NOT ME! MONDAY -- HALLOWEEN, 2011

The whole crew, in Halloween garb. 

Today is Halloween. I have been a parent for nearly 9 years, and I have three children who understand that Halloween is a free-for-all for free candy while living out your childhood fantasies in full costume. I know the great anticipation with which kids approach this most beloved community holiday. And so, I most certainly would NEVER have intentionally left Halloween unmentioned for the last week so I would have a few moments peace from the costume and trick-or-treating talk. Halloween was NOT so unheralded in our house that my kids actually didn't believe me when we mentioned casually this morning at breakfast that on our list of to-do's was to go get them some costumes so they could trick-or-treat, since it was Halloween today. Oh, and get some pumpkins so they could carve jack-o-lanters too. No, Not I!! I did NOT leave costumes and carving pumpkins until Halloween itself.

It was NOT nearly three o'clock before we finished school, got a few chores done, and managed to get out of the house to the dollar store. I did NOT hit the dollar store up for a few ghost masks, a princess crown and wand, some facepaints, a couple of capes, a pumpkin costume, some leggings, and a witch's hat (that was all they had!), and glow wand and a few glow necklaces.  Luckily for me, my kids had asked to be ghosts and a princess (Katya had no choice - she's the pumpkin). Odds and ends for those costumes are easy to find; I got everything we needed for $25, and my kids were thrilled. 

No, this  is NOT like me. I am so uber-organized and pour all my time and talent into creating gorgeous detailed costumes for the weeks before Halloween. I NEVER wait until the last minute to grab anything that works. 

We then did NOT roll into the grocery store at about 3:30, grab a few pumpkins and some candy, and some loaves of french bread for dinner, and get back home by 4:30. We did NOT carve jack-o-lanters and put them out only an hour before dark. 

Claire did NOT carry a sheep-shaped candy basket with her. When you squeeze the sheep's hoof, it does not say "Happy Easter!" 

Katya did NOT go around singing "Happy Birthday" today, because she knew we were celebrating, but just wasn't really sure WHAT we were celebrating.

I was impressed with the kids' tenacity when they all dug in to their pumpkins to clean them out! 

That's pretty ewwwy and gooey! And it swallows up her whole arm!

Sometimes a princess has got to do what a princess has got to do….rolling up the sleeves to get to work!

Gutting her fellow pumpkin. Cannibal.

Spooky! I hate these things!

We're not sure what Katya was for Halloween this year, except for cute.

Our princess, complete with makeup. Enough glitter will make any girl feel like a million bucks! (And yes, I do make her wear warm clothes underneath in order not to freeze out there!

Collin did NOT decide last minute that the ghost mask was too scary, and dig out his trusty Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costume from the dress-up box downstairs. Whatever works! 

Our finished products, awaiting trick-or-treaters (all 20 of them who showed up tonight!)

These are the girls'. Can you tell which is Claire's? The princess with the crown, of course!

These are the boys'. They're sort of into matching lately.

After we put the pumpkins out, I did NOT then instruct the kids to help me clean up the house so if anyone we knew came over for candy, they would not see the mess we'd created today. :) By time Vlad came home, he did NOT say that the kids looked amazing, and the house was sparkling! He gives me a LOT of credit. It did NOT make me laugh just a little bit - mum's the word!

THURSDAYS WITH CARMEN…and a little bit of randomness

Today I am thankful for….the fact that the bug that has hit our house isn't too awful. Claire got it the worst, and Vlad and I have both had 1/2 days of nausea and needing to lie on the couch and do pretty much nothing, but it really hasn't been as awful as stomach flus can really be.

I'm listening to…Spencer, Claire, and Katya playing somewhere in the house. I'm not sure if they're upstairs or downstairs. But they're fairly quiet - always a bad sign. Spencer is being exceptionally patient and sweet to them, and it's a joy to my mothering ears. 

Looking forward to…going to our Little Town this weekend. We're hoping the renter has finally moved out. 

Missing…most of my dishes. We now have five or six plates of three different sets. Where have all the others gone? Have we really broken that many dishes? Have the kids carried them out to the yard? I'm just not sure what to make of it, but one thing is for certain: the next dish set I buy will be the absolute most generic white set I can buy. That way I won't be sad when it breaks, and it will be easy to buy new ones to match. I remember that hundreds of years ago I had a very "beautiful kitchen" as my mother called it. It meant my dishes were pretty, and when the table was set it was actually attractive. Well, not so much anymore… *Wistful sigh*…..Okay, back to reality and the things that actually matter: 

Praying for... direction with the adoption process. We are hung up about finances at the moment. There are many people who step out in great faith and on a limb and jump into the adoption process without the faintest idea where their finances will come from. But $35k is a lot of money, and my husband's brain is waaaaay too logical to jump in without a plan. So we're praying for direction, provision, and that we can know exactly how to proceed with moving, and with getting the finances in order. 

What's for dinner….I wish I had a gourmet answer to this question. The answer lies closer to a rice casserole with pork chops. Yes, I said pork chops. Vlad did the strangest thing and actually bought them the other day. I don't know why because I've never cooked pork chops when they actually tasted good afterward and didn't make me sick to my stomach. One time we actually got food poisoning from pork chops. But he still bought them, and I'm still going to make them. Wish us luck - those who cook, and those who eat. :) 

Burning question of the week…what is up with this little man?:

This kid is going to be the end of my illustrious career as home-schooling mom, I tell ya! This little dreamer boy of mine is really quite something. I cannot for the life of me figure out what's going through his little brain. The best I can come up with is that he is so distracted by his animals and his full-throttle imagination, that he just can't concentrate or doesn't want to concentrate on his schoolwork. It's sort of unbelievable, and at times just hilarious. 

Take those two bottom pictures, for example. These are from yesterday's schoolwork. See the six and the four written in orange crayon under the donuts? Oh, yes, those are a six and a four….but as Collin put it while he was scribbling them sideways (and backwards) "they're having gravity problems." The six over on the right that is scribbled backward, was also endowed with bug eyes and a tongue that is spitting raspberries. This is how Collin does his schoolwork - always full of imagination, especially in anything that has to do with drawing or writing. 

But he also has strange little mental blackouts each day. They seem selective. This morning he couldn't for the life of him remember which number came after 10. So he counted to twenty every time he couldn't come up with it. It took us quite a while to do an addition worksheet. 

The other blackout he always has is the letter "i". He can't remember the sound or the letter. Why "i"? So strange. I finally found a way to give him a clue each time (EVERY time) he comes to the letter "i" in his reading. He hits the letter, squiggles his nose, looks at me for help, and I say, "Iguana in an igloo." And then he keeps going….until the next "i". 

He also doesn't seem to remember letters, words, or ANYTHING from one second to the next. He will write the word "me"  for one sentence, adn then not remember how to spell it the next second. The list could go on and one, but what I really think is happening is that he just doesn't really care too much about his schoolwork yet. He's much too distracted by his stuffed animals. 

Have you ever known a kid to have a stuffed lemur? Well, he has one. In fact, his first one was so loved that he now has a second one. He is the proud papa to two stuffed lemurs. And, of course, he knows their personalities, habitats, and mating patterns. :) This morning he wouldn't do his schoolwork until he had the "Daddy" ginormous stuffed dog all tucked in with puppy stuffed animals under his ears. They slept next to him while he wrestled with his addition. 

I really don't think it's a lack of IQ that I'm dealing with. This morning he came to me and said, "Mom, I had a scary dream last night that was evern scarier than the night before! Last nigh there were alien invaders coming to invade our planet! And so I took out a tommy gun and shot them, and the bullets went right through…."

Maybe if I have him add the number of bullets that came from his tommy gun we'll get past the number 11…. 

Here is a little bit of sweet nothing from our Fall 2011. These are the four little girls who roam our collective four acres all day, every day. This particular day, a dump truck delivering compost to the neighbor was the thrill of the season!

And then there's Katya, who loves her Sunday dress…and doesn't see any reason why she shouldn't climb up the outside of the stair rails in that Sunday dress.  The third picture is from the day that I decided to really give Katya's hair some extra-special treatment. She was born with curly hair, so that morning I put curling gel on her hair, and some hairspray, and scrunched it 'til it was dry. This was the result. Stick-straight! Evidently the curl was transferred to me when she was born.

And this was the view (and still is, at 11:00am) from our windows today. Foggy fog. I love the fog, and this one was/is particularly heavy. When we started school at 6:30am, the street lamplight was glowing in the mist. I'm looking forward to the daylight savings time change, so we might have a bit more light in the early morning.

Happy Thursday! 

BLONDE SNOW WHITE

We got a stomach bug in our house this weekend. Claire got it really hard and heavy yesterday, and is still sick today. Somehow she's even more beautiful when she's not feeling well. She reminds me of a blonde Snow White.

And she's such a little trooper - she trudges back and forth to the restroom to the couch, back and forth, back and forth. She's probably thrown up about 15 times today, but has always made it to the restroom. And no whining or complaining. Her only request was mint tea. Somehow she thinks it will help her stomach. I know she's not keeping anything down AT ALL - even the anti-nausea medicine, but I wasn't about to tell her she couldn't have the one thing that she was sure would make her feel better. 

This little girl has nerves of steel. 

BUBBLE TEA

On Friday night we made "bubble tea" for Family Night. I have to admit, I wasn't too sure how to go about it, but I was sure that I wanted it to be delicious and a memorable experience. I'm not sure it was either, but this is how it went: 

We got out the beautiful parfait cups that were passed on down from my mom. I remember my mom making granola parfaits and the occasional ice cream treat in these glasses. I thought they were so elegant and special that they always gave me a thrill.  So I thought it would be the perfect time to pull them out of the cupboard and give them a whirl with my own kids.

Bubble tea is essentially an iced latte made with tea instead of coffee, and with pearl tapioca mixed in.  Well, we were out of drinking water. One strange little glitch of living in the country with well water that isn't potable, is that sometimes if I forget to fill up the jugs at the grocery store, we run out of drinking water. So we were coasting through Friday evening with milk alone. Turns out, it made things better - the drink was much more rich. 

We started by boiling rainbow tapioca. I found out that when you stir the tapioca with a whisk, they get stuck inside. And they stick like glue. Next I found out that if you shake that whisk for all it's worth to get the tapioca out, the tapioca will fly and stick to the ceiling. As I said, they stick like glue.

Getting the tapioca to boil and then set takes about an hour total, so in the meantime we made our tea drink. I took green tea with a berry flavor, and some brown sugar, and put them both in milk which I set to boil. The tea steeped right in the milk, and the sugar made it all sweet. It was really really yummy! We all loved this part.  

Well, we had to wait forever and a day for the tapioca to be ready. I finally got it ready after about an hour of waiting, and then we mixed it all together with some ice, and had ourselves a little bit of a party while we watched some cartoon thingy - kids' choice!

Truth be told, the milk mixture was awesome. The berries with brown sugar with milk was delicious. But the tapioca….not so much. They were icky and squishy on the outside, and crunchy on the inside. Evidently those babies were too big to cook in an hour. Claire enjoyed playing with them, but that was about the most milage we got out of them. So we pitched the tapioca. Next time I'll try smaller tapioca. Still, it was an experience, and it was fun to try.

Cheers!

AURORA BOREALIS….IN MY FRONT YARD!

I'd always wanted to see the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, and had heard that they were visible from our location on the globe, but had never been able to witness them myself. Well, the other night our neighbor came over to our door and said, "Hey, you want to see the Northern Lights?"

 I said, "Yeah!" 

He pointed out to the sky in front of our houses. "There it is!" 

Yes, indeed, there it was! This is one of the first photos I snapped after screaming with delight.  It started small, but soon….

It grew….

And grew. The whole sky was lit up - the whole dome. In an otherwise pitch-black sky, it provided so much light that the clouds were visible again.

 (That little light is actually a star. There is just a lot of camera shake from my low shutter speed).

It was amazing. I'm sure that no matter where you are, it looks like it's coming from directly above you, but this is a shot straight up into the sky from my spot on the front porch.

My neighbor's house, once the red streaks appeared.

This is a shot of the sky above our house, NOT an imaginary vantage point of streaking through the galaxy.

Far out on the horizon to the north.

What an experience! One I'll not soon forget!

Not Me! Monday

The past few days the bathroom did NOT start smelling badly for no apparent reason. It did NOT begin to smell like sewage in our house. I was NOT on my way out the door to get Drain-O yesterday in hopes of dumping it down the pipes to "Kill bacteria" which were evidently growing and making a stink, when we realized that the smell was not only coming from the upstairs bathroom but also the basement. We did NOT go down there and find the toilet nearly overflowing with toilet stuff, and standing water around the perimeter of the basement. I was NOT extremely thankful that our basement  is unfinished and that the floor is heaved, so the water actually stayed at hte edges. We do NOT have septic backed up into our house. When I wondered why the alarm hadn't let us know there was a problem, I did NOT find the alarm unplugged. The alarm had gone off about two weeks ago, and when we called the septic guy, he did NOT tell us that he didn't know what the alarm was for, and that we should just unplug the alarm. Someone in the family did NOT comply with that erroneous idea. Yesterday I did NOT get ahold of a different septic guy, who told me that the alarm is telling me there is a problem with the pump. Ding, Ding! He gets the genius award. He told me how to *possibly* jog the pump manually into working. It did NOT involve opening up the septic tank and jangling the ropes & chains that are tied to everything down there. Upon opening the septic tank, we did NOT see that our little pond of you-know-what was about five feet deeper than it was supposed to be. And so yesterday I did NOT spend a good portion of my afternoon with my head hanging over the shaft to the septic tank, watching our family's waste slowly recede, after managing to manually kick-start the pump. I did NOT nearly add another kind of waste to the pile while I sat there and got whiff after whiff of that lovely mixture. I did NOT spend the evening laying on the couch, sick to my stomach.

The Asian Market Adventure

Yesterday the kids and I had an adventure. This week we've let the regular routine slip, and as a result the kids have been insanely messy  very creative and busy while I've been turning my back on messes. The result was a mess that would turn my mother gray… ;)

So we spent the morning cleaning up our downstairs. The kids were tidying, and I was wiping and vacuuming after them. By time lunch came 'round, we needed a break. I had promised McDonalds and a trip to the Children's Garden in Assiniboine Park after we made a stop at the Asian Market. There's this huge Asian supermarket that I've always wanted to go to, and it's right next to the kids' favorite McDonalds. Score!

So we took off for that corner of town. McDonald's was McDonalds. What can ya say? However, it was made much more exciting for me by the fact that there was a worker guy who was scaling out OUTSIDE of the playplace in order to get to the top for some repairs. A guys rappelling a McDonald's play structure: now THAT'S something you don't see every day…

Then it was on to the Asian Market. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was sure of one thing: with the city's high and diverse Asian populace, it had to be good. I so wish I'd not forgotten my camera, because it did not disappoint! True, it was a mix of western and Asian foods, but there were so many things that you can't find in a regular supermarket, that there was always something else interesting to see. Most of the packages had what looked like Chinese writing with English subtitles. There were innumerable stacks of coconut milk (seriously, thousands of cans), all sorts of rices and sauces, interesting deserts, about 10 kinds of tofu, lots of canned fruit that we'd never heard of, and veggies that were different than the "normal" varieties. Collin loves strange vegetables, so he talked me into getting some really fat carrots. I decided right there in the store that we were going to cook dinner from what we could find in this store. So we also chose a young coconut, a can of lychee (a red spikey fruit that turns out to taste like a sweet grapefruit with the texture of  a plum), rice noodles, a mango roll cake, and some frozen coconut pudding.

THEN we found the frozen fish section. The kids went ballistic. They have watched so many sea documentaries, that they recognized most of the fish names, recognized some of the fish on sight, and generally could not be quieted with their enthusiastic SHOUTS of joy over frozen fish. They did get some curious onlookers, but didn't seem to notice in their ecstasy over rock-hard sea life. They insisted on picking up each variety, and on some occasions, hugging the fish as well. They BEGGED for a frozen fish. But not just any fish. No….they wanted something interesting, and finally settled on a Parrot Fish. None of us had ever heard of a Parrot fish before, but it was certainly a beautiful fish. In case you've never heard of one, it's aptly named. This is what it looks like: 

Then on to the meat section. This is where things got really interesting. The first thing we noticed were three pigs' heads in the deli window. They were right next to the pigs' hooves, pigs' hearts, pigs' intestines, pigs' lungs, pigs' stomachs, and pigs' ears. Those were next to the beaf tripe, heart, tongue, stomach, liver, and intestine. Yes, all for sale as delicacies. Seriously, what would possess someone to eat a pigs' lung? It looked as gross as it sounded. And my kids let the lady behind the counter know what they thought of her butchered offerings.

Next came whole fish, and squid (not a tiny one - about 2-3 feet long), and then live crabs and lobsters. This is where we got really excited. There was an entire huge barrel of small blue crabs. They were live, and you had to pick the crabs out with tongs and put them in a plastic bag. I asked behind the counter if they would cook them for us, but they only smiled at me as if to say "Silly squeamish American." Well, we had a blast getting those crabs into the bag, squealing and yelping all the way. We each chose one, and they were the hit of the party, let me tell you! Of course, the kids set right to work trying to determine which ones were male and which were female. 

The cashier turned out to be quite knowledgable and was actually able to tell them how to determine crab gender. I was impressed, as usually the cashiers couldn't even tell you the difference between skim and 2% milk. 

So after a quick stop at the Children's Garden (a really awesome playground that I'll have to blog about in the future), we went home and I grabbed the camera pronto!  

The kids wanted to torture observe the crabs a bit. All but one had made it home alive. They were such beautiful little crabs! Look at that blue and orange color! 

They were strong, too. They would grab onto each other when we picked them up, and on a few occasions actually pulled off the legs of other crabs! 

Just trying on the dinner plate for size...

Here's Collin in a face-off with one particularly fiesty crab.

Collin, stop playing with your food!

 In the pot, ready to steam.

Now, you may not believe me, but this little mango cake was the most delicious, light, spongey, moist, decadent cake that I have ever eaten. Amazing.

Here we are, admiring our purchases.

Oh, we also bought rainbow tapioca to make bubble tea.

After the crabs, the purchase that the kids loved the most was the bamboo back scratcher.

Frozen coconut pudding. Gag.

Crabs, all steamed and bright red.

Young coconut milk ready to drink. Yummy!

We didn't have any crab-picking tools, so we used what we could find. Katya was the only child who absolutely refused to eat a crab. She was so freaked out that she wouldn't sit to the table until I took that thing off her place, and put down some noodles and stir-fry (my plan B) in front of her instead.

I actually had no idea how to pick a crab, so I left the table in the middle of dinner to go look it up on YouTube. Turns out, you don't need a hammer!

Then was dishes time. I thought all the kids were watching cartoons while I cleaned up. Then I turned around after all was clean, and found my baby girl here. She had made herself a bed next to Mommy, and was fast asleep on the kitchen floor.  Aww….

We're saving the Parrot fish to eat with Vlad. Lucky him. :)