Because I Had Nothing Better to do with My Time

So back in March or April I agreed to help Canadian Parents for French with the annual monetary awards they provide to graduating french immersion students. We sent letters to the school, read the applications, and judged the winners. The last task was to present the CPF award at the commencement ceremonies. The school I got had the grand ol' ceremony at the Bell Center for Performing Arts on Friday night. I was asked to arrive at 6:30 (no problem, said the other CPF gal, I was home by 8:30) for the presenters' reception.

So I did.

What it was, was a fruit plate in a shockingly hot library. I received my instructions and sat down on a chair with a nice old gentleman from the Legion (shout out to Doug the Legion man!) to watch the second period of the Stanley Cup final. Right around 7 pm they said they were ready for us. We were marched into the auditorium (seats 1052 and packed to the rafters) in a single file and this hush descended over the audience. The bagpiper started (Nails on a chalkboard) and the grads filed in. And in. And in. OK, nobody told me there were 295 grads. And that my girl = 246th.

Once everyone was seated (Freakin' HOURS later) there were four speeches totalling 45 minutes in length. One was funny... the rest: meh. Finally the first row of grads left the stage and when they came back, each one went through this process: MC announced name, Student crossed stage, MC said what student's favourite moment of the year was, Principal changed tassel and gave diploma, posed for picture, MC said what grad will be doing next year, special awards given (if any), two more handshakes and picture poses, student left stage.

Did I mention, 295 grads? And my girl, 246th? All I could think was, I shaved my legs for this?

10 o'clock. 10 O'CLOCK and I was finally up. I walked on stage, thought oh no what if I trip in front of all these people and then: oh my God can they see up my skirt? Because I was wearing those hideous flesh coloured Spanx underneath and that would be worse than death if 1000 people could see them. And then I thought: thank God I shaved my legs for this.

I shook my girl's hand, said Felicitations, smiled for the camera, gave my envelope, and walked off stage, out the door and straight into my car. I apologize to grads 247 - 295. I'm sure you had many good memories I should have listened to, and an exciting future I should have paid attention to, but.

Did I mention we move on Saturday? Holy waste of time Batman. And you know how much CPF gave this very deserving girl? $400. Yippee Skippee. Next year I'm picking a kid whose name starts with A.

Can you stop this Roller Coaster? Because I'd like to get off now. Thank you.

All right. Here goes. Some of you know some or all of this already, but here is what has been consuming all of our time, money - oh God the money - and energy.

We sold our place. It was crazy crazy. The listing went up on MLS on a Friday (May 22), no pictures even up there, and we had a showing before it was even listed! We had more showings that Saturday and Sunday, and by Sunday night we had an offer. It was a decent one, and by Monday night we had accepted it and completed all the paperwork.

So now we had to find a house because we need to be out by June 25. Yes, that is JUNE. 25TH. OF THIS YEAR.

I went out with our realtor, who happens to be Mike's mom's best friend, and we had a fun few days traipsing through houses. On Friday the 29th, I saw one that was too expensive for us, but JUST RIGHT. I brought Mike, the kids, and his mom back for a second look that same night. We looked a little more at others that weekend, mainly I think to eliminate what we didn't want, and by Sunday night we really wanted this house. However, we didn't think they were open to offers. But Monday we made an offer. Long story short - They accepted...!!! Now we had a week to frantically scramble, or it may have been scramblically frantic, to do all that we needed to do to remove the subjects. This is where the roller coaster comes in. After the inspection came back looking pretty good, my mom asked me why I didn't sound excited. Because I really really didn't want to get my hopes up until subjects were off.

We almost lost the house for reasons I don't want to elaborate here. But - wait for it - everything fell into place and guess what? We are fabulously incredibly proud new home owners of a beautiful house a block and a half from the beach and four blocks from the kids' school. I am in heaven.

Snag - you knew there had to be one - we will be homeless for about 2 months. The boys are super excited because they don't appear to be smart enough to realize how this is making their mummy feel all puky inside just thinking about it. We will have most stuff locked away in a container somewhere, a small amount of things in a storage locker we can get to easily, and the rest in the car with us.

So wherever we may roam this summer, we hope to see or talk to all of you regularly. We'll head up to Whistler for a bit, Vancouver for some, and who the hell knows where else. But it's all good by the end of August, and we will for sure be settled by the time school starts again in September!

Now I have 11 days to pack. So see ya on the flip side!

It's a Man Thing

I firmly believe that as the sole female in this household, I should be the one who is exempt from certain tasks.

For instance. Anything to do with jock straps and corresponding cups, I am really not interested.

That is all.

Word words words

There was a lot of talking going on in our house last night. All three boys. Mike was apparently writing code in his sleep, because I heard all about the parameters, and the number 30 was extremely important somehow. That, and he also told Jack not to spill on the new carpet. Jack was fast asleep yelling “Ethan, it’s not fair!” and “I’m thirsty!” to the world in general, whereas Ethan was just incoherently mumble-shouting periodically. I have no idea whether I joined the sleep conversations in my few snatched minutes of slumber. They all woke up looking pretty refreshed... me, not so much.

I read a passage recently and I will (pitifully) attempt to paraphrase it here. The author was speaking about growing old, and how it starts off with you waking up and thinking, “gosh I look tired today”. It’s a process so gradual that before you know it, you’ve thought you looked tired for a year or more and you have to realize that – you guessed it – you are actually old. I had to quickly breeze over that part of the book because it felt a little too real. Age 35 has hit and there is no helping the bags under my eyes or the endless new grey hairs appearing on my head!

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Ethan can read now. Which is - don't get me wrong - awesome, but also presents parenting problems. I always said I'd never lie to my kids but sometimes it was really handy when they couldn't understand something I was trying to say to another grown-up. Now I can't speak French, spell something out or even write it down to get around him knowing what I'm saying. Darn kid's too smart.

And speaking of smart, Jack had his kindergarten orientation. So so cute. He already thinks he owns the school, of course. The principal asked why we had bothered to come; Jack didn't need to be "oriented"! But he is ecstatic to practice his first "homework": the exercise book they gave them to get ready for kindergarten. He can't wait to give it to Madame and he has been working hard on it every night.

All right. Better foster these kids' smarts and actually get them to school on time!

Did It!

So I started off on Saturday like this:
And an hour later, 9 inches shorter and about a hundred pounds lighter, I ended up like this:

I was going to name this post "Cancer Kids will Wear my Hair" but that sounded all wrong so then I was going to try "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow" but I realized I was probably the only one who would laugh at that. If anyone else has long lovely locks they would like to donate to a good cause, let me know and I can hook you up. Which just made me sound like a dealer, and a hair dealer is just weird and is totally something I am not. Anyway.
The downfall to all this is that I actually have to do something with my hair in the mornings now. Ethan asked me what I am going to do now that I can't do a ponytail anymore (Yikes! I don't know! There may be a lot of hats in my future for early-morning school drop-off) and Jack told me I "looked gooder with long hair" (because he's tactful like that). And as for Mike, I think he's still hoping my hair grows fast. But everyone else on the planet seems to think it's a good look for me so I rocked it at the casino on Saturday night. And by rocked it I mean that I played $20 worth of slots ($20 x 10 minutes = $0) and then went back to the room for wine, cheese and pyjamas.
It was a good weekend!

Picture Dump

I stumbled across a couple of months of photos to share with y'all:
We were all crafty

And we played a LOT of adventurer

Jack had party day at preschool - you can see how short he is compared with some of the other boys!

Don't get in the little rabbit's way of finding what the big rabbit left for him!

Ethan kept stopping to tell us exactly how GOOD he was at hunting for eggs

We got in one last ski and snow-tubing day of the season

Ethan started in his first soccer league

Sometimes it looked like he was dancing a strange ballet

And there was a LOT of crotch-grabbing

He even got to play goal for a short time (but let one in...)

Meanwhile Jack ate so many oranges he didn't even have room for a "wafer-thin mint"...

Spring finally sprung

And 25 Club went to a local winery for a delicious dinner!

And there's April in a nutshell!

Ranting Again (This may become a habit)

Who thought it was a good idea to have a road race of 55,000 people? I'm still not sure why I entered the Sun Run this year but I would be very surprised if you ever caught me doing this race again. I had a bad day.

I parked at Trev and Shanty's and had a nice brisk walk to the start. I met some co-workers at the Skytrain station and after taking a photo or two we tried to get to the starting corrals. I was supposed to start with the green bibs and got caught in a crowd like no other. After getting separated from my run buddies (argh), I found myself with no hope of getting anywhere near the green corral. By that I mean I was about 12 feet from the entrance but there were so many bodies between me and it that I had no choice but to wait. The starting gun went off at 9:00. I was finally able to start moving towards the green corral at 9:25.

There was one (actually way more than one but here is the biggest one) panicky moment as we surged forward. Somebody somewhere stumbled and the ripple effect meant that we all staggered. I thought, oh here we go I am going to get trampled to death, but luckily we all managed to stay upright. My heart rate monitor probably registered the moment of terror... I will have to check it!

I finally crossed the start line and... bam. People started walking almost immediately. What the hell were they doing classing themselves as green if they can't even run a block? We were supposed to be the group that finished between 48 min and 1 hr. I also tripped over a stroller (against the rules) and I was constantly cut off by people trying to dodge the walkers and misjudging and running into guess who? Me.

I grumbled for a few kilometers, especially at those who were running all smiley and crap. Then I spotted a JR Direct corporate team shirt ahead sported by a friend of mine. So I ran up behind him and just as he slowed at the water station I bolted past and yelled "You suck Kris!" No response from him and I lost sight of him since it's not easy to run backwards with 55,000 of your closest friends. I stopped to pee in a fantastic (and by fantastic I mean just about as disgusting as you would expect at a mega-event that involves a lot of half-digested PowerBars) Porta-Potty and he must have passed me. Never fear, I saw the shirt ahead of me again so this time when I passed him I yelled "I'm going to kick your ass Kris!" In retrospect, Kris/Chris is a fairly common name so this may have been somewhat startling to my fellow runners. Especially since most of them were not in the same pissed-off mental state and they seemed to actually be enjoying themselves. And since Kris was wearing his iPod and didn't respond yet again leaving me looking (sounding) somewhat ridiculous, I decided to skip the trash-talking part of my race and concentrate on my feet for a while. Plod plod plod and finally I crossed the finish line. Sucktastic.

What a waste of a morning. But luckily in all the hours I was gone the boys and Mike managed to accomplish the grand old task of getting dressed, so it was a successful Sunday on all counts I'd say. We did build our fancy new BBQ that afternoon, though, and have enjoyed a few meals grilled to perfection since then.

Update: Finally figured out why my race sucked. It was too cold to wear my new kick-ass running skort. Obviously the day would have gone way differently if I could have looked a little more Fierce.