Almost Christmas

Tuesday evening Maren had her first ever Christmas recital, with her preschool. Her class is only eight kids, but there are other classes taught by the same teacher, and they all had their recital together. This is a 5-minute video of two of the songs - Maren is in the front row, in the purple hoodie.

We were surprised to discover that all the kids were dressed up, and Maren was the only girl not wearing a Christmas dress. We didn’t really think it was a formal affair like that, and almost let Maren go in her dirty pajamas, which she had been wearing all day (it was pajama day at preschool in the morning, and it only occurred to me maybe half an hour before we left for the recital that other kids might be wearing regular clothes). Fortunately she doesn’t notice or care about that kind of thing at the moment, and I hope it mostly stays that way. I don’t want her to be ostracized as a weird kid, but I would love it if she continues to not be influenced too much by social pressures. Time will tell.

Also, her drawing skills have just exploded. Not sure why this suddenly happened, but it is lots of fun. This is grass, a tree, a girl with very long hair, and a sun:



We are gearing up for Christmas. I finished grading and submitting grades on Friday midday, and my break started at that point. Jeff had finished a bit sooner. So now we are free from work responsibilities for a little while, just enjoying some family time. There are cookies baked (probably too many), gifts purchased, grocery shopping done. Maren is so excited that sometimes she can hardly contain it. I hope Christmas Day is not too much of a let down for her, because I am not sure anything can live up to her expectations. At the same time, she will probably be happy and excited no matter what, so it might be just fine.

Last night in the bath Maren suddenly said “for goodness sake!,” and I realized that she was referencing the song Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Then she said “but Santa’s not real, so that’s why I’m goodness saking him.” I could not stop laughing 😊

Santa trike

Maren’s first ever drawing of something that looks like the thing she is drawing:

It’s a snowman with long arms and legs. The red things are Christmas cookies. After this picture was taken she proceeded to put chocolate chips in some of them by adding dots. What’s amazing about this is that she has essentially never before attempted to draw anything other than scribbles. I’m not sure why suddenly today she was able to try and succeed at drawing something, but this went up on the fridge immediately and I love it ❤️

She is super into Christmas, especially Santa Claus, even though she is aware that Santa is not real and is just a story about Christmas magic. This is her on her “sleigh,“ dressed as Santa Claus, with Rudolph attached to her hat.

She has also been a big help decorating the Christmas tree. She put up every single ornament, and they are packed quite densely in a couple of areas.

The end of semester here is busy, and I have a term paper to grade that isn’t due until Thursday at 5 PM, so my holidays don’t really start until it’s almost Christmas. But the amount of excitement around Christmas that a three-year-old can produce makes everything seem more magical. 

Backyard fun

Not a lot of time to post today, but here are some photos from playing in the backyard this afternoon:

Happy Thanksgiving

Last Thursday was of course American Thanksgiving. Since we are in Canada, we don’t get Thursday or Friday off of work because it is not a holiday here. But we celebrated on Saturday by having a special dinner of mushroom pot pie, mashed potatoes (using potatoes from our garden), stuffing but with rice instead of bread, and cranberry sauce.


And of course pumpkin pie.


Other than that this week has been pretty much like every other week has been for a while. I was super surprised when I started this post to discover that I forgot to blog last Sunday and didn’t even realize that two weeks had gone by. So things have been pretty standard around here.

Jeff discovered this scene and thought that it was pretty funny.

Maren’s imagination has been kind of incredible lately. Yesterday I had to go out while she was still having lunch, and she just nonchalantly said “Bye black monitor lizard!,“ as if 1) I was aware that that’s what I was in her pretend world of having lunch at the reptile store, and 2) it is totally normal for me to be pretending to be a very specific reptile.

For a while, we have been dealing with constant imaginary play in which she is other people/animals and we are other people/animals and it is impossible to keep up with who we are supposed to be and who she is, but she gets super mad if we call her by the wrong name or are not playing along as if it’s real. The real problem is sometimes she changes who she is and who we are so quickly that in her mind we are in a totally different place than where we think we are. Also, Jeff has said that he would like to interact with his own daughter every once in a while and all this pretending to be other people gets old. But it is good to know that her imagination is healthy and working :-)

Winter has arrived

I am pretty sure fall is over and winter has arrived. It has been quite cold, and it snowed a couple of times. Looking in the forecast it does seem like we might get one day with a high above freezing, but for the most part the highs are below freezing for the foreseeable future.

So yesterday we went to the sledding hill. I didn’t sled because it is not considered a safe pregnancy activity, but I took pictures while Jeff and Maren did a few runs.

There was hardly anyone else there – just two other families — and really just barely enough snow. But Maren loved it, and is happy that sledding season has arrived. I think she is definitely a born Canadian, and seems to love winter more than I would expect :-)

Dead mouse or sewer?

First, Halloween 🎃 

Maren had been saying for months that she wanted to be an eggplant for Halloween. We thought she might change her mind, but she didn’t. She was a “scary eggplant, because I don’t like eating eggplant, so some people might think it’s scary.” 

On Tuesday she trick-or-treated in the building where her preschool is (which is a huge university building housing many offices/programs/departments), then on Wednesday morning she trick-or-treated with daycare in several buildings on the main university campus, and Wednesday night Jeff took her trick-or-treating around our neighbourhood. Her total haul was way more than a 3-year-old can handle. A large quantity disappeared before the next morning, without her noticing at all. 

We had plans to allow two treats per day, but realized that at that rate it was going to drag on forever. So yesterday we said she could just go for it, and eat as much as she wanted. I think she got overwhelmed pretty quickly, and started sharing her candy with me and Jeff. Yesterday was challenging behaviourally, but the candy was gone by bedtime, and we are all better off because of it. 

While Jeff and Maren were off trick-or-treating, I was holding down the fort handing out candy. There was an initial rush, then things slowed down a little, and then it got totally crazy. We had prepared with 280 pieces of candy, and about 250 temporary tattoos. At the start I was giving one candy and one temporary tattoo, and then when things slowed down a bit I was giving two candies and a temporary tattoo (and eating some of the candy myself). Then it got insane all of a sudden, and even going back to one candy per kid, we were totally out of everything by 7:45. I didn’t count, but we figure that we gave candy to between 230 and 250 kids, and there were a ton more who would have come after we ran out. Last year we had around 150 kids, so we thought we were prepared, but last year it was super cold and eventually snowed, and this year the weather was comparatively mild. Lesson learned. 

All through the past week, we were dealing with a horrible smell in our house. I immediately thought sewer, and called the plumber on Friday the 26th. He came that day, armed with the knowledge of our previous sewer problem, and after carefully looking (and smelling) around, concluded that we probably had a dead mouse. So we did all kinds of stuff to try to figure out the problem, including having our heating ducts cleaned and disinfected, thinking we could have a dead mouse somewhere in that system. It seemed at first like the duct cleaning had worked, because the smell temporarily went away, but within 10 hours or so, it was back. 

Finally, Jeff and I did some thorough, smelly, systematic investigation, and discovered that the smell seemed to be emanating from the floor below our downstairs bathroom, and then on closer inspection, specifically seemed to be coming out of a 100-year-old piece of broken pipe sticking out of the basement ceiling. Further calls to the plumber, and the problem appears to be fixed, as of yesterday. It seems that when plumbing was updated, some section of original sewer pipe was left connected to the sewer system, and not sealed off. We don’t know why we suddenly started to have problems, but it could be due to an animal plugging up the part of the pipe that comes out of the roof. I am cautiously optimistic that the problem is solved, but I will remain vigilant. We love our house, but hate the haphazard approach to renovations that various owners have taken over the years. We have had the kinds of problems that no one expects. But at least this one seems to be solved!

Mice

First, happy birthday to Jeff! We had a super low-key celebration involving going out for breakfast, and cupcakes in the afternoon. Maren wanted to help blow out the candles. 

Maren very sweetly spent $2.75 of her own money to buy a present - sidewalk chalk, which is definitely out of season, but Jeff and Maren went out and used it on our sidewalk anyway, with the effect of producing very cold hands. 

The not fun news of the weekend is that we have a mouse problem. And by problem, I mean a dead mouse somewhere in the walls or insulation or vents or some other hiding place in our basement furnace room. Which means that every time the heat comes on, it blows the smell of dead mouse throughout the house. Nowhere is safe. 

We know (or are at least pretty sure) it is a mouse because we have an infestation. We have caught 9 mice as of last time Jeff checked the traps. I can’t really do much because the diseases spread by mice are dangerous for developing fetuses, and not worth the risk. At least the mice are now confined to certain areas of the basement - they were elsewhere in the house, and we found and blocked the access points we could figure out. We thought maybe they had moved out, but then the smell started and we inspected the basement more carefully. 

We called one mouse control company and they were kind of useless, so I will be calling someone else tomorrow. But we don’t know what to do about the smell. It is terrible. We might have to have someone come in and basically tear apart the walls. At least it’s just in a mostly unfinished area. 

But here is something funny I discovered just before Maren’s bedtime:

It might just be me, but I think it looks like the doll is viciously attacking the skeleton, maybe sucking blood from its neck. Not totally sure how this scene came to be, but I do know that earlier the skeleton was the doll’s big sister, and they were travelling by train together.

Very October

This last week we have had some very nice fall weather, and I feel like we have been doing very fall things. Jeff has been putting up Halloween decorations outside, raking leaves, and we have been going for fall walks.

Yesterday was an especially October day with a trip to the pumpkin patch and stopping for cookies and hot chocolate at a little café on the way home.

Trip to the pumpkin patch:

Playing trick-or-treating (blurry hand is knocking on the door):

Maren is super excited for Halloween, and this morning was trying to negotiate how many days away it is. I told her it is 10 days away and she was trying to get me down to two days. I don’t think she ever quite understood that I can’t change the flow of time. 

Dress up

Maren likes playing dress-up these days. Fairly frequently, she wants to put on her “tutu dragon” outfit and dance to music.

The wings were an early birthday present from my sister and brother-in-law, and she calls them her dragon wings. We got her the tutu at a children’s resale clothing store. The mask came from a birthday party she went to, and she has drawn on it with markers. It makes for a pretty good outfit :-)

We are all pretty excited for Halloween coming up. We were pleasantly surprised last year by how busy our neighbourhood is with kids on Halloween, and while I have fun handing out candy at home, Jeff and Maren will be out trick-or-treating.

But Maren has not yet decided what she wants to be for Halloween. For months she was saying she wanted to be an eggplant, and I actually ordered an eggplant hat off of Etsy to help with her costume. But now she says she wants to be a witch or a bat or a skeleton or a vampire or a banana split. So we aren’t really sure yet.

Jeff’s friend Scott is in town for a conference, and yesterday Jeff and Maren and Scott went to two Halloween stores. Maren tried on a few different costumes:


I don’t think she will wear a mask, but the pictures are pretty hilarious. Apparently they put her in a hockey mask and had her run around the store saying “I’m scary, I’m scary!” I can only imagine.

Happy Thanksgiving!

It is Thanksgiving here in Canada. We have had a lovely three day weekend, though all of us are sick. I got a second cold on top of my first cold, and Jeff and Maren both have the second cold. Maren was least hard-hit, but she hasn’t napped two days in a row, and that has caused a bit of lability. Possibly the cold is part of it as well.

We tried something new for our vegetarian Thanksgiving main dish - mushroom pot pie. It was absolutely a success. Maren didn’t eat it, but she didn’t actually eat any of the food we had prepared. This is normal for her lately, and I hear quite normal for her age. So we had mushroom pot pie, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, baby red potatoes from our garden, and roasted carrots from our garden. It seemed like a relatively simple Thanksgiving dinner, but everything was incredibly satisfying and delicious.

And here is an extra gratuitous Maren picture:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Birthday, deck, sick, garden

Birthday: Maren officially turned 3 years old. We brought oatmeal m&m cookies to daycare, along with the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game that didn’t make it at her party. She had ice cream and presents at home. There were balloons to play with. I think she had a pretty great 3rd birthday. 

Deck: When we bought this house, our deck posed many accessibility challenges. It had four different sections at different levels, no railings or handrails (so getting safely from one area to another required some really careful maneuvering), and cut the yard in two.  This meant that the faucet for the hose and the garden tool shed were separated from the garden and main yard area by the deck, so that it was necessary to go up over the deck and down a handrail-less set of steps and then back again if I wanted to water the garden. So basically totally not functional for me. 

Starting the week of the 17th we had our deck totally redone, and it was finished last Wednesday. We also had a weird section of our fence replaced. The results are amazing. Our deck and yard both feel hugely bigger, because there is so much more usable space. The deck is smaller, but it’s all at one level and there are railings all around, so the entire footprint is usable space, not having to worry about step-down areas or falling off the side. We now have two sets of steps, both with handrails. There is still a lot of work to do to make all of the yard space usable, but just having it all connected as one yard makes it feel about twice as big. And now I can garden independently, which I am pretty thrilled about. 

Sick: I found out on Tuesday that I have iron deficiency, and started supplements on Wednesday. This explains some bouts of extreme fatigue I have been having, and hopefully the problem will resolve quickly. On Wednesday night I started to lose my voice, by Thursday it was pretty bad, and Thursday night I had all kinds of trouble sleeping. Then Friday morning I could barely speak, my throat was extremely sore, and apparently I had also contracted some kind of stomach virus. I was pretty miserable all day Friday, but after a good sleep felt immensely better by Saturday. I still sound bad, but feel almost normal. 

Garden: Saturday morning was for spending in the new backyard. We harvested all the carrots and potatoes from the garden, and Jeff raked leaves. The carrots and potatoes were the only things spared by the rabbit who used our garden as a salad bar, and I was quite happy with our yield, given how neglected the garden was this summer. 

It has been colder than normal, and it was chilly and very fall-like this morning, but sunny and a lovely day to be outside. I am happy to be less sick. Overall, I would say this has been a good week 😊

Almost 3!

Maren is almost 3! Today we had a birthday party for her even though her birthday is actually this coming Wednesday. We were going to have it next weekend but another kid is going to have a birthday party that weekend so we went with the earlier weekend. I think we are entering the period in childhood where we have birthday parties to go to a lot.

In any case, we had a super fun time with a cake, ice cream, and piñata. We had pin the tail on the donkey available, but after the piñata it seemed like the kids had had about enough. Also, they all got kazoos, which it turns out can be extremely loud but also lots of fun.

As part of being a big girl now, Maren has started preschool – just two mornings a week, but an exciting step for her. We had registered her for preschool months ago, and then we withdrew her because she did not meet all of the potty training requirements. But the preschool teacher contacted us and said that if potty training was the only concern we had about her readiness, then we should just give preschool a try. So far so good, and Maren seems to really like it.

At Maren’s birthday party today were a seven week old baby and three kids who had just started kindergarten. It really doesn’t seem that long ago that Maren was as little as the baby, and it really won’t be long before she is as big as the kindergartners. It’s fun to see her growing up, and I’m also glad that we will be doing the baby thing again soon :-)

Visit

Over the weekend we had a visit from Jeff’s sister and her daughter. It was a quick visit, but we had a nice time visiting, and Maren had a lot of fun spending time with her older (5-year-old) cousin.

This photo is courtesy of Jeff’s sister. One thing I have noticed is that most of the photos we are able to get with visitors are reading pictures. It seems like the combination of Maren sitting still and an adult having the freedom to take a photo occur more when books are being read than any other time.  This was definitely true a couple of weeks ago when Jeff’s dad visited – almost all of the photos I have of that visit are reading photos.

This last one has the bonus of also showing off Maren’s pig nose (which she insisted we make after seeing something in a book where cats make craft projects including pig noses).

Semester start

Last week was the first week of classes at University of Regina. I am teaching two graduate classes – one first year masters, and one first and second year PhD. Teaching graduate students is easier and harder – harder because the material is more complicated and I have to be thinking more deeply, but easier because they do a lot more of the work. I feel kind of unprepared, but I’m sure it will go fine. The first week went fine. 

However, it is difficult to focus on classes when I am personally more interested in the fact that I am growing a little baby. The whole first trimester I was super tired and had a lot of nausea on and off. Now that I am solidly in the second trimester, I feel like I’ve gotten a bit of my energy back. Thank goodness I have, or I don’t know if I would be able to teach at all. 

It is a busy semester with my two classes, plus three PhD students, one MA student, and one honours student, all heavily involved in their thesis and dissertation research projects at the moment. Plus a number of students asking for reference letters already, and that number likely to increase dramatically as the weeks go on. Plus I’m doing this whole thing serving as our faculty association “equity officer,” which means lots of meetings, and lots of behind the scenes work. Plus all the rest of the stuff, all the little things that go along with having an academic job. Oh yeah, and I’m supposed to submit a grant by November 1, which I haven’t started working on at all. 

And it all seems important, but at the same time not that important. It seems more important to spend time with Maren while she is still an only child and there is time for that. It seems more important to focus on my health, and not being overly stressed. I will do a good job within the time that I have allotted for work, but I won’t work extra. I’ll do what I can, and if I do a crappy job, the bonus is that maybe people won’t ask me to do some of those things in the future. But it seems like lately that when I have more to do than I have time to do it in, I end up working more efficiently, doing enough but not more than enough, and finding that everyone else is reasonably satisfied with my performance. And prioritizing. Maybe I won’t submit that grant proposal. But regardless, I will keep in mind that my family is more important to me than my work. Always :-)

Monster Mash?

Maren likes to dance to kids music (or really any music). In her new tutu. With her friends Chatterbox and Pumpkinhead. 

Too many things

I have not posted for several weeks and there are too many things to post about. So I am just going to give quick updates.

1. We took a two week trip to Oregon. We were in Eugene the whole time except for a couple of nights when we went to see my brother in Corvallis and spend a night at the coast. We met my sisters new baby, Maron‘s first cousin on my side of the family. Here are some pictures:

2. While we were in Oregon we attended my 20 year high school reunion. We saw friends that I haven’t seen for many years, and met the children of friends. Here are some more photos:

3. I am pregnant. 13 weeks along. Due date March 1. I had quite a bit of nausea for a while, but I am feeling better. We had an ultrasound on Friday and saw the baby moving. We are all pretty thrilled :-)

The Expedition

Maren has said things in the past couple of days that have made it hard for me to keep a straight face. For example:

“I prefer not to get dressed right now because I’m making trains.” (Said while making trains out of LEGOs)

After I explained that I was putting an ice pack on my face to cool down: “That’s not a thing. You just made that up.”

It’s not that the things she saying are particularly funny, just that they are so funny to hear, said with all seriousness, out of the mouth of a child who is not yet three years old.

She has also been singing a ton. She was singing in the bath today, and I tried to capture what I was hearing, but somehow she knew I was there and started singing more quietly and carefully after I started recording. So this video is really not that great compared to what we were hearing:

But I would like to draw your attention to the phrase “the expedition can pick you up, pick you up, pick you up!“

Camping, take 2

We returned today from a two night camping trip at Good Spirit Lake Provincial Park. It is a 2 1/2 hour drive, which took us quite a bit longer with a lunch stop on the way there, and construction on the way back. It is lovely and quiet there. The campsites are quite close together, and the first night the campground was full, so it felt a bit crowded. But last night the campground was almost empty - we had no neighbors at least two sites in every direction, so it was incredibly quiet and private.  The first night and next morning it also rained hard for a long time, but then the weather was lovely for the afternoon and evening. However, last night and this morning it was unexpectedly cold, so much of our trip was fairly physically uncomfortable. 

Yesterday morning we went for a short hike with my trike. We didn’t get very far before the terrain was too sandy for my trike to go forward, but it was still nice to get out. 

Then in the afternoon we went to the beach. The lake has a beautiful sandy beach, and the water is incredibly shallow for a very long way. Perfect for little kids. Unfortunately bad for me -  wading is something that messes with my balance pretty terribly. The movement of the water on my legs (in this case only part of my legs) tends to knock me over, so I need to either be all the way in the water or all the way out. So I watched from shore. 

Last night Maren couldn’t get to sleep before dark, and woke up with the sun. The daylight hours are long in Saskatchewan this time of year, which meant that Maren slept about 5 hours less than normal. Needless to say she had a very difficult day, as did we. Also our air mattress got a hole in it yesterday, and we thought we fixed it but we didn’t, so we all slept terribly. All in all I am ambivalent about this trip - sort of good, but sort of awful. Definitely our last tent camping trip of the summer 😊

Camping

Earlier this week we went camping. We stayed at a provincial park less than an hour drive from here, in a permanent tent structure with cots to sleep on. The park, the campground, and the campsite were all nice.



We had our first foray into reading chapter books with Maren - Winnie the Pooh.



We even went on a short hike with my trike.

Unfortunately, some of our camp neighbors were loud and inconsiderate, keeping us up with their drunken loud ramblings until about 1:30am, when the sun woke Maren around 5am. We were all tired, and I think a little cranky.

After some consultation with friends with young kids, we are heading to a different campground next weekend, this one a little farther out of town and very family-oriented. We are hoping for better luck there!