On househunting (part one of many)

Those of you who follow me on twitter have already been privy to the angst, but I think I’ve exceeded the satisfaction that 140 characters worth of hand-wringing can afford me.

So, we’ve officially started looking for a new home. Okay, I’ve officially started looking for a new home. Beloved watches the endeavour in the same manner one might watch an inevitable but slow-moving disaster — peeking through splayed fingers, knowing that chaos lies ahead and helpless to avert it yet helpless to look away.

And, obsessive personality that I am, househunting is no longer just a hobby but a vocation that must be lived and breathed every waking (and many sleeping) moment. Once upon a time, just a few short weeks ago, I was content to occasionally peruse the latest listings on Grapevine, to noncommittally browse MLS a few times a month. I even managed to attend an open house or two, without igniting the white-hot nuclear fire of my obsession.

Until last week.

Suddenly, it’s all I can think about. Houses, houses, houses! School zones, property taxes, ensuite baths and finished basements — bring it! Talk to me about it, show me more more more properties, I can’t get enough about HOUSES FOR SALE!

(Don’t you feel bad for poor Beloved? While he is vaguely on board with the idea of us at some point in our lives moving to a different house, I’m quite sure that he does not want to discuss it every hour of the day. Is this a man/woman thing, or just us?)

Truth be told, I’m not even sure why I’m so fixated on buying a house all of a sudden. I love our house, I truly do. I love the location, with a park across the street and the boys’ school within view of my bedroom window. I love the morning sunlight that floods into the four windows in my bedroom like a tsunami each morning. I love the large yard (when I’m not cursing the overgrown garden, that is!) and the new hardwood floors, and just about everything else about it.

Except the kitchen. I loathe the tiny little galley kitchen with its abject lack of counter space and the fact that we can barely fit a table for six in there with no room for company. And I would really like a fourth bedroom, so the boys don’t have to share. If I could somehow think of a reno that would plunk an expanded kitchen and another bedroom onto our existing lovely townhouse, I’d do it — but it’s just not possible.

You know what I really don’t want, though? A monster house. Why are all the newer homes, built since 2000 or so, so friggin’ HUGE? Really, we don’t need a living room AND a family room AND an office AND an eat-in kitchen AND a dining room all on the same floor. I’d be fine with a kitchen big enough for a really big table and no dining room — in fact, we use our current dining room as a play/computer room.

We went to see one this week that I really loved. It was in Old Barrhaven, a neighbourhood I never really considered before but have become quite interested in lately. It was built in 1978, but was all newly decorated and very fresh looking. It had a living room and dining room and a kitchen with space to move but none wasted, and a lovely little sunken family room. It had four bedrooms, and a partially finished basement. It had me at floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room and dining room, but kept me enchanted with character and a simple modesty. And when I saw the affordable price, the circle of covetousness was complete.

In the end, though, the thing that so endeared me to it ultimately crossed it off my list — it was so modest that it only had one full bathroom. Try as I might, I simply could not imagine us functioning with five people and only one shower/bath combination — so not going to happen. Sigh.

In the past week, I’ve viewed the MLS listings for four-bedroom homes in Barrhaven so many times that I’ve practically memorized them. This one will take too much work, that one is on a busy road, this one has a truly wretched floor plan (what were they thinking) and that one just doesn’t speak to me. I need more new listings, why aren’t there any new listings, I’ve clicked on the site five times today and there are still no new listings!!

Of course, if I ever actually find a house worthy of buying, we’re farked. Even though I’ve been told that three-bedroom, three-bathroom town houses in Barrhaven are a red-hot commodity right now, I am weak with fear at the thought of the effort required to sell our house. Oh my sweet lord, the fixing and the painting and the de-cluttering and the (whimper) keeping it clean for viewings? Shoot me now. To say nothing of actually packing and moving. Me, who is neurotic with fear over change. Oy.

So if you know of anyone who is selling my dream home in my price range and who wants to buy my current home sight-unseen with my assurances that it’s a really lovely place? Let me know, please.

Until then, got a househunting story to share? I’m looking for something to occupy my attention in between clicking refresh on the real estate websites.

Measuring summer by the cup

I know summer isn’t really over yet, but I’m back at work now and my holidays are over. Even though it’s a little less than a month until the boys go back to school, Beloved’s holidays are also more or less over after next week. So, even though there is plenty left of the summer of ’10 to enjoy, I’m feeling retrospective about it already.

It has been, by just about any measure, an amazing summer for us. In the month of July alone, the boys swam in an ocean, a Great Lake, an inland freshwater lake, a river and a pool. How awesome is that? That alone has to qualify as some sort of excellence-in-vacationing milestone!

We did a *lot* of traveling this summer — the big trip out to Nova Scotia, a slightly less epic loop around Southern Ontario to visit two sides of the family, and lots of little day trips. Oh how I love a good road trip! And to their credit, the boys only twitch a little bit when they see me loading up the car again.

And so, if swimming in salt- and fresh-water bodies isn’t your idea of a good time, here’s another way to measure excellence in summer vacations: how many Tim Hortons did you visit? 🙂

In the great summer of 2010 road-trips, aside from my usual Barrhaven and west-Ottawa Tims locations, we bought coffees and mocha iced-capps in:

  • Drummondville, QC196b:365 Canadian icons
  • Grand Sault, NB
  • Moncton, NB
  • Halifax, NS
  • Lunenburg, NS
  • Bridgewater, NS
  • Saint John, NB
  • Bristol, NB
  • Lévis, QC
  • Morrisburg, ON
  • Trenton, ON
  • Georgetown, ON
  • Aberfoyle, ON
  • Clinton, ON
  • Angus, ON
  • Hunstville, ON
  • Renfrew, ON

Phew, that’s a lot of coffee! I wish I had some sort of passport so I could have collected stamps from all of them. What, too obsessive? I swear, I only used this map to roughly locate a few for our trip out east! (For the southern Ontario loop, I used an app for my iPhone. Um, yeah, maybe just a weensy bit addicted. But if you love Tims, it rocks!!)

So, apparently in addition to a lot of swimming, we drank a lot of coffee this summer. *blush*

How ’bout you? What’s your measure of a summer well spent?

Postcards to go – now optimized for your mobile device!

Just a quick editorial note to let you know that I’ve finally made the blog mobile-friendly. You shouldn’t see any difference from a PC, but thanks to the WPTouch plug-in it looks a whole lot better on the most common mobile devices. If you’ve got one, let me know how it looks!

I still want to do a little tweaking, including creating an official icon, but it’s a good start (considering I actually started doing this about four months ago!) And, like so many home improvement projects, I figured I do the big reveal now when I’ve got 85% of the work done, as there’s a strong possibility that it will take another four months for that last 15% of tweaking to be done!

Special thanks to Elise who encouraged me to do it, way back in the day. 🙂

Ottawa’s Hidden Treasures: Andrew Haydon Park

I‘ve spent so much time this summer blogging about other places that I’ve completely forgotten one of my favourite bloggy activities: telling you about the fantastic family hangouts we’ve discovered here in Ottawa for summertime fun.

If you are looking for a fabulous free activity on a hot summer day in Ottawa, you should definitely check out Andrew Haydon Park off Carling Avenue just west of Pinecrest (about a kilometer west and on the other side of the street from the Colosseum Theatre.)

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.

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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!

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This isn’t the typical suburban splash pad with shooting fountains and dumping buckets; instead, the kids have to pump the water up (or at least throw a switch to get a burst of water) and it trails down through a series of canals and water wheels.

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There’s a mechano-lego-builder inspired vibe to the play structures and getting the water flowing that appeals to all three of the boys, and I’m always grateful to find an activity that engages all three of them equally. (It’s not always easy to bridge the gap between two-and-a-half and eight years old!)

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And best of all, it’s completely free. Bring a snack or a lunch and enjoy a wander through the rest of this gorgeous but often overlooked park and it’s marshy waddle into the Ottawa river.

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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!

In which she joins the iPhone generation (plus! A giveaway!)

For my birthday this year, Beloved and the boys got me an iPhone. Yay! Like so many people I quizzed in my six-month long quest for info on iPhones, I found that although I wasn’t quite sure why I needed it when I set out, as soon as I had it I found it indispensable. I use it as a camera, for on-the-go connection to the Interwebs, to find the nearest Tim Hortons, as a GPS when we are traveling and, hmmm, what else? Oh yes, a phone!

When I first signed up to be a part of Mom Central’s My Living Stories blog tour, I only had the iTouch and wasn’t sure if we’d be getting an iPhone or not. And to be totally honest, once I had the iPhone I wasn’t sure if I wanted the boys rubbing their grubby little fingers all over it! But I was interested in the idea of apps for kids, so I signed up, thinking if nothing else I’d try them out on the iTouch.

And I liked the idea behind My Living Stories. They’re classic stories turned into an animated storybook application for preschoolers. In their own words,

The My Living Stories apps combine beautiful artwork, narration and interactive features in an easy to use platform that is perfect for preschoolers to read along all on their own, without any help. My Living Stories are a great solution for entertaining on-the-go or as an aid for teaching children to read at home. The apps allow for your child to read along with English or French narration or read the stories themselves. Interactive sounds and animation bring stories to life. Another great feature is the ability to record your own voice to go along with the story (this feature requires an iPhone or iPod Touch with microphone capabilities).

I’d downloaded the Princess & the Pea, King Midas, and The Tortoise & the Hare, but hadn’t yet had a chance to show them to to the boys. Then we went out for dinner to Lone Star with my folks (on my birthday, in fact!) and Lucas informed me about 90 seconds after we’d placed our order with no room for negotiation, “Me all done!” And I’d completely forgotten my restaurant distraction bag of tricks (playdough, crayons, books, dinky cars) at home. And then I remembered the iPhone.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Decode Entertainment (the makers of My Living Stories apps). Not only was Lucas captivated, but the big boys crowded around and all three of them were engaged through all three of the storybook apps. And we managed to eat, pay the bill and escape with neither the toddler nor the birthday girl melting down. Success!

To be completely honest, I still have to poke around with the apps to figure out a few things — mostly because the iPhone itself it still so new to me. I had to read the story myself, but you are supposed to be able to hear the story being read. And, even more cool, you can record your own voice reading the story.

And now, the giveaway! Mom Central is sponsoring the My Living Stories blog tour, and is providing a $25 iTunes gift card to share with one of you. Yay for freebies!!

If you’d like to be entered in the contest, please leave a comment below and tell me which of the My Living Stories apps you would choose or suggest your favourite kid-friendly app. (Note: you seem to need to open the link to the apps through iTunes. I searched and searched, but this was the only way I could figure out how to link to it!)

Here’s the details:

1. This giveaway is for one $25 iTunes gift card.

2. You must be a Canadian resident to win.

3. I’m not the only blogger running this promotion, and you may enter the contest on multiple blogs; however, you are only eligible to win one iTunes gift card as part of the My Living Stories contest.

4. To enter, leave a comment below telling me which of the five My Living Stories apps most appeals to you. Or, suggest a kid-friendly app that you recommend.

5. A winner will be chosen using Random.org based on all eligible entries.

6. Contest closes at noon on Friday 6 August 2010. The winner will be contacted via e-mail within 24 hours.

7. You must be willing to share your contact information with Mom Central Canada to collect your prize.

Disclosure: I am participating in the My Living Stories program by Mom Central on behalf of Decode Entertainment. I received three free apps and a gift card for my participation. As you know, the opinions expressed on this blog are entirely my own.

Jeff and Meghan’s Wedding

On 21 July, a perfectly blue and clear Saturday afternoon, Meghan and Jeff got married in a charming ceremony at the Rockcliffe Park gazebo. I couldn’t have asked for a more joyful, sweet and (phew!) photogenic couple for my first wedding shoot!

After a sweltering week, we were blessed with a breezy and relatively cool day for the wedding, but that didn’t stop me from sweating through the day. Weddings? Are a LOT of work. And also? A LOT of fun to photograph. Especially when you have an adorable couple who never stop smiling, laughing and looking at each other with obvious love throughout the day.

See?

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I’m slowly learning to love taking pictures of people as much as I love taking pictures of stuff, but I have to admit that I could have played with endless permutations and combinations of the rings and the bouquet and the shoes and the delicious little details of her dress like this for hours — if we didn’t have that whole pesky wedding thing to get to!

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The bride and her bridesmaids had an 18th floor suite at the Delta to get ready, but I was so busy taking pictures that it wasn’t until the very last minute that I noticed this spectacular view. (And isn’t it the perfect backdrop for such a gorgeous bride?)

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This is one of my favourite shots of the day. A girl and her daddy, both in the moment and loving it.

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These two monkeys, on the other hand, were behaving just long enough for me to capture this classic shot — before they found more mischief to get into. Adorable, no?

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Everything about the afternoon was delightful, and Meghan and Jeff never stopped smiling for a moment, right up until the car drove away with them still grinning.

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Here’s a few more of my favourite shots of the day, or you can see the full set on Flickr.

Meghan and Jeff's Wedding mosaic

Well, not quite the full set. I gave the bride and groom a set of 200 images, of which I posted 30 to Flickr. In total, I almost completely filled an 8 GB memory card with 1224 images of the day! Eep!! I think I just about wore out the shutter on my poor old Nikon. 🙂

Thanks, Meghan and Jeff, for allowing me to be part of your amazing day. I hope each day of your lives together is filled with the sweet bliss that was the essence of your wedding day.

“Faster, faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death” ~Hunter Thompson

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:

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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.

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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?

Road trip!!!

What do you do when you and your husband and three kids successfully survive a 3500 km road trip through four provinces?

Give ’em two and a half weeks to recover, then throw them back in the car again and head in the opposite direction!

We just finished a week-long road trip loop through southern Ontario and up the shore of Lake Huron to north of Huntsville and back through Algonquin park. Thanks to the miracle of scheduled posts, I’ll bet that you didn’t even know that I was gone! We left Saturday afternoon, after the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk (which I will blog eventually) and just got back a while ago.

I have a few stories to share and a few million pictures to process, but here’s one that sums up the trip just about perfectly… my brother brought us to this wonderful Tow Mater on the Bluewater Highway on our way into Goderich for a day at the beach:

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Doesn’t it just scream “road trip” and “family vacation”? Mad props to the guys at the Goderich Power Centre and their awesome sense of humour.

More soon, after the laundry and a really thorough cleaning of my darling little Mazda…

Compelling parenting question of the day: Cartoon characters

When Lucas showed an early preference for the Muppet Show, I was delighted. I could have hours of the Muppet Show on in the background and not only is it not annoying, but I’d actually enjoy watching it with him.

Sadly, his tastes have taken a turn for the worse. He now loves, unfathomably, Max and Ruby. And Caillou. I don’t think there is a more annoying character in television landscape than Caillou. (Although, I used to hate Wonderpets, too, and that one has grown on me lately.)

Time for a parenting poll: what is the most annoying kids’ TV character? Pedantic Dora? Whinging Caillou? Psychedelic In the Night Garden?

What say ye, oh parents of the boob-tube addicted preschool set?

The one with the earwigs

I don’t know about where you live, but in my end of town it has been a crazy summer for earwigs. I have never seen so many of them! And while I am pretty much okay with the usual infestations of ants and even spiders — earwigs? *shudder* I’ve taken to banging my morning paper rather fiercely against the porch wall before allowing it into the house, after more than once leaping up off the couch in a panic as one crawled across me.

We seem to be getting a lot of them in the house, which I’ve never seen before, and we’re getting them in the office at work, too. The jury is still out on whether they bite or not — I’ve heard it passionately argued both ways — but those pincher thingees on their arse ends are more than enough to put them on my “squish at any cost” list.

Do earwigs freak you out? You may want to stop reading now. This is my guaranteed-to-make-you-shudder earwig story. Don’t worry, I’ll understand. Come back tomorrow and we’ll be back to the rainbows and unicorns, no hard feelings.

The other day, I was putting water in the kiddie pool for the boys. They’d been in the pool the day before, and I’d hung their bathing suits on the deck rail to dry. Simon’s had fallen during the night, and was sitting in a heap under the porch swing.

I was wrestling with the hose, so in my defense, I was preoccupied. If I’d been paying attention, I could have easily seen it coming and averted the whole nasty affair. But I wasn’t.

I’ve told the boys I’d help them with their bathing suits in a minute, but Simon is excited about playing in the pool, and sees his bathing suit on the deck. He grabs it and brings it into the house.

(Can you see it coming? It gets worse.)

Beloved is sitting in one of those little Ikea plastic chairs, fiddling with the printer under the desktop shelf when Simon comes in, leaking a trail of earwigs from his infested bathing suit. He hasn’t yet noticed that his bathing suit is practically moving of its volition, and wants Beloved to help him put it on. In the ingratiating matter of children everywhere, does not simply ask for assistance (oh, the many points at which disaster could have been averted) but instead, to get his father’s attention, tosses his earwig-infested bathing suit onto Beloved’s head, where the earwigs rain down like a biblical plague and scurry every which way into my dining room.

(I told you it was gross. Imagine it from Beloved’s perspective, with them slipping into his shirt collar and down his back!)

I was, blissfully, outside, but I heard Beloved’s bellow of dismay and came running. I managed to scoop up a dozen or more, and Beloved caught as many, but he said that at least twice that many got away.

And now? We keep finding them *everywhere*. In the kitchen, crisped in the lint trap, and one memorable night floating in Beloved’s soda. We’ve moved every piece of heavy furniture on the main floor in our quest to eradicate them.

Just about anything else would be tolerable, but earwigs? Ick!