Visiting with Uncle Maurice

On a beautiful day in mid April Adara and I headed off to visit our 80 some year old Uncle Maurice. This says pretty much everything about the day that Uncle Maurice and Adara had.

Dufferin Grove Park

About the end of March or so we were out in the west end for a birthday party. Adara had been very patient and agreeable at the party so we wanted to give her a special treat by going to a new park. I had remembered hearing about Dufferin Grove Park with it's legendary pizza oven, play structures and the like. The description doesn't do it justice, it's a kids paradise. There's evening a whole section that's just a massive sand pit with full size shovels and huge logs for bigger kids to move around and build out of.

After an hour and a half of unexpected play, I ran across to the local grocery store and grabbed a hunk of cheese, a hunk of sausage, some bread, carrots and mini tomatoes and we stayed until the sun went down.

Cats Away

The cats (both of them) are away out west visiting Len's family this week so I am playing. I just came in from a huge run, and have the extremely exciting plans of writing an assignment for my hr class and cleaning the house up a bit. It actually makes me really happy to have a quiet moment to catch up on a few things. I also have all kinds of plans with friends this week too. Adara has been the travelling gal this month; she'll make it to school a grand total of 12 days in May. This is probably for the best as she's bored by it, unmotivated and ready for a break or a new challenge. The week before last she had a vacation with grammy and poppa in Goderich. It seemed to involve a lot of painting and drawing and dressing up, so a pretty good vacation by her standards. I was away at the professional association of Canadian Theatres conference and Len was busy replacing the main floor of the house with some new hard wood. It was a great week, Len finished his major project and I got to see some long held hopes comes to fruition at my conference. Its complex and industry involved, but suffice to say that we've been working for some new approaches in theatre making for nine years and we finally seem to be getting somewhere. So, I'm looking forward to the family rest this week, but also to them returning. In the meanwhile I run, write, read, socialize and sleep.

Dinner

Kinda smug about tonights dinner. It was a straight up meat and potatoes kind of thing; chicken, mashed potatoes, asparagus and carrots. But I got smart and seared the chicken in some butter on my cast iron casserole dish, added a dash of stock and popped it in the oven.
It made the BEST GRAVY EVER! That's all. Just a wicked good simple dinner and I am feeling smug.

Lovin' It.

A skating skirt, bat ears and cape. Thanks Grammy for the 35 year old skirt, thanks Fancy Pants Kids and Gretel for the costume awesomeness. It takes a village!

For the Love of Liam

No one else is in the room when her cousin is

Birthday cake

Last week Adara and her friend who was over visiting helped me to make and decorate Len's birthday cake. As he's allergic to wheat, It's always a big of a production to make him a decent cake. Thank heavens for my friend Dennie who gave me the definitive gluten free baking cook book and my sister in law Janice who gave me the definitive gluten free easy weekday meals cookbooks. My angels!

The kids went to town on the decorating with the piping bag that Len got me for Christmas that I thought that i would never use but already have used twice.
They made a bit of a mess of it, but it tasted good and was fun!

Family Day

We asked Adara what she wanted to do for Family Day. Since we live in a big city, there was a tonne of options. Zoo? Science Centre? Movies? Family fun Fair with camel ride and bouncy castles? Nope. She wanted to "go out for breakfast so you don't have to cook, have a dance party, watch a movie, play a game and have a picnic" Ok, we can do all of that since dance party refers to just her and me dancing and picnic means on our living room floor. As it was a beautiful day we threw in a little playing on the equipment at the beach for good measure.

The picnic it turns out was to be costumed. So, the Lone Ranger, A caped crusading bat, and a slightly over jewelled princess had dinner on the floor with candles. Can you guess who was who?

Photographer or Music Teacher

Tonight at Bedtime Adara was talking about how she wanted to be a music teacher, which I was thinking was the first time that she'd mentioned wanting to be anything at all. Then she reminded me that she'd wanted to be a photographer but had changed her mind for now. The photographer thing came up over Christmas when I suggested to Grammy that she lend Adara her digital camera to play around with for a while. Here are the results.




Not bad for four years old, eh? Really, though, with two theatre people in the family, neither music teacher or photographer is really floating my boat. How about stock trader or computer programmer? No? Oh well, fine then, be what you want to be kid! :)

Memories

I absolutely love when I see a photo of a friends kid on another mom blog and they're wearing something that Adara once wore. It immediately takes me back to that moment and time with her, to whatever age and stage she was at. I compare her at that age to the child currently in the clothes and think happy thoughts about both of them. It doesn't even have to be something that was Adara's to begin with. There are a series of sleepers that have passed back and forth between my friend Jenn and I and I love them just as much each time that I see them. It's like your life, briefly matched to the life of someone else that you love. Perfect.