Dinner and a Movie

Dinner...








Takes...






For....




Ev...






Er...





At our house.  An eternity.   An everloving eon.

 

(Craptacular audio... but you get the gist.)

Movie Date

Beauty and The Beast  in 3D with Hanna - I love this photo!  They look so grown up!  I can see them at the movies in 15 years too (sans mommies, of course)!  Holy Exclamation Marks!

Brrrrr

I'm a bit of a lot of a wuss when it comes to winter weather... no desire whatsoever to frolic in snow (if 30 somethings can even "frolic"), can't stand the synthetics that warm clothes are made of (fine hair+dry air+synthetics = a flucking annoying halo of floating hair) and I don't need to SEE my breath to confirm it's still there - so really... no use for winter at all. 

So Saturday, we sat inside and made our own fun... which included a "fort" of Shae's design.  It was more of a pillow and blanket nest, that Shae surrounded with anything at all she could find on the first floor of the house.  Warm and cozy, and accompanied by Winnie the Pooh on the computer.

Januar....blah.

Nope!  I did NOT die!  I am succumbing (totally off topic - but isn't "succumbing" the most awkward word ever?) to the January blahs.  Seriously... January is like nipple hair on women - NO PURPOSE.  None.  It's just irritating.  Something you deal with.  January.  Blah.

Anyway.  Happy 2012!

Shae and I spent Christmas at my parents where we tobogganed and slid and played board games and dressup and oh, ya - Santa came.  We were so lucky to have Dylan and Uncle Shane with us all Christmas morning too!

Then we hit the road and spent a few days in Ottawa with friends and family.  We went to the AMAZING little hobby farm for breakfast one morning with Jan, Cooper and Jack.  Had lunch at the new giant Ikea with a pileup of Sedore ladies!  We also got to have breakfast another morning with Yetta, Danielle and Sarah.  We just love Ottawa!  It was an amazing holiday, and I feel blessed to have seen so many people that I love. 

Although I took 348975843975 photos and videos... about 10 are in focus.  So, I'm posting 30, because it amuses me to post so many terrible photos.  Here ya go:

Sneaking in this one - heaven - Baileys and ice with chocolate milk... as I hike through the woods.

Snow eating with Poppa

A bite of snow.

MY FAVE!  MY ABSOLUTE FAVE!

Chutes and Ladders

Christmas morning - bedhead.

My gorgeous creature. 

Dylan

Checking out the haul

Synthetic pajamas+new play tent = awesome hair.

Gramma SEZ this chocolate is mine...

Snowman!

The crew

Snow Angel

Hot chocolate at Pinto Valley

Cooper, Jan, Jack - Pinto Valley

Team of Clydesdales - cooling down on the coldest day EVER.

Pig.  Very tame pig.

Jan and Jack

Checking out the barn

Still the coldest day ever.  EVER.

From her dress up trunk - thanks GiGi!

My second fave - dancin' with Gramma.

Jingle Bells!

Tonight, Shae and I proudly donned our Elf hats and stood in a -58 degree line up (hyperbole...) for 20 minutes and had a 5 minute horse and carriage ride through downtown Brampton...

It was cold, there was LOTS of traffic... and it was a fairly ugly stretch of city we saw... it was FIFTEEN dollars for it... but it was worth it to watch Shae puff with pride when I told her this was how princesses get around.  Then she did her princess wave to all the people we passed.  It was a memory maker.  Enjoy the craptacular photodocumentation...

Fast asleep - just too much fun.

.

The Graduate

I can't believe it... it's here already... my baby graduated!







From Swim School.  WHATEVER.  It's a big deal for ME.  She passed THREE levels!  She's like, the greatest graduate in the history of graduates in the entire world.  EVER.

I'm a little proud of her.  And apparently, obnoxious.

A photo of my graduate with her first certificate.  She's going into... SEA TURTLE.  The big times.

And a video from her last class:

"Love You Forever..."

Robert Munsch (seriously, it took me THREE tries to type his last name right!) penned the book. The book that makes most moms weep (and others cringe).  It's about a mom that sneaks into her son's room at various stages of his life- even after he moves out and has a child of his own (the cringe-worthy part)- and takes him onto her lap to rock and sing to him.

I read it before I had a child, and it was mushy and moving, and of course, now that I have a kid, it makes me bawl my face off when he ends up rocking his mom at the end.  I actually don't own it.  Weird right?  But I think it's too heavy a read for a three year old, and I don't want to bawl my face off every time she requests it.

The book is in my head lately because I seem to be going through a grieving process of late.  It's not all consuming or anything requiring medicaton - but lately, I've started staying in bed with Shae after she goes to sleep.  I study her face the way I did when she was a newborn, and completely foreign to me.

Her face floats back and forth between the sleeping 1 week old and the sleeping 3 year old.  Her lips are transposed over the memory of her brand new wrinkly lips and her flushed sleeping cheeks are a gateway to remembering how small her little face was - when I could kiss a quarter of her face at a time.

And I CRY!  I cry and cry and cry and cry, big woeisme sobs with runny nose, while I look over her long form and smell her stinky sleepy breath and kiss her little face as much as I like because she can't protest - because when did this happen?  When did she stop being a baby?

How am I ever going to live when she is too big to want me to throw out my arm to snuggle under?  How will I ever remember how lovely it was to sneak into her bed and stroke her impossibly soft face and kiss that soft place under her chin I made?  HOW FAST will it seem that she is ready to live out in the world after it's happened?

And it's too much and too terrible to comprehend - and it's MY JOB.  I have to MAKE her ready to do that.  To make her way.  And so I cry - because it's the VERY LAST THING I want to imagine doing - and the single most important thing I'll do.  An absolute catch .22. 

How did Robert Munsch see into my future?  Did his mom do this too?  I'll bet.  I'll bet moms everywhere do this awful terrible task, and only mourn the passing from year to every better year in the dark of a bedroom, over their sleeping baby's form...