halloweens past

My mom made all my costumes.

Well, okay, there was the one year I went as a bride and she had to cut down the Southern Belle monstrosity we'd found hanging poofily at the thrift shop, but for the most part? I was an original.

I don't make all my kids costumes, though. Crafty skips generations (or so I'm finding) and they're still delighted with bits and pieces. Last year, I made my son's costume (he was a zombie) and bought a wee witch outfit for R. The year before, he was a Transformer and she was a purple cat. (I didn't get the purple paint out from under my nails for weeks!)

Tradition-wise, we've started them young (they both went out their first Halloween (in costumes) - Cass was 26 days old, and Rosey just a couple of weeks) taught them the old-school spooky thrill of scaring people, hammered into them (or at least I hope so) the importance of saying thank you when strangers give you candy, and set them free to run in the joyous gloom of Halloween night. We live in a rural enough area that the houses are in places few and far between, and we usually end up taking our car. Wherever the houses are closer, the kids (and I!) hop out, and they swoop through the dark, looking for the next house with a light on, while B trundles behind, headlights on low.

The kids also like telling spoooky stories after the great candy hunt with only the light from the fire......great for sound effects and grandiose gestures (with the occasional crackling noise from furtive wrappers) and hushed, quiet, cliff-hanger voices that grow LOUDER at plot points and character changes.

After Halloween we say goodbye to the pumpkins and the gourds and the crazy spiderwebs hung over everything, and the world looks stark and plain for a few days.

But the candy goes on and on....

click here to read about more of our traditions and hear about what candy will be at my house this year!

life underwater

One of the really beautiful, amazing things about living near a watershed is

You don't have to look up to see the sky.

kicking it with ponies

It's been an amazing week over here. Last week, Cass went to his first judo lesson, and walked out an hour later beaming. He broke a board. WITH HIS FOOT. On PURPOSE.

This month alone, he's started drama club at school, a soccer program, and judo. He's trying new things and figuring out who he wants to be, and it's fun to watch.

Today, it was riding a horse.  It was Rosey's birthday party, and nine of her good friends came out to eat cupcakes and hop up on the ponies. Most had never been on a horse before. They all did well.

Cass is very interested in riding. Rosey is too.

She's upstairs right now, wearing her brand-new Stables t-shirt, and ta-thumping her Barbie horses (and their riders) through their paces.

Welcome, horse-mad age! Welcome!

thanksgiving

That was the best, the best Thanksgiving weekend ever.

My lovely-and-wicked-smart (and they are) sisters-in-law put their heads together and came up with a fantastic way to celebrate the holiday. Bored with the usual, they hatched a plan to get us all away from home - a way to have us all relaaaaaaaax this year.

Barely an hour from home, the spot we ended up in was amazing. AMAZING. 

THIS is the view from the kitchen of our cottage.

 And this is what you saw out the front door.

 And if being tucked into a gorgeous cabin in the woods with water and myriad shades of fall leaves around didn't clear away all the cobwebs and stress, right down the road was...

the beach.

And now I have pictures of my children frolicking in the Atlantic ocean in mid-October.

 Frolicking. Swimming. Running up and down the hard-packed sand and screeching with joy like young gulls and finding treasures and swooping from the water to the sand to where the adults sat with their faces tipped to the sun and back to the water again.

This beat turkey coma all hollow. 

Magical, amazing, incredible. 

My pictures don't do justice to the beauty of the place and don't show the depth of the absolute peace there. I'm homesick, and I can't wait to go back.

charmed, I'm sure

I was cleaning the bathroom tonight and found, coiled in one of the wooden cigar boxes that hold my mothers jewelry, something I haven't seen in years. Something that I'm so glad I have of hers. I can still remember how it looked against her neck.

It started out as bracelets. Charm bracelets. Someone - Mom? - put them together and created a necklace, a chunky, fun piece that she wore with many different things. There were charms bracelets filled with charms from Grandma Gebhart (my great-grandmother) my grandmother, my great-aunt, my mom, and a small, uncluttered piece that held the few I remember from trips we took when I was small. A silver horse and carriage from Mackinac Island. A tiny flag from the Bahamas. A hoop-skirted belle from My Old Kentucky Home.

My great-aunt Alberta had great charms - even a tiny silver cocktail shaker that when pressed, opens and a little devil head pops out. (Bertie lived through Prohibition.) There is a wee class ring from my mother's alma mater on her string, and my grandmother has a fantastic spinning top. I love telling the stories to Rosey and wondering with her about the ones we don't know.

There are a lot I'll never know about, since both Mom and Bertie are both gone.

Tonight, though, is no time for being wistful for the past. Tonight is also eleven years since I took Bear's (slightly damp) paw and promised to love and cherish him. So I have some celebrating to do!

Goodnight!

do something little, help something big

Go here to see how Energizer and Evergreen are teaming up to make our world a better, more sustainable place.

slipping in the snark

It's hazy out here, where I've been lately.  The weather is foul, murky-green shot through with bilious colours, and the footing is decidedly treacherous. If you ignore both the pond-stink of old water and whatever that was that just went squirming and shrieking off through the underbrush, it still looks sorta normal.

Kinda normal, anyway.

Ever get caught up in a relationship you look back on and know with a sick twist to your gut that you ignored your feelings, stuffed down the slightly-hysterical voice inside you that was giving you warnings, the i told you so i told you so i told you so clawing rampant under your skin? And then the ooze buuurps under your heels and you realize you're far too deep in to abandon ship now.

We bloggers get invested in each other. Hazard of the beast, really, when talking about our lives and families and children and carpool and work and work again. Then Facebook came along and catapulted us all into each other's laps, and I now know more about people I've never 'met' than some of the ones I've lived near for a decade now.

What do you do when you realize that someone you've looked up to isn't who you think they are? Someone who you've read for a few years, whose stories you've looked forward to and whose children you can call by name?

What do you do when the mask cracks and falls away and what you see beneath takes your breath away with revulsion - all the pretty stories sworn up and down to be truth exposed and crumbling in daylight, groups and websites sprung up to hammer home the point that you've believed a lie, a lie with a wide colourful bow, yes, but still a lie - what do you do?

I kind of wish I still was clueless. Because now? I gaze at my family in the light of the waning sun and know that I've lost something through this revelation, that the blogging community for me will never be the same again.

I mourn, yes.
And then I turn my back on the toad squatting in front of me and look towards the sun, clear at last.



**This has been bubbling for awhile, but I need to get it out and on the page before it festered from simple grief, disbelief and pity to hate**

purrs and mews

Surprise! We adopted the kittehs. (You never saw it coming, did you?) They had their booster shots yesterday (and a feline leukemia test and a squirt of revolution) and were perfectly behaved, and now they're officially part of the family.

They're lovely and playful and fierce hunters of toes and a lot of fun. They spend less and less time under things (Jasper still freaks them out a bit) and more and more time with their motors running full-throttle, being petted and flopping with all feet in the air for belly rubs. Wish I was that comfortable with people! (Well, maybe not. I think rubbing my belly might be a definite mood-breaker during committee meetings.)

They've also taken over the sunny windowsills in the living room (Fine, huffs Lucy, lashing her tail, I'll go out to the one in the kitchen) and do a fine job of napping, little bodies all wound up together like a jigsaw.

Now we need to figure out the great de-clawing question. But that can probably wait for a bit.

We're busy enjoying all the purrs and mews.

black and white redux

Boy, things are quiet here when the kids are gone! B and I just rattle around...

The two are having their last adventure of the summer - a weekend at a cabin on a lake with fun aunt, smores, and no parental supervison. and I'm trying to keep B from going dotty over the fosters.

It's not easy. Just look at the wee faces!

 This is Cirrus. (But we call her Boo.)

And the handsome fella is Nimbus (but he's Inky 'round here*.)

And Bear is a big puddle of goo over both of them. We're fostering them, I say, but I'm beginning to think I'm speaking a language he doesn't understand.

Lucy is aghast that they're still here and mutters quietly while giving them a wide berth. Since they spend their sleeping time under the couch and she prefers the luxury of a whole! kid's! bed! to herself! they haven't met much. She's not actively hostile - I predict that will come when they wend their way upstairs and flounce into the above-mentioned kid's room - but with them losing timidity by the day it seems soon Lucy will have to lay down her paw and assert herself.

I haven't had wee kittens like this (and they're three and a half month old, not teeny things) in years. They are awfully cute.  And sweet. And one of them licked Bear's foot today.

We're just fostering them, I say again. Really.


*The kids were all hot to name them. Great! Go for it! Then Cass rattled off a list of Greek gods and Rosey decided the boy should be named Sparkles.

Perseus and Sparkles. I figured the first chance they got they'd pull a MacGyver, slit a windowscreen and thumb their way back to town. Nope. So a couple of easy names (for the foster kitties, the ones we're not keeping) were decided upon.

And so it begins....

black and white

We have been watching the sofa intently for the last few hours, with breaks to go jiggle toys behind the couch and shake treat bags.

No, honestly, we haven't gone insane. We're fostering two wary kitties.

 They were found in a port town near here, and were not socialized as tinies, and it shows.  They came today from a foster home where they learned to trust enough to jump up in people's laps and be petted, but tonight is a whole new ballgame and they've been using the underside of the couch as homebase. Now that things have quieted down (I sent the kids to bed - of course, they're back down here now, but it's calm at least) they've been weaving in and out around the floor and taking tiny bites of food.  In the last half an hour they've progressed to jumping on the couch and checking out the windowsill, and I'm sure they'll be in the litterbox tonight.

Lucy is decidedly unimpressed but we expected there would be a few days of outraged shrieking before the order of things is settled.

They were named for clouds when they came. The girl is white with a grey smudge on top of her head, and her brother is coal black with flashy gold eyes. 

I say we're fostering (it's something I believe in whole-heartedly) but I've got a sneaking suspicion that while I went over and over the concept with Rosey and Cass until they understood that these kitties were temporary, I was having the conversation with the wrong person.

Yep. Bear might be a problem. He's been the one most actively gathering them up and ooh-ing and aah-ing over how little they are, how sweet, how their purrs are so loud....

('Course, now I'm remembering when Lucy came to stay, and how she picked Bear out within hours of her arrival, and sealed the deal with a big rumble purr and a lick on the cheek.)

And, of course (no fool them) they've been turning their volume controls up, cuddling, playing when he tosses the toy, etc.

I'll try to get some pictures soon as they don't run when they see me coming. But the house feels good tonight, warm and full.

pontificating

Waiting for Irene...(and feeling a little wordy)


I was darn near late getting back from my lunch break on Friday - I was listening to a great report on CBC radio about technology and 'unplugging'. (The interview is here - it starts at about 14:00) Fascinating stuff. There have been studies done that say that when you read a computer screen, if there is a block of text (much less a picture) that doesn't have anything to do with your reading, it shoots your comprehension of what you do read by 50%.

That's scary, thinking about how much of what we read is broken up by fancy, shimmery ads and different fonts and scrolling texts with coloured backgrounds.

Our brains use different pathways to process things - even things as similar as reading off a screen and reading off a page.Read all your stuff off a screen, and the pathways used to comprehend words off a page? Begin to shut down.

Getting all the news about this incoming was-a-hurricane-but-is-now-a-tropical-storm? Is like waiting for Godot - the bad news is still there, and you can look for Jesus' co-conspirators if you like,  but it...never...comes. Yesterday we ran around frantically tying down the tractor and tidying everything away, doing the storm checklist: Do we have food? Can we cook if the power goes out? Does everyone know where to go if a tree falls on the house? and then today.....we waited.
It's spit rain and misted a lot, and there have been some interesting gusts of wind, but listening to the forecasts and forecasts and forecasts is really just stressing out the kids and making them punchy.

So today we've been watching movies and reading books (we made a run to the library earlier) and treating this like any other rainy, might storm, y'know, day.

And I wonder if exposing them to two days of news broadcasts and footage of roiling waves and flooding streets is good for them. If they might not be better off not having so much to think about. So much lag time before the actual event, so to speak.

If we should have unplugged.


I am so grateful that all my friends and family are safe from the effects of this storm. Please do not think I am negating the good things that having an early-warning system does.