly, due to our kids’ multiple food allergies, our food experience on this trip involved mostly a tour of all the Wendy’s and A&W locations in the maritimes. However, I will (like the rest of the known world) endorse COWS, the ice cream store, where the non-allergic among us ate as often as possible, while the milk-allergic indulged in Raspberry Cordials and additions to their T-shirt and bookmark collections. There’s several COWS locations and they are all great, but the one in Cavendish – the original – has a T-shirt outlet shop, so if you’re looking for deals it’s a must-visit. Our favourite french fries came from the Taters down in Peake’s Quay in Charlottetown, and you can also hit the PEI Brewery there for some J.J. Stewart’s locally brewed Root Beer, which we loved.

That’s all I can think of for now…but ask away any questions you have!

We are becoming a family of game players, and I just love that, because I adore games. I admit it, I have a reputation as a Super Competitive Type, but I swear, it’s not about the winning – it’s the playing. So I’m super happy the kids are getting into (a few) games and we’re able to play as a family sometimes.

Lately we are obsessed with 7 Wonders, a game that has an impossibly complex set of rules, but once you play it one time you easily get the hang of it. It’s complex enough to be interesting for the adults but fun enough to be interesting to the kids. I recommend it highly (if you’re interested, we got ours at Chapters). It’s listed as being for ages 10 and up, but Gal Smiley at age almost-9 can easily handle it, and even Little Miss Sunshine, who just turned 6, now plays with us – she sometimes needs advice but has won on more than one occasion, which FRUSTRATES ME TO NO END.

Huh, I guess maybe I do deserve that Super Competitive label.

Anyway! My real point here is that when you play 7 Wonders, you have to gather resources in your corner, and one of the cards you can add to your stack represents Glass.

And whenever someone plays the Glass card, I feel compelled to quote Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard. It’s this segment:

Dwayne T. Robinson: I’ve got a hundred people down here, and they’re covered with glass.
John McClane: Glass? Who gives a shit about glass? Who the fuck is this?
Dwayne T. Robinson: This is Deputy Chief of Police, Dwayne T. Robinson, and I am in charge of this situation.
John McClane: Oh, you’re in charge? Well, I got some bad news for you *Dwayne*, from up here it doesn’t look like you’re in charge of jack shit.
Dwayne T. Robinson: You listen to me, you little asshole, I’m…
John McClane: Asshole? I’m not the one who just got butt-fucked on national TV, *Dwayne*. Now, you listen to me, jerk-off, if you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the problem. Quit being a part of the fucking problem and put the other guy back on!

Sooooo…not so child-friendly. Yet I cannot stop myself. Mostly I come out with, “Glass? Who gives a crap about glass?” – which is more than enough for the kids to be quoting all over the house. Yesterday we got the video out – having failed to check out the exact passage on the internet first – and let the Captain see just this scene, and as you can read above, in just six short lines there are approximately 1000 swear words and inappropriate references. GAH. The next time this video comes out of its case, the kids will have to be at least 30.

Sad to say, this is actually part of an increasing pattern of swearing that has been going on around here. The other day, Sir Monkeypants was putting the Little Miss to bed, and she busted me out with this:

Little Miss (whispering): Mommy said the f-word today.
Sir Monkeypants: Really?
Little Miss: And it wasn’t just once. It was like, “f-word f-word f-word f-word.”
Sir Monkeypants: REALLY?

Guilty as charged, I’m afraid.

So yes, it’s time for a little tidy around here, a little cleaning-out-of-the-mouth-with-soap. With school starting, it seems like the right time to put the sailor mouth on hold, don’t you think? F-word right!