Seven random things: Maïa

1) She is the youngest—but only the second smallest—kid in her class.

2) Her obsession with horses is at epic heights: she loves anything resembling, related to, or containing the name horse. Horses, unicorns, pegasus, zebras, sea horses, horse flies... I think she would love hippopotamuses if I told her that "hippo" means horse.

3) Maïa is way fancier than her mom has ever been. Dresses, necklaces, anything with embroidery or flowers or butterflies.

4) She could sing in tune at the age of 18 months.

5) She has been to Egypt, Cuba, and three different provinces in Canada.

6) She draws about 5 to 10 pictures per day.

7) Is currently obsessed with reading words: I caught her yesterday reading my body butter container.

Seven random things: revised

So, there's this meme... and Melanie T tagged me. Here are the rules:

Link to your tagger and post these rules.
Share 7 facts about yourself: some random, some weird.
Tag 7 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).

Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs.

Here we go:

Seven Random and/or Little-Known Facts About Me

1- I was always the tallest kid in my class in elementary school. Except for one kid; he's 6'8" now. I, for the record, made it to 5'3" (I stopped growing in grade 6).

2- I watch General Hospital every once in a while. It's my guilty pleasure. It's like eating Kraft Dinner: you know it's not good for you, and you regret it afterwards, but geez does it feel like coming home sometimes.

3- I have never broken a bone or had stitches. I guess my childhood was pretty boring...

4- When I was about five years old, a motorcycle gang called The Outlaws bought the house next door and made it their clubhouse. At some point, a rival gang (it is assumed) fired a grenade into the window of their house; someone lobbed it back out and it went off in the street directly in front of my house. The two street-facing windows in my room shattered inward, and there were shards of glass all over my bed. I was asleep in my bed at the time; I didn't even wake up.

5- I love meat. But I don't eat it. I'm over it now, though. Mostly.

6- I can make a clover shape with my tongue. Don't know why. I'm trying to teach Maïa how to do it. She's still working on rolling her tongue.

7- I won the grade seven science fair. My project was on mummification; at the time, I wanted to become an archaeologist. My friend Stephanie and I mummified chicken legs in three different manners, then we left a fourth one to rot (as a control). We kept the legs at Stephanie's house. Stephanie's dad wondered aloud, a lot, why we weren't doing it at my house.

So here are the seven people I'm tagging:

1 - Naomi
2 - Sarah (perhaps now she will post something??)
3 & 4 - Louise and Andrzej
5 - Katie
6 & 7 - Rubby and Susan (even if theirs is a full-blown website and not a blog...)

Where have all the babies gone?

Derek and I are enthusiastic anti-packrats. To be truthful, we're rather tyrannical and dogmatic about it. If something in our house does not have an immediate use, it had better look out because it's on its way out. There are a few exceptions to this rule, like my wedding dress (although, in my defence, I did try to sell it, to no avail), and Derek's shelf-ful of class notes dating back to his first year in English Lit.

So it is no surprise that as soon as our children grew out of clothes or toys, we have striven to find each item a new home, usually by passing them along to friends or acquaintances. Even some furniture gets kicked out: a few weeks ago, after I found a new dresser for our room, we graduated my dresser to Maïa and Maïa's to Solanne, and the change table that had been holding all of Solanne's clothes graduated to the curb (someone picked it up within an hour).

The net effect of all this purging is that we have nearly no baby things left in our home. It's all kids' stuff now. Gone are the teethers, the exersaucer, the highchair, the cloth diapers (hurray!), the tiny sleepers. So when I look around, I wonder where did our babies disappear to? It's the strangest thing; when I signed up to have babies, I knew that they would become children and then adolescents and then adults, but I never really considered that the babies would be gone, forever. In theory, I miss Maïa the Baby and Solanne the Baby, but in practice, I must admit, that I'm really enjoying this part. More than I had imagined I would. And I think that the part of me that misses the babies is mourning what might have been; because, in fact, I found those times quite trying, tiring, and troublesome.

So while I will miss Solanne's baby sounds (her "L"s are becoming a real L sound rather than a W sound), and those magical Baby Signs, I am embracing the wonderful little girls that they are and that they are becoming, every single day. I guess that's the beauty of raising children: it's the becoming that is the most exciting, even more so than any one moment.

Hallowe'en pics

Maïa decided this year that she wanted to be a cat princess. Not a cat; not a princess. A cat princess. This led to a lot of confusion. She was variously mistaken for a cow, a pig, and a hippopotamus. But she was patient and adament: "No. I'm a cat princess!"




Solanne "decided" that she would be a baby elephant. In fact, we gave her the idea since we already had the costume (does it look familiar?), and she happily agreed.




The Saturday after Hallowe'en, we were all invited to a Hallowe'en party at a friend's house. A post-Hallowe'en Hallowe'en party is always a good idea since it's nice to have at least two occasions to which to wear the costume we've so carefully picked out. The hostess told me that the adults were encouraged to dress up, too. I wasn't going to, but then I remembered this dress that I made, about ten years ago. I had never had the opportunity to wear it, so this was my big chance to make its début. Derek picked through the kids' dress-up box for this hat that Nick left the kids when he moved to BC. It was lots of fun to dress up, even if none of the other parents (save the hosts) was wearing a costume.

Childhood illnesses

It's a wonder any of us make it out of childhood. Between the dumb and dangerous things kids do and the rash of illnesses they suffer from (including rashes), it's incredible that they survive. We are lucky enough to have vaccines for the biggies, but even the little ones can leave them miserable and their parents begging for mercy.

And I've been lucky. (Having said this, I am now betting that my next entry will be entitled "Chicken Pox, Bronchitis & Impetigo All at Once!?") We generally get a cluster of flu's and colds from October to April, with a couple of ear infections thrown in just for fun. So far this season, which, for the record, started in early September, we've had the croup, vomitting, fevers, colds, and now pink eye. It's boatloads of fun in our house, I tell ya. Non stop.

But I'm not complaining. Well, only a little. Okay, I'm whining. But I do recognise that we live in a great time and place, and that getting sick only means getting sick and not dying.

I just thought I'd let you all know what's going on in our household these days. So when you ask, how's your health, you know that overall, we're doing okay. It's just that the devil is in the details.