I shirked my blog duties yesterday, and forgot to post a Happy Birthday to my big man, turning 10 this year.
There just isn’t a more interesting, funny kid than this guy. Smashing good looks too, as you can see.
Category Archives: Family News
Quarterly Blog Update
So, it’s been an unintentional blog hiatus, the way these things sometimes happen. Available time comes and goes, my estimation of how interesting I am goes up and down, and if these two things intersect at a low point, then that’s how you get no blog updates for over a month.
Still, here I am. WordPress 3.8 came and with it a new blog theme, which I am sporting here just for fun. Sometimes a new theme helps with the creative juices. I kinda like it, let’s see how long it lasts. Another benefit is the removal of that rather large, rather blurry header image I had been using of the dogs. It was always meant to be replaced with something of better quality, but I never got around to it. Go figure.
Anyway, here’s an update for you. Recently Cael was reading something and he asked us “What’s a señor’s home?” Nikki and I looked at each other, and had no idea until I looked at the word: senior. Pronunciation is important.
In the same vein, Quinn asked me “Dad, what’s vaganza?” I naturally gave him my best parental blank stare, fervently hoping this wasn’t anything that would require “A Talk”. He said, “yeah, this sentence here says is was an extra vaganza, what does that mean?”
So, people, remember that you can have a small amount of vaganza, but in general it’s always best to have extra vaganza on hand when you can arrange it.
So, in case I don’t get back to you here, have a fantastic holiday with all kinds of vaganza, and stay out of the señor’s home, but those señor’s discounts are pretty sweet sometimes.
In which I re-affirm the miracle of air conditioning
I hereby propose that air conditioning is the single cause of the modern age of prosperity.
Let me explain. Recently our air conditioner suffered a little problem, which naturally only happens when the temperature reaches into the absurd, like it did recently in Ottawa. If felt like an eternity of way above average temperatures, reaching 40C with the humidity. Anyway, I happened to be on holidays for most of the heat wave, which may be a good thing most times, but seemed to hinder our activities due to the crazy heat. Anyway, when the air conditioning died in the house, needless to say I called the repair guy immediately. Also, finding out that there would be a long delay before anybody showed up was also not much of a surprise.
So I was left to contemplate the fact that my thermostat in the hallway read 30C, with every window open in the house, and the outside humidity approaching 94%. Several things came to my mind slowly over the next 48 or 60 hours before we had AC again (the humanity!). First off, beer tastes much better when you are being slowly cooked alive in your own home (good thing I was on holidays). Second, sustained heat does something to your brain where any drive you may have to get things done just melts right away. You just can’t put two thoughts together, no matter what you do. So, combine those two things and you have the basis for my hard-won theory that air-conditioning brought us to our current level of prosperity, not the other way around.
However, one notable exception to this rule is Nikki. As I have mentioned before, she is thermally challenged at the best of times. So when I was literally reduced to a drooling moron affixed to a chair, she was more and more comfortable. Her skin was literally cool to the touch at 30C. She said more than once how comfortable she was, and was not very sympathetic to my grumbling and complaints. I may have mumbled something about how that isn’t natural, and that she may be a robot, or something like that. I can’t recall now since I was more or less sweating beer by this point.
This post would have had a stunningly crafted conclusion if it wasn’t mostly written while my brain was turned off. You get the point, right? Right?
Don’t take your AC for granted, people.
Let’s Mess With the Kids – Part 452
This has probably been covered before in many ways on this here website, but Nikki and I have noticed the completely inconsistent things we do to our poor children. Let me explain.
First off, to our own delight, we don’t have even the slightest hint of music taste concerns at our house. Not sure if this is even a thing anymore, but our kids like the same music we do, and boy is it rather an eclectic mix. At any minute, they could be singing along to Ray Charles on their iPods, or maybe rocking out to the new Daft Punk album. Quinn finally got over his unrelenting Bron Yr Aur Stomp addiction recently, while Cael couldn’t stop dancing to Thrift Shop, you get the idea.
In this very same vein, this week I realized that we are giving them the STRANGEST childhood as far as culture is concerned. For starters, we introduced them to Smokey and the Bandit on Monday, which was an enormous hit as you might imagine. That movie is remarkably kid friendly for something made so long ago. The only real problem is Jackie Gleason’s rather foul mouth, and thinly veiled racism, but most of the worst ones went right by the boys since he uses a particularly incomprehensible southern accent. Anyway, we saw that movie, and then on Tuesday for some reason or another I got talking to them about my Grade 5 teacher at Naismith Memorial PS, Mr. Lake and how he loved poetry. Which led me to find and read some favourites to the boys:
William Wordsworth – I wandered lonely as a cloud
Robert Frost – The Road not Taken
Alfred Noyes – The Highwayman
We even discussed what they might mean, and enjoyed the descriptive language together.
Now, separately these two things are just lovely anecdotes of family time. But when you realize that these two things happened within 24 hours of each other, you begin to realize that perhaps I’m not really qualified to have children. I mean really. What. The. Hell? I’m not really giving them a solid literary background, as Paula will probably mention in a comment here, these poems are like popcorn, not really all that nutritious or filling. And the movie clearly isn’t really worth all that much in terms of their development, with the possible exception that I was able to demonstrate where the Dukes of Hazzard CAME from. It also probably explains why Cael wants a CB radio installed into the Sienna.
So anyway, there you go. The kids will be weird in that ever so unique way that makes them Vallentyne weird, and not Jones weird or Smith weird or, well you get the idea. That’s your job as a parent; not only to give your DNA to your kids, but to provide your very own special mix of strange so they can go off and mix it with some poor unsuspecting person and raise their own special kind of weirdos. The circle of life turns onward.
Isabelle Boileau
While there were several announcements made on other sites already, I thought I would welcome Isabelle here on the blog and share a little pic that may not have already been publicized too much.
Isabelle was born May 21 and has kept our attention FULLY for the last 9 days, even more so than adorable little baby girls do normally. The medical details aside (they are vast, technical and rather hard to follow) she ended up having open heart surgery at a ripe old age of 3 days. She’s doing fantastically well, and is quite obviously fully infused with the patented “Vallentyne Disdain for Rather Large Medical Problems”(tm). Many of her ancestors have honed this skill over the years and there’s no better way for her to flaunt this ability than in this pic here:
This little pup is literally sneering (adorably) at the array of medical equipment surrounding her. Her arrogant(ly adorable) curled lip indicates her lack of concern for these paltry machines and stitches.
Indeed, she seems to be focused mainly on giving us all conniptions, while coolly observing our concern with a flippant attitude and nary a worry.
The only silver lining in all of this for me, as near as I can tell, is if this beautiful little girl is this much trouble at 9 days old, I am very grateful that she won’t be my responsibility when she turns 16. It’s all about me, of course.
Joking aside, her journey has been an amazing testament to her Mom and Dad, and just how amazing modern medicine is these days. The Toronto Sick Kids hospital is nothing short of incredible, and we are in their debt forever. Simple as that.
Here’s to Isabelle and many more years of grey hair-inducing hijinks that DON’T involve hospital beds.
Eastercache 2013
As an important part of any good upbringing, our kids are well-versed in the Chocolate holidays: Easter, Halloween, Labour Day (doesn’t everyone celebrate that one with chocolate union cards? huh). Anyway, as anyone knows, the very best part of the Easter Chocolate holiday is the finding of treats that have been hidden around the house. It’s way better than Halloween in that sense, since you don’t have to go and beg for your stuff from strangers with bags of candy, which on any other day of the year is a sure jail sentence for anyone trying to give other people’s kids candy, but I digress.
Our kids LOVE the Easter egg hunts, which if I do say so have been awesome in the past. Since the kids could all read we have er, The Bunny has left a very detailed note with riddles about the location of some of the things to be found around the house. The Bunny has good writers that can really be creative, one of them is called something that rhymes with Tricky and boy can she write a poem. Anyway, as the years passed we realized that the kids may need something a bit more challenging to maintain the fun, so I had a call with The Bunny and we decided that we would take the show on the road so to speak and hide things outside the house. At first this was modest, since the kids were young. I used a free app on my iPhone (which I had AT THE TIME, long before I saw the light, or rather the Lumia 920 that I really, honestly love more than I ever did my iPhone)** to get the GPS coordinates of where I was hiding the goodies, and then the kids could use the app to find the goodies again. It ends up being a simple compass and distance display for them, but of course anyone who has used a compass to navigate before knows that’s it’s rarely that easy, and it’s not perfectly accurate, so there is still at least a little bit of looking required. The hiding area became the green space behind the house. The kids loved it, it was way too much fun.
This year, since we had a newly licensed driver in the house, it was time to take it up a notch and the whole city of Kanata became part of the egg hunt, which was both hilarious and so much fun. Obviously Jordy couldn’t navigate and drive at the same time, so the boys took turns giving directions. Needless to say it was a good thing that it was early and there weren’t many folks on the road, as there was much sudden changing of direction. The first stop on the Eastercache was by a stunning serendipitous coincidence Starbucks, which was so handy, as Nik and I dearly needed a huge coffee…. Jordy wasn’t COMPLETELY jazzed by having the handsome barista hand her the bag of Easter goodies from behind the counter, but whatareyagonnado?
It’s price you pay for having absolutely cornball parents I guess. Maybe next year I can cook up a map of the GPS coordinates we used for you folks to laugh at.
** Update to clarify that I was using an iPhone 3G to do this years ago, just before “Thinking Different” became a joke.