So The Captain is turning 8, and we’re having a party in a couple of weeks. I like having birthday parties because I like to plan parties in general. I like designing all the graphics stuff and shopping for loot bag stuff and baking cupcakes. Especially the cupcakes part. YUM.

Back when The Captain turned 4, we had his first party and we thought it would be one of maybe two or three he’d have in his life. But then someone I was talking to (the poker girls, maybe?) mentioned that the window for traditional birthday parties – with the games and the presents and the candles – was fairly narrow.

I guessed that age 8 would be the last year for the big party – after that, maybe there would be the odd sleepover with one kid, or taking a best friend to a hockey game, but it wouldn’t be the same. So I totally strong-armed Sir Monkeypants into letting me have a party every year until age 8, so this is it – the last big one for The Captain.

(Until next year when I can’t help myself from planning something. But I really will try to resist.)

This year, we asked The Captain what he wanted to do and he said he would like to pretty please play video games until his eyeballs bled. And I said, “YES YES YES” to that, because I was afraid he was going to ask to go to Cosmic Adventures, which we totally could not afford. Having a bunch of friends over to play Mario Kart until someone has a seizure? AWESOMELY FREE.

So I designed invitations:

That font is called Continuum and it’s the same font used in the Wii Logo. No one cares, but I know it’s there. It’s all in the details, people.

We also decided to have a few other games on hand, hopefully to avoid that whole seizure situation, and also on the off chance that someone was not into video games. We’ll be playing Pin the Moustache On Mario:

I had the poster printed and laminated at Staples from an image I found online. It was expensive – $25 – but hopefully reuseable. Sir Monkeypants pointed out, though, that we probably could have found a Mario poster at WalMart for $5. So um, yeah, maybe do that if you want to recreate this magic. The moustaches are cut out of black bristol board – I had some scrap on hand – from a pattern I made by tracing the appropriate part of the poster.

We’ll also be playing Mario Bingo:

I made these boards from images I found online – it’s just a table in a Word document, printed out and pasted onto coloured paper I already had. I bought a bag of random buttons at Zellers to use as markers but you could use anything from around the house – washers, macaroni, Lego pieces. It just happens that the Little Miss is really into gluing crafts that involve buttons, so the button bag was worth it to me. For prizes for the Bingo (and the Moustache game), I just bought some inexpensive Hot Wheels.

Lastly, I also have the classic Who Am I game on hand, Mario themed of course:

Our kids adore this game at parties. You put the picture on your head (we tape it to a hat) so you can’t see it. Then you ask yes-or-no answers to try to guess who “you” are. Hopefully the boys at the party know the Mario characters well enough for this game to be a success – in the past we’ve played it with Star Wars characters and Disney characters and it went well. We let the kids keep their little picture when they guess and that’s a plenty good “prize” – in fact, one thing we really love about this game is that there is no “winner,” per se, so it’s great to play with the five and six-year-old crowd that are ready for games but don’t like to lose.

Once again, I made these cards by shamelessly scamming images from the internet and printing them out in colour. I AM CHEAP.

So there’s these classic type games, plus there will be two different video game stations, plus a Lego station. Eight-year-old boy HEAVEN, I tell you.

Eventually we will get around to having cupcakes – The Captain has requested a repeat of these beauties that I made for Sir Monkeypants’ birthday:

They are cookies and creme cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, which is the awesomest cookbook ever. Well, second awesomest.

And at the end, there will be loot bags and balloons:

I like to put one big thing in the loot bag rather than a bunch of small things, and since we saved money on just about every other aspect of this party I blew the budget and got each boy one of those new Lego board games (the smallest ones). Don’t feel slighted if you personally prefer the many-small-things loot bag. Frankly, my kids like that a lot better – it’s like a treasure trove of pure delight. However, I like the one-big-thing and this party is nothing if not ALL ABOUT ME, so Lego games it is.

And that’s it! Hopefully it all goes well…and if not, we have a full week of March Break to recover.

My friend Debs brought over something awesome this week:

Food That Really Schmecks, by Edna Staebler. Debs lent me More Food That Really Schmecks, too.

I’m a huge fan of Edna and her amazing, revolutionary, life-changing pie cookbook. I’ve been wanting to get my hands on her first cookbook – Really Schmecks – for a while now.

I thought I’d borrow it from Debs, flip through and copy out a few recipes to try. But problem number one is that there are like, six hundred recipes in here, and I could seriously make every single one. (Well, maybe not that one for stuffed veal heart.) I don’t think Debs is down with me borrowing her book for the next decade.

Problem number two is that it’s kind of hard to get around to the cooking part when you’re too busy reading. This isn’t a recipe book like all the other recipe books you own. This is a chatty, memoir-esque ode to food.

Take, for example, Edna’s recipe entited “Asparagus”:

You probably know more about preparing aspagus than I do. I boil mine in salted water and I like it so well simply with butter melted over it that I never try anything fancy except a cream or milk cheese sauce. But I do want to tell you: never throw away the water your asparagus was cooked in. Keep it in your fridge to use in soups or with a bouillon cube melted in it and served hot in a mug, or mix it with tomato juice or V8 for a cold or hot drink. It’s full of vitamins and flavour.

Isn’t she the coolest ever? Here’s one entited “Tired Carrots”:

Toward the end of the winter when carrots are limp – and I am too – I sometimes give them a shot by sprinkling them with any of a variety of things in my herb cupboard…Sometimes I’l cut up an onion or two or a couple of springs of leaves of celery or parsley…and always I use plenty of butter and pepper. …Nothing depresses me more than the constant sight of carrots-and-peas on every main dish in restaurants, hotel dining rooms and at banquets. There they inevitably are, a dull, dry pile of flavourless orange and green. I won’t have the combination in my house.

I tell you, she defines the word firecracker. I wish I could have known her.

There are many more traditional type recipes too, with lists of ingredients and instructions for preparation, but never without Edna’s commentary to colour them. Her memories intermingle with hints and tips on how to prepare the food just so. Here’s her intro to “Toasted Beechnut Cookies”:

But who has beechnuts in these days? We used to spread blankets under the trees in the bush and Daddy would shake down the nuts. Mother patiently opened them with a sharp knife and toasted them in the oven. If you haven’t a beech tree handy you could use toasted almonds.

I was raving about Edna to my mother in an email last week, and she spontaneously decided to take my ENORMOUS HINT and order me my very own Food That Really Schmecks from Amazon. It should be here any day now…so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me for a little while. I’ll be in the kitchen with Edna.

Man, I haven’t blogged in forever. There’s no good reason why, time has just been flying by and I have no account for it. Someday I’ll be sixty five and the kids will be in university and all I’ll be able to say about these years is, “I made a lot of muffins and surfed a lot.” Now that’s legend…ary.

I’ve had a terrible cough for the past three weeks that is preventing me from sleeping, and usually I’d be all over that with a cranky blog post about how life is SO HARD and I am SO SICK, but despite the lack of sleep and the hacking up a lung every three minutes, I’m still cheerful. In February. No whining about winter, no bitterness when the green bin goo freezes to the bottom, not even a peep about snow pants and five-point-harnesses.

What gives? I’m actually starting to wonder if my happiness is some sort of symptom of a fatal disease. If this were an episode of House, he’d totally think my joy is not normal. Then he’d diagnose me with something horribly painful, and I’d die at the end of the episode with a smile on my face, which is about as happy an ending as House ever gets, so I guess that’s good. But still, the little flicker of worry is starting to HARSH MY BUZZ. Knock it off.

Speaking of TV, did anyone catch Ken Jennings on Jeopardy these past three nights? If I’d had my act together I would have blogged about it in advance, although KenJen mentioned it on his own blog and of course, you all follow that faithfully, don’t you? Anyway, Ken lost to the mega-computer Watson, but I don’t care, he’s still the coolest dude on TV as far as I’m concerned. Ken, Mindy, call me! We’ll do dinner.

And in other TV news, I totally got sucked into watching Survivor last night – Sir Monkeypants had it on while I was making up Super Mario Bingo Cards for the Captain’s upcoming birthday party. Eventually I had to put the laptop down because OMG, Best! Episode! Ever! Jaw dropping twists! Larger than life personalities! People who think they’re in charge, totally outwitted! People who think they’re in charge acting like asses, and being called out for it! I’ve been away from Survivor for years but I’m already totally committed to this season. LOVED IT.

And now, I must toddle off and make some muffins, finish those Bingo cards, and otherwise putter my life away while whistling a happy tune. What IS wrong with me, anyway?

What is it about this time of year and birthdays? It’s like a national holiday today – Happy Birthday Day. We know several people who have their birthdays today, or yesterday, or tomorrow.

Our good friend Glenn’s is today. One kid in Little Miss Sunshine’s playgroup has his birthday today. Two kids in her preschool class have their birthday today – the only birthday that is shared by two non-twins in her class of 24 kids. Two of Sir Monkeypants’ cousins have birthdays today. MyFriendAgi’s birthday was yesterday, shared with MyFriendJen’s youngest daughter; our next-door-neighbour’s birthday is tomorrow.

A few years ago, when Dani was pregnant with Lucas, she had a contest to guess his birthdate. I went with February 8, because it’s THE birthday to have, it seems – even though it would put poor Dani overdue by something extreme like 10 days.

One guess at his birthday, And I didn’t even win her guess-the-birthdate game, because two other people also chose February 8, also because they or someone close to them had a birthday that day.

It’s James Dean’s birthday today (so cool), John Williams’ and John Grisham’s too (prestigious). Also, Gary Coleman’s, Vince Neil’s, and Seth Green’s, which are slighly less glamourous, but you know, still funky.

It’s also Jules Verne‘s birthday. Google has a special logo today in honor of him that is awesome, as if I needed to tell you that. New contest! How many years before the word “google” is listed as a synonym for “awesome” in the thesaurus? “We saw the latest Cameron Crowe movie at the theatre last week and it was google.”

But my point here is that amid all these birthdays, there’s one that stands out. Today is Sir Monkeypants’ birthday. He is 40 years old. He wouldn’t let me have a party, so if you see him today, at least do me a solid and embarrass the hell out of him by yelling HAPPY BIRTHDAY, OLD MAN at the top of your voice, will you?

Today I was driving to skating lessons with the Little Miss and I saw a car with the plate CRZEBTFL. Instead of contrating on the road (SO overrated, am I right?), I spent the whole drive trying to figure that one out. Cree-zeb-tee-fil? Cruz-eb-tiff-ell? Maybe one of those things where every letter stands for something – Come Run Zippily Ever Being Truthful For Love?

Then I realized it said CRAZY/BEAUTIFUL. I’m ready for Bumper Stumpers.

I was going to say that my days with Sir Monkeypants are sometimes crazy, and sometimes beautiful. But actually, every day is crazy and beautiful. It’s insanely busy around here, but oh so fun. There are soccer balls under the couch and Barbie shoes all over the floor, but there’s singing in the air and giggling around every corner. There’s sparkle glue permanently etched onto the kitchen table, and twinkles in the eyes of three wee faces when either of us comes home from being away.

It’s a good life. Here’s hoping we spend the next 40 years being just as crazy and beautiful.

My fellow blogger Bob LeDrew is part of an upcoming event that crosses over with the Blog Out Loud crowd. Bob’s a stand-up guy with a lot of interesting things to say about social media and communications. I almost never endorse events or products on this blog, but all Bob wants to sell you is a rocking good time, so that can’t be all bad, right?

Bob’s part of a group putting together a one-night reading of censored works – songs, books, poems, possibly even some blog posts. It’s called Censored Out Loud, and will feature several totally awesome and outrageous performers with plenty of experience at the mike. The idea is to draw attention to the issue of censorship, celebrate the idea that creation is powerful and should not be contained, and hopefully raise a little money for charity along the way.

When I think about all the nasty stuff I’ve said about Bell in the past for taking away my internet access for two hours, I can’t imagine how I’d feel if someone told me my words couldn’t be posted…ever. We take the freedom of self-publishing that comes with blogging for granted, I think, and it’s important to protect the idea that talking about stuff – even it’s controversial, even if it’s trivial, even if it’s related to poop – is how we learn and grow as a society, as a group.

The show takes place Wednesday, February 23, 2011, starting at 8:00 pm at the Raw Sugar Cafe, 692 Somerset Street West. There’s a cover charge of $10 (or whatever you can afford to pay), and proceeds are going to go to PEN Canada, an organization that fights for the right to create and read. Come on out and hear some great reading, and support a good cause.

Man, I hate it when I write a really, really long blog post, and then people just trying to clear their reader over lunch click on Turtlehead and see reams and reams of unbroken text – like, can’t she even do us the favour of including a photo, for heaven’s sake – and so they move on.

Hate that.

However, I am way backed up with blog post ideas and I have to clear my head so today, you get a bonus two posts in one! Hope your boss wasn’t expecting you back from lunch any time soon.

So this weekend!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

On Saturday I went to the mall specifically to share my views on garbage collection in this city. I am very passionate about garbage collection and green bins and LORDY, what people put in their recycling boxes. Here’s a sample of some of my past bloggy rants on that subject.

Anyway, the City of Ottawa is considering changing the pickup schedule, among other things, so that the green bins are picked up every week all year around, but garbage is only picked up every other week. I’m totally in favour of this plan. With our family of five, our green bin is straining to contain our bi-weekly compostables, and I could easily fit two weeks’ garbage in our garbage can.

The City was hosting a series of open houses/consultations on this subject, but they’re over now (except for one in Richmond tomorrow evening if you’re really passionate about it). But you can still go online and fill out a survey on this issue here.

So! My point here is that I went to Bayshore Mall on Saturday to see the Open House and to make my views heard. There was a guy there with an iPad who was gathering survey results, so I chatted with him and he wrote down my answers.

And then – there was a quiz! A recycling quiz! They show you 10 items, and you have to sort them correctly.

SHEER HEAVEN, I’m telling you. I just about busted with excitement. And of course, I went ten for ten. It was almost ORGASMIC, how joyful I was. AND, I was the only person so far that day (it was almost the end of the consultation time frame) to go 10 for 10.

I AM THE QUEEN OF RECYCLING.

I know I should be ashamed or at least mildly embarrassed at how happy I was to get 10 out of 10 on a recycling quiz. However, I cannot hide my delight. It’s like I took a test on being a good person and then got an A+. Not to mention it gives me authoritative backing to continue being an obnoxious, judgmental jackass about the contents of other people’s blue boxes from now until eternity, and there’s nothing I love more than being an obnoxious, judgmental jackass, so THAT ROCKS.

Could I USE any more capitals? Do you SEE how awesome I am?

And that was pretty much the best of times.

Now for Sunday.

We had tickets to a 9:30 a.m. Kinderconcert at the NAC, and Lord in Heaven, why is the poor NAC always involved when this family has a crisis? Anyway, the Captain and Sir Monkeypants had another engagement, so it was just going to be me and the girls, With one of our extra tickets, Gal Smiley invited her friend ShyGirl.

Saturday afternoon, the Little Miss spikes a fever and goes downhill from there. But she can’t skip the concert, because Sir Monkeypants won’t be at home, and I really felt we just couldn’t cancel on ShyGirl because we’d only invited her the day before.

Sunday morning the Little Miss wakes up feeling perkier, so we drug her up good, and she seems fine, so we decide to go for it.

Now here is my fatal error. At the NAC we park inside, so we always leave our coats in the car. So Gal Smiley asks me if she can wear running shoes instead of boots, since she’ll only be going from our garage to the NAC parking garage and never setting foot outside. And I say, in super slow motion with heavy drums-of-warning in the background, “Suuuuuuuuuuure.”

When I was a kid, if it was wintertime, no matter where we were going, we wore boots. I can hear my mom’s voice so clearly, “What if we get stopped on the side of the road somewhere? You have to be prepared.”

I heard that voice in my head on Sunday morning, and I thought, “I should throw the girls’ boots in the car, just in case we get stopped on the side of the road somewhere.” And then I thought, “But, Sir Monkeypants will totally make fun of me, and seriously, in all those years growing up, did I ever once get stopped on the side of the road somewhere? Well, there was that one time, but one time out of like, 500 times is pretty small chances. So forget it.”

FAMOUS LAST WORDS. Or thoughts. Whatever.

I pick up ShyGirl and with the three girls in the back, we’re off to the concert, in gently falling snow creating mildly slippery roads.

Then a light comes on in the van, indicating we are out of washer fluid. So despite plenty of salt coming up on the windows, I couldn’t clear them very well.

Then ANOTHER light comes on in the van, that looks like a fishbowl floating in squiggly water, and I was all, WTF? But of course I just kept on driving because when you ignore something, it just goes away, right?

Once we were parked at the NAC in the underground garage, I pulled out the manual and looked up the funny symbol, and it turns out it means “low tire pressure.” So I had a look around, and sure enough, one of the back wheels is about 60% flat. FABULOUS.

It was time for the concert, though, so we went up and watched it before I did anything about the car. It was about “Orphea,” a feminized version of Orpheus, specifically about that time he went down to the underworld to bring back his wife (“grandfather” in this kids’ concert version). If you know the story, you’ll know that Orpheus manages to convince Hades to let him bring his wife back, as long as he does not look back. But he can’t help himself, and he does look back, and his wife is sucked back into Hell.

I knew this story, but I figured there was no way they’d end a kids’ show like that, but OH MAN, WAS I WRONG. And no offense to the players, who were amazing, but seriously? Two seconds after the end of the play I have three crying girls on my hands. Why didn’t the grandfather come? When will she see him again? Why, dear Lord WHY, did she look back?

(I’ve answered that question at least 50 times since Sunday morning, by the way. Never gets old. Oh wait, IT TOTALLY DOES.)

So! The girls are sad, and now we have to go deal with the car. While the girls snack and sniffle, I call Sir Monkeypants and he recommends that if the tire is not completely flat, to get to a gas station and fill it with air, then get home and we will figure out what to do from there.

So I come out of the NAC and start nervously driving around downtown, in the snow with a partially flat tire, looking for a gas station. Did you know that the downtown core has about as many gas stations as my recycling quiz has wrong answers? As in, none?

Not to mention the fact that there is this one street that runs along the canal – Queen Elizabeth, maybe? Or something like that? – that once you are are accidentally on it, cannot be ever, ever exited? And if you do find an exit, you’ll be lost, lost, lost in tiny side streets made six-feet narrow by parked cars and snowbanks on either side?

So there I am, lost in the city, driving blind because we have no windshield cleaner, on three wheels on slippery roads, with someone else’s kid in the backseat, and another kid sick and about to move out of the medication window, to a combined chorus of “We’re starving/We’ve passed that building twice already/Why did the grandfather have to die (sob),” which I believe is the very definition of GOOD TIMES.

We wound up driving around downtown for 45 minutes, the whole time I was convinced we would blow the tire out and I’d be stuck on the side of the road, in winter, with kids with no boots on. I was obviously asking for it. Do not mess with fate, Lynn!

If my mother read this blog, she’d be commenting furiously right now, all YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER and HAVE I TAUGHT YOU NOTHING and CALL ME, I WANT TO RE-TILE THE BATHROOM AND NEED YOUR OPINION.

And to add insult to injury, Gal Smiley and ShyGirl passed the time by playing a name-that-tune kind of game, and Gal Smiley used excerpts from the legendary art-house film High School Musical 3, while ShyGirl used the hipster Pride (In The Name Of Love) by U2. Total pop culture education fail for me, right there.

Eventually we found a gas station at Bronson and something-right-by-the-highway. And of course, their air pressure injection machine thingy was broken. So I did what any tough, strong woman would do, and called my husband hysterically and cried. Oh yes, hear me roar.

I decided to bail on downtown, and we drove home very slowly using about a million back roads. I found gas station along the way near Riverside and Hunt Club and got some air in the tire (HEAR ME ROAR) and an hour-and-a-half later, we made it home where I passed out from stress.

Or actually, it was because I had caught whatever was ailing the Little Miss, and spiked my own fever, and then quietly died. On the side of the road somewhere.

And that was pretty much the worst of times. Does that make my weekend work out to even steven?

Last night we had homemade pizza for dinner. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it was to me. When you have a kid who is allergic to eggs, milk, and soy, it makes it really hard to make a traditional pizza. I have in the past made cheese-less pizza for the Captain, but then it’s just bread with a little tomato sauce smeared on it, and hell, he may as well just have some crackers and Sunbutter instead, you know?

Luckily, we live in amazing times where scientists can create cheese-like products out of air and several chemicals. I do not even want to know what is in this stuff, but there’s a new “cheese” in town, called Daiya. I read about it on It Ain’t Meat, Babe and I assumed it would not be suitable for us, but IT IS. No milk, no eggs, no soy. No gluten either, for those who care.

That is VERY exciting.

So last night I made “cheese” pizza for the Captain and he loved it and had four slices and didn’t react to anything and I can die happy now because I was able to give my kid pizza. The triumphs of the allergic-kid mother are very small, indeed.

In other landmark news, I had to go to the mall last night to buy a new bathing suit. I’m sure I don’t need to write another word for you to imagine what that experience was like. Buying a suit in January is weird, because no one has suits in stock except The Bay, which has a lovely selection of matronly suits for Ladies Of Leisure who are embarking on cruises, and good ol’ Bikini Village, where it costs you $30 just to go in and look.

But it really was a necessity – a definite exception to the shopping embargo – because I take swimming lessons on Friday mornings. For the past several weeks I’ve been wearing my choice of:

a) a suit comprised of a stretched-out bottom half I bought for our honeymoon, fifteen years ago, matched with a top I bought while pregnant, which News Flash!, I am not anymore; or

b) a two-piece suit I bought to go on vacation with my sisters way back before I had kids, when I was at my skinniest ever, which News Flash!, I am not anymore, and trust me, seeing my belly button is a scarring experience; or

c) a matronly flowered top/skirted bottom number that I bought when desperate for our trip to Disney last year, which is rather low cut and slips sideways when we practice diving, giving all the elderly gentlemen in my class a peep show.

Now that’s classy.

So, I went to the mall and I approached the Bikini Village and I said to myself, “You will go in there. You will try on suits. You will NOT look at price tags, You will get something respectable. DO IT.”

And I came out with a very nice Speedo that mostly, sort of, fits me well enough not to shift while swimming, and mostly, sort of, makes my butt look huge, and mostly, MOSTLY, cost a fortune.

But at least I can swim now without burning the eyes of everyone else there. Whew!

I entered a writing contest this weekend, a challenge from Writer’s Weekly to write an 875 word short story in 24 hours or less. They send you a couple of topic sentences to inspire you around noon on Saturday, and then your story is due by noon on Sunday.

Leading up to the contest I bounced around from relaxed (“It’s no big deal, whatever”) to panicked (“My brain is a vacuum! I have not one single idea in there!”) to super confident (“And lastly, I’d like to thank my husband, for not turning up his nose at dinner of Frosted Flakes on that fateful Saturday night”).

Mostly I expected to sit paralyzed in front of my blank screen, unable to think of a single word or idea to explore. I find writing essays, magazine articles, and advertising copy comes easily to me (blinking sign here – WRITER FOR HIRE, CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP), but writing fiction is like pulling teeth. It’s painful, bloody, and leaves a hole in my head.

I usually take yoga class on Saturday mornings. You might be imagining a class where we do lots of nice stretches and commune with the earth, but my class is more full of lots of impossible positions that leave me communing with my bottle of ibuprofen. But I still thought it would be a good idea if I went – a supple body bringing about a supple mind, as my friend Tudor would recommend. And I do think it helped loosen me up – or at least, brought about a feeling of euphoria that I had survived. My arms didn’t fall off! Only mostly! That’s success right there!

Once the topic was released at lunchtime, I puttered around for a bit, helping make lunch for the kids and thinking things over. Then Sir Monkeypants took the scamps out to the Museum of Nature for the afternoon, leaving me with three glorious, uninterrupted hours to write.

Which I did.

But I also ate.

I ate a whole bag of chips. NOT the single serving kind. And I also had a chocolate chip granola bar. Two. Actually, three. And a big bowl of cereal, and some leftover Clodhoppers from Christmas that were kicking around. And I polished off the chocolate milk.

Apparently, junk food is critical to the creative process. Who knew? If I ever write a novel, I’m going to come out of it weighing 300 pounds.

Anyway, by the time the kids got home the bones of my story were there, and I was more than ready to take a break and help make dinner and pack them off to bed. Then I tweaked for another hour or so, and then, it was time.

I let Sir Monkeypants read it over.

While I lay on the couch with my head under a blanket, body rigid with terror, embarrassment, nakedness. ACK TO THE MAX, DUDES.

But he kind of…liked it. And he gave me a huge compliment by saying that he had no idea I could write like that. I guess the ol’ blog just doesn’t scream “Nobel Prize for Literature” on a regular basis. (Only on occasion. Those Dance Show posts require painstaking research, you know.)

I slept on it, then in the morning I changed a few minor things and then spent an hour agonizing over a title (still SO CRAPPY, alas), then I pressed send. And with one keystroke, I became a real writer in my own mind.

So in the end it turned out…kind of great, actually. I had fun, my story is passable, and most of all, it was a real confidence booster. I can’t thank Tudor over at Two Writers Talking enough for mentioning it earlier this season, and for personally encouraging me to give it a try.

I’m not sure when I’ll write more fiction, though. Life is busy and it’s the time, more than anything else, that is hard to come by. There’s another contest in the Spring…I’ll shoot for that and see how it goes. I hope you all will join me!

After a rather grey December, I’m pleasantly surprised to find that I’m having a simply delightful January. I am normally not a fan of winter. January and February…and March…and April…always seem to drag on forever, with me feeling like a prisoner in my own house. But somehow, this January has been cheery and bright. I feel like I’m (mostly) on top of things, the kids have been (mostly) very good, and I’m…

Happy.

Strange, I know.

All three kids have a strange quirk right now that is (mostly) quite charming. The Captain is working on becoming the perfect ninja, capable of sneaking up on anyone and scaring the bejeezus out of them. If he sees me reading on the couch, he’ll get up and loudly announce that he’s “JUST GOING TO THE BATHROOM,” then he’ll creep around to the back of the sofa oh-so-quiet-like, and yell “BOO” in my ear. The first time he did this, I jumped about 10 feet in the air, thus cementing his commitment to try it again every day for the next year or so. Totally hilarious the first 500 times. Starting to get a wee bit old now, but I’m still chipper about it.

Gal Smiley learned a few weeks ago while skating that you can put one pair of socks over another pair. She thinks this concept is brilliant. She started coming home from school and putting on a second pair of socks over the ones she had been wearing. Then she upped it to three, and now she’s up to wearing four pairs of socks on a regular basis. She looks like she has giant elephant feet, not to mention the fact that she’s running through the entire contents of her sock drawer every three days. But still the cuteness is there.

Meanwhile, Little Miss Sunshine has decided to sing her way through life. Every request for juice or a snack is sung: “I woooould liiiiike…a snaaaaaack….” Her biggest hit is in heavy rotation around here, entitled, “Cheer Up.” It goes, “Cheeeeer up Mommy….cheeeer up Daddy…cheeeeeer up everyone I know in the wooooooorld…” All sung completely tunelessly. She then finishs off with a pat on the head; her siblings do that to her so often that she’s interpreted it as a universal way to show love. No wonder I’m in such a good mood – the song demands it.

Sir Monkeypants and I spent all day Sunday cleaning out our basement. I think we had every box for every piece of electronics we had ever purchased down there. Sir Monkeypants spent hours breaking down boxes, while I sorted through the toy graveyard down there and bagged up a bunch of baby stuff to go to Boomerang or charity.

One thing we decided to sell, finally, was our running stroller. It’s a Zooper Buddy, which is a really good model, but it’s meant for very small babies and even the Little Miss does not fit comfortably in it anymore. I listed it online for sale on Sunday evening, and by Monday we had a buyer all ready to go.

Sir Monkeypants brought the stroller up and got it ready by the front door, and then, unexpectedly, the Captain burst into tears. He is really attached to stuff and has trouble with change, and he just did not want to let the stroller go. I comforted him by telling him all about the new family that would be able to use it for their new baby, and by telling him we would do something fun as a family with the money.

Eventually he stopped crying but he asked me if I would take his picture with the stroller so he would always remember it. I agreed to humour him, but as I looked through the camera lens at the two of them standing together, I got a lump in my throat myself. I was never that attached to the stroller, but seeing the small space for a baby compared to my giant seven-year-old boy…my my, how time has flown. I won’t miss the stroller, but I sometimes miss my babies.

It’s strange how you can feel so content in life, and yet still yearn for things past. How happy and sad can blend together into bittersweet. Just for one moment there, I felt the pull of the same old January.

But today it’s going to be snowing, and we’re going skating, and I have a meeting at the preschool that will involve many Snickerdoodles. I love my seven-year-old, and my six-year-old, and my three-year-old. Winter, you ain’t got nothing on me.