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I was a little hesitant about going to the Blog Friends Fest. Not only am I incredibly shy in large groups, but I didn't know how everything would work out bringing the baby along. A weekend of drunken debauchery with a baby on the hip is sooo Britney.
Over eight months and he still won't take a bottle come hell or high water. Sigh. It's just as well - I'm not sure that I could leave him for a whole weekend right now. Luckily for me, I was able to call in the reserves.
Today, the family took off to Niagara Falls to attend the Blog Friends Fest. Ahh, traveling with two small kids. I have this blissful picture in my head of long roads stretching out to the horizon, sunny skies, and boys happily playing I Spy or the Alphabet City game in the backseat.
Har, har. The reality is much different. Generally, there is always someone screaming, moaning because they're hungry or bored, or whining because they want to hear "My music, play MY music!".
All I can say is THANK GOODNESS the nice people at Ford lent us their new Flex for the trip. I had no idea how much you had to pack. The kids are small! Why do they need so much @#%$ stuff?!
Have you been over to BlogHers Act Canada recently? This month challenge is Eat Locally! Check out the most recent results over in BHAC:
This week was a great week for us in terms of eating locally. Since
eating locally is our challenge this month here at BlogHers ACT Canada,
we are pretty proud! We took advantage of two awesome ways to eat
locally, the farmer's market and a pick-your-own-produce farm.
Continue reading "More local eating! Farmer's markets and pick-your-own." »
And of course there is always something being said over at Binkywood:
Psst. Hey You. Wanna see a show? Don't be a chicken! C'mon. Just click on the button down there. You know you want to. All the cool kids are doing it. Go on. I'll wait.
There now. That wasn't so bad, was it? In fact, you're probably feeling pretty good right about now.
Here's the thing: I love summer. I really do. I love the sunshine. I love watching the wind blowing through the leaves. I love that I don't have to hunt around for hole-free socks in the morning. What I don't love about summer is the dearth of good television available. Yeah, sure, there's TV on DVD (how parents of small children survive without this, I'm not sure), but we jumped on that bandwagon ages ago, and we're running out of shows to watch. I'm starting to get the shakes. Thanks to Joss Whedon, though, I can cure my summertime blues and satisfy my lust for *MORE! SHINY! NEW!* programming...on the Internet.
Five years ago, if anyone had asked me what my five favourite things were in my hip little Queen West kitchen, I’m pretty sure the list would have looked like this:
1. The drawer full of take-out menus
2. My Bodum
3. The Mr. Peanut commemorative blue glass jar
4. The two retro baker’s racks
5. The half-q of weed in the freezer
Fast-forward to today, when the take-out menus get a lot less milage, the Bodum has given way to full-size coffee maker that must be buzzing by 8 am, the Mr. Peanut jar shattered in an unfortunate moving accident (grrr), the baker’s racks are stacked with kids’ toys in the basement and the greenest thing in my freezer is a bag of broccoli. Which doesn’t roll very well.
OK, so we all had a brief freak out when the media got us all crazy about Bisphenol A and bad plastics. (Addictine is happy that BPA is no longer in baby bottles in Canada, but frankly she didn't want to buy more plastic and kept using some of the Gerbers that she'd had from Kid #1.)
We've also all gone through our fair share of sippy cups before finding the right one. But this is my job here: to let you know which item might possibly be the best ever so you don't have to waste your hard earned money too.
After quite some time writing Pick of the Litter columns, first for MommyBlogsToronto, and now for the awesome new Playdate, I have covered a fair bit of territory, topic-wise. Every once in a while, now, I run into a book that makes me think, Oh! I wish I has seen that one when I wrote about... Well, there are always new things to write about, so I hate to reprint the whole column with the new additions, but I thought I'd refer back and offer up a few of the things that would make good add-ons to some picks of the past.
When buying a house, the Husband and I decided that we wanted to stay in Toronto, rather than moving out to the 'burbs. A lot of factors went into that decision, the most obvious being that we work downtown, and didn't want a long commute. Beyond that, we both do theatre, and the majority of the gigs - the good ones, that is - are in the city. But we also knew that we wanted to raise our (eventual) kids with easy access to all the arts and culture the metropolis has to offer. We didn't want every trip to the museum or the theatre to be a Major Outing.
Ha, ha. Enter two kids and EVERY trip is a Major Outing. Heck, just getting out the door sometimes is difficult enough. So imagine my surprise and delight when a bright shiny flyer fell into my lap as I was perusing The Little Paper one day.
When you think of your childhood, what are you eating?
For me, the food of childhood is the food of a frugal, frustrated mother trying to keep her husband and four picky children happy on a tight budget. Things like spaghetti and meat sauce; sausage and peppers; chicken soup with matzo balls; various cheap cuts of meat sprinkled with garlic salt and paprika and stuck under the broiler – that is the stuff that stuffed me as a kid. There were also plenty of signature dishes of differing levels of appeal making their way out of our mother’s kitchen; dishes that my sister and I gave names like ‘Ketchup Stew’ and ‘Monsterloaf.’
