Happy Birthday to my baby brother

A belated happy birthday to my baby brother, Ryan! Yes, he may dwarf me now at 6 feet something, something, but I still think of him as my baby bro. He was at our place a couple of weeks ago to spend the night and head out at 3:00 am for a turkey hunt. (Crazy.) He was successful and showed off his prize on my front lawn, AFTER dripping some turkey blood on the front porch. Perhaps good for a voodoo ceremony later?

As Ryan said, "Your neighbours must think you're rednecks." If not us, at least my family.

Happy 9th birthday!

Happy Birthday to our nine-year old! I can't believe the time has gone by so fast. She's gone from fitting in one hand to wearing my sweater at dinner last night...and it pretty much fit. I think we've officially entered the tween years now, complete with a camera for her birthday to take pictures of her friends to post online (not).

Tonight, we'll be having the cake that the kids and I made. An annual tradition actually. We make chocolate cake, lick the beaters (George taught them), and then repeat the process for the icing. We have a crude but tasty decorating technique that always leads to an interesting final result:

Our official party will be on Friday. We had a slight postponement because Blake woke up sick today, but Faith took it in stride. She's already used up a set of batteries on her camera, so I'm thinking that will keep her busy the rest of the night. And, between that, homemade pizza, and cake and ice cream, it will be a birthday well done.

Mother's Day starts at midnight

As is normally the case when you have a three-year-old and a nine-year-old in the house, you're always going through a transition of some sort. In our case, Blake is transitioning from a daily afternoon nap to no nap at all. Mention this to any parent of a kid who's no longer napping, and you automatically get a look of sympathy. It's also a short-form excuse of sorts when we're out in the afternoons now and he has some sort of meltdown in a store. I just have to look slightly apologetic as I throw him under my arm and say, "He's not napping anymore."

So, this transition means that my normal afternoon nap on the weekends has been severely curtailed. Yesterday, I told George that all I wanted for Mother's Day was a nap. I should have kept my big mouth shut. Add to this the message I left on our friends' answering machine telling them we'd have Faith's birthday party on Monday night so we could have a peaceful day of doing nothing on Sunday. How could I have cursed myself so?

Yes, this year Mother's Day began at midnight when Blake woke up crying and struggling with his breathing. Croup. A fairly bad attack of it for him actually. George took him right out to the porch wrapped in a blanket and the cold night air helped straighten out his breathing almost immediately. (Thank you cold snap!) I'm not sure why it works, but I'm glad it does. Then, it was a call to TeleHealth (thank you Mike Harris...did I just type that?) to get a second opinion. Yes, we were doing the right things, and were to visit a doctor within 24 hours.

Blake spent the night in our room, in case of another attack, so I spent the night listening to his wheezing and George's snoring - a symphony to be sure. And, when 7:00 rolled around, who jumped out of bed completely refreshed and declared, "I'm all better now!" I can tell you it wasn't George and I.

But, as it was Mother's Day, the kids and George headed downstairs, and Faith brought me a bagel and juice in bed. I even got to read a little bit. Quite heavenly actually. The kids had made me cards and Faith created a paper-mache bowl, while Blake gave me a sparkly-painted tulip. George got me a card and my favourite chocolates, which promptly went into the new bowl to be shared.

Then we got back to real life. I took Blake to the on-call doctor, who told me he was fine now, and gave him a puffer for his next croup attack. Then, on to the grocery store/pharmacy to pick up said puffer, where all the other mom's were also out doing their shopping today.

Finally, back at the ranch, I headed up to bed for my now completely non-optional, I'm-going-to-fall-flat-on-my-face-I'm-so-tired nap. Blake crawled into bed with me and we both blacked out for an hour until Faith nudged me awake to make her birthday cake for tomorrow.

Yes, just another day of motherhood.

Now, here's to my two best mother's day presents....

Sunday Stills: The Letter B

Sydney has been urging me to try out Sunday Stills - each week you post a picture related to a theme. This week's theme, the letter B, seemed to fit this picture I took on a very warm April 30th in our friends' backyard.

A family of fractions

Faith is working on fractions at the moment, and had to write about our family using, what else? Fractions. Here it is:

Half of my human family are boys. A third of my family are girls. A forth of my family are mamals. One fifth person in my family is an animal that lives under water. 3 out of 5 people in my family have curly hair. One fifth in my family has a tail. 4 fourths like to swim. 1 fifth likes to build dinosaur traps.

Yes, she included our fish in the family. Who else would have a tail? I leave you to figure out who builds the dinosaur traps.

New two-wheeler

Blake graduated from a trike to a two-wheeler at Easter. He has so far mastered forward and steering, but braking...not so much. He's fine with this though. It just means he can go faster. When he goes down a hill, I'm usually running after him yelling "BRAKE!" and he's taking his feet off the pedals so he can go faster.

A major milestone

Riding a bike has been Faith's Waterloo for quite awhile now. She has insisted that riding a horse is much easier. Pointing out a horse is bigger and has a mind of its own hasn't worked. But, we took a chance and got her a new bike for Easter (thank-you Zeller's midnight madness). And, I told her that if she got really good at riding her bike, I'd do a horseback riding lesson with her. (!)

This weekend, she finally realized success! I give all the credit to George, who seemed to have the magic bike-riding touch. She still needs to work on starting and, perhaps more importantly, stopping. But she's OK with falling off. She dragged us out again after supper to ride around the school parking lot like a pro: