September 2009

Tue, 1 Sep: Back to school.

Fri 4 Sep: Beginning of long weekend. After school we head out on a camping trip to a provincial park a couple hours drive away. Chuckles will be staying with Lovely & the puppies again – now at a month old their eyes are open and they are getting mobile. Cute as all get out!

Fri 11 Sep: Ethiopian New Year. Don’t do anything particularly special. Meant to go to our fave Ethio resto, but no go.

Sat 12 Sep: Mustang starts the fall session of art lessons.

Sun 13 Sep: Button has a soccer tournament – last of the season. We miss the first game owing to church, but get there in time for the second. Lovely warm day.

Mon 14 Sep: Button starts Music for Young Children. We’ve talked about it and he’s been fine with it, but when the time comes to go he is insistent: he doesn’t want to. Refuses to come to the car. Goes into my office room and cries. (At least he hasn’t “run away,” like he is wont to do.) No amount of coaxing, bribery, threats, works. Finally I get Laoye to pick him up & put him in the car. He cries all the way over. At the studio he refuses to exit the car. I go up and explain to the teachers, one comes down and manages to coax him out and up to the lesson. He seems to enjoy it and by the time we head home he’s, if not happy, at least not crying or sulking. I’ve told him he has to go at least 3 times and then if he hates it he can stop.

1-11 Sep: Scrambling to find childcare/Nanny. I want someone to come to our home, in large part because of Lovely (& puppies) but also I just prefer that to out-care or institutional type daycare. Tried using an agency to find a live-in-caregiver already in Canada. The only available ones weren’t interested. Got onto a couple of nanny-matching websites. Found several local young people with relevant training & experience. A bit challenging because I’m only offering part-time (after-school plus some dog/puppy care and housework, meal prep). But find and interview two likely candidates. Offer job to one, who accepts. Yay! Just in time. It's been kind of stressing me - taking up a lot of head space - but it's worked out okay. The Lord provides.

Mon/Tue 14-15 Sep: New Nanny comes for “training” with Laolao & to have some time with kids before LL/LY leave. Seems like a good match.

Wed 16 Sep: Laolao & Laoye fly back out west. As they have doctor’s appts tomorrow and we holidaying until the 7th, they didn’t relish having to hurry back in the bus (slow and noisy) but decided to store it over winter, come back next spring and spend the summer travelling first east to the coast and then all the way west, taking their time and making it an enjoyable holiday.

Sat 19 Sep: Button starts six-week soccer lessons. We take two puppies to the practice; they run around the big field next to the soccer practice. Too cute! After soccer, we head to church to attend the wedding of a good friend. Put puppies in their crate in the basement. Following the service, puppies join us going through the receiving line. We don’t stay for the reception because… well, just because.

Tue 22 Sep: Kids start gymnastics.

Mon 28 Sep: The third Music for Young Children lesson. I don’t remind Button that it’s the third time; he doesn’t bring it up. Seems to be enjoying himself. Doesn’t even complain too much about practicing. I think we’re good.

1-30 Sep: Busy placing internet ads for puppies and responding to a million people who want to buy a dog for next to nothing and a handful of potentially serious purchasers. Find a home for Opal. One down, two to go! (Peridot will go to Lovely’s breeder as stud fee.) Now that the Nanny issue is solved, I can put a bit more energy/attention into this.

I'm back!

Hi, folks, I’m back – after a hiatus of over seven months… Hopefully I’ll maintain consistency again (at least for several months!). Initially I didn’t blog because life was just rather hectic. Then, the longer I didn’t blog, the more there was to “catch up” on, and the feeling of needing to put an increased effort into doing so grew in tandem.

So now I figure I’ll just give you a brief review of the highlights of the past six months, and if I get around to filling in the blanks, great. If not, so be it.

Last August, when the hiatus effectively began (I know I posted once or twice about puppies after that, but that was just “filler”!), there was a lot going on.

Tuesday Aug 4 to Friday Aug 7: Kids spend the week at Farm Camp (daycamp). Laolao & Laoye get a break.

Tuesday Aug 4: Smash up the car. It happened on the way to Mustang’s horse riding lesson,. No one was injured, but the car wouldn’t go. We missed horse lessons, sat around for an hour or two waiting for police and tow truck etc. About the only lucky thing in the whole matter was that it happened within several blocks of home, so we could walk home after all was said & done.

For the next three weeks we used a rental car and most of our spare time was spent looking at replacement cars. Actually, Laolao & Laoye did most of the car hunting, occasionally with kids in tow, (yay for parents!) and just took me to view the ones they thought most promising.

Thursday Aug 6: Lovely’s puppies are born!! You can read about it on my Puppies!!! post from last August. Suffice it to say, it was an eventful day.

Aug 10-20: Kids have swimming lessons every weekday morning. Button passed his Swimmer 2 last session, so both are in Swimmer 3. Mustang passes at the end of this round, so next session –likely next spring – she’ll start Swimmer 4 while Button will still be in Swimmer 3. Frankly, watching them in the pool, I would have said Button was doing a bit better than Mustang, but I guess the instructor thought otherwise. Good for Mustang! She did Swimmer 2 about 7 times before passing, so to pass Swimmer 3 in just two gos is great.

Wed 12 Aug: Laolao & Laoye fly back to Edmonton for a long weekend, to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of some very close & special friends. I’ve rounded up kid/dog sitter for those few days.

Sun 16 Aug: We have 10-day old puppies on lawn to enjoy sun & grass. Lovely is leashed nearby, with the end of the leash draped over the hose holder on the fence, so she doesn’t get too anxious. A cyclist comes zooming around the corner at a pretty good clip, heading – as it were – straight toward her puppies, though in reality just heading to go down the alley. Lovely takes off like a bullet after him and bites him in the leg. Not a severe bite, as bites go, but she still punctures the skin. Neighbour is not willing to accept that she was just “defending” her puppies, and calls in a complaint, so now I have to deal with the bylaw officer & fine. Bother. I should have made sure she was securely tied.

Tue 18 Aug: Laolao & Laoye return. Mustang has her final horse lesson.

Thu 20 Aug: After swimming lesson, we take off for a long weekend camping trip in the bus. Good friend Chuckles comes after work & spends the weekend with Lovely & puppies. Chuckles is almost family, & Lovely loves her, so I know Lovely will be fine with her & not get too nervous.

Sun 23 Aug: Home again. Chuckles says Lovely was a bit anxious while we were gone, and definitely happy to see us home again!

Thu 27 Aug: Buy a new car. Well, a new second-hand car. Though it’s only a year old, and driven by an elderly couple who decided they should stop driving, so it only has (had) 16,000km on it. Very nice condition. It’s a Kia Spectra, hatchback (my preferred style of car), ice-blue in colour. It’ll be ready for pick-up next Tuesday or Wednesday.

Sat 29 Aug: Shop for school supplies for Mustang. As she’s now in Junior division (Grade 4) we have to buy them ourselves. Button starting Grade 1 still can get his from the school for a mere $10, so even though I anticipate it might cause a bit of a stir when Mustang gets all this new stuff and Button doesn’t, I’m too much of a skinflint (okay, I’ll be nice to myself and say frugal) to buy all his stuff too. We do get a couple of things for Button, but not nearly what Mustang got. (I’m right, it did. But we survived.)

Sun 30 Aug: Take the kids to the Fair.

Mon 31 Aug: Take the day off. Last day before school starts up again. We all head 100km down the road to a living Pioneer Village. A lovely day, a bit cool and windy but sunny. Kids love throwing bread or what have you to the carp that live in the canal. We tour the historic flour mill, lumber mill, gardens, school house, barns, hotel, etc. See the horses, cows, piggies, ducks… Buy a loaf of fresh-baked stone-ground bread from the gift shop and have that with fixings for our lunch. I’d found a book in the library that is set in part at this Village – a time-travel book, in which a modern-day girl is transported back in time to a date when the village is about to be attacked, and she helps save the day. We read it in the car on the way down & back again. Kind of cool to get a sense of the people who once lived here and some of the events that occurred over a hundred and fifty years ago.

6 – 31 Aug: working on finding puppy purchasers. No takers yet. Also working on finding fall child care. In Feb lined up a young Chinese woman to bring over as a Nanny (live-in caregiver). Thought I’d covered all the bases, but it seems her education isn’t suitable (she’s almost finished a university degree, but because it isn’t focused on child care and she doesn’t have enough full-time related work experience, she’d likely not qualify for a visa). She’s found a job at a school in China and plans to work there for fall & likely winter/spring, then try for the visa. Means I need to find someone for fall asap. Potential Ethio lady living in our city (friend of a friend) doesn’t work out; she’s studying. Okay, by end Aug things are getting sticky… school starts tomorrow & Laolao & Laoye are leaving in two weeks…

And that, dear friends, is why blogging didn’t get done in August.

Puppy update

The pupsters are now a bit over six weeks old and turning into real little doggies! They had their first vet appointment today, for vaccinations, de-worming, and a general check-up, and did fairly well. No major upsets, though our little chicken-dog, Peridot, did get a bit shivery with fright.

They’re all between 1500g and 2kg now – hard to believe that a mere six weeks ago they were so small they could in my hand, whereas now they’re getting so you have to hoist a bit to pick them up in one hand and they are very, very wiggly! They are mostly weaned now, eating puppy chow two to three times a day, though they still attack Mama’s teats when they get a chance and are hungry. And attack it probably seems to Lovely, seeing as their teeth are growing in so that when they bite down you can really feel it!!





And their personalities are starting to show through:

• Diamond is the big boisterous boy of the litter. The first-born and first at everything else: size, stamina, energy level, eagerness to play… He is the one to pounce on his litter-mates and start chewing ears and tails, at least until they pounce back or squeal at him to stop. Always hungry, he is first at the food dish and has been known to sneak into Mama’s food when he gets a chance.

• Peridot was second-born and she is about as opposite to Diamond as opposite can be! Shy and quiet, she’s the one to hide away in the crate when the others get to rowdy, though we have caught her giving a few pounces of her own from time to time. She was born the smallest and has remained so ever since, truly earning her nickname, Petite Princes Peridot. Shy at the food dish, I often give her a dish of her own so she doesn’t have to compete with her rowdy brothers and sister. She is always ready to give you a snuggle and a kiss!

Opal, our black boy, is fairly lively though not so much as Diamond. Boy, does that pup love to run! Out on the lawn, down the street he’ll go if given half the chance. Or scoot from puppy corner to front door if we so much as crack open the gate to let him out. He loves to chew on the puppy teething ring I picked up a few weeks ago.

• Garnet is the last-born. She is very much what I imagine her mother was like at that age- sleek fur just beginning to develop some soft waves, very snugly but not lacking in energy, sociable and active. She gives her brothers the run for their money in the pouncing department! She had a short stint as fattest dog of the pack, but Diamond figured that would never do (beat by a girl?!!?) and has out-eaten her ever since. Still, she’s growing well, as evidenced by her round little tummy!

You can read about the breed, Australian Labradoodles, on my breeder website: www.dragonramdoodles.com.

P.S. Anybody want to buy a puppy? Diamond and Opal are available.

Holiday #1 - Sandbanks

Well, I thought I’d post a bit about what we’ve doing this summer (other than school-learning related activities!!)

This summer we stayed pretty close to home. Our first holiday, which began two days before school was out (owing to my work holiday schedule) was five days at Sandbanks Provincial Park. This is a very VERY popular park, and when I made the reservation back in late February, there were only about 3 or 4 sites available (and I had to modify out travelling dates by one day to get a site).














The kids and I, along with Lovely, drove down in our little PT Cruiser, but this time we didn’t have to pack along much of anything except our clothes, swimming gear, and a few books and toys, since Laolao and Laoye were driving from out west with their camper bus and we’d arranged for them to meet us at the campground.

We got there around 8:45pm, as dusk was settling. Laolao and Laoye had arrived a few hours earlier and were already set up in the campsite, a nice spot not too far from the beach. Although seeing as the closest beach wasn’t open to dogs, we ended up driving out to the dog beach most days.









I can see why this is a very popular place! Not only is it fairly close to a number of major cities, but more importantly it has great amenities and the beaches are fantastic. Being on a VERY large lake, we had almost ocean-like waved coming in to shore, and the shallow water extended way, way out into the lake, so the kids & dog could ride the waves and walk far far out before the water even reached their chests. The sand is magnificent, and one section of the beach has large dunes, small mountains practically, that we climbed up and down and explored. It was handy to have the car along with the bus, so we could drive to the far-away dog beach and the sand dunes, without having to move the big bus around.

The weather was quite good. Not particularly hot (not like one might expect in late June), and we had some rain, but the rain mostly fell at night and being in the bus, it didn’t affect us much at all.









The bus has sleeping capacity for 4, so one of the kids (and Lovely!) slept on the floor while the other slept with me (they took turns!). Given that it was a bit crowded inside, we mostly ate outside, and rigged up a bit of a tarp to keep the picnic table dry.

About all we did was play on the beach, sleep, eat, play some more, have ice cream, swim and play and sleep. It was great!!!

















On the way home, we parked the bus at a church parking lot in a small town a few hours’ drive from home, and all climbed into the car for the rest of the trip, because in just five days we’d be coming back this way for our second summer jaunt.

At the Fair

Every year the fair comes to our town during the last two weeks of August. The main attraction is the midway, with lots of rides for all ages. There are also concerts and other performances, and displays of animals that harken back to its agricultural roots. Last year, after our adventures out west (and since we’d attended a fair there), we didn’t go, so this year’s visit was Button’s first in our hometown.

We had planned to go the last Saturday of the holidays, but that was a cool and rainy, blustery day. So when Sunday dawned warmish and not too cloudy, we decided that would be day (or we'd miss our chance, as it was the last day to go!) We arrived a bit after noon, shortly after it opened, and immediately headed down to the midway. I had a coupon for one discounted “ride-all-day” bracelet and bought two more. The first few rides we went on were kiddie rides, but still lots of fun. Then we tried a few for bigger kids, and enjoyed them too. Both Mustang and – somewhat surprisingly – Button were not keen on the wilder rides like where you go upside down, but things like the ferris wheel and the house of mirrors and giant slide were favourites.



In the middle of the afternoon – during a bit of a squall – we went into the Agricultural Centre building and enjoyed seeing the animals there, then picked up some ice cream and fries for a snack.



At 5:30 Laoye picked us up after a fun-filled day and we headed home for a movie and bed.