Inadequate Materials

Well, the monkey-children are in bed and we got exactly ZERO trick-or-treaters. Halloween is done for another year. What a relief! After we got home from our own trick-or-treating fun, this little interchange occurred: Firstborn : I love you. Me : I love you too! Firstborn : I was talking to my candy. Sigh...here's a shot from before the sugar high kicked in. Tomorrow, I bludgeon the jack-o-lanterns and make a pie. Happy Halloween!

As I've mentioned, my parents were down for a short visit recently. They really are stars, showing up here with all kinds of fun stuff for me. Among many other things, my mom saves me all her magazines and brings me a stack so I have something to read during my downtime. This is a real treat for me, since I don't often buy magazines myself. This morning, I was having a leisurely browse through Woman's Day over coffee when I suddenly found myself recoiling in horror at this: OH MY LORD!!! I'd like to thank the wizards at the Ashton-Drake Galleries for coming up with something new for me to have nightmares about. Here's hoping YOUR halloween is just as frightening, my loyal blog buddies!

I love the way a kid's brain works. Tonight, my next-door neighbour called, as he sometimes does, and said he'd been cleaning out the garage and found some of his (grown) kids' old books, and would my kids be interested in them? As both my boys are avid readers, and knowing he'd have some classic English fare there (his late wife was a British expat), I told him to bring them on over. After I hung up, I told Firstborn that Mr. Brown* was coming by with some new books for him. He looked up at me, all excited, and said: "Will he be in costume?!!" I had to try hard not to laugh out loud at the thought of the sixty-something farmer from next door, who had been erecting snow fence in his fields all day in the cold and rain, putting on a clown suit before swinging by our place to drop something off. Firstborn seemed pretty disappointed when I told him no. But look at what was amongst the piles of Beano annuals! The first full-length novel featuring Peter, Janet and...

Oh boy, what a month! The Captain has now deployed to places unpleasant and dangerous, and I'm coping with the fear by pretending he's on course and refusing to watch or read any news. I have to say, denial is working well for me! The Captain had nearly a month off before he left, and right after he deployed my parents came out for a visit. You know parents. I suspect they wanted to see for themselves that, between Rosemary's Baby's diagnosis and the Captain's departure all within a 6-week period, I was not about to have a complete nervous breakdown. They stayed a few days and headed off down the highway for home this morning. So presumably, they figure I'm doing alright. We had such a great visit, and it came at the perfect time, but necessity dictates that we need to be getting back into routine now. We have had pretty much 6 straight weeks of uproar around here. Both Firstborn and Rosemary's Baby are quite out-of-sorts. As it turns out, we ALL need our ro...

Rosemary's Baby is autistic. I wasn't sure I wanted to ever mention this. Firstly, it's one thing for me to relay his naughty adventures from the perspective of the frazzled mom that we can all relate to, but it's quite another for me to blab his very personal issues to the world willy-nilly. I have a responsibility to protect his privacy. As well, this sort of thing is SO not what I wanted my blog to be about. I was always just hoping to find the fun in a life that can be mundane, frustrating and exhausting. Turning this into Poor, Poor Pitiful Me , or worse yet, Super Army Wife's Autism Blog Of Heroes kind of makes me want to puke in my mouth a little. But I'm outing my kid now because I know realistically that if I want to tell these stories properly, it's going to come up from time to time. Rosemary's Baby continues to do outrageous and hilarious things that I simply must share, and it's about embracing him for who he is. Besides, when he grows...

Soooo...I promised a new post this past weekend...and now it's Tuesday. Sounds about right! I once again found myself avoiding the impulse purchase at Wal Mart today. It's actually getting easy now. I guess practice really does make perfect! But the more I avoid picking things up on impulse, the more attention I find myself paying to the way stores market their wares. Today, for example, I was really intrigued by the stuff at the checkout. You know the things I'm talking about. The array of reading material, with candy underneath, and across the way, the racks of...everything. Those odds and ends that just sort of end up being the things we'd maybe grab on our way out, thinking they'll come in handy. There are lighters, dangly air fresheners for the car, glue sticks. That kind of thing. I can remember once buying a keychain that doubled as a miniature tire pressure gauge. The thing was too small to handle, let alone uncap and stick in my tire (handy really, since I...

My blogging is slipping lately, and I promise to remedy that as soon as I figure out how to clone myself. For now, here's another Drabby to Fabby before and after! Yes, it's true. I'm slowly turning into one of those people who enters contests for a living. This one is all about smoky eyes. The Captain thought I did it for him. Sweet, silly Captain. Before Check out the wrinkles, the paleness and the pores. Yuck! Also, look at those dull, dead eyes. Most people have to have a lobotomy to get that look. I have Rosemary's Baby. After The smoky look! Okay fine, the makeover did nothing for my wrinkles or my pores. And "smoky" might be a bit of an exaggeration. Maybe "foggy" is a better descriptor. Either way, I must've been happy with the look because my eyes seem to have gained some life in the transformation. Proper post this weekend, I promise. Happy Thursday, everyone! The weekend is almost at hand!

I'm really late at jumping on this bandwagon, but a week or two back Diggestive at Writing about Everything and a Few Lists (among many others, but this is where I first saw it, so he gets the credit) wrote a letter to himself at a different time in his life. I love this idea. We all know that hindsight's 20/20, but it's fun to think what might be different if we'd known back then what we know now. Dear Wendy 1988, For the love of God, get rid of that curling iron AND the hairspray. Your hair should not look like it was pulled into a tornado and then laquered so it'd stay that way forever. Also, acid-wash jeans and rainbow suspenders might look cool while you're bouncing around to MC Hammer at the high school dance, but the pictures will not stand the test of time. You look ridiculous. The following items will end up in a landfill, and you should NOT spend your (dad's) hard-earned money on them: George Michael-style fedora Cassette tapes Fluorescent pink ...

Things are nutty around here! But I wanted to show off my new skirt before Drabby to Fabby was over and it was too late to show it to you and call it a makeover! Here is my (out-of-focus) drabby shot: It's me in my PJ's, with Rosemary's Baby bouncing around behind me (because it's really too much to ask to be left alone for 5 minutes on my bed in the morning, right?!). I think Bert's expression pretty much says it all. But look at how much better I look a short time later (try to ignore all that clutter on my kitchen counter)! My hair is brushed, I'm wearing a little lip gloss. And do you like my new skirt? No, I didn't go back on my no-impulse-shopping plan . I used up some (rather loud) fabric from my stash and made myself a very simple A-line skirt! It's like shopping, but without the guilt! The moral of the story is, if you're going to go all minimalist and anti-consumer, you should do it after a series of really big shopping sprees...

Just a quick thanks to Theresa at The Fultons for this very nice award! As you all know, I'm terrible at following instructions, and things are so crazy here right now that the idea of picking 15 of you and then commenting ALL of you makes my head spin! So, I'd like to break the rules a little and pass this award on to all of you out there who are reading and blogging. If you've never won an award before (or even if you've won 100), this one's for you, from me! Post it on your own blog if you like, and feel free to say that I gave it to you! And, of course, don't forget to include a lengthy acceptance speech, thanking your third grade teacher, throwing in a few references to your most extreme political views, and posting a picture of yourself in your most glittery evening attire. Then if you're feeling up to it, you can throw yourself an after-party. If the paparazzi show up, we'll need links to the tabloid pics. Have a fantastic weekend, my loyal subjec...

I've been getting further and further behind in my blog-reading lately, so I'm playing catch-up tonight. Stephanie at Steph in the City has a weekly feature called Group Blog Thursday, which I always mean to participate in, but never find the time to. So this week, I risk getting even more behind in the laundry, losing ten extra minutes of sleep, and missing the Leafs scoring the winning goal (snort!) to answer the question "What book(s) did you love growing up?" 1. Richard Scarry's Please and Thank You Book : I got this book when I was 6, and I took it with me on the ship when my family moved from Canada back to England for a few years. Sailing across the ocean made me sick for the full ten days, but I'll never forget how jealous I was that Pig Will got to eat ice cream after helping his dad at work. When I met the Captain, I discovered that he'd loved this book as well, and not long afterwards, he bought me a copy (the cover is STILL the same!) to repla...