This week in photos: Banners and birthdays and brrrr!

This has been a week bookended by birthdays and full of brrrr. Oh my good god, is winter not over YET?

Saturday was warm and cozy inside the house as Simon celebrated his 9th birthday party with a few good friends.

Simons party

These horses were from Manotick’s shiverfest a few weeks back but I didn’t get around to posting them at the time. I love the frost on their faces, poor things!

Shiverfest horses

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I’ve been playing with ideas for new blog banners on and off for quite a while now. This was a failed attempt:

Typewriter and camera

But then I finally stumbled in to what I really wanted. Once I had the idea down, it didn’t take me long to put these together:

Blog banners

Did I mention it was cold this week? This month? Seriously, has this not been a particularly cold, snowy winter? Poor Lucas fell asleep in the car with his hands shoved deep into his pockets for warmth.

Winter car nap, with hands in pockets. Baby it's cold outside!

I got so sick of the cold that with 15 cm of snow in the forecast I went hunting through my archives looking for signs of spring and warmth. A little over the top, maybe, but that’s how I’m feeling about warm spring sunshine right about now!

Dear Spring, I miss you. Come back soon!

And then, Lucas turned FIVE!

Happy birthday Lucas!

The nice thing about birthday season is that once it’s done in mid-March, spring really is just around the corner. We’re getting there!

A love letter to Lucas, Age 5

My sweet baby Lucas, you are FIVE years old today!

Snowman fun-5

Lucas, you are growing up waaaaaay too quickly. Not only are you five years old, but you are a clever and advanced for five, so much so that sometimes we forget you’re still wee. And I know for a fact you think you’re a peer to your older brothers, age-gap be damned.

Christmas torture

Lucas, you are a sweet, loving and independent fellow who knows his own mind. Your two favourite things are drawing and jigsaw puzzles, although you like crafts, playdough and video games a lot, too. You go through reams of paper each week, drawing Sonic and puffles and creepers and Willie the cat and whatever else catches your creative fancy. You’re just learning your letters, so what was an independent act is now a joint effort as we spell and you write your captions carefully (and often backwards).

Drawing

You are half way through your first year at school and you seem to love it. You especially love your teachers, and are disconcerted when there’s a substitute in the classroom. Your mates are Cole and Logan and Rachel and Owen, but your best friend seems to be Meg from daycare. You are impatiently counting the days until full-day kindergarten next year, when you get to go to school all day long like your big brothers, but I love our Wednesday afternoons together and I will deeply miss them when you’re at school all day. You’re a great companion on our afternoon errands, and I am so grateful for the time we have been able to spend together.

Off to school

This year, you will have your first big-boy birthday party at A Gym Tale – a little bit delayed, but you’ve showed your usual patience with even that. You are very excited about the super-hero theme, and have said that for your birthday dinner today you want your favourite meal: breakfast with bacon and eggs, toast and homefries, and a chocolate cake with chocolate icing and colourful letters on it.

Boy on a bike

You love music and listening to songs on the iPod. You also love games, online and off, and hold your own playing Uno and Yahtzee and Catan Junior with the family. You don’t have much patience for being babied anymore, even though you still have one foot firmly in preschooler land. Thankfully, you still love Max and Ruby, for example, and Bubble Guppies and Toopy and Binoo, and you still play happily in with your toys in an imaginative world of your own making.

Uno on the porch

You love the library and books of all sorts. This year, we’ve enjoyed discovering the world of Mr Putter and Tabby, and Henry and Mudge, and a slew of Robert Munsch books. And to my amazement, you’ve lately started reading to ME at night, carefully sounding out the words in the first books of the BOB series of books for beginning readers.

Lime Kiln Trail 2012

Of all the boys, I think you loved our cruise this past fall the best. Six months later, you still mention it randomly and out of the blue every now and then: “I miss the boat Mommy. When can we go on another cruise?” You also very much miss our “Manotick pool” this long winter, but after October or November you at least stopped asking about it weekly. You also started swimming lessons this year, and of course you loved them.

Apple picking 2012 (11 of 11)

You are a sweet and loveable boy, Lucas. You are generous with your hugs and kisses, and you seem to be slowly overcoming your deep shyness with strangers. You battle fiercely with your brothers on occasion, especially Simon, and you are a relentless snitch! You are also loquacious and imaginative, and have a wonderful appreciation for a good knock-knock joke.

"Mom, take a picture of us cuz we're cute!"

My sweet Lucas, you bring joy and sunshine into our lives every single day. I still can’t quite believe you’re not a toddler in diapers any more – wasn’t that just yesterday? You’re growing into a fine young boy and we are very proud of you.

DSC_0537

Happy birthday, my darling Lucas!! We love you!

Look up ^^^ there – new blog banners!

I‘ve been hankering for a bit of a bloggy makeover. I’d started playing with new banners three or four times in the last year or so but never managed to put together anything I like. When I started using the new watermark, I thought I’d pull that font into a new header, and eventually I’ll pull the same style into a new header for my photo site as well. (If you’re reading through a feed reader or on the mobile theme, please click through and take a peek! You might also have to clear your cache – my computer keeps calling up some of the old headers even though they’ve been deleted from the server.)

So – what do you think?

There are eight versions right now, and it should randomly rotate through them as you refresh or click on individual blog posts. I pulled together the typewriter and the camera on the left as a bit of a play on the idea of telling stories in words and pictures, and because a blog banner with my Nikon and MacBook didn’t seem quite so visually appealing. And the photograph at the right is just because I like the idea of a bit of variety in the headers, and I think these pictures offer a bit of a riff on my common bloggy themes of family and play and life in Ottawa.

Here are all of the current headers:

Blog banners

Already forgot what the banners used to look like? Here’s the ones I made up back in 2010:

New blog banners

Let me know what you think, I’d love to hear your comments!

Yep, she’s still blogging eight years later

A part of me says, “Wow, has it already been eight years since your first blog post?” And another part of me says, “Seriously, it’s only been eight years? Seems like much longer than that.” Well, in a way I suppose it has been. I created my first website dedicated to photos and stories about the kids back when I was pregnant with Tristan (heh, using my mad HTML skills, Front Page and a Geocities site!) so that’s going back about a dozen years. But it’s been eight years this week since I’ve been on the bloggy bandwagon.

Every couple of years I like to haul out the first meme I ever did (memes were good, eh? I miss memes) and use it as an excuse to wax blatantly nostalgic.

15 years ago today I would have been:

  • About to graduate magna cum laude from the University of Ottawa with a degree in Comms, after going part-time nights for six years to get my degree
  • Freshly appointed to a mid-level program management beancounter job and feeling like a young professional for the first time
  • Living in a tiny third-floor attic apartment in the Glebe with Beloved and starting to think about wedding plans for the next year

10 years ago today I would have been:

  • Getting ready to come back to work after my first year of maternity leave
  • Tempering my dismay at the end of mat leave with huge excitement about coming back to a new job: my first job in public affairs (where I still work today)
  • A couple of months away from finding and buying our townhouse in Barrhaven and then finding out I was pregnant with Simon

5 years ago today I would have been:

  • Hugely pregnant and overdue with Lucas, and liveblogging the lack of labour and then, finally, the labour and arrival of the “player to be named later” (the posts from my pregnancy with Lucas still seem like the glory days of the blog community. I miss those days!)
  • Did I mention hugely pregnant?
  • And overdue?

1 year ago today I would have been:

  • Happy to be back with public affairs, this time managing the social media team (I love my job!)
  • Enrolling “baby” Lucas in junior kindergarten
  • Finding my groove and kicking off a very successful year with the photography business

This year I am:

  • Thinking about blog and website makeovers (now taking suggestions!)
  • Contemplating changing the photography business name
  • Feeling busy and involved but (blissfully!) not overwhelmed… most of the time

Today I am:

  • In the midst of birthday season mayhem
  • Feeling much more confident about my parenting skills than I was 10 years ago
  • Happy

Next year I hope:

  • To have saved enough from the photography business for the full-frame camera I’ve been coveting
  • To do more travel with the family
  • To be done with daycare forever

In five years I hope:

  • To be wrangling with Tristan over getting his (gasp!) driver’s license!
  • To be considering a return to full-time employment (to top up my last years of income before retirement!)
  • To have renovated the kitchen and the basement family room

I was going to include a checklist of which prognostications and goals I got right and wrong in prior years but this is getting long, so I’ll save that for another day.

Funny that I’ve now got blog posts in the archives that cover so many of these highlights! I wonder if I’ll ever get to a version where I say, “15 years ago I launched this blog, using (snicker) a keyboard and a PC!” and we’ll all laugh about how quaintly antiquated it all was?

This week in pictures: winter family fun – and an award!!

How cool is this? I just found out that Postcards from the Mothership won third place in the “Art and Photography” category of the Canadian Weblog Awards!!

2012 Canadian Weblog Awards winners

I had been nominated in three (!) categories: Best Parenting Blog, Best Blog about Life and Best Art and Photography Blog. (And a HUGE thank you to whomever nominated me!) I love the fact that the Canadian Weblog Awards are juried (no grovelling for votes!) and I love love love that I won in the Art and Photography category. Thank you!!!

So, ahem, how about some photos?

On Saturday, we went out to enjoy Manotick’s Shiverfest with a little sledding. What we didn’t realize until after was that the city had closed all its hills because they were so icy. We’d hauled ourselves out in the cold, though, and we had the hill to ourselves for most of the time we were there, so with me playing traffic cop to make sure nobody took off too soon and wiped out a brother, we ended up having a lot of fun.

Shiverfest sledding fun

Shiverfest sledding fun

Listening to Lucas hoot and holler, somewhere between exhilaration and terror, was priceless, as was his bellow of assurance at the bottom of each run. “I’m okay mom!”

Shiverfest sledding fun

The next day Tristan and I braved the cold for a wander around the Lime Kiln Trail. The poor wee birds must have been starving with the recent deep freeze, because I swear we could have just sat in the car and held our hands out the window to feed them. We’ve fed the chickadees many times, and I’ve never seen them so aggressive.

Feeding the chickadees

Feeding the chickadees

The middle bit of the week was a little less photogenic. Tristan put together this “cracker napkin” and I thought it would make a good instagram shot.

Cracker napkin

And there’s always room for a cat-dog shot, right?

Cat's eye view

(I’d like that one a lot more if the light had been a little better and the shot a little less grainy. Oh well.)

And then suddenly, Simon was nine years old!

Happy birthday Simon!

Can I eat my cake now mom?

Doesn’t his expression say “okay mom, one more, but can I eat my cake now please?”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think there is a birthday party at some point today for which I should be getting ready… 😉

Great moments in parenting – the birthday party fail edition

I thought I had it all under control. Clearly, I did not.

Poor Lucas, poster boy for the third child, has reached the ripe old age of five and has never had a birthday party. Knowing this, we started making plans to ensure he actually got one this year in December, even though his birthday is February 8. A good six weeks in advance, we called and booked a party room and worked out a guest list. It was a lock.

Last Friday I was supposed to get the invitations, but I forgot them on my desk at work. Annoyed with myself, I figured two weeks less two days would still be plenty of notice. That Monday afternoon I sat down and wrote out all the invitations, confirmed the guest list with Lucas and stuffed them into his backpack to be distributed the next day at school. That’s when I found the invitation FOR Lucas, from a classmate.

For the same day.

For the same place.

For the very next time slot.

Yeah. Four straight hours of birthday party might be a little much for your average four year old to bear, don’t you think?

Luckily, I recognized the RSVP name as a mom who is also on the school council with me. I felt comfortable enough to call her and cross-check against her invitee list against mine, hoping there wouldn’t be too much duplication. The girls were no problem, he hadn’t wanted to invite any girls (Lucas takes after Simon in this regard; his bestie is a girl) but he had invited every boy in the class. Heartbroken for Lucas, I called to reschedule the party and the soonest time slot I could get was 10 days after his birthday. So much for planning.

Really, that was nothing more than circumstance and bad luck (although I can’t help castigating myself for not getting those invites out earlier!!) but I really can’t blame anyone but myself for what happened with Simon’s party.

Knowing the boys were desperate for their own handheld devices, we gave Tristan and Simon a choice this year – a big party and a little gift or a little party and an iPod Touch. Neither one hesitated to choose the iPod, of course. So we told them they could have three or four friends over in lieu of a party, and we’d have an extended sort of play date with cupcakes and birthday presents. (And then I scored the iPods at half off during a refurb sale after Christmas. Win-win!!)

So I picked up some invitations and wrote out three five (I am such a softie) and Simon sent them off to his friends last week. It was only earlier this week that I realized what I had done, or more specifically what I had NOT done. I hadn’t made a note, mental or otherwise, of what time we had put on the invitations.

“Um, Simon?”

“Yes Mommy?”

“Do you remember what time we put on the invitations for the party on Saturday?”

“Um, no?”

Rats.

I mean, it wasn’t a big deal. We would be home anyway. I was pretty sure I’d said 1:00, or maybe it was 1:30. It might have been 2:00. Probably not as late as 3:00, right? Hmmm. The only challenge would be coordinating the arrival of the grandparents, who wanted to appear in time for cupcakes but not endure two hours of a houseful of kids hepped up on birthday energy. I figured I’d just call them when kids started showing up and tell them to show up in an hour.

But, it was bugging me, so I casually approached one of the moms today at school pick-up.

“Hey, how are ya? Warm out today, eh?” I said, and we chatted briefly about the unseasonable warmth. “So, I um, have a kind of a favour to ask. Do you, um, happen to remember what time I put on the invitation for Simon’s party?” She thought it was hilarious and confirmed that it was, in fact, for 1:30.

I thought THAT was one of my finer parenting moments, until the phone rang earlier this evening.

Ring ring.

Me: “Hello?”

Child’s voice: “Um, hi. Is this Simon’s mom?”

Me: “Yep, that’s me! Did you want to talk to Simon?”

Child: “Um, actually, no. I was calling to talk to you.”

Me, mildly surprised: “Oh, okay then. What’s up?”

Child: “Well, Simon said you forgot what time the party is, and we thought that it might be important that you know, you know? So I checked the invitation, and it says 1:30. Just so, you know, you, um, know. Okay?”

Me, dying: “That is very considerate of you sir. We will look forward to seeing you on Saturday.”

One of my finer moments indeed.

Moral of the story: do not, under any circumstances, hire me as a party planner.

Flashback faves: BOB books

Almost six years ago, I wrote this sponsored blog post for MotherTalk books, which eventually became Mom Central Canada. Tristan was five and a half at the time, and I still remember how he gobbled up the BOB books for beginning readers. Last week, we dusted them off for a-week-shy-of-five-years-old Lucas, and watched the same delight sparkle in his eyes as he read them to me. (The original blog post was sponsored, but I’m sharing again because you have a little one who knows most of the alphabet and the sounds they make, these books really are terrific!)

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I have a confession to make. I didn’t read a single book in the boxed set I’m supposed to be reviewing today for my stop on MotherTalk’s Bob Books blog tour. In fact, I had them read to me – by Tristan, my five year old son.

(pause for gasps of delight and surprise)

Yep, it’s true. Neither one of us imagined he could read a whole sentence, let alone an entire book, and yet by the end of the first day, HE had read to ME not one, not two, not even four, but FIVE books of the twelve book boxed set. And they say boys tend to have trouble with reading!

BOB booksThe Bob Books are designed for beginning readers. Each book in the set of 12 introduces a few new letters and increasingly complex sentence structures. The letters seem to roughly follow the same introduction schedule as the Jolly Phonics program they’ve been using at Tristan’s school – first M and S and A, then D and B, then G and H, etc. Book one starts with simple constructions like “Mat sat.” By the fifth book, he was sounding out full sentences like, “Dot and Mit sit on a mat.” A little thin on plot, maybe, and they lacked character development. But it was really something to watch Tristan sound out new words and assimilate familiar ones with only a little bit of coaching from me, and the look in his eyes as he realized he was actually reading was truly a great moment in my parenting career. His attention span is a little sketchy sometimes, so I was delighted when we finished one book and then another and he continued to ask me if we could keep reading. It was his idea to continue through the box, not mine, and he was eager to continue reading books to Beloved the next night at bedtime, too.

It was also a good way for me to see where we might have to do a little more work. He was having trouble distinguishing between a lower case “n” and “h” for a bit, and confusing his “b” and “d” (I’ll give it a bit before I start to panic about dyslexia, which does run rather rampant though my family.) Like his mother, he wants to be able to rush ahead without actually reading the letters themselves, and I had to keep reminding him to slow down and read the words and not just guess based on the picture. “Trust the letters,” I told him. “The pictures can be tricky, but the letters will always tell you the truth.” I was really astonished at how quickly he assimilated entire words. By the end of the fifth book, he didn’t have to stop to sound out “the” or “and” or “is”.

I was really impressed by the first set of Bob books, and was pleased to see that there are four additional sets we can work through. (You can read more about them on the official Bob Books website.) Might be a good way for me to invest the $20 Amazon.com gift certificate I’ll be getting for this MotherTalk sponsored review!

This week in pictures: The #OttGatLove deep freeze edition

Cold enough for ya? *rolls eyeballs*

I’d like to thank Nowell (really, no sarcasm!) for inadvertently scheduling the “Why I love Ottawa/Gatineau” photo contest during the coldest week in eight years. If it weren’t for his inspiration, I’d have spent my lunch hours this week huddled in my cube with my wee pedometer recording only the steps required to get to the bathroom and the printer and back. But my fierce sense of photo competitiveness, mixed with a good dose of adventurousness, and an utter lack of common sense, had me out scoping and shooting some of my favourite downtown subjects almost every day this week in temperatures that dipped to a brain-numbing -40C wind chill. So I got both the photos and my desired number of steps almost every day, and only a little bit of windburn on my cheeks. I think we can call that a win!

At the risk of tipping my hand and spoiling the big reveal during the upcoming silent auction, I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that this photo will be one of the ones I submit to the contest. If you’ve been reading for a while, you know how much I love the Rideau Canal in all seasons, and from the moment I heard about the contest, I knew I wanted to try to capture a good canal shot to submit. I was delighted when the last bit of the canal was opened for skating at the end of the week, and yesterday spent a delightful extended lunch doing the penguin walk down the canal from the NAC to the Corktown Bridge and back.

What says I Love Ottawa/Gatineau more than love itself? (As I said on the Flickr caption, I have deep admiration for people who can skate holding hands. Personally, when I skate I need my arms free to flail and pinwheel.)

Skaters on the Rideau Canal

I tried not to take too many photos of the Parliament Buildings, but at the end of every day the ones I loved the best all seemed to feature them. I mean, I do love them – I think they represent Ottawa’s history, and being the capital has of course shaped the city we love today. Aside from all of that, though, I just think they are lovely and my camera is magnetically drawn to them. See?

#ottgatlove contender?

Parliament silhouette

Rideau Canal - almost ready for skaters! #OttGatLove

Speaking of cold (did we speak of anything else all week long?) this was the scene on Sunday as I was driving home from Barrhaven. That was the day it started out 6C and raining, then turned into a blizzard. Then the wind kicked up, and I found myself in one of the more intense white-outs I’d ever seen. Then the temperatures started dropping and the sun came out, but the wind kept howling. What a day!

Blustery blowing snow

But it wasn’t all cold and bluster this week. I spent a warm and lovely hour indoors meeting this interesting woman, an entrepreneur who needed headshots for the business she is launching. I hope I have this much energy and gumption when I’m in my retirement years!!

Ottawa entrepreneur

(I’m also really pleased with this one for technical reasons. We didn’t have a great spot for backgrounds, so we used a bedsheet draped from the kitchen covers and then I used photoshop to smooth it out and add a bit of colour and texture.)

Although it was great to be back using my Nikon again (it’s more reliable in the deep freeze than my iPhone, which shut itself down more than once in complaint this week!) I did manage to catch a few extra shots that didn’t make the shot of the day list.

Only my profound love for Ottawa would get me out snapping pix for #ottgatlove in -18C!

Untitled

Untitled

So although working downtown has given me a lot of ideas and inspiration for the photo contest, the one thing that’s hugely and obviously missing is the thing that’s just about impossible to capture while I’m wandering around downtown at lunch time: the boys! Because much as I love the canal, the Market, the Parliament Buildings and the rest, the thing I truly love about Ottawa is what a great place it is to raise a family. Hoping to find a good shot or three at Shiverfest this weekend!

What do you think of the shots so far? I have until Monday to decide which one to submit. Got a favourite or an idea for another shot? Let me know! And by the way, in case you didn’t see it, if you decide to play along and submit a photo, it doesn’t have to be a current photo. You can submit your entry here.