Snow Day!

Well, ish.

"Ish" in terms of the snow. It definitely looks like a winter wonderland out there.

And The Husband got the snowblower out for the third time this winter.

But it's not all snow getting blown. It's actually a sloppy, gloppy, slippery mess of ice and sleet and rain and snow.

And we have a loooooooong driveway. He made it down okay (not sure if he was able to actually stop), but we'll have to cross fingers for getting back up at the end of the day.

And it's "ish" in terms of the day, too. The kids' school is starting two hours late due to the weather. Tell me - how is that helpful? Parents still have to juggle and figure out what to do with their kids. There's no point in going to work if the school bus only comes at 10. Why not just call it so I can send them downstairs to watch TV all day and make their brains as sloppy as the snow?

Fortunately, I was late for work today so was still home in time to get the call. And, even more fortunately, my job can be done equally well from my kitchen table as from my cubicle, so I can throw the kids on the bus and get cracking.

(Working from home also allows for elastic waist pants, huzzah!)

Happy Leap Day, everyone!

(And Happy Birthday Frederic, you poor wand'ring one! Here's to another four years off your pirate contract!)

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Peitricia Mae, M.D.

Tonight's emergency procedure:

Retinal reattachment.

(She was a very good patient.)

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Sneaky!

So The Boy's latest obsession is his new Pokemon game.

Now you might think I am a bad parent because I let him play Nintendo a lot. But see that little round thing? It's actually a Pokewalker (aka a pedometer). The deal is that he can download his little monsters to this thing and for each step he takes, he gets life points.

(Genius marketing, I'd say. He gets to mushify his brain with screen time while I get to tell myself I'm being all sly and getting him to exercise. Kind of like that time I put zucchini in the brownies. Which didn't go over all that well.)

While this doohickey does get him on the treadmill sometimes, he much prefers to bounce around the house a la Tigger.

Or, his favourite option:

He sends it with me on my runs. Yesterday I got him 19,000 lifepoints.

(Although it sort of bit him in the butt. Apparently he was crying while I was gone and wailing, "when's Mom coming home???" The Husband couldn't figure it out, until he realized that since I had taken The Boy's favourite monster with me when I went running, he was stopped in his tracks on his game. Ha!)

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Metal Mouth

FINALLY!

Proof that we haven't been going to the orthodontist every six weeks for the past eighteen months in vain:

(I'm just glad we paid up front. If I had had to pay each time we were told, "things look great! We'll give it another six weeks and see where we're at...," I might have wondered just a bit whether the teeth doc was drawing things out ever so slightly.)

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Bows At The Ready

Happy February, everyone! Long time, no blog see!

Things continue rolling along here at Casa la PM. We still have no snow on the ground, and any that has tried to make an appearance has been unceremoniously melted away within days. I keep waiting for winter to start....

Super proud mama moment today! It was the "All-City Orchestra" concert where the newbies (aka the fifth graders) joined the seasoned veterans (high schoolers) for a mass orchestra extravaganza.

The twelfth graders were really quite amazing, and gave us parents of new cello players a lot of hope for the future.

The fifth graders were also amazing, although their repertoire is still pretty scanty, hence the playing of Jingle Bells three days before Valentine's.

Here's our budding star:

And here's the orchestra en masse (it's Dona Nobis Pacem just in case you can't quite place it. I think one grade is ever so slightly ahead of the rest...):

And despite the high schoolers' attempt to be super-relevant by playing a Lady Gaga medley, this was The Boy's reaction to the concert:

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Happiness is...

Walking out of Home Depot with colour-matched cans of paint.

It's project weekend! I heart projects. Poor The Husband - this is the first time I've really owned a house (we owned the duplex, but always had "keep this neutral/inexpensive" in the back of our minds). So he's got 16 years of pent-up decorating flooding through his world right now.

And while I try not to involve him as much as possible (I'm very handy with a paint roller), I also know that I am hardware-challenged and plaster walls + PM's prowess with a hammer = big, gaping holes. So he is the official installer/mover of heavy objects/curtain-rod hanger. He hates hanging things because he cannot handle pictures that are not level or perfectly aligned, so it takes him ages.

(I'm of the eyeball it and "just put a nail in already" school of installation, which is why he won't let me do it.)

But the painting is my baby, hoo boy! And the thrill I get in my heart when I open that lid and smell the paint is fabulous.

Two rooms up for this weekend: bedroom and bathroom. Seems like a lot, but I'm trying to minimize disruption so I figure do it all at once.

We had a poll on bathroom colours. The Girl marked her initial on the ones she liked:

The Husband marked his initial on the colour he wanted:

(That is, the existing colour.)

Silly boy. Doesn't he know that a new paint colour can change your life? And always for the better?

Now, off to tape....

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