The Incident

So, for Christmas last year and this year, my parents take us and my youngest siblings (the ones that live at home) to Grand Forks for a few days and get us all a hotel room in the Canad Inns Grand Forks, where we spend a lot of time enjoying the waterpark. (We spend a lot of the rest of the time shopping at places like Target, which we don’t have in Canada. Nursing tanks for $16, whaaaat! Same quality costs at least $40 here…. but I’ve wandered off topic.)

The waterpark is divided into this area, which is a splashpark with two smaller waterslides, and then a middle swimming pool, and then another little splash area for really small kids which is attached to a ‘river’ of sorts that you ride floaties around, and the main attraction, a whirlpool waterslide.

Nicole enjoying the waterslides, and me hovering like the mother hen I am… my mom was up in the hotel room with Olivia, she has Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Disorder and the chlorine really gets  to her. (and clearly I’m not in bikini-body shape but since I had a baby six weeks before this picture was taken I’m not hating on myself.)

Now, we all had a hoot, especially Nicole. She ran around CONSTANTLY. Like, wow. The batteries do not die on this kid. There was no pause, there was no break. Just the on button.

So, I was taking her down the whirlpool waterslide just one more time before I headed back up to the room. The first time I had gone down, I’d ask the lifeguard at the top, who was wearing glasses, what I should do with mine … wear them or hold them. He said, “I’d hang onto them.” So I did. Now watch the photo progression as I hit the bottom on the last round.

Yay/whoosh! Yay/whoosh!Kerplunk! *snap*Oh, shit!Exucuse me… my lens snapped when I hit the bottom and dropped into the pool! (Lifeguard doesn’t say a word and just walks off…)

And now I’m cheerfully yelling at my sister to stop taking pictures and go find my husband and tell him what happened. I get very panicky feeling when I can’t see, my vision is pretty bad. And of course I didn’t pack any spare glasses! Now I need to buy a new pair, but the next night when I got home I did find an older weaker pair with the nosepiece broken, but two lenses. Far worse off was the hotel, they did some diving and came up with four pieces of my lens and decided the responsible thing to do would be to shut down half the waterpark – everything connected and unfortunately most of the main stuff – and drain and totally clean it. I felt really bad for all the people who were there and for the Canad Inns as well. I mostly was just feeling sortof panicky and sorry for myself at the time though, since I could only see clearly out of one eye! My choices for the rest of the time were either a wierd trippy sort of double vision, complete blur, or closing one eye to look out of the good lens. Bummer. Note to self – when you’re dependant on breakable plastic to see, bring a spare, always!!!!

So for now I went to walmart vision center yesterday and got fitted for my first ever pair of contacts. I have been meaning to for a long time, sometimes glasses are pretty inconvenient, although I do love mine. I hadn’t seen myself clearly without glasses for more than ten years (except for really up close.) I kept staring at myself in the mirror off and on while wearing them yesterday and today! (a few hours at a time, to get used to them.) I also keep feeling like I need to put my glasses on, since I don’t see them in my line of sight. Like I said, it’s been more than ten years of wearing them all the time! Here is my last good self-portrait, taken in June.

So, here’s the big reveal of me without glasses, and having done my hair and makeup to be worn without glasses. (The first time I did my makeup to wear without glasses my hubby flunked me and sent me back… LOL.)

So, New Year New Me, I guess! i have been chickening out of trying contacts for years and years now. It wasn’t touching my eyes that bothered me, or putting things in my eyes… I have just been wearing glasses for so long I was afraid I’d look crappy without them. I’m still going to order another pair of my current prescription to at least have on-hand… I haven’t quite decided yet if I will wear contacts most of the time or not yet. I am soooo insecure about this, you have no idea. I’ve had glasses and hinged a lot of how my face looks at any given time on them since grade six, people. That’s a lot of formative years and then the full chunk of my adult life so far. I mean, I have never stepped back and taken a good long look at my adult face without glasses before. I wasn’t sure at first, but I think maybe it’s not so bad. (and now I can buy cheap sunglasses for the first time ever… super yay!)

Happy New Years, everyone!

A quick peek

Here’s a quick peek from this weekend… starting with my little meatball. This is the change table I reviewed for CSN Stores, by the way. I love it. Olivia loves it, too. She just stares at the bars happily whenever I put her here. If I need to put her down for a sec to go to the washroom or something when she’s crabby, I put her here. Keeps her happy.  Another thing that keeps her happy is her minkee lovie. A friend of mine makes them and gave me a great deal. Santa Olivia! My mom bought this dress for Nicole but Nicole outgrew it by mid November (she was a July baby and it is 3/6 mos… Nicole was a little chubster too, but not quite as much as my little meatball.) Me and my girls. Okay, the smallest one is a loaner. Believe it or not, she is only 8 days younger than Olivia! My sister in law was due at the end of December but her water broke a month and a half early, plus Olivia was born 11 days past her due date, so they wound up super close together. Cute though, little girl cousins and they’ll be in the same class! Note that I am not wearing a headband here. Yaay! No headband. Oh, I guess I should admit I gave up on being shampoo-free. I went beserk a few days ago and declared it OVER. I attacked my hair with shampoo and then slathered on the conditioner. No more greasy-looking static hair!

Speaking of going beserk… okay, where I am it is –20 C …ish. Depending on the day. It’s a dry cold, and the furnace makes it a dry warm, too. I WANT TO TEAR OUT MY FINGERNAILS AND MY HAIR AND GNAW OFF MY HANDS. I get this every year. And then I pull out the humidifier and continue slathering on obscene amounts of lotion. I don’t know if I’m the only one who gets this crazy over it or what, everyone else kindof gives me the crazyface when I bring it up. But I literally cannot stand to fold laundry or put on clothes or change diapers or anything that involves touching fabric when I’m this dry. I don’t even have my vents on in the car, I feel like I can literally feel the heat sucking the moisture out of me.

Does anyone else have any Wow-Crazy-Lady things? I have the dryness thing and I also go insane over certain textures of fabric. I won’t go anywhere near a damask-y looking couch, I just know the feel of the fabric will give me shivers up and down my spine. Like nails on a chalkboard.

Oh! Guess what! Stay tuned… sometime this week, I’m going to jump on the scale and share the results. Time to start getting fit again!

monster/treasure

Ay-yi-yi. You could not possibly fathom how excited I am to have Nicole’s bedroom finished soon. It seems that without a space of her own she is having a hard time coping with life in general, and is driving me absolutely up the wall. Normally when she gets upset she runs to her room to decompress, right now she has her bed in our room and since she knows that is not ‘her space’ she’s been hiding under the coffee or kitchen tables when she’s steamed. Hopefully when she moves back into her room her little ‘wicked streak’ will end. We’re dog sitting little Lily here for a week and Nicole is over the moon about it. She feeds Lily and takes her for walks – inside and in the backyard and occasionally around the block. Poor Lily is a bit overwhelmed from time to time, she is not used to such completely constant attention. Nicole has it in her head that she will prove herself and end this story with a puppy of her own. Chris is of the impression that he would like to get hisself a Basset Hound to be his hunting buddy. I did a bit of research and apparently they are good companions for children. It does not take any research, however, to realize who is going to wind up cleaning up poops and pees off the floor during the training period. There will be no puppies in this house while I am pregnant. We shall negotiate the possibility next spring. Maybe. Meanwhile, I have a pair of third birthday parties to plan. Apparently we shall be having a Fancy Nancy-type tea party on the Sunday, with Grandma and Grandpa and Auntie Tiffany and Uncles AJ & Jamie in attendance. (Jamie will be 15 and hasn’t quite realized he could skip tea parties yet, and we shall see what Uncle AJ, a little further into his teens, has to say about this. Perhaps he shall not know of the tea party part until he’s here wearing a feather boa with a 3 year old niece instructing him not to remove it. Perhaps, indeed.) For that the plan is to make a small tiered cake with fondant, and I’m looking forwards to it, it will be a fun experience.

For the ‘friends’ birthday party, I’m moving it back from when I was originally going to do it, because I was originally thinking a very low-key gathering on Sunday, but did not take into consideration one nearly-3-year-old. FANCY AND A CAKE AND A TEA PARTY. So the ‘puppies and kitties’ party will be later next week, perhaps Wednesday, and I’m keeping that a little more simple. Headbands and face painting will have the guests providing their own puppy and kitty type entertainment, and fish and bone shaped snacks will fill the rest. Simple and fun! And cupcakes because hi, cupcakes. You can’t not have cupcakes. Seriously.

zip zip zip

Okay so today is hectic and a wee bit crazy. I sliced my finger and used a condom pocket as a bandaid. I swept and mopped my entire first floor in a move-the-furniture kind of way, so count on another Norwex rave soon because I did not realize that my life was incomplete without that mop.

I am in an exceptionally good mood because between my floor and the fact that I took my new Norwex window cloth to EVERY REFLECTIVE SURFACE WITHIN SIGHT, from windows to microwave to oven front to laptop to door handles to sink, my house is SHINY AND BRIGHT. It is just amazing how much brighter your house is when it’s clean and shiny. And how much better you feel. Maybe that’s the post-workout buzz from scrubbing everything.

Okay so I was not going to rave right now but I just have to put it out there, my house is shinier and cleaner looking with just Norwex stuff and water then it normally gets with el-cheapo generic microfibre cloths and cleaning products. JUUUUST SAYING. Also, Mickey Mouse helped me clean my floors. If by Mickey Mouse you mean a Mickey Mouse stuffie whose arms are being wrapped around my mop when I’m trying to clean. Not super helpful but funny so I let her ‘help’ until she got bored and wandered off.

I’ve also been sewing and that sort of thing. Nothing new in the shop yet but if you want to see some finished custom orders or the sneak peeks, those can be seen on the tw*nkletw*nkle fan page. If you look over to the left sidebar there’s a nifty little widget that will take you there. That way I won’t spam you up with photos of items for sale unless you’re wanting it, because I am  a pretty lazy considerate person.

Now if you excuse me I’m going to go break into song about I WANNA TAAAAKE YOU THERE and bake some cupcakes. Don’t think you could get away without me forcing pictures on you. You’re in for a treat. We’re talking a dramatic photo montage. Otherwise known as my way of entertaining myself while playing Little Peoples with Nicole.

ENJOY. Except this is a serious and dramatic story told in photos so maybe try to feel adequately subdued.

 

In other news, if some Norwex executive is out there googling Norwex and happens to find me, YOU’RE WELCOME. Send flowers. (Flowers is french for cash, for the record.)

I was going to blog about Manicotti

So, I made manicotti the other day, which as it turns out takes about an hour and a half to make and stuff 14 noodles. I may possibly just be incompetent though, perhaps it really only should take an hour. Anywho, I was trying to photograph the manicotti. I even went all out and set the table up all cute-like. If it weren’t for the Princess place setting, this could almost be romantic-looking. Enter Chris, who has suddenly decided he needs to be featured in the blog more, I guess. Dive-bombing the manicotti. This was apparently helpful, to demonstrate how tasty this looked.  Given my aggravation, of course, he had to try and lunge into every single frame. In some form or another, he was there. This was him telling me I needed to get a shot of him eating. He is pretty certain he was hilarious. I was pretty certain he needed to shave. Thankfully, after seeing these pictures, he finally decided I was right, he did need to shave. Phew. MMMM, caaaaalories. nomnomnom. I only had two. These were stuffed with a mix I threw together:
-my DIY meatball mix that I had browned instead of meatballing. (ground beef + StoveTop stuffing + egg + a few extra seasonings.) 
-some caramelized onions (half a gigantic onion)
-a can of parmesan-somethingsomething pasta sauce
-a cup or so of grated cheese
-a cup or so of grated and cooked cabbage! A little extra healthy, unfindable under all the pasta sauce and cheese. That mix was stuffed into the cooked noodles, which I then laid out and covered in pasta sauce and mozza-mix cheese. The evening of the day I had labored over these forever, Chris wasn’t feeling well, so I wound up freezing not just the ‘second serving’ for later, but this one as well. I should have taken it out of the freezer much earlier in the day, the middles were finally warmish when the stuff on the edge of the pan was starting to burn! Live and learn… Here’s Chris finally biting into the manicotti… he approved! He does not normally like tomato-based pasta dishes. Also, he did not know about the cabbage I hid in there. (insert cackles here) And I’ll send you off with a gross picture of Chris being a dork. ewwwwwwww. He said I absolutely had to post these, though. He’s a pretty big fan of himself. Nicole, by the way, enjoyed the manicotti as well. She ate every bite!

Growing, in the good way

Okay, so as you might recall, if you've been following along, I volunteered to be a counsellor at a special needs camp for a week.
I was nervous beyond belief. I even developed an eye twitch, when I'm really stressed out I get that and it's beyond aggravating. Between the stress I was going through prior to going, and my nerves because I have never really had much interaction with special needs kids/people before and I didn't know what to expect or what would be expected of me, I was a HOT MESS.

If I go again next year, which I'm seriously considering, I will know what to expect. Fun, fellowship, and a lot of people who have more in common than they do not.


(as my blog has grown in popularity since this post was written, I removed or fuzzed pictures where you can see people/locations clearly for their privacy.)

We had a pretty decently sized group. We all had a lot of fun, I think. Except one of the girls from my group got either a cold or allergies, which really sucks.

One of the other counsellors from my group helping 'J' up the climbing wall.

My group of ladies about to go go-karting. As you can see, we were having a lot of fun!

The whole week, I had fun, I sang, I helped, I studied scripture, I helped with crafts. I canoed, did a zipline, go-karted, and even took a midnight(ish) swim with the other counsellors + the cooks. Oh, the cooks. Sigh. I thought I was going to gain five pounds that week, but I guess I was active enough that I only really gained one.

Oh, and lastly, here's one of a gazillion pictures I took that were Much Better than the ones that Chris took of ME pushing Nicole. Scroll down to the next post to see the best picture he took of me. Yeah. LOL

And yes, that is what you think it is. Socks and sandals. Don't say a word. I don't have a choice in letting him out of the house like that, sorry. At least you can't see the full bush beard he is trying to grow. Good grief. I told him if he grows a full bush beard (no insult to those who like them, but I Do. Not. Like.) I am going to cut my hair off and dye it black and red. Which would be fun, but he Does. Not. Like. So we'll see. Probably will have another case of him not believing me until I do it. Just like the Laundry Incident. (When I told him I would do a load of laundry a day, so if his clothes were in the hamper they'd get done. HOWever, if his clothes were on the floor, IGNORE BUTTON. He agreed but didn't believe me. Until he ran out of clothes.)