Category Archives: Family News

Buttkickin’ Love

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Yesterday was “Family Day” which means for us that the kids stay home with Nikki while I go to work anyway.  Still we had a nice family dinner planned since we were all apart this weekend to our various activities; Nikki and I had a weekend to ourselves in Gananoque, Jordy was at her Dad’s place with a bunch of girlfriends, and the boys had a holiday at Nanny’s.  So we celebrated Vallentyne’s Day together last night, and it was great. It’s nice how even though all of our separate weekends did not go completely smoothly, we pulled it together and had a nice time in spite of it all.

Cael summed it all up nicely a few days ago.  He was eating his dinner (slowly as only a 5 year can) and hamming it up as usual, and he made a fist and smacked his other palm a few times and said in his best “old geezer” voice (which involves adopting a toothless expression that words do not do justice) “Who wants some buttkickin’ love?”

Indeed.

Diversity

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Today was the first of monthly visits I’m scheduled to make to Quinn’s classroom to help out in the mornings. I agreed to once a month, thinking I would do this for both the boys and be at the school once every two weeks. Turns out that the kindergarten class doesn’t need me, but the Grade 1’s were happy to have the help. After today I may be offering up more of my mornings.

Everyone knows every child is different and it is impossibly hard to compare any one child to another. Personalities, learning styles, comprehension, focus, and the general willingness to please (or not) are just a few of the characteristics that you find crammed into one classroom. All of these characteristics can make a classroom very crowded despite the number of children there are inside. Quinn has 16 kids in his classroom. This was amazing news for us considering Jordynn has had up to 31 kids in her classrooms over the years. I think it is wonderful to have a smaller class. You would think it would give a teacher an abundance of time for individual attention. This is not necessarily the case.

I spent the morning with a beautiful little boy who I was told has yet to be “assessed”. This particular little man needs one on one attention to be able to stay focused on a task and unfortunately he does not have an EA. He and I had a very successful morning together and the teachers were happy with his progress. This progress only happens for this little trooper when he has someone working with him. Unfortunately all the other days, when there isn’t the one on one, he does not find the same success or achievement. This broke my heart. This is also hard on the teacher who is unable to give what she obviously wants to give to this student as it would take from all the others. 16 is a rather big number now in my eyes.

Then I saw children who just seemed to not have any respect for the teachers repeated requests to be quiet, pay attention, work on the assignment, or put up their hand. I was however told that today they were a little excitable (likely due to my presence), but I know some of these kids from Quinn and his teachers in past years, and am fully aware of what the teacher has to face every day with some of them, mainly their lack of respect.

Of course among these children are some that have been desensitized to the regular distractions and disruptions of others and coast through their day, following rules, and looking forward to recess to burn off the boredom/frustration.

I guess in a way it is like any job where you are subjected to all different types of personalities, opinions and behaviours. Call it a wakeup call for me though to see firsthand the skills our children learn at such a young age. Given the restrictions put upon our teachers for maintaining order, it appears to me that our kids are forced to grow up a little sooner with the life lesson of tolerance, or sadly, the disservice of just being tolerated.

Let me finish by saying this; I left that classroom this morning with a warm fuzzy in my heart having given to a kid who deserves more that what is presently available to him. We had success. We did the assignment…albeit not easily…and not without steady redirection to the task at hand, but the smile on that little boys face made my cup runeth over. He beamed, puffed out his chest and took his work to the teacher for his well deserved praise. We even did the extra bonus work damn it…and by God he felt good about it. Our shared high-five at the end of that made my day/week/month. The sad part is the ache in my heart for I know that tomorrow may not be as good a day for my new little friend.

There is an ache in my heart for those who will potentially never learn respect for others, and will unfortunately grow up being tolerated, never knowing that isn’t a good quality in life.

There is an ache in my heart for those who are held back from their full potential as a result of having to tolerate others.

Hats off to teachers. Whitney, I think of you often and admire your perseverance, your patience, your tolerance. Today reminded me of my respect for teachers. Especially the good ones. We need them.

So the next time the form comes home in your child’s back pack to see if you are willing to offer up some of your time to volunteer in the classroom…and you could actually make some time….don’t recycle it right away thinking you are already too busy with life and its demands. Think of my little buddy who may only have one morning a month with a mom who didn’t realize how badly she was needed in the first place.

MushMom

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As I have mentioned previously, Nikki lives her life in a state of perpetual hypothermia, her blood is always chilled to a thick gelatinous viscosity that sluggishly seeps through her veins.  No warmth is radiated from her core to her extremities.  They are freezing cold and are brittle and stiff all day long.  Even in the hot summer months her hands and feet only barely rise to non-cadaver temperatures.

It’s too easy to tease her about this of course, which I do mercilessly.  All joking aside however, we were talking about this last night while she gave my shins frostbite with her toes.  I suggested that perhaps she wasn’t dressing warmly enough to be comfortable during the day.  She countered that she wears multiple layers all day long, and that isn’t enough to make her feet and hands comfortably warm.  I then suggested that she could wear a toque during the day since even though the head is not a significant source of heat loss, maybe it would help to keep her body temperature up.  I suggested that if she did that, we could start calling her MushMom, you know, like Mushmouth from Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.

It turns out that I was actually thinking of Dumb Donald, who wore a toque that covered his whole head down to his mouth, with eye holes.

Dumb Donald

In my defense, Mushmouth also wore a toque, but a regular sized one.  However, Mushmouth did have the excellent speech impediment that makes the joke funny.

Mushmouth

So, if that seems like a long way to go just for a joke about Nikki wearing a toque all day, you are correct.  But then we wouldn’t have been able to reflect back on Fat Albert, which would have been a shame.  A little Cosby bonus for those of you who remember, I can still sing the Picture Pages song.  Anybody else?

UPDATE:  You know what is kind of wonderful?  The Internet has decided, as a whole, that this blog post is the definitive place to find any and all information about Mushmouth.  I know this because my stats say so.  I think that’s awesome, but with this great responsibility comes great responsibility.  You all need to realize that Mushmouth is the guy above with the RED toque, not the dude with the eye holes cut into his toque, that’s Dumb Donald. I, too made this mistake before conducting exhaustive research for this post.  PLEASE PEOPLE, when you dress up like that for Halloween, you are actually dressing as Dumb Donald, not Mushmouth, ok?  Thanks for reading, carry on.

Nikki’s Job

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Our friends have been hearing it for years now when we talk about Nikki staying at home with the kids:  Only a couple of years now until Nikki goes back to work.  It’s a familiar tune we have been singing for a long while now.  It was a lifeline for Nikki when the boys were really young and it was HARD to be home all day.  Really hard.  Hardest thing you can do, probably.

There was multiple sources of stress placed on her back then; stress from the kids who were very very busy and required super human patience to just make it through the day (see HurriCael and other posts about Quinn and Cael for proof of this), stress from herself when she felt that she wasn’t up to the task and guilt from just wanting to be somewhere else.  Not to mention the financial issues with having a single bread-winner (myself) on various contracts that aren’t necessarily stable.  It added up to a lot of crazy days and some really hard ones on everybody involved.

She would justifiably complain that she was too tired and wiped to really appreciate her time with the boys at home when they were really young.  It’s a catch-22 that really sucked, basically.

Now it all seems like a distant dream.  The kids all get along really well, in fact the Christmas holidays went so well we all were sad to see them over, unlike past holidays when the sense of relief when the kids go back to school ripples through the house.  They used to just need to get out of each other’s hair, but these days they all get along so well it’s a let down when the regular schedule starts again.

The struggle is for Nikki to decide how strong her desire to go back to work really is.  Things are running so smoothly now it’s a hard decision to uproot everyone’s life just to go back to work.  It’s not as much of an escape for Nikki as it used to be, there’s a sense of uprooting the house schedule for even less of a reason.

Then we look at two income households longingly, sheer earning potential aside there’s a whole lot of stability to be had when both spouses are working.  I’m pretty lucky to be working most of the time, but I probably haven’t taken more than two days off in a row for about 8 years now.  Some “paid” holidays would sure be nice now and then.  Not to mention that a job with some medical and dental benefits would certainly help out a lot.  But, we’ve made it this far, what’s another few years?  <knocks on wood-like government desk>

So there you go, it’s pretty clear:  there’s just no right answer.

I saw this article in the Globe and Mail (read it before their stupid paywall comes crashing down.  Why on earth would anyone pay to get access to articles that happened in the past?) and it sparked this post since it resonates strongly with our current position.

Happy New Years

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The last post of the year would normally be some sort of top ten list, or perhaps some new year’s resolutions.  Not here though.  Here’s the past year of the blog, highlights and lowlights.  Mostly it’s just the stuff that jumped out at me today scanning back through the year’s posts.

First off we have perfect hindsight.  This one really smarts.  Looking back at January I was excited about the new Apple TV and thought it was ready for prime time.  Flash forward to just this past week and it seems that I am as stupid as can be.

I debated my increasing maturity because I realize I am now capable of listening to cover songs without instantly rejecting them out of hand based on some sort of naive sense of purity.  I noted that the music industry continues to die without many other signs of life, in spite of some really excellent advice available for free.

Technology was still of great interest of course, as it always will be.  The ever increasing use of social networks to keep in touch with people led to greater and more intricate knowledge of your network of friends, ambient awareness was the term coined.  It’s continuing, and the Friendfeed sidebar is a good example of how that will grow even more.  This year led to even more robots designed to assist humans live every day lives, which I noted would inevitably lead to the death of us all.

I spent quite a bit of effort trash talking Mexico and Winnipeg for their attempts to make their mark on the skating world, even thought I didn’t have to defend Ottawa all that much.  We still win.  Similarly, the LimerickDB is still the best place on the web for rhyming jokes, and we sampled a few of my favourites.  Also, we were privy to the most private thoughts of a monster, disturbing stuff though it was.  I had lots of fun with rubber truck nuts, not directly however.  It doesn’t hurt that they are silly beyond belief in the first place, but then the legislation starts and things get really weird.

It seems that a series of gun-related events cause me to post about them far more often than I normally would.  One gun post even actually resulted in a series of (gasp!) comments from actual other people.  Most often it was just me complaining about them and the people who are clearly not wise enough to be holding them, especially in public.

Speaking of people not wise enough to protect anybody, how about those TSA airport screeners?  It spawned a whole new category of posts that will no doubt continue to grow.  Similarly I particularly enjoyed myself writing about a certain monkey-smuggler who succeeded and then failed in remarkable fashion.  Also we saw a family who was too stupid to protect their dog from a hungry snake, although they had several days to do something about it.

The financial crisis and subsequent auto bailout wasn’t funny, but that didn’t stop me.  It lasted a few days, but we aren’t done with it yet since there’s more to come.  Finally the strangest news story to hit here must have been the multiple feet washing ashore in B.C. I stopped mentioning it, but the story continues to this day.  Crazy.

Finally, some of the more personal posts that kept me amused over the year, I mentioned Nikki’s growing fresh laundry addiction, just one of the hazards of staying home to watch the kids.  Similarly, I revealed how she is a heat vampire bent on freezing me solid.  She also laughed heartily at me for this little escapade with the Stratus, where I learned to use the Force to drive the car.

So there you go, it’s the past year of the blog condensed for your convenience.  Hope you had a good year, I think we did.  All the best to you and yours, see you next year.

Merry Belated Christmas

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I’m late with the Christmas post, but what are you gonna do when you are having fun and being as lazy as possible?  A good time was had by all at our place this Christmas, I hope you had a great holiday as well.  The boys got Nerf dart guns this year, and so Nikki and I thought that the whole family should be armed, you know, for self preservation.  The ensuing war lasted about 45 minutes and was clearly the highlight of the whole day.  Here’s Whit getting ready for some Nerf-style vengeance on someone, with Cael and Quinn who have her back.

Whit looking for revenge

You can see the results of her ill-fated attempt at a charge….

dsc_0511

If you can’t shoot your relatives at Christmas, when can you?