Inadequate Materials

Reading back over my first three posts, I fear I've perhaps left the impression that my parental apathy is worse than it actually is. Given, my children spend an appalling amount of time in front of the television while I get on with other things, but we do also have moments every day that experts in the 80's would call "quality time". Living where we do, a lot of that time happens out-of-doors, and last fall, after Rusty and Jerome had escaped to a neighbouring farmer's field for a sniff and a roll in the cowpies one time too many, it became apparent that we needed to build a fence. The Captain was typically somewhere far, far away at that point, so this was not a project I was going to be able to start and then hand off to him when I got bored. But I do have a great and wonderful friend, a sort of Thelma to my Louise (okay, I've never even seen that movie , but I remember something about them driving over a cliff, and that sounds like something Thelma and I ...

Well, here we are on day 3 of the blog, and I have not yet been distracted by something shiny and forgotten all about it, never to return. Give me a couple more days. That said, the backlog of housework since this little endeavour began is suggesting to me that maybe I can't do this EVERY day. But if there's one thing I learned from Judy Blume , it's that you don't have to write in your diary every single day. And also that girls in the early 70's had to wear maxi pads with a pink belt--yikes!! But anyhow, this post should have a point, and here it is: Rosemary's Baby has taken the broken TV one step closer to TV heaven. Let's back up a bit to a time when the TV was just a regular old 25-inch outdated monster that picked up 2 stations and sat on one of those basic black plywood TV stands we thought looked classy and modern in 1985. Sometimes on the weekend, the Captain and I have things we want to get done. I retire down to the basement to engage in one of m...

I've never been big on those snap traps. Perhaps it's the mother in me. So one day a couple of years back, my wonderful husband, the Captain, brought home one of those humane things that traps the mice but doesn't do them any real harm (unless you forget to check it for several days, and I've had a couple of traumatic experiences with this, so let's just move on). Since then, I've spent many a morning chatting away to cute little furry, beady-eyed prisoners downstairs in the pantry. Today was just such a morning. My dogs, who shall heretofore be referred to as "Rusty" and "Jerome" (because I'm obsessed with personifying long-retired puppets from Canadian children's programming), like to attend the release party, and despite their insistence on pulling down the curtains in a frenzy of barking and jumping every time a squirrel runs by the window, they never give escaping mice a second sniff. So, with Firstborn safely playing computer ga...

Don't you love it when posts start out this way? I realize now how spoiled I was with my first child. "Incidents" involved things like bottles of chocolate syrup being spilled all over the living room and then mashed into the carpet, or entire jars of Vicks Vapo-Rub being smeared through his hair. One unhappy episode involved me ill-advisedly allowing him to play with the spice jars while I yakked on the phone to a friend living at the other end of the country. Who knew that a 3 year-old playing with a jar of dried hot peppers could be so disasterous? You know what happened--he rubbed his eyes. Well, these were the good old days. My youngest is a 2 year-old hellion. On a good day, I secretly think of him as Rosemary's Baby . He has little interest in chocolate sauce and hot peppers (yet), but is oddly fascinated with the contents of his diaper, and more specifically what he can do with it. About 6 or 8 months ago, I opened his bedroom door to wake him up from his aft...