With back to school starting so late this year, it seems like Christmas was ages ago. I don’t know about your kids, but at our house the kids are twitchy. Most of the gifts have been examined and played with, the family visits are past and the Christmas decorations stashed away for another year — and we still have a couple of days to kill savour together before the kids go back to school.

Are your kids getting squirrelly too? I thought I’d pull a few ideas from my archives to share, in case you missed them the first time around.

1. Digital camera scavenger hunt

You don’t need to use a camera for this – the low-tech version is just as fun – but the kids love the added element of the camera. Maybe they got one of these for Christmas? Make up a list of things outside like “blue car” or “tall tree” or “mail box” or whatever is in your neighbourhood, and then set the kids free to find the things as a team. It can be as short or long a list as you think they have the attention-span to complete, and by using the camera you don’t have the problem of what to do with the stuff they collect (a problem we’ve had with other scavenger hunts, and on a daily basis simply because my kids are natural scavengers!) Rainy day or freezing cold outside? Make it an indoor scavenger hunt with things like, “Daddy’s socks” and “blue shampoo bottle.”

2. What’s in the bag?

You need a bag about the size of a shoe box for this. A fabric bag is best, like a shoe bag, and a recyclable shopping bag works well, too. You have to do a bit of advanced legwork for this one. Collect a bunch of stuff that has interesting shapes, sizes and textures. Dinky cars, a carrot, a bar of soap, a sock — whatever! One at a time, put an item in the bag and see if your child can guess what it is by feel alone. So simple, and surprisingly entertaining. We always end up laughing.

3. Beads

Don’t just buy bulk beads from the craft store, though; bring them to an actual bead store and let them pick four or five “special” beads from the bins, and then make up the difference with pony beads or other plain beads. You can also get a mixed bag of discards… my boys loved the ones that looked like crystals in a bag I thought was rather uninspiring. Letter beads are also a hit if you don’t mind forking over a bit more cash. And make sure you don’t choose the cord that is plastic and stretchy – it’s impossible to knot. Get nice thready cord.

When they finished making necklaces for everyone in the house and bracelets for Granny and Papa Lou and the rest of the extended family, all the Webkinz got new collars and we made enough bookmarks to last a year. You can also get little key rings to make backpack decorations. My kids LOVED the bead craft!

4. Treasure maps

This is similar to the scavenger hunt. One year our nanny made up a treasure hunt for each of the boys for their birthday gift, with ten rhyming clues leading them throughout the house. If I didn’t love her before this, when I read the work that had gone into her clues I knew she was terrific. Sample: “Under the place you sit to dine, you will find clue number 9!” The treasure at the end can be something small, because it’s the hunt that makes up the fun. If you’re feeling less wordy, you can just draw a treasure map with a nice big X that marks the spot.

5. Magazine cut-out books

I could spend hours doing this when I was a kid. Find some old magazines and catalogues destined for the blue box, and some construction paper. Cut pictures, words and letters out of the magazines to create a little story book. So simple, but creative and entertaining.

How are you planning to spend the last few days before the kids go back to school?

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Wow, did you see the forecast for this weekend? I don’t know if I’ve ever eaten Thanksgiving dinner in shorts before – yowza, it’s going to be a spectacular weekend!

Here’s five quick ideas of ways you can get out of the house and celebrate Thanksgiving in Ottawa:

1. Admire the fall foliage at Gatineau Park
The National Capital Commission is offering a program called Follies of the Fall Forest, a two-hour guided hike along the Sugarbush Trail including lessons on identifying trees and discussions of why exactly leaves change colour. And it’s FREE!

2. Manotick Harvest Festival
This runs Saturday October 8 from 11 until 4 pm. There will be horse-drawn wagon rides, pumpkin painting and face painting for kids, a harvest market, and you can visit Watson’s Mill, among other activities. The village is beautiful in the fall – well worth the drive!

3. Celebrate the harvest at a local farmers market
Is there any better way to celebrate the harvest than fresh, local food? This weekend marks the last weekend for many local farmers’ markets, so it’s time to get out and stock up! This website has a great list of local markets with hours and locations.

4. Saunders Farm
It’s Haunting Season at Saunders Farm, with a list of activities that seems to grow each time I visit the website. Giant jumping pillows, fairy gardens, pedal racing, mazes – there’s more than a full day of fun here.

5. Take some family pictures
The autumn light is soft and flattering, and you simply can’t beat the backdrop of colourful fall foliage. Why not get out and take some family portraits this weekend! (That’s what I’ll be doing!) Last year, I wrote a post with five suggestions for great places in and around Ottawa to take family portraits, but heck, at this time of year it’s hard to find a bad location for pictures!

Got any other tips to share? What will you be doing to celebrate this summer – erm, I mean AUTUMN long weekend?

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I was in Costco the other day and they had the back-to-school supplies out already. Nooooooo! I’m not ready!!! Yeesh, summer has barely begun!

And yet, when the kids are restless, those long summer days can seem less like something to be enjoyed and more like something to be endured. For this week’s version of Friday Family Fun, here’s five crafty ideas that will keep kids engaged – for a few minutes, at least!

1. Make-yer-own sidewalk paint

I love this craft, and had no idea how easy it would be to make nor how easy it would be to clean up!! I wrote a post all about how to make-your-own sidewalk paint with nothing more than corn starch, water and food colouring last year.

2. Make-yer-own moon sand

Confession: we haven’t tried this one yet, but I’ve seen it all over the Interwebs this summer. Apparently, if you mix 4 cups of sand, 2 cups of corn starch and 1 cup of water, you get the equivalent of that mouldable Moon sand stuff. I think this would be really fun to try with that fancy Crayola coloured sand, which would give more than enough for each boy to have his own bin full.

3. Make-yer-own playdough

If moon sand isn’t your thing, how about some home-made playdough? We got this kool-aid playdough recipe from Simon’s nursery school years ago, and I really like how it turns out. You’ll need

1 1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup salt
1 pkg unsweetened Kool-aid (the mini-ones)
1 cup boiling water
1 1/2 Tbsp vegetable oil

In a bowl, mix flour, salt and dry kool-aid mix. Boil water and add with oil to dry mix. Be careful, it’s hot! Allow to cool a bit but while still warm knead with hands for about 5 minutes. Will store for up to two months in a Ziploc bag.

4. Beads

We make a trip out to the local bead store each summer. Once upon a time, I thought of beads as more of a girl thing, but I couldn’t be more wrong – all the boys I know love to make beady crafts. And you don’t have to limit yourself to jewelry, either – the boys make nametags for their backpacks and lunchbags, zipper pulls for their jackets, and even name collars for their Webkinz pets. I usually buy a big bag of pony beads and alphabet beads and some elastic cord at the dollar store, and let them choose half a dozen or so fancy beads each from the bead store, and we’re good for at least an afternoon of entertainment.

5. Rock painting

This is another one on my to-do list for the summer. You’ll need some bright colours of tempra or acrylic paint (not watercolours), some brushes, and various sizes of rocks. Tip: collecting the rocks can be a great way to waste an afternoon – erm, I mean, another way to spend some quality time with your children! You can be ridiculously fancy like Martha Stewart, or aim a little lower and just hope more paint ends up on the rocks than the kids. You can guess which end of the spectrum I fancy!

I also found this neat idea on Pinterest: Use a stamp kit, stencil or transfer to create a whole bunch of alphabet tiles made from small stones. Isn’t that a fun idea?

So there you go, that should keep the wee beasties busy for at least another week, right? As always, please feel free to share your ideas for crafty family fun in the comments!

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Hooray, it’s summer vacation, and according to the forecast, the first week of summer vacation is going to be hot and steamy — just the way I like it! All summer long, I’m going to be posting suggestions for activities to keep families busy and happy. This week, I’ve got five suggestions for ways to beat the heat around Ottawa — and four of them are FREE!!

1. Andrew Haydon Park’s water park

This is one of my favourite places to visit with kids in Ottawa. Andrew Haydon park sprawls down the edge of the Ottawa river with beautiful walking trails, duck (well, mostly geese) ponds, a waterfall, a bandshell, and several play structures. It’s anchored on one end by the Nepean Sailing Club and one of our favourite splash parks on the other end.

Bring a blanket (but there are benches and picnic tables on site), a snack, a handful of buckets and a change of clothes (there are also washrooms on site) and expect your kids to get wet. And sandy. Very, very sandy!

If you go: Andrew Haydon Park is located off Carling Avenue at Holly Acres Road. The splash park is near the eastern-most parking lot (and a long walk from the western-most one — be warned!) Parking and admission are free!

2. The city’s wading pools are not just for wading!

When I think of wading pools, I think of those very shallow pools from my childhood parks, often circular and graded down to a central drain, and all of about 10 inches deep. Some of the city’s (free!) wading pools are a heck of a lot deeper and more fun than that! In particular, we like the one at the corner of Greenbank and Lisa Ave, just around the corner from Ikea. It’s got a deeper area for big kids, a shallow area perfect for toddlers, and the lifeguards are always terrific, actually engaging the kids while watching over them.

You can find a list of the city’s 56 (!) wading pools, as well as a great mapping system, on the city’s website.

3. Ottawa beaches

I may yet write a separate post about beaches in and around the Ottawa area. For now, I couldn’t write a post about ways to keep cool on a hot summer day without at least a passing mention of the terrific beach at Brittania, just up the road from Andrew Haydon park, in fact. We visit Britannia beach at least a couple of times each year. There’s a huge stretch of sand, the water is clean, shallow and kid-friendly (it’s the least-often closed-due-to-pollution beach in the city), it’s supervised with lifeguards during certain hours, and there are also play structures, a snack bar, and a huge, grass and tree park nearby.

There’s also a great breakwater for exploring, which happens to be one of the best places in Ottawa to watch the sun set!

4. Splash pads

We were lucky that the water ban in Manotick, Barrhaven and Riverside South didn’t affect us too much, but I was relieved to hear when it was lifted so that we could continue to visit our favourite splash pad in Barrhaven. Did you know there are more than 50 splash pads in parks throughout Ottawa? Some are bigger than others, but how fun would it be to visit one each day for a week?

5. Waterslide parks

Summer just wouldn’t be complete without at least one day at one of the two awesome waterslide parks near Ottawa. Mont Cascades is on the Quebec side, and Calypso is about 40 minutes east of downtown Ottawa in Limoges. We could spend a whole day in Calaypso’s Pirate Splash Pad and the wave pool alone — and in fact, if the stars align correctly, that’s exactly where we’ll be today!!

I blogged our first visit to Calypso last year, if you’d like more details.

So there’s my best suggestions for beating the heat of an Ottawa summer — and I didn’t even get around to mentioning the city’s outdoor swimming pools, indoor wave pools, or that old standby, the backyard sprinkler!

Got any suggestions to share? What are your favourite places to get soaked in Ottawa?

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As I mentioned yesterday, this summer I’m launching a new bloggy series: Friday Family Fun! I thought I’d get us started with one of my favourite summertime activities: meeting the animals. Here’s five great places to visit if you’d like to get to know our furry friends in and around the Ottawa area.

1. Valley View Little Animal Farm

Valley View is the perfect place for the toddler to early school age set. There’s fun stuff to climb on at the front of the park, and a small barn with goats, chickens, rabbits and the usual petting zoo type creatures that you can feed by hand. My boys have always been fans of the dozens of metal yellow Tonka trucks strewn around near the entrance… when they were toddlers, I think we could’ve just paid our admission fee, play with the trucks for three hours and then leave again without actually looking at the rest of the farm! If you do that, though, you’ll miss the wonderful animal barns (pigs, ponies, peacocks, geese and chickens, bunnies, ostrich and deer and so much more), the most amazing playgrounds and climbers, and a fantastic agricultural museum. You can read my blog post about Valleyview from 2009 or visit the Valley View website for more details. Valley View is open every day except Monday, and admission is $8 per person.

2. Papanack Park Zoo

It’s been quite a few years since we’ve been out to the far east end of town to visit the Papanack Park Zoo, but I’m surprised that I’ve never blogged about it. At this zoo off Highway 174 near Wendover, you’ll find an assortment of animals from lions and tigers to gibbons and squirrel monkeys to arctic wolves and black bears and much, much more. Admission is $17.50 for adults, $10 for kids 6 – 18, and $8.00 for kids 2 – 5 years old (kiddies under 2 are free!)

3. Parc Omega

Parc Omega is on our list of places to visit again this summer! Parc Omega is a kind of African Lion Safari with native Canadian animals like wapiti and wolves and bears instead of lions and baboons. It’s the same concept, though. You drive a 10 km loop through gorgeous forests and plains amidst the (mostly) free-roaming animals. Instead of baboons crawling on your car, you can feed carrots (and, in our case, soda crackers) to wapiti and red deer. There are also hiking trails and an interpretive centre.

Parc Omega is about an hour from Ottawa, down Hwy 148 to Route 323 near Montebello. Rates are as follows: adults $18; children 6 to 15, $13; and 2 to 5, $7. I blogged about our visit in 2008.

4. The Canada Agriculture Museum

We! Love! The! Farm! I’ve had the joint membership to the Canada Agriculture Museum, the Aviation Museum and the Science and Technology Museum for years, and they have paid for themselves over and over again. It just wouldn’t be summer without a morning at the Farm, visiting the smelly cow barns, petting the baby calves, admiring the muscular horses and the chubby pigs, and taking a ride in the tractor simulator. And have you checked out their relatively new (2009, I think?) play structure? It’s awesome! The Agriculture Museum is definitely one of the best places in Ottawa to visit with kids.

Admission is an affordable $16 per family (oh how I love family-pack admissions!) but there are excellent membership and day-pass combo prices as well. Check out their website for details!

5. Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo

Let’s face it, summer is not all sunshine and clear skies. If you’re looking for a rainy day activity or need to get out of the blazing sun for a while, consider a trip to Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo in the city’s south end.

You may have encountered Little Ray’s traveling show at a summer event or a birthday party, but if you’ve never made the trek out to see them on the south end of Bank Street, you should! They have an amazing array of slithering, swimming, creeping and flying creatures, and an amazing educational program that keeps kids riveted. Family admission for four (sigh) is $38, and $8 for each additional person. I’m particularly fond of Little Ray’s because that’s the first place I ever took all three boys on my own back in 2008, and we make sure to go back at least once a year.

That’s my five recommendations – do you want to play along? If you blog about animal adventures in the national capital region this week, let me know and I’ll put up a link to your post. Or you can play along in the comment box. Got a suggestion for family fun with animals in or around Ottawa?

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Here in Ottawa, it’s the coldest day of the winter so far, and the mercury has clawed its way up to -24C. But the sun is brilliant, and it’s making me twitchy. Now that the days are starting to get incrementally longer, I can feel summer calling my name. Unfortunately, it’s still a long-distance call!

I’m especially excited about this spring because we’re in the new house. With the giant front porch and a patio that stretches the length of the back of the house and a full half acre of land, the house was made for celebrating the outdoors.

I’ve got big plans for that big patch of land, too. Here’s five things that I can’t wait to do come spring thaw:

1. A clothesline. I am ridiculously excited about the idea of stringing a line from one of our towering trees back to the house for laundry. A small part of my mind wonders if I my enthusiasm for an outdoor line won’t wither up and die after the first time I forget to bring things in before a shower, or the first time I find a bug in my underwear drawer, but for now I am delighted by the idea of having a clothesline.

2. A vegetable garden. There’s so much room, it’s just a matter of where to cut into the lawn to create a little hobby garden. I know myself well enough to restrain my impulse to make a 10m2 plot which will require hours of intensive maintenance and which will undoubtedly be neglected to death by mid-June. But I have been chatting the boys up about a tidy corner spot to grow some tomatoes, and cucumbers, and peppers, and sugar peas. Those are my big four for this year, and we’ll see where the rest takes us.

3. A new BBQ. I think we’re on our fourth or fifth cheapo BBQ in the last dozen years or so, and it’s rusting to pieces. The handle is askance and the element, which I replaced last summer, is looking a little sketchy again. I’ve got my eye (and my sale alert!) on a mid-level one at Crappy Tire. It’s *shiny*. We haven’t BBQ’d anything since we moved in mid-October and I’m going through withdrawal!

4. A patio set. Our old deck wasn’t really big enough to support a full patio set, and Beloved isn’t overly keen about the idea of eating outside. However, now that we have so much more space (do you see a theme here?) I’m looking forward to creating a little outdoor living space. I’m thinking this year we might have to settle for a second-hand or garage-sale special this year, and maybe get a nice one in a couple of years’ time.

5. A fire pit. One of the first pictures I saw of the house and yard, on the real estate website, included a view of the back yard where you could see one of those little backyard firepits, and I’d love to pick one up. I’m not sure if we’re far enough out of downtown to have one legally, but I’ve heard that as long as you put a grill on them and have a pack of hotdogs nearby, you can get away with calling it a cooking fire. I love the idea of a backyard fire pit for summer nights almost as much as I love our fireplace for winter nights! And mmmmm, the marshmallows!

So that’s what’s warming my cockles this cold January day. When you dream of the summer to come, what do you hope to do?

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This post was inspired by a CBC article about how Shaw Cable moved its beloved Yule Log channel to a Video On Demand channel. The previously free stream featuring nothing but a Yule log burning in a fireplace, now entering its 25th year, will now cost 99 cents. The fee, plus a matching amount from Shaw, will be donated to charity. Thanks to the Twitter conversation about the change to Shaw’s Yule log channel, I discovered that of course there’s an app for that. And then I fell down the rabbit hole of iPhone Christmas apps.

Here are five of the most interesting Christmas-themed apps I found. (Caveat: I have not tested many of these. Use at your own risk!)

1. The Yule Log app. As soothing and oddly compelling as Log itself.

2. Christmas Music by Nutsie. Thousands of Christmas songs wrapped up in dozens of playlists like Top 100 Christmas Songs, Children’s Christmas, Krazy Kristmas, and (I’m so curious, I may just have to fork out the $1.99 for this one) the Jingle Bells Playlist.

3. Postcards from Santa. This one is getting such great reviews that I think I might have to try it myself! “Select from a number of charming santa images, use our pre-written santa message or write your own, and enter the name and mailing address of the child you want to send the postcard to. We will print the customized postcard and drop it in the mail. Your child’s postcard will arrive only a few days later in the mail.” Fun!

4. Talking Santa. “Talk to Santa and he will repeat your words. Poke, swipe or tickle Santa to see his various reactions. Run Santa over with a huge snowball. (I can hear my boys howling over this already!) Give Santa milk & cookies. Touch the bag to see more than 20 gifts. Shake your device and see what happens.”

5. The Christmas Tree Decorating App. No space for a tree? This seems like a silly little app to help you feel like you decorated the tree. “Decorate your tree however you choose with colored lights, ornaments, candy canes and icicles. But be careful not to drop any ornaments or you will hear that dreaded shatter! Watch your individually decorated tree sparkle as you countdown the days till Christmas.”

And, for those of you who don’t have an iPhone or an iPad, here’s four more 21st Century Christmas sites and services!

I’ve said before how much of a huge fan I am of the Portable North Pole application. Upload a picture and make a few specifications on Santa’s site, and Santa will e-mail you a link to a personalized video that mentions your child by name AND shows a picture of him or her in Santa’s big book. This is a delightful service and my boys are already asking if Santa will be sending them a new message this year. (Um, note to self — next task on list = upload pix to Portable North Pole!)

Along the same lines, Sympatico’s Magic Santa is an online video service you can use to make free personalized videos messages from Santa for your kids. Sympatico.ca is partnering with Kids Help Phone and will be giving $0.25 to them for every video made up to $50,000. There’s also is a contest… one family will win a trip to Walt Disney World by capturing a photo or video of a child’s reaction to a Magic Santa video and submitting it to the contest site by December 19, 2010. And there’s even a Magic Santa iPhone app.

The NORAD Santa Tracker site has been around for awhile, but now there’s a mobile version, too! This Christmas eve, join NORAD to track Santa’s flight from your phone. On December 24th, open Google Maps for mobile and do a search for “Santa” to see his latest location.

And of course, you can always follow Santa on Twitter!

Completely serendipitously, just as I was finishing this post, my brother e-mailed me this amazing video of a Christmas concert staged entirely with iPhones and iPads. As my brother said, how could you NOT want an iPhone or an iPad after you see this?

We’ve come a long way from letters the editor, haven’t we Virginia?

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As I’m packing, I keep having these great ideas for blog posts that will never get written, because they’ll either be no longer relevant or (more likely) completely forgotten by the time my life slows down enough to allow for regular blogging again. Some ideas that will likely never see the light of day:

• Five things we won’t tell the new homeowners
• A love letter to my packing tape gun
• Five reasons to never hire my real estate agent

Today, I’ve been packing the stuff from my dresser into boxes. (Sidebar: does this seem as ridiculous to you as it does to me? Every other time I’ve moved, I’ve simply removed the [full] dresser drawers, carried them out to the truck, put them down in a stack, carried down the frame, put the drawers back in the frame, and repeated the whole process in reverse at the destination. Now I’m told that I’m supposed to pack the drawer stuff in boxes. Meh.)

Anyway, ahem, yes, I have been packing the contents of my dresser drawers into boxes. My dresser has three big drawers for t-shirts and jammies and stuff, and four much smaller drawers, perfectly-sized for underwear and scarves. One of these drawers is full of the little bits of memorabilia and nostalgia that I’ve been keeping for so long that I couldn’t possibly part with it now, regardless of how ultimately useless it might be. I know for a fact that when we arrive in the new house, I will take this stuff out of the shoe box in which it has been transported, put it back into its little drawer, and mostly never look at it again until we move in 15 more years. I don’t need this stuff, but I can’t part with it.

Here’s a selection of five random pieces from that drawer:

1. John Olerud rookie card in plastic shield

This is, in fact, but a single card of the many, many baseball cards I have. They are left over from another life, some from my childhood and some from the practice marriage, when I thought the most interesting thing about me was that I knew a lot about baseball and watched nearly every televised Blue Jays game in the 1993 season. I also have a cap on which I collected the signatures of most of the World Series winning lineup in 1992, and a full set of McDonalds ball cards circa the early 1990s. And I’m about six cards short of the full set of 525 Topps cards from the 1971 season.

2. My Carleton University student card

I attended Carleton from September to December 1988, before I unceremoniously dropped out to work full time as a cashier at Zellers. Definitely not one of my more inspired life choices, and yet even after graduating magna cum laude through the University of Ottawa, I can’t part with this old student card.

3. The key to my first car

It was a little black Mazda 323 hatchback. I loved that car to death, literally. Did you know you can drive a car more than 60,000 km without an oil change and it will still go? Even though we traded it in for a fancy red Sunfire with a sunroof in 1998, I like having that key around. It reminds me of how far I’ve come.

4. An old Watchmen bumper sticker

I have no idea why I have this. But I’ve had it for close to 20 years, so it must be at least valuable if not actually important, right? (C’mon, you remember the Watchmen, right? Boneyard Tree? I got this when they played the front lawn of the Supreme Court building, about a million years ago.)

5. A card from my mom, circa 1989

For my practice wedding, I carried a bouquet of stargazer lillies. One day in the months leading up to the wedding, my mom send me a silk version of my bouquet in a little vase, and this card was in the box. The flowers and the first husband have long since been relegated to the junk heap of history, but I’ve kept this little card for no reason whatsoever except my mom gave it to me.

Five things that I didn’t take a picture of but also didn’t throw away: the letter spelling out the drug protocol for our infertility treatments, the paper where we kept track of Tristan’s diaper contents for the first three weeks of his life, a little keychain with a viewmaster-like picture of my friends and me at Canada’s Wonderland in 1986, a cassette tape my grandparents recorded for me in 1977, and the slip of paper where Beloved wrote his mailing address out for me on the weekend we met and fell in love, just before I made the six-hour drive back to Ottawa in the aforementioned little black Mazda.

Surely I’m not the only sentimental fool in the room. If I rifled through your secret cache of memorabilia, what would I find?

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Last week on Twitter, Vicky was asking for recommendations on places to take great fall family pictures around Ottawa, and I told her I had a post half-written on the topic. It took me another week to get it all out there in a coherent fashion! Now that the rain has let up for a few days, maybe we’ll be able to get outside and enjoy those fall colours before they wash away!!

Here’s my recommendation for five great places to visit for fall family pictures in and around Ottawa:

1. Hogsback Falls

A favourite of mine in any season, it’s especially lovely in autumn. If you climb the hill just before you get to the Baseline overpass, there’s some terrific old ruins up there.

2. Stony Swamp in Barrhaven

The light is gorgeous, especially if you love those rich yellow leaves. Bonus: lime kiln ruins!

3. Majors Hill Park

Get your leafy fix with a side order of Peace Tower in the background. Spectacular!

4. Mud Lake

If it’s nice this weekend, I’m hoping we can make it out for the hour or so it takes to hike around this gorgeous beauty hidden in the urban west end.

5. Blacks Rapids

Easy access to a Rideau Lock station without the downtown parking trouble!

Other great ideas that I can’t illustrate with photos from my own collection: Andrew Haydon Park, Gatineau Park, Mer Bleu Bog, Petrie Island… damn, but we live in a gorgeous city, don’t we? Got a favourite I didn’t mention? Share it in the comments!

The light is gentle and warm this time of year, and the rain has finally ceased – let’s get out and enjoy it before the (shudder) snow flies!

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There’s barely been time to tweet lately, let alone blog. Although the craziness of back-to-school week has subsided, there is no end yet on the horizon for the craziness that is selling this house. It’s been two weeks since it was listed and we’ve had a dozen appointments so far to see it, but we’ve still got nothing. I’m digging deep, deep into my psyche to find a wellspring of patience and zen about this whole experience.

In fact, it’s been a huge learning experience for all of us. Here’s five things I’ve learned so far:

1. I have attained the age of 41 years without ever properly learning how to make a bed.

To be fair, bed-making is not a skill I value. I frankly don’t care whether the beds get made or not in the mornings, and love crawling into my bed at the end of the day just as much when it’s taughtly drawn as when it’s a disheveled mess, but the stager said the beds must be made to “hotel perfection” for each showing. Hotel perfection is something we’ve yet to achieve, although we’ve now progressed beyond haphazardly tossed comforters and sheets hanging down. Barely.

By the way, Mom, don’t take this one personally. You imbued me with many other important life skills that have come in far more valuable than bed-making. Why am I so challenged at this? It seems to me the beds were made every day when I was growing up — obviously not by me, though!

2. I am a lousy housekeeper.

I’m sure I have put in more hours cleaning the house in the past two weeks than I have collectively over the past year *cough-orthree-cough* and have become obsessive about keeping the place clean. No mess will rest on my watch, and seeing mess in other places that are not my house for sale is beginning to stress me out. After the first weekend of showings, I went in to work on Monday and was horrified at the state of my desk.

I have, however, learned how to vacuum myself backwards out of a room so I don’t leave footprints in the pile — excellent for later when you come home and try to extrapolate viewer satisfaction based on the number and size and patterns of the footprints in the carpet.

3. I will never, ever ask to view a house unless I am 98 per cent sure I want to buy it.

I will absolutely never ask to view a house just on a lark. Honest to god, if I’m going to spend half the day cleaning the place for you, you damn well better be thinking about putting in an offer. And, as a corollary to this point:

4. There is a special place in hell for people who make appointments and do not show up.

After spending four hours cleaning this morning and making special arrangements to drop the dog off at my parents place, we returned after the designated hour to find that nobody had bothered to show up. One entire perfect autumn Saturday wasted, for no reason whatsoever. That’s just cruel.

5. Children do not understand the concept of preparing a house for show, no matter how carefully (or shriekily) you explain it to them.

One fine day Beloved was working until just before the showing, so I had to prep the place myself. With 20 minutes left and the main floor left to vacuum and polish, I came up from the basement to find Lucas holding one of the stair rail spindles, complete with rusty nail pointing out of the end. Exactly two minutes after fixing that, I accidentally vacuumed up the Nintendo DS charger cord that was plugged in to a power bar under the television set. When I yanked the vacuum back in a panic, not only did I yank the entire power bar out from under the TV, but I yanked the Wii, the cable box and the DVD player that had ALSO been plugged into the power bar off the back of the TV cabinet and onto the floor. With 10 minutes left before the people arrived. And I found myself saying to the children, “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but please — for the love of your mother, just go and sit over there by the front door and do not touch ANYTHING for the next ten minutes. Really, please? Just. sit. there.”

I’m thinking of creating a category for these posts called “misadventures in real estate” but I’m hoping that the experience won’t last long enough to merit one.

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Here’s something you likely noticed about me: I’m always up for a new adventure. There are some thrills, though, that I have purposefully avoided in my life, and riding a motorcycle has always been one of them.

In fact, up until last week, I’d never been on a real motorcycle before. I grew up in a family biased against motorbikes — my grandfather witnessed a horrific accident in which a motorcycle rider was killed, perhaps even decapitated if my memory of the story is correct, and his fear of bikes was passed on to my father and to me.

My brother Sean, on the other hand, happened to marry into a family of people who have their M-class licenses and love motorcycles. When he mentioned a year or so back that he had his own bike, I admit I was surprised, and worried. Bikes to me are dangerous and reckless machines, even in the hands of reasonably responsible people.

But I was also just the tiniest bit intrigued. I’ve long admired their fluid lines and shiny chrome bits, and admit to being curious in a very hesitant sort of way. Which is how this ended up happening when we visited my brother’s family last week:

Yeah baby, that’s me on a motorcycle, entrusting my life to the same kid I spent most of my childhood looking for new and unique ways to make miserable. Right about the time this was taken, I was thinking I should have been a whole lot nicer to my brother when we were kids!

He took me for the most amazing, exhilarating ride through the concession roads and secondary highways near his home in Georgetown, and I was astonished at how much I enjoyed it. Um, once I started breathing and stopped clenching my jaws and butt cheeks in terror, that is.

So now that I’ve logged a good 20 minutes of saddle time and am a professional motorcycle passenger, here’s five things I learned about motorcycles:

1. It doesn’t take long for you to get used to the alarming way the ground rushes up at you when you bank to make a turn, but the first few times you turn a corner you’re sure you’re road rash.

2. To truly enjoy the experience, you must first stop envisioning the potential 24 point newspaper headlines describing the horrific crash and grieving family you left behind.

3. You don’t have to hold on tightly enough to leave finger prints. Through two layers of leather. (Sorry, Sean, hope the bruises heal soon!)

4. Riding in the snow is obviously out, and riding in the rain is only for the truly dedicated. Riding in long pants, an armoured jacket and 3/4 length leather gloves is also no treat when the humidity nears 40 degrees.

5. Oh my sweet lord, it’s a LOT of fun. I liked it waaaaaay too much. As soon as I unclenched my sphincter, anyway. Once I relaxed and started enjoying the ride, I could immediately imagine a perfect afternoon spent on the bike with a camera stowed safely inside my jacket, doing carefree loops around the Niagara escarpment and stopping here and there to take pictures as the spirit and the prevailing wind inspired me.

Aside from the amazing feeling of connection with the environment that I felt on the bike, like we were a part of the landscape instead of merely passing through it, what amazed me was the instant admission into the club of cool as soon as I donned the motorcycle jacket and helmet. I couldn’t believe how many people raised a hand in casual salute as we drove past, including one elderly gentleman standing beside his car who waved at us with happy enthusiasm as if we were Peter and Jane Fonda.

(Less cool was standing in a parking lot with two bike dudes looking on in amusement as my brother untethered my helmet for me just seconds before I hyperventilated. Apparently I need to practice my cool just a wee bit more.)

And the quote I used in the title of this post? Totally appropriate and totally true. I hadn’t wanted to go any faster than 50 or 60 kms an hour, but when I looked over Sean’s shoulder one giddy moment and saw the speedometer creep over 100 km/h on those back country roads, I felt a crazy kind of blissful freedom I never would have expected. I still don’t think I’d ever want to actually drive one. Too heavy, too complicated, too much risk. But to ride along as a contented passenger behind someone as capable and trustworthy as my brother? In a New York minute.

I don’t know what’s more astonishing, that I’ve come to love riding a motorcycle or that I’ve come to appreciate my brother as capable and trustworthy. Who would have guessed it?

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It’s true, not that long ago I considered “cooking” to be preheating the oven and opening the box. It’s also true that while I’m a bit of a Johnny-come-lately to the wholesome food movement, I’ve embraced it with my whole heart. When I was blogging the other day about my 5-ingredient chicken fingers, it got me thinking about some of the other culinary skills I’ve acquired over the last couple of years.

You know what I cook really well? Hamburgers. Grilled hamburgers. My mouth is watering just thinking about it! And so with a weekend pending and BBQ season upon us, I thought I’d share five tips to hamburger perfection. (No, my entire cooking repertoire does not revolve around the number 5. I don’t think.)

1. Start with ground meat. What I mean here is forget the frozen pucks, and skip the pre-formed fresh patties, too. Did you know you pay more just for them to make little circles out of your ground beef? Take off your rings and get your hands dirty, it’s worth it! (I haven’t tried ground chicken or turkey yet, but more power to you if you can get away with it. My persistently low iron likes a little red meat a couple of times a week! And while extra lean is best for you health-wise, the extra fat in lean pretty much burns off on the grill, so you can save a few more pennies there.)

2. Don’t overhandle the meat. Break it up with a fork in a big bowl. Dump some breadcrumbs or oats on top, and either a whole egg or just the yolk. Add a little salt and pepper, and if you’re like that, chop up 1/4 cup or so worth of onions and throw that in there. A splash of Worcestershire sauce gives it a little zing, too! Stir it up just enough to combine the ingredients, but try not to overmix it.

3. Make perfect patties. I finally figured out how to keep my burgers from bulging in the middle. I take roughly enough hamburger so that I can close my hands around it, and rather than making a ball and then squishing it into a patty, I form it directly into a disk. A fine distinction, ’tis true, but it makes the difference in a burger you can get your jaws around!

4. Only flip it once. This is key!! On a hot grill, cook for about six minutes, flip, and cook for another five. Baste with bbq sauce if you must — I often forget. If you’re making cheeseburgers, add cheese and cook for one more minute… just enough to make it melty but not runny. Again, it’s a fine distinction!

5. Use the new skinny buns. Have you tried them? A nice crusty kaiser bun is nice, too, but we love those new thin whole-wheat buns. A little bit of a chewy compliment to the burger itself, and just perfect!

Creatures of habit that we are, we usually have baked beans and a nice leafy salad with hamburgers. What do you think? At the very least, now I know what I’m making for dinner tonight!

Edited to add: as I was typing this up, I knew I was forgetting something! Bonus tip: do not, under any circumstance, squish the patties on the grill!! All the yummy juicy moisture will run out, and your burgers will be dry.

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Look what I did this weekend!

No, I didn’t go out and have another boy… but after spending a lovely morning taking pictures of Baby Everitt and his sweet parents, I sure was thinking about it!!

Everitt is the son of my friends Sheila and Rob, and this was my first ever not-my-family photo shoot! Exciting — and more than a little nerve-wracking!! It’s one thing to be taking pictures of your own kids, when you can boss them around or give up and try again later, but to take on the responsibility of capturing decent pictures of somebody else’s family was a lot more stressful than I expected!!

Everitt, who turned four weeks old the day these pictures were taken, was a dream baby. His bright blue eyes watched the crazy chattering lady with the clicky black camera with bright interest and infinite patience. His parents, bless them, were equally patient.

I had some ideas in my head going in of shots I could take like classic newborn poses, close-ups of fingers and toes, and other examples I’ve seen. Trouble is, even babies don’t sit still and they can be as wriggly and vexatious as toddlers! And I certainly didn’t want to stress out mom or baby when they’d been kind enough to invite me in. So I kind of went with the flow, and while I did a little “stand here, move the baby this way” kind of directing, mostly I moved around and tried not to be too intrusive.

Here’s five things I learned about taking pictures of newborn babies:

1. The macro filter works great on fingers and toes, but unless you capture the baby’s face straight on, one of the eyes will be out of the plane of focus. Applies equally to the nifty fifty wide open at f1.8.

2. Shoot in RAW for extra exposure control, and what you can’t fix in RAW you can hide with B&W!

3. Even when baby fusses a bit, snap a couple of frames.

(And this one, too. It was almost a discard, but the more I looked at it the more I thought it captured something essential and lovely about those early, bleary days with a new baby in the family!!)

4. Keep an eye on your LCD when the light is harsh or contrasty. I had to toss more than half the images because the baby’s face was overexposed beyond redemption in the bright light streaming in through the window. Next time, I’m bringing a muslin sheet to cover the windows — or at least draw the curtains a bit. I’m used to northern light — southern light is much harsher!

5. It’s hard to go wrong when you start out with a really gorgeous family as your subject!

Not bad for my first time out of the house! There’s a few more worth sharing on Flickr, should you be curious enough to see more. Thank you so much, Sheila and Rob and especially Everitt, for inviting me into your home and for being so darn photogenic!

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The weather forecast for Family Day in Ottawa looks just about perfect for Winterlude’s outdoor activities, which means that the entire population and half the tourists will be skating on the Canal or zooming down the ice slides at Jacques Cartier Park. Had enough of outside? (If you haven’t, here’s five ideas of free things to do!) Looking for family-friendly and frost-free indoor activities for this Family Day? Here’s five suggestions!

1. Visit the Children’s Museum at the Museum of Civilization. This is the best hands-on museum in the city, and a place we visit several times a year. Swab the deck, put on a puppet show or build a house — there’s no shortage of fun activities here. One of our favourites! Special for this Family Day only, kids under 18 accompanied by an adult get in FREE!
2. Try an indoor playground. Okay, so not exactly thrilling for you, but kids can never get enough of these noisy, colourful, chaotic places. Cosmic Adventures in the east end and Playtime4Kids in the west end are but two of many choices in town. This is not exactly a cheap afternoon out, though — Cosmic Adventures will set you back $13.99 per child ages 4 – 12 plus $3.99 per adult.
3. Take in a movie. Planet 51 and The Princess and the Frog are both playing at the Rainbow Cinema at St Laurent. Admission fees are $4 per person, all ages, with an “early bird” special $2 price for shows that start at 10:00 am. At those prices, you can even afford a popcorn or two!
4. The Museum of Science and Technology is still one of the boys’ favourite places to visit. In fact, we’re overdue for a visit — this may be our activity of choice on Monday. Lots to see and learn, and lots of ways to burn off a little bit of energy too. A family of five can get in for $18 (how I love places that respect the fact that not all families come in fours!!) but the annual family membership pass is a bargain at $72 for unlimited admission to the Science and Tech Museum, the Aviation Museum and the Agriculture Museum at the Central Experimental Farm.
5. Go bowling! We’ve recently rediscovered bowling and the kids love it. MacArthur Lanes, Walkley Bowland Merivale Bowling Centre all seem to be open tomorrow (but please don’t take my word for it — call ahead!) and cost is in the range of $5.00 per person per game, plus $2 to $3 for shoe rentals. Beer and nachos for the grownups is always optional!

However you’re planning to spend it, Happy Family Day!

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Did you know that Wednesday January 27 is Family Literacy Day in Canada? From the Web site:

Family Literacy Day takes place every year on January 27. ABC CANADA Literacy Foundation and Honda Canada created the day in 1999 to encourage families to read and learn together. [...] Literacy is more than books. There are many ways to strengthen your literacy skills – all it takes is practicing for 15 minutes every day. Reading, writing, playing a game, following a recipe or even singing a song all help prepare children for challenges ahead and sharpen skills for adults.

Now, I’m guessing that I’m preaching to the choir when I tell you that literacy is one of the most important tools you can give your children, but I’m always looking for new tips and ideas for turning learning into a fun family activity.

Here’s five ideas for inspiring literacy in your family every day:

1. Encourage your kids to tell stories. When you’re waiting in line, or in the car, or otherwise find yourself with time on your hands, create a story together based on something around you. See that man with the bright yellow t-shirt? What do you think he had for breakfast this morning? Why is he wearing that yellow shirt? Is his favourite colour yellow? Do you think he wears yellow every single day, one day wearing yellow pants and one day wearing yellow underwear? Why? You can get really silly with this, but it’s great fun and my kids love it.
2. Did you know there’s a Sesame Street podcast? You know I love Sesame Street, and you know I’m fixated on my iPod. What could be better than the Word on the Street podcast from the creators of Sesame Street?!
3. Sing it! I mentioned the other day how astonished I am that Lucas, not yet two, knows the melody if not all the words to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and he’s been calling out the last word of each line to You are my Sunshine for months now. This year’s official theme for Family Literacy Day is “Sing for Literacy” and ABC Canada has provided access to free karaoke videos online.
4. Wear your words. This is a neat idea for older kids from ABC Canada’s family literacy tips pdf: write a story or a poem on an old pair of jeans. Love this idea!
5. Make yer own books. Tristan was about three when I helped him make his first book, made of pictures cut out of a Thomas the Tank Engine catalogue. He made his own first comic book around age five. All you need is a single letter-sized page cut into quarters and stapled along one edge and voilà: instant 8-page mini-book ready for words or scribbles or stickers or whatever your child can think of. If you like, get fancy and use a hole-punch and ribbon or yard to bind the side. The only problem with these is that the kids make them by the pile and I never have the heart to throw them out!

Care to share? Add your thoughts for making literacy fun in the comment section!

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I have to tell you, I love the (relatively) new category I’ve added of “5 things.” On days like this when I’ve got a handful of half-baked ideas that just won’t come together, or when I feel like chatting with you but can’t get organized enough to assemble a coherent post, I can always crunch them into a ‘five things’ post.

So here we go, five things that are making me happy about this Christmas season.

1. If it ain’t done by now, it ain’t getting done. I call this my official Christmas tipping point, when the joy of the season and the excitement of anticipation finally eclipse the stress of of planning, organizing, wrapping, baking, and shopping. Time to release my inner child. Yay!
2. After more than a decade of asking for it, and trying to catch it on TV, I’ve finally got not just one but TWO copies of my all-time favourite Christmas movie, A Christmas Story. I PVR’d it last night on CBC, and my brother burned me a copy of his DVD yesterday. I tried a few years ago to share this with the boys but they weren’t old enough to appreciate it. I’m saving it for a special Christmas Day family viewing. Yay!
3. It’s super-quiet here in the office (I still *so* love this job, btw), and the crisis that had me and several of my colleagues in a panic for most of the past 24 hours seems to be on its way to being resolved. My dad is on the way for a tour of our broadcast studio and operations, and after this afternoon I’m on vacation until January 4. Yay!
4. My brother and his family are in town. The kids really love their cousins, and it’s wonderful to have family together at Christmas. They may have to leave a little earlier than anticipated, based on the storm that may or may not happen this Friday and Saturday, but I’m still happy just to have the gang together. Yay!
5. I really do love Christmas. This year was the most stressful yet as far as preparations go. I had a hard time initially coming up with the perfect gift for everyone, and plans kept shifting on me. But now it’s all good and the boys are excited as the presents begin to pile up under the tree and we’re down to just one or two more items on the advent calendar and it really is beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Yay!

Share the joy, what’s making you happy this holiday season?

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Back in the day, the only ways you could “interact” with Santa were to stand in line at the mall to sit on his knee, or maybe at your parents’ annual company Christmas party.

Now that we live in an interactive world, though, not only can your kids write a letter to Santa, or listen to Christmas Eve updates of his whereabouts from the local weather man, but you can get e-mails, videos and track the big dude yourself starting early in December. Here are five fun ways for kids to communicate with Santa, starting with my fave.

1. The Portable North Pole. I love this app, madly and deeply. Whomever came up with this and put it together is brilliant. I did this last year and the look on the boys’ faces was priceless — and though I haven’t been all the way through it this year, I can see they’ve made even more improvements and personalization. You the parent have to go in ahead of time and set it up, supplying your kids’ first names, something they’ve done that’s good, a photo if you like, and other personalized details. They give you a link to a video, and you can visit it later with your kids. I must remember to go in tonight to set up all three boys, so they’ll know Santa is thinking about them!

2. Letters and e-mails to Santa. Yes, it’s true, you can e-mail Santa and he’ll reply, but isn’t the ritual of writing and sending an actual paper letter, and then the eye-popping excitement of getting something back in the mail box, worth the extra effort? In Canada, you have to mail your letters before December 16 if you want a reply. Mail to:

Santa Claus
North Pole
H0H 0H0

Or you can send an e-mail through canadapost.ca/santascorner. (Hmmm, in the US, it seems that the US Postal Service has stopped providing a Letters to Santa service this year. Any other ideas from our American friends?)

3. Norad’s Santa Tracker. When I was a kid, I remember watching with slack-jawed wonder as Percy Saltzman, the weather man on Global News, talked about Norad tracking Santa as he began his journey around the world on Christmas Eve. I think just about everybody has heard of Norad’s Santa Tracking service, but I had no idea of this charming history to the project, courtesy of WikiPedia:

In 1955, a Colorado Springs-based Sears store ran an advertisement encouraging children to call Santa Claus on a special telephone hotline. Due to a printing error, the phone number that was printed was the hotline for the Director of Operations at the Continental Air Defense (CONAD). Colonel Harry Shoup took the first Santa call on Christmas Eve of 1955 from a six-year old boy who began reciting his Christmas list. Shoup didn’t find the call funny, but after asking the mother of the second caller what was happening, then realizing the mistake that occurred, he instructed his staff to give Santa’s position to any child who called in.

In 1997, Canadian Major Jamie Robertson took over the program and expanded it to the Web where corporation-donated services have given the tradition global accessibility. In 2004, NORAD received more than 35,000 e-mails, 55,000 calls and 912 million hits on the Santa-tracking website from 181 countries. The site now gets well over 1 billion hits.

Love it!

4. Friend Santa’s on Facebook Last year, there was a kerfuffle online when Facebook refused to let Santa have more than 5000 friends but the Norad Tracks Santa page has more than 37,000 fans. And if you’re in it for the presents, the I Believe In Santa Claus group has more than 150,000 fans and seems to have regular giveaways.

5. Follow Santa on Twitter. Alas, Santa is not immune to the celebrity social media phenomenon of having squatters steal his identity, but you can trust updates from @noradsanta (official twitter ID of the Norad Santa Tracker project) and @SantaClaus is keeping a public list of who’s naughty and nice! (And, those of you with a more cynical inclination to the holidays might appreciate the tweets of @loadedsanta, definitely not safe for kids!)

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As you may remember, I made a (ahem) somewhat involuntary switch from driving a Dodge Grand Caravan to a Mazda 5 last July, when I wrecked the van and it burst into flames. (You know, I’m still a little twitchy even five months later?)

I’ve been meaning to write a follow-up post for months. Even though I was a very reluctant comer to the title of minivan owner back in late 2007 when we bought the Caravan, I had come to love the feeling of driving around in a spacious, elevated and insulated little world of my own. As it turns out, we had the minivan for exactly the right amount of time — I’m not sure we could have easily managed those earliest days with a newborn, when you never leave the house without a stroller and a bag and a bumbo or some sort of other seat and a ridiculous amount of other gear. One thing I’ll say for the Grand Caravan, we never lacked for places to put stuff.

That was my main concern in switching back to a car, even a station-wagon sized car like the Mazda 5. Would we all fit, with a car seat and two boosters? Would there be enough room for a full load of groceries? Would it be up to the task of hockey bags, strollers, and the rest of the crap we haul around with us?

Turns out, the answer is yes.

Truly, I love the Mazda 5 to death. Not only does it have more than enough space for us AND our stuff, but it doesn’t have that soul-sucking stigma that a minivan has, and it’s way better on gas. Here’s five things I love about my Mazda 5:

1. It fits a full load (and I mean *full*) of groceries without flinching. I usually fold down one of the seats in the third row (it has a 50/50 split) and that together with the bit of space at the back is more than enough room. And, when I had to bring home new closet doors from Home Depot, to the amazement of the young fellow helping me cram them into the car, I managed to fit an 7′ x 4′ box into the Mazda and close the hatch by folding down every seat except the driver’s seat and the one directly behind the driver.
2. Even with all the seats in use, there’s still plenty of room for day-to-day stuff. There’s just enough room in the back for a couple of grocery bags, or a folded up stroller, or a couple of backpacks, and it seats six quite comfortably. (Can you tell I have issues with space?)
3. It has heart, and pep. I drove a little Mazda 323 for about a decade, and this car reminds me of why I loved it so. When you press the accelerator, it wants to go. It doesn’t feel heavy and lumbering like the minivan did. It feels, even with the automatic transmission, like you’re driving it instead of just steering it.
4. It’s cheap to fill. The $75 fill-ups with the minivan made me choke every single time. The Mazda takes $45 to fill and I can get 500 to 600 km of city driving from that.
5. I can park it easily and I don’t need a step-ladder to scrape the windows. The minivan was just a beast to manouever, and a bear to clean off in the winter time. I haven’t had to do anything more than an ice-scraping so far this year, but at least I can do that in a couple of minutes. And, I can reach the middle of the windshield!

In the interest of fair reporting, there’s a couple of things I’m still not quite sold on. The automatic wipers are a little flaky. The ride is not as smooth as that of the Grand Caravan — but to me, that just adds to the “driving instead of just steering” enjoyment of the ride. I miss the giant double glovebox of the Caravan and the extra space around the seats, and I think the middle seat might get a little messy in the winter with kids with snowy boots clambering over and around it to get to the back row of seats. Ingress and egress from the back is not bad, but was far easier in the Caravan.

We haven’t yet attempted a road trip with the Mazda, so that’s the last hurdle to be attempted before I give it a full five-star rating. When we bought it, the dealer threw in a free Thule roof rack system, so there *should* be plenty of room for our stuff. We’ll see!

In all, we had the minivan for exactly the time we needed it: our first year of adjusting to being a family of five. I’d read a lot of press on the Mazda 5 before we bought it, and many people opined that it would be a perfect car for a family of four but maybe not more than that. In all, I have to say that it is the perfect size for us. I may not feel that way when I’m the shortest one in the family, but I’ve got a couple of years left to worry about that!

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Today marks the 40th anniversary of the debut of Sesame Street. I love Sesame Street madly and deeply, and have since I was a preschooler. I may have mentioned that once or two dozen times before.

You know who else loves Sesame Street? My kids. Of all the children’s programming we have on DVD and tape, everything from Blues Clues to Looney Tunes to Pingu to Thomas the Tank Engine to the Schoolhouse Rocks series, the two things that Lucas wants to watch are the Muppet Show and “Bird.” Big Bird, that is. We have two old skool Sesame Street DVD collections comprising six disks of 1970s Sesame bliss, and they’re in nearly constant rotation at our place.

In honour of the best children’s program on television, here’s five things about Sesame Street.

1. The same puppeteer, 75-year-old Carroll Spinney, has been playing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since Day 1. (Have you ever seen the very first episode, where Big Bird’s head is pointy and Oscar is orange? It’s very, um, disquieting.)
2. In 2005, Cookie Monster went on a health kick and changed his iconic anthem from “C is for Cookie” to “A cookie is a sometimes food.” I think of this, together with the introduction of the inexplicably appealing but unbearably grating Elmo, as the show’s nadir in my own estimation. (Lucas, on the other hand, worships Elmo even though he doesn’t appear in the early episodes we watch on DVD. I saw a four-foot Elmo in the window of Mrs Tiggy Winkles and thought it would make a fun Christmas gift, until I choked on the $179 (!!!) price tag.)
3. In its first season, the show won a Peabody Award, a Grammy and three Emmys, and Big Bird appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Sesame Street now holds the Guiness Record for most Emmy Awards, with an impressive 122. (Do the math — that’s an average of three each year for 40 years!)
4. The guest star on Sesame Street’s first episode was James Earl Jones, long before he was the voice of either Darth Vader or CNN, reciting a very solemn alphabet directly into the camera. Apparently, the show receives more requests for guest-star spots than they can accomodate each season. Here’s the full list of celebrity appearances. And check out this terrific compilation by Musicradar.com of the 11 greatest Sesame Street guest songs – I think my inner indie fan loves the Feist and REM ones the best.
5. The Old School DVD collections carry a disclaimer that says “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.” I’m still perplexed by this. Is it the Ladybugs at the Ladybug Picnic discussing fire insurance? Is it the trippy, psychedelic animations? Is it the obvious Snuffleupagus-ism? Hell, I’d rather have the boys watching vintage Sesame Street than (insert name of any show produced by Nickleodeon or Disney here) any day.

And one bonus item: have you been watching the Sesame Street doodles on Google? If you’ve missed them, the Huffington Post has a slide show with all seven of them. The one with The Count is my favourite, I think.

(Hat tip to Shannon Proudfoot and her fun articles in the Ottawa Citizen this weekend, from which I filched some of the content for this post!)

Happy birthday, Sesame Street. 40 rocks!

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Looking for some family fun this Thanksgiving long weekend in Ottawa? Here’s five ideas! (Edited to add: please note this post was written in October 2009. The last four points still apply, but the Lego exhibit was, alas, in 2009 only.)

1. The Lego exhibit at the Museum of Science and Technology. Free with museum admission, this is a wonderful exhibit in one of Ottawa’s best locations for family entertainment. We checked it out last weekend, and all three boys were thrilled with the hands-on Lego displays, and the amazing exhibits created by master Lego builders. They’ve put out separate tables of Lego for the big kids and Duplo for littler fingers. Even though we’ve got bin upon bin of Lego at home, we still spent the best part of an hour just in this part of the museum alone.

2. The butterfly exhibit at Carleton University. We tried this one year, but I’m just bug-phobic enough that I was uncomfortable with the idea of all those dangly legs and antennae. If you’ve got a higher threshold for insects, though, the kids will love having the chance to see so many beautiful creatures up close and personal.

3. Parc Omega. The fall colours are at their peak this weekend; why not drive the couple of hours out toward Montebello to visit Parc Omega? We visited last year around this time, and the scenery was spectacular. Here’s my post about Parc Omega from last year.

4. Saunders Farm. An Ottawa fall classic! There’s corn mazes, a Discovery Barn, a Barnyard Treehouse, a “haunted hayride” and — for the older kids — the Barn of Terror. We paid $60 for our family of five last year and found it was worth every penny. We might check it out ourselves again on Monday if the weather holds.

5.Take a hike! Let’s face it, the weather might not be ideal right now but the forecast calls for six months of winter, so you might as well get out and enjoy fall while it lasts! Two of our favourites are Mud Lake and Stony Swamp.

What are you doing this holiday weekend?

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