Today we went to check out Castle, a board game café downtown. A few photos, some with captions if you hover over top...
Some days it's exhausting, but other days I feel so lucky to be Alex and Simon's mom!
Today we went to check out Castle, a board game café downtown. A few photos, some with captions if you hover over top...
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Bought our tree at the local grocer on Sat., and hauled it home. We'd had him cut a ring off the bottom for added freshness, but it still needled like crazy. Also, we ended up having to borrow a saw from a neighbour to cut off an additional branch, as the stump would not fit into my cheap stand. The friend who was helping us set up got over-zealous and sawed off another branch, too, leaving a giant gap on one side!
After a weekend filled with dance recitals, German school concert and more seasonal festivities, we finally managed to get the darned thing decorated. Since last Christmas had found some of us with Trevor and others on PEI (and hence, without a Christmas tree), I couldn't actually remember what decorations we had kept when leaving for Argentina, and which we had passed along to Trevor. As we unpacked our one remaining Christmas bin, I was sad to discover that I must have passed my fancy pears and apples on, along with the wooden stars that a former room-mate and I had bought together at a local shop more than a decade ago, but I was pleased to find our various birds (aviation theme, hehe) and musical instruments (including the little drum ornament I stole from the tree at the hospital the night my mother died over 20 years ago!!!) nestled in among various red balls and the five remaining straw stars made by my great-grandfather. The boys, of course, preferred silliness and wrestling to a more picture-perfect pose once all the decorations were in place, so here is the best I got: (click to enlarge) It began in the wee hours of the morning. One of my kids was sick, so sleep was restless at best. I'd stayed up far too late (again), too, planning a circumference lesson for my Grade 8s, so that didn't help in terms of the sleep situation.
When I finally hauled out of bed at 6:08 a.m. it was a race against time to get out the door in time for work. Of course this was a morning when one of my kids opted for a meltdown requiring parental intervention. It is hard to be calm, patient, a great model of tranquility and optimism when your tired as #%^!… AND YOU'RE RUNNING LATE FOR WORK!!!! But somehow I managed to pull it off with some success, get everyone's tears dried and leave the kiddies in reasonably decent spirits as I sprinted out the door, lunch bag in one hand, folder of marking in the other, while juggling phone, keys, bus token and sheer physical and mental exhaustion! No sooner had I gotten on the bus than I realised that the data stick on which I had saved my marginally brilliant circumference lesson was still plugged into my computer. Ugh. Too late to turn back -- I had duty before school that day, and was already running behind! Still half asleep and now worried about when and how I would re-plan the lesson I was to teach later this morning, I rode the bus while finishing up marking some Grade 7 Math journals, and stumbled from bus to subway to Mississauga Transit bus, backpack and lunch bag in one hand, stack of math journals and orange pen in the other, phone (hopefully) in pocket, trying not to lose anything, but reticent to pack all the marking up in my backpack due to the lost time (and resultant incomplete marking) that comes with such frequent transfers. Safely installed on a new-ish and very comfortable Mississauga Transit bus, I got deep into my marking again... when I looked up to a strange landscape, and realised that in fact I was on the WRONG BUS!!! REALLY, PEOPLE??!!! What kind of a loser gets on the wrong bus?! In a city she's lived in her whole life? Happily, the diversion wasn't too far out of the way, and there was a southbound bus I could intercept some stops ahead that would take me directly to school. I got on that bus and discovered three of my students and a colleague were also riding it! :) Managed to make it to school just in time to dump my various piles and bags and run out to morning duty. Happily, I had a planning time this morning before my Grade 8 class, so my "to do" list got bumped in favour for the more urgent "re-make in 32 minutes the circles lesson that Ms. Teschow spent 1.5 hours on last night and then idiotically left at home". With two minutes to spare at the end of my planning time, I logged onto my email to check the status of some colour printing I had sent off to the keeper of the colour printer in the school the night before -- ambitiously, I had prepped and sent some colour printing for THREE upcoming lessons in ONE email, in order to save everyone time. 12 pages of colour printing in one fell swoop would soon be mine, with no subsequent paper chasing over the next two weeks... at least for that stuff. Or so I thought. My organization was my downfall: Waiting for me in my inbox was the less-than-inspiring news that anything over 6 pages required principal approval, and could I please check with Mrs. So-and-So and get back to printer lady. Tempted as I was to simply re-send the printing request in three distinct less-than-6-page chunks, I instead took a deep breath, brewed myself some Mate, and went out into the hall to greet my Grade 8 math class. Sometimes such days happen... And it's good when they're finally over! So I'll skip over the part about getting home to find a letter from the building under the door requiring a whole series of actions in the next 24 hours which I can't possibly and simply won't fulfill, and instead fast-forward to the part where I got to snuggle with my kids at bedtime and read the penultimate chapter of Anne together, which we started last summer on the Island, and which has become such a regular part of our routine that the boys have requested the sequel once we finish the first book. :) A nice, calm finish to this terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day! First Hallowe'en without the kids was bittersweet... last year at this time, we were in Buenos Aires, and this past week I got three emails from some of last year's people asking me if there was any plan for this year's event, hehe. (We've been gone since May!!) So this year was Trevor's turn, and with Tats out of province, I decided to volunteer to help shell out at my building. As the weather was fairly lousy, we actually didn't get that many children passing through. But, give me a few dozen chocolate bars and couple baggies of cheesies, and I'm happy as a pig in shit! It was nice to hang out with some of my neighbours for a low key evening in the lobby, and I enjoyed seeing some of the unique and interesting hallowe'en costumes of my fellow apartment dwellers, their children, and -- in several cases -- their pets! The boys, meanwhile, were at their dad's... having come home early, they were busily sorting through their hallowe'en candy before selecting a previously agreed-upon number to indulge in.
Managed to squeeze in an overnight at the Island this weekend while we had guests staying at our place. In addition to climbing trees and checking out the beach at Centre Island, we also rediscovered the skate park behind the pirate playground near the Rectory Cafe on Ward's... on our scooters! :D On Sunday morning, it was time for "church"; today's island service focused on the blessing of the pets, and was held at the Wards Island Association Club house. A number of dogs and even a cat were in attendance with their owners. Apparently, coyotes have moved onto the Island in recent years, and there has been a growing problem with cats being, well, eaten. Over 30 cats missing or killed in the past two years!! After church, it was back to the skate park for a little more scootering for the boys, while I investigated and photographed a rotting log for my Grade7 Science class! Then we boarded the ferry back to the city to run a few errands before heading home.
As part of this year's Culture Days in Mimico, Lakeshore Arts put on an event in the Square outside our building: A Cardboard Village invited all who wanted to, to join in and build a structure out of cardboard to add to the "village" in the square. The boys got on Board, initially planning to build a "life sized castle", which went through various evolutions, and ended up a "coffin", in which they took turns lying and giggling while the other boy put the "lid" on top! ;-P
You know it's back to school in earnest when the annual pre-German School Muddy Duck breakfast happens!!! Every year the boys take a photo with the duck, and they couldn't wait to snap this year's shot before heading inside to the buffet. German school began with tears, but ended in reasonably contented resignation as they discovered that in fact their new teacher was pretty okay. She even played a game with them! (Turns out, actually, that she is the former choir director -- I used to sing when *I* went to German School a hundred years ago or more, lol!) They also saw some old chums from previous years, so in the end, everything was good. After German School, we chanced upon a Street Fair, which ate up most of our Saturday. Sunday morning Simon headed off to church with his Dad, and Alex and I TTC'd it to my church in the east end of town. Since we had a day pass, we elected to run a few errands downtown afterwards, and ended up in the midst of the TIFF buzz, which was kind of exciting... It felt a little like being out and about in BsAs... after all, it was sunny and bright, and we were surrounded by people. But the people mostly spoke English rather than Spanish, and instead of one bus that takes you everywhere, we spent most of the day navigating various streetcar re-routings and short turns, as is the better way's way here in TO, lol!
Due to the 150th anniversary of the Charlottetown conference (which preceded confederation), there are a series of numbers around town this summer. Today, on the boys' penultimate day here on the island, we decided to finally climb and pose like all the other tourists! After our usual Sunday-after-church ritual of Taters-Cows-Internet-at-Beanz, we snapped a few more numbers photos, then headed over to the CARI with Tats for a swim. Despite the rain, we decided to make one final stop at the lighthouse beach before heading home to bed.
One of our new favourite activities on PEI is berry picking: Last week the boys and I picked enough raspberries for them to take a batch to share with friends at summer camp and still have plenty left for snacking at home. This week, we headed back to the Berry Patch on Hwy 2 to see about blueberries. It was the first time any of us had picked blueberries before, and I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Turns out blueberries are right down on the ground, making them an ideal fruit to be "raked", which most outfits do, and then put them through a fanning machine, which separates the leaves and stray stems from the berries. For us amateurs, though, it was half an hour of handpicking. With all four of us eati--, er, I mean picking, we managed to accumulate two small baskets at the end of our hard labour. I have a new-found appreciation for blueberry pickers, and a better understanding for why the prices for farmers' market or store-bought wild blueberries tends to be rather high!
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About Vera...After writing for several teacher and multiple birth publications, including ETFO's Voice Magazine, Multiple Moments, and the Bulletwin, Vera turned her written attention to prolific blogging for some years, including BiB, "Learn to Fly with Vera!" and SMARTbansho . Homeschooling 4 was her travel blog in Argentina. She now spends more time on her Instagram (@schalgzeug_usw) than her blog (pictures are worth a thousand words?!)
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