Bibliomama

A few days ago Eve texted me from school to say her BFF's mother had given her permission to go off school grounds during recess to Tim Horton's for an iced capp, so Eve wanted to know if I was okay with her going too, even thought they're not technically supposed to leave school property during recess until next year. I said yes. She then sent me this: THEN once they got back to school she asked me to text her saying I'd dropped off their iced capps at the front desk, in case anyone asked where they got the iced capps. Then she deleted all the texts except the one I sent. Total badass, that girl. **************** She gave me this card for Mother's Day: ***************** I was hanging out with her BFF's Mom after she took all the girls to Comic Con for BFF's birthday. They were talking about how girls still send nude pictures and the other mom and I were goggling and despairing. Then the BFF said "one guy asked me for pictures. So

Or doing much of anything, if I'm being honest. I'm done all but three and a half hours of my work placement and I was looking forward to a quiet week with Matt gone AGAIN, but I kind of miss working, and I can't settle to any wholehearted loafing and it's been mostly too cold to walk much (yes, I do have a treadmill now that you mention it, how kind and helpful, shut up). I went to a Lumineers  (and Kaleo , swoon) concert with friends that was wonderful even way up in the cheap seats, then I had book club, which was great, and not only because I actually managed to go to the right house this month (don't ask), and yesterday I finally started cooking again after a few weeks of an absolutely pathetic showing in the kitchen. I also made a couple of significant phone calls, to book driving hours for Angus and pay off a forgotten FedEx taxes and duties bill, so, you know, that used up a fair number of spoons. I still have to make a doctor's appointment for me, make

Before I had kids, I went to Bluesfest regularly, usually with a friend (my husband isn't really into live music. It's okay, he has a lot of other good qualities). It was downtown so I would bus nearby or to my friend's place and we would walk over. I saw John Hiatt, Buddy Guy and Saffire and the Uppity Blues Women (they were great musicians and hilarious - one of their songs was called Silver Beaver, and it's about pretty much what you'd guess from the title - and while I was looking them up to embed the link I read that one of them died and now I'm sad) and The Blind Boys of Alabama and a bunch of bands I didn't even know or can't remember now. We moved to even more of a suburb. We had a couple of kids. Bluesfest moved somewhere a little less accessible and I stopped taking public transit and got less comfortable with it. Bluesfest got much less Blues-packed, but that wasn't really a factor for me - I like the blues, but I understand that the f

Wednesday (yesterday) was Take Our Kids to Work Day. Matt was planning to take Angus until he realized that he was going to be in Japan. He arranged for a colleague who is also a family friend to take him instead. Then his best friend's mother mentioned that she could take him to the General Hospital where she works. He really, really wanted to do this (because he wanted to see the operating room and get lectured on health and wellness, you understand, not because he'd be spending the day with his friend), but he was worried that it wasn't polite to withdraw from the other committment. We were discussing this at the dinner table and Matt said he thought it was fine for Angus to go to the hospital, we would thank the other person and let them off the hook. Then Eve said "...or he could just stay home with Mom and fold laundry - I KNOW THAT'S NOT ALL YOU DO, I REALIZED IT WAS REALLY OFFENSIVE AS SOON AS I SAID IT PLEASE DON'T TAKE MY FOOD AWAY." Then

All photos from Eve's session with the incomparable Sarah McCormack .

I'm not sure how I feel today. If I evaluate how well I'm "doing summer", it comes out okay. I'm not hiding inside from the heat all the time; I've been to five baseball games and the beach. I've taken Eve shopping for groceries and clothes and had a blast doing it. It feels like we're more than two weeks in, which is good because it means we've packed a fair bit in. I did manage to dig up the weed-choked flower-and-herb beds in the back yard, but I haven't managed to top them up with soil and plant anything, so that makes me a little sad, although we're still in Schrodinger's trip territory - Angus's baseball team will win/will not win Provincials tomorrow and then we will travel/not travel to Calgary for Nationals (you heard that, right, Baseball Gods? WE MIGHT NOT WIN. No cockiness here. Outcome is uncertain). Which makes it hard to plan things like flower and herb beds that need daily watering. I'm feeling a little unfocus

I always kind of liked grocery shopping with the kids when they were babies. They usually slept or looked around and I felt a sense of accomplishment at the end. Unless we got caught in the rain on the way back to the car. When they were toddlers it was even better. I'd plunk them in the front of the cart and they would make lion noises or eat a cookie or a cheese bun (yes, I always paid for it) and we would make silly comments about whatever we were buying and they would entertain the other shoppers. But when you have little kids, it always feels like a treat to be allowed to run any kind of errand by yourself. You feel almost weightless - no solid little body to swing from car seat to grocery cart, no worrying about losing someone in the produce maze, no stopping little hands from dropping a watermelon on the bread. So when they started school, I would go grocery shopping when they were in class. And now we've come full circle, where it's kind of a treat when they'

A couple of months back, I got wind of NetGalley.com, a website through which publishers " provide digital review copies to professional readers, including booksellers, librarians, media, bloggers, reviewers and educators". I shouldn't visit that website, I thought. I'm drowning in books. Even though the review copy stream has slowed down since my original contacts at a few Canadian publishers have left, between library books, Kindle books (DAMN those daily deals, DAMN them!) and books I've bought, the stacks have grown, the queue is alarmingly long, and sometimes it makes me feel a little stressed. Not grateful and happy and excited, the way one SHOULD feel when blessed with this embarrassment of riches, but stressed. For no really good reason, because aside from a course or two, I'm free to read whatever the hell I want, but I definitely wasn't in need of a further source of books. Certainly not one where the requesting and delivering of said books is as

Last night Matt and Angus were out at baseball and I was in the kitchen cooking a bunch of stuff while Eve was reading on the couch. I told her I was just going to go upstairs and wash my face and then we'd have dinner. I took off my apron and threw it over the top of the couch. I kicked off my sandals which I wear in the kitchen because they have orthotics in them and it's better for my feet and back. I walked upstairs and into my bedroom and into the bathroom, stuck a scrunchy in my hair and washed my face. Then I reached for my glasses, because I always wash my face, dry my face, then wash and dry my glasses before putting them back on. No glasses. I looked around, confused. I always put them down to the left of the sink on the counter. I moved the little baskets that have my nail clippers and hair clips and stuff in them. No glasses. I looked to the right of the sink, where my hair dryer and straightener live. No glasses. So now I'm totally confused and also blind

We're a mixed-bag of viruses over here. Eve has been stuffy and her eyes "are pretending to be waterfalls", Angus has the voice of one of Hell's lesser demons. He went to school this morning, and I picked him up at noon for an orthodontist appointment - when the receptionist heard him talk she suggested I not bring him back. I had a sore throat and bad sinuses on Tuesday morning, which suddenly morphed into the Barfing Plague on Tuesday afternoon. And my husband has somehow been dodging among the large-droplet-contagion without getting wet so far. He did have to put my socks on this morning so I could get Angus to the orthodontist, since I wrenched my back muscles so badly in the process of turning my gastrointestinal system inside-out that I could hardly move. Turns out it's almost as hard to put on someone else's socks as it is to put on someone else's glasses (if you've tried, you'll know what I mean). "What the hell are you doing? You can&

The whole concept of Black Friday eludes me. I mean, Boxing Day makes a twisted, horrifying sort of sense, I guess - you just bought a bunch of stuff for other people, then you go buy a bunch of stuff for yourself, and it comes in...boxes...or something (I don't shop on Boxing Day either). But Black Friday? That sounds like a plague or something. Crap, it just occurred to me that if I Google 'Black Friday' I might discover some extremely good reason why Black Friday is called Black Friday. I'm not doing it. Can't make me. Anyway. There is no way in hell I will be crashing through anybody's door at seven o'clock tomorrow morning. BUT Eve needed a Christmas outfit and some pants that fit for the winter, and I needed some goat milk lotion from Crabtree and Evelyn (shut up, I totally needed it) and Angus was staying after school for the evening to referee the grade seven volleyball tournament. And it's Thursday, NOT Black Friday. Yesterday Eve said &qu

The prompt for today is "tell us about the last thing you hid". When I got home from Zarah's, I had two shopping bags that had presents for the kids in them (mostly for Eve, because pretty much everything Angus is getting comes from Best Buy or Evoshield, not quaint little shops in downtown Barrie). I was exhausted from the drive, and I stuck them in a corner of the living room, intending to deal with them better the next day. Five days later, I realized that they had been sitting there, not particularly well closed, right next to where Eve practices the piano every day, and she hadn't looked in them. I realized this because she reminded me that they were there, and asked me if I could move them because she was having a progressively harder time resisting the temptation to investigate. And that is what kind of kid I have.

I was supposed to babysit Rose today while Eve went to Marianna's. Eve got wind of this and refused to go to Marianna's until after Rose left. Which was good, because Rose completely prefers Eve. First she was like "musical toys! Spoons! Cups! This place rocks!" Then she was like "THIS IS TOTAL B.S! WHY WAS I LEFT HERE WITH THESE BUFFOONS?" Which, as it turns out, was just "WHAT'S THE THING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER WHEN YOU'RE TIRED AGAIN? OH RIGHT..... ZZZZZZZZZ...." Then she woke up and she was all "WTF?" Then she was all "My Mom's back.... LATER, LOSERS."

Have I mentioned how much I love everyone who reads and comments here, and how I would totally buy you all homes in the south of France if I could? Even though I still don't know if we should get a dog? Because I really really do, and I really really would. And we are completely maybe getting some kind of dog some day. I picked Eve up at school dismissal to whip her over to piano lessons, then whip her back to the school so I could do my interview with her teacher and then we could work the book fair for the evening, which is always nuts because all the parents come in before or after their interviews. I had my usual four-minute interview - Eve's enthusiastic, Eve's bright and interested and wonderful and when Eve and Marianna sit close together they talk too much. Check. I went back to wait with Eve for the librarian to arrive and unlock the library. She was six minutes late. There were people lined up and pounding on the library doors like they were high and the last

You know it's a bad NaBloPoMo post day when I resort to day-counting. I know it's a bad brain day when I have to stop and wonder how many days it's been and then I realize the Mo stands for month - IT'S THE DATE, STUPID. Today I was getting dinner ready in the kitchen and Eve was asking me questions and her voice was coming from a place it doesn't usually come from - she wasn't in the bathroom or at the top of the stairs in the doorway to her room, which is where she's usually yelling from when I'm in the kitchen. I asked her where she was and she said "in here". She was reading in the reclining chair in the living room. No one ever reads in that chair. No one even sits in that chair. Usually that chair holds Matt's briefcase and/or baseball and basketball crap. She was cuddled up in it with her book and a blanket. It was like looking through a portal into an alternate dimension. I listened to some of a program on CBC today about ho

A couple of months ago, Katy the library tech at our school said the principal didn't really want us to have the Book Fair this year. Uh........ say WHAT? WHO DOESN'T WANT TO HAVE A BOOK FAIR? Eventually she said we could have the Book Fair. A couple of weeks ago Katy said nobody had volunteered for the Book Fair. The newsletter is online now, which is great. People were always complaining about getting more than one newsletter if they had more than one kid at the school - having it online wastes much less paper. The only problem is that almost nobody reads it when it's online, so nobody knew we NEEDED volunteers. So I said no problem. I'll just come every day. As it turns out, we got more volunteers, which thank god because I love the Book Fair and I COULD go all day every day and today flew by and the library is my happy place, BUT my introvert energy tank is empty and I fed my kids leftover Chinese food and no vegetables for supper and I am brain. dead. I

Last year (when she was the biker) and this year, Eve decided fairly early exactly what her costume would be and pulled together all the elements herself - well, I did order her biker boots online, but come on, how could I not bring the awesomeness of Eve together with the awesomeness of biker boots, given half the chance? It was a leather vest in her closet that inspired the biker costume. I'm not entirely sure what set her off this year, and truthfully I found the whole thing a little bizarre, but she was enthusiastic enough beforehand and convinced enough that it was 'epic' when it was all finished that I decided not to intervene. I've always said that costumes pulled together from stuff you already have are better than costumes you buy. Right? For your viewing pleasure, my daughter....... The Vampire Rapper. ...named J.Z. Dawgy Dawg. (I suggested J.Z. Bitey Bite as an alternative. She was unimpressed.) For the