Well, another year and another VCP under our belt, we are now tireder (still) and older, but given that it was such a good time all is forgiven.  There was fewer folks than we thought, but given the blustery and snowy road conditions, I guess we got a great turnout.

There are pictures (lots of pictures) yet to be sorted through. We look for the most embarrassing, least flattering, compromising pictures to be placed on the Internet for safe keeping so they don’t fall into the wrong hands.  We have to be careful and respectful of our guest’s privacy of course.

Some special shout outs:

• everyone who brought us a bottle of wine.  Thanks so much, Nikki may never need to buy another bottle again.
• the guitar lads.  Rod and Shaun provided some excellent tunes tirelessly for the living room crew.
• PJ for bongoing along gamely, bringing a certain level of professionalism to some rather rambling tipsy guitar songs.
• Andre who actually made it to the party through the snow, flying some 3000km or so Google tells me.  Good to see the whole Dupuis clan there.
• Nikki’s fine bar tricks, showing her drop shot prowess over and over.  That was the result of some careful experimentation and breaking more than a few glasses, but it paid off.  Tracksuits and jägerbömbers (I think there should be some rock dots in there somewhere, I am probably wrong) all round.
• Wilson for bringing and sharing said Jägermeister, to the detriment of everyone’s sobriety.  I think we owe you a bottle, buddy.
• Everyone who brought food for the Kanata Food Cupboard.
• Everyone who contributed to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and signed our wall.
• Everyone who brought food, we ate it all and it was delicious.

I know I have forgotten lots of fine folks, please correct me on any unintentional slights.

It’s time people.

The party elves have come and gone and have left the house in sparkling party condition.  We are ready to rock in every way, the forecast has even cooperated so far, with less snow than before scheduled to fall.  There’s no reason to not come, so just do it, ok?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7ytn1Cp2WM

Jordy has been riding for a while now, but we recently moved her to the Nepean Equestrian Park, which is actually a pretty nice place to be if you like horses.  I don’t.  Or rather, they elicit a strong reaction from my sinuses, resulting in instant revolt against the faintest whiff of horse.  But I digress.  Jordy has been riding and she loves it in a way that no other activity ever has.  Soccer, numerous dance classes, swimming, they all pale in comparison.  She is also quite good at it, which doesn’t hurt one bit.  

After moving to the new horse farm, she of course is now riding a new horse during her lessons.  Despite the horse looking quite majestic and regal (in a sinus-filling way), it seems that it is rather a moron.  It seems she had the unfortunate luck of drawing a horse that is at least 90% mule.  She was VERY frustrated after her first lesson, it seems that the style of riding she was learning previously was not quite up to the standards of the new place.  Added on to that was the horse, who was determined to do things his own way, and not listen to Jordy at all.  After that fateful day we asked Jordy if she wanted us to see if we could get her a new horse to maybe help out a bit.  She refused, and has made it her personal goal to master that horse at all costs.  It seems that the horse is not the only stubborn one.  So far it seems to be working out, her recent lessons have gone much better.

Her only request?  A riding crop….  Probably all the better to “school” her new horse.

While Quinn and Cael get mistaken for twins all of the time because of their similar physical size, anyone who spends more than 3 seconds with them together quickly realizes they are incredibly different in almost every way.  It’s hard to emphasize this to other people.  Sure they share similarities; for instance the fart game is the absolute height of comedy and has been for at least a year.  Star Wars has taken up residence in their psyche as part of their core belief system (as it did for me, and probably will for generations to come).  The light side and dark side of the force is a framework that is remarkably compatible with their Catholic schooling.  Darth Vader is incredibly cool and very compelling (the Devil, temptation, etc) but the light side is the good guys, and we all know deep down that we are Jedi, and not Sith.  

The differences run deeper than the similarities though.  Taken separately from each other, Quinn is thoughtful and a deep thinker.  He loves nothing more than for me to explain something to him that is complex and technical.  Admittedly he is older, but his passion for detail and technical stuff is uncharacteristic for kids his age.  Cael expresses every thought that comes into his head physically.  His hands working, flapping and grasping as he tries to explain his latest cool idea, his cheeks fixed into what must be a painful perma-smile, his eyes flashing and wide open.  That’s not even to mention his constant calf-punishing jumping.  He has an attention span when you get his attention but every other thought in his head commands his attention more than I ever could.  A request from a parent is like a whisper in a hurricane, there’s no chance of it getting through unless he basically is reading your lips, over and over until he repeats it back to you, and even then it has a half-life of about 2 minutes.  Less if he happens to run into Quinn on his way to do whatever it was you asked him to do.

Let me provide a small concrete, if rather disgusting, example of how these boys are as different as night and day.

Last year Cael got a virus of some sort, and wasn’t feeling all that well.  Nikki and I had a dinner out planned that night, and Cael seemed to be ok once we got him to bed, so we had the babysitter come anyway and went out for a few hours.  We got back and got ready for bed, and when we went to kiss the kids we found that sometime in the last few hours Cael had gotten sick in his sleep.  He didn’t even wake up it seemed, but instead managed to sleep in it, rolling around and generally making a big mess until we went in to kiss him.  A quick midnight shower, some new sheets, and he was back in bed and feeling fine.

Compare that to Thursday night with Quinn.  He went to bed as normal, no indication anything was amiss.  Nik and I went in to kiss him before bed as usual, and we found that he too had been sick in his sleep.  The difference was he managed to make a tidy mess beside his bed, his bedding hardly the worse for wear.  We cleaned it up and left him snoring away without even moving him.  I asked him in the morning if he remembered being sick in his sleep and he was mystified about the whole thing, couldn’t believe it happened.

Sorry if that’s a little gross, but there you go.  You have neat and tidy Quinn on one hand, and Hurri-Cael on the other.  Still, they both did manage to sleep through the whole thing…

If you haven’t already called, or emailed, or Facebooked your attendance to the VCP then I encourage you to do so now.  This date is the milestone day in Nikki’s project file when we must start a tally of sugarplums, hall-decking boughs of holly, and a general inventory of the available stock of holiday wishes.  Having a good time is serious fricking business, people.  To that end, please please don’t make us adjust our project milestones, it really screws up the Gantt chart, and messed up Gantt charts are enough to really put a kink in Nikki’s party planning groove.

It’s ironic that I post this on the blog, which as we all know has a readership that could be contained inside a Toyota Prius with their dogs included, but hey it makes me feel good.  Besides this week has seen rather spotty publishing updates, so I really needed some filler to make it up.  So, here we are.  Pointless party plug.

Still, what you have read you cannot unread, and now you can’t complain even more about the lack of original content posted here.  So there.

It’s amazing to see the competitive streak Quinn has recently developed.  I never had it, and I really don’t think Nikki has it, so we are at a loss to explain where it comes from.  Just the other night a fun game of Crazy Eights was soured at the very end when Quinn realized he hadn’t won a single game (Cael surprised us all by winning 3 out of 4).  He put on a very pronounced pout, and was sullen when we called him on it.  This kid just has to win, maybe not all of the time, but boy is he keeping track.

The fact that this year is his first year to be all day at school probably has a lot to do with it.  It’s surprising how little we really know about what is going on there all day (I know we have been doing this for years now with Jordy, it’s just new for the boys again).  It makes me wonder what kind of games they play at recess.  Recently he has been taking a stronger interest in sports, mostly hockey.  We have skating lessons coming up for both boys in January and Quinn is stoked about it.  Cael not so much.  Road hockey has become a new favourite and we have spent lots of time recently messing around on the street.  There’s not a hint of any issues with competition then, we never even keep score.  If you try playing a board game or card game though, look out.

I can’t figure it out, it’s really weird.  I don’t necessarily want to squash it altogether, but it’s hard to strike a balance between pushover and raging animal when winning is at stake.