An old school friend has an apple orchard, and she let us piggy-back onto a school tour. She was great – taught us all about apple planting, growing and picking. We went out into the orchard and picked about 3 bags of apples. Gail then invited us in for tea and we had a very nice visit, catching up on the last 20 years or so. She has 6 children and is expecting her 7th! Kudos to her; everything seems to run very smoothly around her house. I can’t imagine what would happen if we multiplied our two-kid chaos times three. In fact, it makes me feel a bit nauseous to think about it. I’m quite happy to stop at two kids!
On Friday, we had a whirlwind apple-kitchen day to use all our delicious freshly-picked beauties. We made an apple pie, apple tarts, apple turnovers, caramel apples, dutch apple cake and of course apple sauce. All in the space of about 5 hours. I threw everything into the freezer, with the exception of the caramel apples, so I wouldn’t be tempted.
Last weekend was fun – we had Jack Day on Saturday. Way back when Jack turned 2, Ethan was 3½ and all the attention showered on Jack caused a little setback in the Ethan potty-training schedule. We soon realized that E. needed a little attention and so we created “Ethan Day”. He got special time alone with Mike in the morning and alone with me in the afternoon, and voila! Potty training back on track. Flash forward to today, Jack’s 3½ and Ethan just celebrated his 5th birthday and got all the attention. Guess who started peeing everywhere again this week? After Jack Day (which was really just a couple of hours at the park with us while Ethan hung out with Grandma Sugar) we seem to be ok again. And on an even better note, Ethan has held true to his word and has been wiping his own bum for 15 days now. 
I had told him that the bum-wiping free ride officially ended on his 5th birthday, and he’s been cool with that. I’ll be buying toilet paper more often (kid isn’t exactly stingy with the TP) but I’m feeling pretty good! Jack’s only once every couple of days, but Ethan’s a thrice-daily kind of a poo guy, so it gets a bit much.After Jack Day, Mike and I left the boys with Grandma while we went to a surprise birthday party, and then dinner at Aaron and Marzia’s with them and Kim and Gene. We had a great night, and stayed out – wait for this – past midnight! Yes, it’s true. We got home around 1:30. We then had a delicious brunch at the new Irish pub in Langley before picking up the kids.
We’ve decorated for Halloween now, so we are in the midst of glorious orange and black tackiness at the moment. Our piece de resistance this year is a large spider web we spun on our porch, stretching over the bench. The kids are getting excited for Halloween but I have a lot of work to do still on their costumes. You’ll see pictures once everything’s done there.
The last thing to report on is a speaker I heard this week. His name was Barry MacDonald and his talk was on Boy Smarts. He was a very good speaker and he had a lot of good and interesting things to say on parenting boys. My favourite was Ethan’s comment when I told him where I was going that night – “But Mummy, you already KNOW how to be a parent!” Sigh – I wish that were true.
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