The end of Storyland?

I read in yesterday’s paper that Storyland, near Renfrew, will likely be closing at the end of this season, and the news made me sad. First the Hershey chocolate factory in Smith’s Falls; now this.

Storyland is truly one of Ottawa’s hidden gems, tucked away in the woods near a scenic overlook on the Ottawa River, 40 minutes from the city. We paid our first and now maybe only visit to Storyland last summer, and I found it a sweet and nostalgic place; a downmarket cousin to the fancy and expensive theme parks in most metropolitan areas.

There were two things I loved about Storyland. First, it appealed to me because it reminded me of my own childhood favourite places, where the slides were metal and coated in chipped (and likely lead-based) paint instead of modular plastic in primary colours. Like this!

July 06 004

The other thing I loved about Storyland was its simple and authentic charm, and its inherent lack of glitz, loud music or moving parts. If Disneyland is a $200 computerized, interactive, automated remote control toy, Storyland is a free wooden train set discovered stashed away in your grandparents’ basement. Not only is it filled with character, but it’s staffed by characters – literally. The (mostly young) staff are dressed in character costumes inspired by Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm and Disney alike, and are open and friendly and unselfconscious about their attire.

There are playgrounds and paddleboats, a bouncy castle and mini-golf. What really gives the place its charm, though, are the little features tucked away on easy to follow paths, like this wishing well:

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Or Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage:

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Or the three little pigs:

July 06 010

When I was growing up, my favourite place to visit was a little park in my hometown of London, Ontario called Storybook Gardens. I’d like to bring the boys back there some day, simply because of the many happy memories I have of going to Storybook Gardens at least once, and usually many times, over the course of a summer. Storyland is like the country cousin of Storybook Gardens, just a little bit more wild and unkempt, but maybe a little bit more fun because of that.

I’m sad to see Storyland close its doors. Maybe I’m just nostalgic, but I’d like my kids to spend more time in charming places like this. Matter of fact, gems like this one – relics of the 60s and 70s just like me – are probably tucked away in hidden corners all over the place. Is there one near you?

Edited to add: Hooray!! On May 10, 2008, a small article ran in the paper stating that Storyland has a new owner and will re-open on June 21. Yay!

10 pixels in – my first video game review

Not too long after my recent post talking about how the boys have transitioned from a TV addiction to a computer game addiction, I got an e-mail from a nice lady offering me a sneak preview of “the first video game made for kids 3-6 on Nintendo DS.” The boilerplate advertised that “Storybook DS features skill-based mini-games and read-aloud fairy tale adventures for shared play and interaction between mom and child.” I wrote back to say thanks for the offer, but we only play games on the PC and we don’t have any game consoles. She wrote back to say, “No problem, we’ll loan you a DS console for a while to play to the game. You can keep the game cartridge, and send back the console when you’re done.”

Hard to say no to an offer like that, isn’t it? And that’s how someone who doesn’t really like video games becomes a video game reviewer – or at least whores her children out as video game reviewers. Let the record show that they didn’t seem to mind.

So I have to start out by admitting that I’m a little bit biased against handheld games, especially for the preschooler set. I like to see and hear what they’re doing, and it’s harder to share a four-inch game console than it is to sit together in front of a 15 inch monitor.

Nintendo StorybookHaving said that, I have to admit I was immediately impressed with Storybook DS. I know kids get this stuff so much more intuitively than we did, but literally within one minute of snapping the cartridge into the console, Tristan was using the stylus to colour a picture. A few minutes later, he was showing Simon how to do the same. With no input from us, they found their way through a counting game, a music game, a drawing tablet and a storybook reader.

Tristan and Simon playing Storybook DSBoth boys enjoyed Storybook DS, even if it was a bit on the simplistic side compared to what they are already playing on the computer. Tristan had an easier time navigating and exploring, but both boys could use the stylus to play by themselves. I’m not sure about it being billed as “shared play and interaction between mom and child” – more like interaction between child and video game. I peered over their shoulders a few times to see what they were up to, but three of us jockeying for position around a four-inch screen didn’t work well for us. If you’d like to pick one up, they’ll be available in stores in late September. (Sorry for the lack of links. I had asked for a URL to point to, but never did get one.)

It was nice to be able to test-drive the Nintendo DS as well as the game itself, and Beloved didn’t waste any time going down to the local rental place and picking up a few other games for us to try. I can see the appeal of handheld games, especially for long car rides, or for when one wants to watch TV and the other wants to play games, but I’ll stick with my initial assessment of handheld games. They might be a nice treat for the older kids, and no doubt my 3 and 5 year old would love to have one, but when we finally capitulate to a game system for the family – sadly, with three against one I know it’s a matter of when rather than if – I’d much prefer a full-size, TV-based console rather than a handheld one.

So what do you think? What age – if any – do you think it’s appropriate for kids to start playing with personal, handheld video games? I don’t think I can hold out on this one forever, but seven or eight years old sounds about right to me.

Yay Day!

It’s a dreary kind of day here, grey and threatening rain – not that I can see a window from here. And I have a cold that kept me up all night and so I might have otherwise been tempted to be a little cranky and feel just a little bit sorry for myself.

But then I started thinking about all the things that I have to be grateful about these days:

  • a healthy, happy pregnancy. (What they say about the second trimester being the “honeymoon trimester” really is true, isn’t it?)

  • the new nanny. I don’t know who is happier, the boys or Beloved and I. Not once has Simon said, “I don’t want Jen to come over today” whereas he complained endlessly about going to the previous caregivers’ houses.

  • a four-day weekend this weekend, and a four-day weekend next weekend. Yay!

  • as if a four-day Labour Day weekend weren’t enough to celebrate all on its own, we’re going on a mostly FREE weekend getaway to Smuggler’s Notch resort in Vermont!! The media relations folks out there (Hi Karen and Barbara!) caught some of my posts about the trip to Bar Harbour in their ‘family vacations’ google filter, and they’re doing an experimental blogger outreach campaign. They’ve offered us the standard press package, including two nights of accomodation – free! We’ve got all sorts of cool activities lined up, like an “evening wildlife watch” family canoe trip, and day camp for the boys on Saturday so Beloved and I can enjoy a (don’t laugh!) Segway tour of the resort. You know, those stand-up motorized scooters? Now picture pregnant, naturally clumsy me on one of them – hilarity, if not trauma to innocent bystanders, is sure to ensue. Plus they have FOUR pools, EIGHT waterslides, a couple of different playgrounds, trail hiking, shopping… it’s going to be a busy weekend! (Don’t hate me; it’s an embarrassment of riches, I know. I’m not worthy – but I still said yes!)

  • and last, but not least, the boys continue to make me laugh every single day. We haven’t told them about the baby yet (the anticipation of the new school year is enough to make their little heads explode; I can’t burden them with a five month wait when I can barely stand it myself) but we have been casually dropping babies into the conversation a lot lately. The other night at bedtime, the boys spontaneously started talking about having a baby brother or sister. Tristan’s preference is for a baby boy, whom he thinks should be named “Joe Joe”. Simon, on the other hand, favours a baby sister, and he insists her name should be “Darth Luke”. Note to self: don’t engage the boys in the baby-naming process!

Now you go! What’s making the sun shine in your world today?

Administrative notes

So it’s been almost a week, and I am getting comfy in my new bloggy home. There are still boxes of clutter everywhere and I’m still tinkering with where I want to keep the blogroll and whether I like the sofa under that window and whether I should plaster all my categories on the wall beside the Green Day poster or tuck them away in a dropdown box. But in general, it’s starting to feel like home.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how the look of a blog and the voice of the blogger are so intertwined? Or is that just me? It took me weeks to get used to seeing my words in a new font last time I changed it back on the old site, so I think it’s going to take a while for me to get used to all this happy yellow and fanciness. (No joke, I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I fixed the columns so they were left-justified instead of centred yesterday.) Do you think the new look suits the overall character of the blog?

I’m pretty happy with WordPress over Blogger, and will likely write a couple of posts detailing exactly why and how I went about the transition (should anybody care) and maybe writing up a comparison of Blogger-hosted versus WordPress on my domain. The short version is, I’m glad I made the switch.

I know I shouldn’t give much credence to the stats, but it’s still a little humbling to go from a Technorati rank of 35,790 all the way down to 3,915,745, and to watch the traffic stats fall by almost half because of a non-existant Google Page Rank over here. (Ooo, as of today, Technorati acknowledges a second blog linking to me, so my rank jumped half a million blogs to 2,469,418… how exciting! But, if I can see that at least half a dozen of you have already adjusted your links to point to the new blog, why doesn’t Technorati see that? Step away from the stats, DaniGirl.)

Speaking of which, if you’ve honoured me with a link from your blog could I please trouble you to adjust it to point to http://danigirl.ca/blog instead of the old blogspot address? If you want to pick up the new feed, it’s at http://danigirl.ca/blog/feed/.

I’m actually surprised at how quickly Google indexed the new blog. If you Google “Postcards from the Mothership“, the new site is already the fourth link on the page – so feel free to click on it to boost it up the page for me!

And by the way, does anybody have any idea how to get the hypen off the end of the blog name on Google and Technorati? It’s obviously reading something from the meta data, but I’ve played with all the options and have no idea where it came from or how to get rid of it! Anybody know from meta data and tags? Anyone?

(Edited to add: hyphen problem fixed! Yay! And an interesting factoid for anyone else interested in Technorati rank: did you know that only links that are hard-coded into the blog are counted by Technorati? Blogrolls that are maintained by a script – i.e. through Blogrolling.com – are not counted. Interesting!)

Random bullets to banish the brain clutter

Blogging really is a feast-or-famine kind of thing, isn’t it? There are times when your brain is empty, and you go days fearing you may never be graced with an inspiring idea again.

And then other times, your brain is so busy blogging all.the.time that at any given time, you have half-composed posts oozing out of your brain, begging you to get to a keyboard and release them to the Interwebs. This is one of those times. I have a lot of ideas rattling around, but nothing cogent enough to form a full post.

Thank goodness for the existence of random bullets!

  • We woke up this morning to what appears to be a brand new double mattress delivered to our front lawn. Problem is we didn’t order a new mattress. I have no idea where it came from or, more importantly, what to do with it. It’s garbage day today, so maybe one of the neighbours put it out and some prankster dragged it down the block to our lawn? But seriously, have you ever dragged a full-sized mattress anywhere? It’s not like the wind just picked it up and carried it over. The irony is that we could really use a new double mattress, but I’m not sure I trust providence enough to accept randomly occurring mattresses as part of the natural order of things.
  • I was supposed to call for my Integrated Prenatal Screening blood test results yesterday – and I completely forgot. I guess I’m not too worried about them, eh? I’ll try to remember to call today.
  • I also go for my first official appointment with the midwife today. Yay!
  • Today is my sister-in-law’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Belinda!! Sometime in the next four days (oy, my memory sucks!) is my very dear friend’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Jojo!! Saturday is my cousin’s birthday. Happy birthday, Mike!!
  • Last Sunday would have been my 18th wedding anniversary, had I not bailed from the practice marriage back in 1993. Eighteen years! Eek!!
  • I find it somewhat validating that since I have made the jump to WordPress, Haloscan has been under some sort of spam attack. I think the last time I had to delete a spam comment was months ago, and I’ve had to delete more than 20 in the past week.
  • Tristan has been on a ‘what I want to be when I grow up’ kick lately. Last month, after visiting the African Lion Safari, he wanted to be an elephant trainer. The other day, I was getting ready for work when à propos of nothing, he announced, “Hey Mom? When I grow up, I want to be king.” (pause) “Why are you laughing?” You go, Tristan! Queen Mother sounds like a lovely career option for me.

The one where the nanny didn’t quit

So, it’s the nanny’s third day today, and she didn’t quit yet. I’m so happy! (Amazing how my standards have dropped, isn’t it?)

Seriously, though, even beyond her not quitting, I’m thrilled with the new nanny. The boys ask every day whether Jen and Jordan (her one year old son) are coming today. She brings them to the park; she plays games with them; last Friday, she brought them to her house for the afternoon and they did fingerpainting and came home with home-made, car-shaped cookies. She’s got Simon on the potty a couple of times a day. She even emptied the clean dishwasher so she could put the lunch dishes in it. Really, I love her!

I’m not the only one who loves her. Friday night at dinnertime, Tristan had just finished telling us all the fun things they did with Jen that day. He asked if she would be coming back the next day, but I told him that Mummy and Daddy don’t have to work on Saturdays or Sundays, so we’d get to spend the whole day together as a family. “And besides,” I teased him, “would you rather spend the day with us or with Jen?”

He didn’t hesitate nearly long enough before answering, “Jen!” In other circumstances, I might have been peeved, but frankly by this point, I’m happy with that answer.

It’s still a little awkward having her in our house, though. We’re making up rules as we go along, because I hadn’t really thought any of this through. I don’t know if I should leave a list of suggested lunches for the boys, based on that week’s trip to the grocery store, or just let her root through the cupboards and make it up based on what she finds. I’m also not sure whether I should be buying stuff for her to make lunch for herself.

I was also thinking about leaving suggestions for activities, and leaving her our family membership card for the Farm and the Science museum. If it were me, we’d be going to the library, and playgroups, to parks in other neighbourhoods – anything to burn daylight! – but I don’t want to overwhelm her. I’m not sure I’d want to be doing a lot of field trips by myself with a 1, 3 and 5 year old!

So, day three and all is well on the daycare front. It’s going to nearly break us financially (her pay is barely $100 less a week than Beloved earns) but at least for the next year I’m willing to pay that price. Do you think this is finally the good karma I’ve earned after more than half a year of dreadful experiences?

***

A quick editorial aside comes to mind as I’m writing this post. When I refer back to old posts (which, I am noticing, I am quite fond of doing) should I be linking to the original posts back on Blogger or the ones in the archive here? The original ones have the comments. What do you think?

A very expensive (but fun!) Saturday

We had a fun and adventure-filled but ghastly expensive day on Saturday.

In the morning, we visited the Ottawa debut of A Day Out With Thomas. Those of you who have been around for a while will remember the absolute magic of our first adventure with the Very Useful Engine, two years ago in St Thomas, Ontario.

Our latest adventure was not quite so magical, but a fun morning for the boys. In addition to a rather uninspired 30 minute train ride through some scrub and industrial land, there were train tables, temporary tatoos, arts and crafts, and of course, a giant gift shop filled with all things Thomas and Friends. Tristan’s waning interest in the big blue engine was rekindled, but Simon has always been less of a fan than his brother. In the gift shop, he looked around for a while before asking, “But where are all the Star Wars toys?”

In the afternoon, we went with Granny and Papa Lou to one of my favourite summer traditions, the Ottawa SuperEx. While the SuperEx never lives up to what I loved about London’s Western Fair from my childhood, I still look forward to it every year. I love the grease, the sleaze, the colours, the carnival food, the excess of it all.

The boys don’t really need me to ride the merry-go-round with them anymore, but I still do.

Merry-go-round

But mostly, they ride by themselves.

Driving

I'm flying!

They weren’t big enough to go on the bumper cars by themselves (they couldn’t have reached the pedals even if they wanted to) but Beloved and Papa Lou were willing to go along for the ride. My mom and I watched from the sidelines and laughed the whole time – of the four of them, I honestly couldn’t tell you which one was having more fun.

Bumper cars
Bumper cars

I think my favourite part of the SuperEx are the games of chance. My mom and I are usually pretty good at the squirtgun games, but this time it was Tristan who won his own stuffy.

Granny and Tristan

And no matter how expensive the day might have been, all the money in the world can’t buy memories like these.

Bumper cars

The Birth Announcement

Tristan, Simon, Beloved and especially DaniGirl are pleased to announce the arrival of their brand new baby blog, the newly independent Postcards from the Mothership on Danigirl.ca.

This version of blog was delivered after more than a week of hard labour on the part of DaniGirl, with extensive coaching by Beloved.

Special thanks to:

  • Tech Support at Namespro.ca, for extraordinary customer service and at Hostingplex for having the patience of Job while walking me through the initial set-up;
  • Tom at One Hertz, for designing the Mandigo theme, and for actually answering my questions about how to tweak it (after deciphering my awkward attempt to ask for assistance in French!) and Suze, where I first admired a variation on the theme;
  • An 18 year old amateur photographer from Israel named Michelle, who gave me permission to adapt her lovely Flickr image for my new header.
  • Urban Fonts for the funky handwriting font in the header. (Beloved says it’s too thin, but I love it!)
  • Marla for her critical eye and unvarnished honesty (and she has a new blog, too!);
  • Andrea, Ian, Colin and Barbara, who provided insight on hosted domains and the tools to use them;
  • And last but certainly not least, Beloved, who not only picked up the slack around the house this week while I spent endless hours glued to the laptop, alternately cursing and gloating as I encountered and overcame untold problems both small and large, but tutored me on Photoshop, provided creative input, and was smart enough to know when to help, when to take over and do it for me, and when to get the hell out of the way.

    You’ll see I’ve imported the archives, but simply can’t import the old comments. I will continue to cross-post at both blogs until after Labour Day, but original blog will be kept indefinitely, in case one day a fix is available.

    Please take a look around, and let me know if you see any problems with links or the design or anything. I’m open to suggestions, too!

    So? What do you think?

    • The 16 week update: Wherein I let out this breath I’ve been holding

    Just been for my 16 week OB appointment. Let me tell you, it was a hell of a lot more pleasant than the last time I had a 16 week appointment, and did not live up in any way, shape or form to the “oh no, not again” anxiety dreams that haunted me all last night.

    The whole thing lasted – I kid you not – maybe seven minutes. She checked my blood pressure (110 / 60) and asked how I was doing, and pulled out her doppler. Just because my life is not complete without some moments of heart-stopping drama, we didn’t hear the heartbeat on the first side she tried – and my heart shrunk down to the size of a pea. And then, when she pressed her doppler to the left side of my abdomen, there it was: whoosha whoosha whoosha, that beautiful baby music. And my heart grew to the size of an elephant.

    And that was it, the appointment in its entirety. The IPS results aren’t in yet, so I’ll have to check back early next week. But I’ll happily celebrate good news when I can. 16 weeks and all is well!