The good and the bad.

The Good
-The dentist didn't find anything horribly wrong with William's tooth.
-The visit only cost $30 and I was expecting it to be more.

The Bad
-What a waste of $30.

The Good
-Willliam slept on a mattress not in his crib last night for the first time and he slept beautifully.

The Bad
-William would not go down for a nap today and now he's impossible.

The Good
-My friend Columbia is in my parenting class at the Early Years Centre.

The Bad
-I drove back to the Early Years Centre for afternoon drop-in, but William fell asleep in the car so I didn't go in. Yet, when I got home again he STILL wouldn't go down for a nap.

The Good
-I tanked up the car today, for less than a buck a litre.

The Bad
-I think I lost my debit card at the gas station.

And the Mother-in-law of the year award goes to...

Eva! Who sewed these fabulous Star Trek Uniforms for us:

Adam is going to be the Captain and I'll be his sexy pregnant lieutenant. I can't wait to wear this to our friends' Halloween wedding (yes, a Halloween wedding, if you knew the couple, this would make perfect sense to you). Maybe I can also wear it when the new movie comes out in May (for extra nerdiness) but I hope I'm not still the same size by then. Eva doesn't quite get my obsession with Star Trek, so I'm not she understands what a fabulously marvelous thing she's done for me. First, I get to have the coolest Halloween costume in the history of time, second, I get to be sexy even though I'm pregnant, and third, STAR TREK RULES. Eva, you are truly awesome!

Adam inherited his mother's creativity and has been using it in the past few months to construct a carbed for William based on the Subaru Rally Car. The bed is currently almost done and is in our family room looking like this:

I have to admit, this thing is super cool. The only problem with the whole project is that our second bedroom aka "the new baby's room" is being used as a workshop and currently looks like this:

And it's time for me to be nesting darn it! Luckily, Adam promises to have the bed done by the weekend, as long as he doesn't have another week of late work nights.

BTW: I hate how blogger's spacing gets all screwed up everytime one adds a picture, and how the program automatically puts the pic on the top of the entry when I clearly want it in the middle!

BBTW: I'm off to take my toddler to the dentist to check on that loose tooth.

Yawn.

This afternoon I felt exhausted. This may have had something to do with the fact that I spent the morning taking William to the fall fair run by the early years centre. Lots of chasing William around, then carrying him around, then bouncing him on my hip because my baby loves to dance. There were also some raffles that we paid for but didn't win (at least I think we didn't win, perhaps they just haven't called the winners yet) and also some animals that kids could take turns holding and petting. William doesn't quite get the concept of taking turns so he would start to cry as soon as his turn was over right up until the next animal landed in his lap (it was nap time).

Soon after I got home I went out again to help my brother and his wife pick up some new furniture. Of course I didn't physically lift anything (that's for non-pregnant people), but they needed me to chauffeur their new endtables because our Forester has the largest trunkspace of anyone in the family. Not an overly difficult task, but afterwards I was ready for bed (it was 3 pm).

I would have been tired anyway, but I also felt that pregnancy-related tiredness, where all your bones hurt, especially your hips, and your whole body feels like jello.

I told my husband this and he said "If you were jello then you would have no bones so they couldn't hurt." I get the feeling sometimes that Adam doesn't understand the depth of my exhaustion. So I complain more. Also I got him to take me out to dinner and then watch William while I took a bath. That last part is especially difficult because William loves baths so much that when he hears the water running, he runs to the bathroom door and screams until someone lets him in, or someone forces him to go somewhere else.

Anyway I felt much better after my bath and I put William to bed and everything was peachy. Adam unfortunately had to go in to work, even though it's Saturday night, and he worked until past nine pm both yesterday and the day before. Late-night graphics emergencies happen more often than you might think. (Hence why I'm awake writing blog entries at midnight, instead of sleeping).

Baby Expo

My husband says "baby expos are a crock." If by that he means a transparent attempt to sell useless products and services to pregnant women (who are more open to suggestion because of abnormal hormone levels), then I agree. But I feel like I haven't been paying enough attention to my pregnancy this time around, and I should be engaging in more mom-to-be activities. (Plus, the last time I was at one of these things I won $70 worth of maternity clothes. Sweet!)

My husband also says "never bring a toddler to a baby expo." This seems like good advice, in retrospect. William is unwilling to sit still for any length of time (even if that length of time is less than ten seconds). This meant that Adam and I took turns chasing our toddler around the conference room, while one of us sat and listened to various baby-related salespitches. (By "listened" I of course mean partially zoned out with one ear open for our number in case we won a door prize). Toddler-chasing was especially difficult for me because I tried to also fill out the many contest entry forms at the same time. Have you ever tried to fill out a form with a squirming toddler on your lap? I guarantee, noone will be able to read my entries.

At the end of the night we had a tired (past bedtime), frustrated (he couldn't take the toys home, or eat the candy) toddler, and no doorprizes.

Tragedy (we missed garbage day)

Okay, so I know the garbage handbook says to put your garbage out by 7am on collection day, but up until now they've always come after 11 am, making it quite convenient for my hubby to put it out as he leaves for work every other monday morning. So now we have a small garbage dump in our backyard attracting all manor of bugs and vermin. Some points that elevate this minor annoyance to a tragedy:

• We have a toddler still in diapers, so much of our garbage is made up of festering poop. Some municipalities take diapers in the green bin that gets picked up weekly. Not ours, of course.
• Two weeks ago, our last garbage day, the sanitation engineers neglected to fully empty our giant outdoor garbage bin, leaving half of the waste (and whatever is feeding on it) still in the bottom.
• Last week, our last garbage and recycling day, was on Tuesday instead of Monday because of Thanksgiving. Of course we forgot and didn't put it out.
• This weekend my inlaws came for dinner so we cleaned the house. This left us with a lot of extra "cleaning" garbage and recycling.

This means we have, in our yard, 3 weeks worth of festering poo, 2 weeks worth of rotting kitchen garbage, plus whatever waste has been hiding under our furniture since we moved in.

Famous Children's Author Breaks Her Arm

Tonight my Dad called from the emergency room "Looks like Mom broke her arm, can you come get Mortie?" (Mortie is my parents' jackapoo). Apparently they were with Mortie at Spencer Smith Park, when Mom fell off her rollerblades. That's all the details I got from my Dad (not the story teller my Mom is), so I've decided to create my own version of events:

As part of a publicity stunt to promote her new book, Mom decided to attempt a death-defying roller-blading trick. First she would navigate a hotwheels-style loop-de-loop, culminating in a hoop that was set on fire. When she jumped through the hoop she would need to stay airborn long enough to clear an olympic-sized pool filled with sharks with "frickin' laser beams" on their heads. Unfortunately Mom didn't know that her jacket wasn't flame retardent, so it caught fire as she jumped through the hoop. In a desparate attempt to extinguish the flame, Mom jumped into the shark pool, which put out the fire. Unfortunately one of the sharks bit her arm and broke it.

Of course, I wasn't there, but that seems plausible to me. Totally something my Mom would do. Anyway my Dad said that Mom had her arm set, and a cast put on, and when I talked to him a few minutes ago they were just waiting for the okay to go home. Me and William are totally going to sign the cast later.

The tooth

Last night just before bedtime (William's not mine) my husband asked William if he wanted to have a bath. The answer of course was "yessssss", in fact William was so excited by the idea that he raced up the stairs and out of sight. As Adam and I were working up the energy to follow our enthusiastic toddler, we heard a thud, following by screaming.

I raced up the stairs, and William came running towards me, blood gushing from his mouth. Not usually a good sign.

After much hugs and kleenex we were able to determine that one of William's bottom teeth had been knocked loose. It didn't fall out, but was definitely slightly off from its original position.

After our son had calmed down a bit, Adam gave William a bath and some advil and I put him to bed. He slept through the night like normal, but this morning he had trouble eating his cereal and had to be given yogurt instead.

The internet has varying opinions, from giving this a wait and see approach, to taking him to a dentist right away. Some places say that he should be taken to the dentist if the tooth is bothering him, or he has trouble eating. Of course the tooth is bothering him, this just happened yesterday!

Of course we don't have a dental plan of any kind, but I'll pay out of pocket if my baby needs a dentist, no problem. The trouble is, having no dental plan means I have no dentist that I see on a regular basis, and I'm becoming overwhelmed by the hundreds and hundreds of dentists in the yellow pages (we almost have more dentists in this city than we have teeth). I'll just have to play pediatric dentist roulette.

On a lighter note, William now says "Cow."

My vote didn't count (as usual)

The Conservatives won again. They even won in my riding. Again my faith in the intelligence of the average Canadian has been shattered. First a brief history of the Conservative Party:

Back when they were losing... they were called the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party (or CCRAP). They changed their name to the villainous-sounding "The Alliance" to avoid the unfortunate innitials, and began touring the country promoting "family values" which is right-wing code for anti-gay, anti-feminist.

There was of course also the Progressive Conservative party, a more middleground conservative group. They won only 12 percent of the vote in the 2000, with the crappy Alliance winning 66. These two parties merged to form today's Conservative Party (they were forced to remove "progressive" from their name because the Alliance is anything but).

Now they've won their second minority government in a row. This last election called prematurely, breaking new laws that the Conservatives themselves came up with. Come on people!

If you voted Conservative, fine, not everyone has to have the same opinion as me. If you didn't vote at all (and this time that makes up nearly half of the population) shame on you! It's YOUR fault that we have crap running our country.

The Glucose Test

Well I went in for my glucose test today. This one of those things things they give to pregnant women to torture them. It begins and ends with a blood-sucking needle and involves sitting in the waiting room for an hour and a half (I was not allowed to leave), having skipped breakfast, and forbidden to ingest anything except a rather disgusting orange drink designed to test the limits of my sugar-tolerance. As she was sucking my blood, the nurse said "The things you have to go through to have your baby eh?" I didn't know what to say to that. After all, this bizarre custom was invented by the vampirous medical profession, and I'm sure my baby would eventually be born, happy and healthy, without a 50 ml bottle of medicinal orange Crush.

While I was in the waiting room, I was reading an issue of Chatelaine (my choice was that or Canadian Living) and I noticed that one of the features was written by my Ryerson writing prof, David Hayes. I immediately flipped to the article like the groupie I am. The story was about some women who were horribly tortured by their foster mother as children and, having sent the old woman to jail, were now going after the authorities who knew about the abuse but refused to do anything. It was kind of heavy reading for so early in the morning and left me searching the front of the magazine for a fluffier piece. I'm now remembering that David might actually be reading this blog entry, he used to be a fan, and I heard it through the grapevine that he's still recommending my blog to his class (perhaps as an example of how NOT to make money with ones writing). In that case, nice job on the article David, well-written and emotion-provoking.

Afterwards my husband and I went to the school near our house to vote against the Conservatives. I'm hoping Stéfane Dion will squeak by with a win.

Pretend it's yesterday

I realize my one-a-day post marathon has already been derailed as I forgot to post something yesterday. So pretend it's yesterday, and maybe you'll see another post tonight (I'm having Thanksgiving dinner at my Mom's so something interesting is bound to happen).

The other day I watched about half a minute of Little People Big World (which is a reality show about a family of dwarves). Anyway during those thirty seconds dwarf daddy was fixing up some buildings on his farm and he had made a checklist of what needed to be done at each building posted the list on the door. So since then I've been day-dreaming that I'm super-organized and toying with the idea with making and posting lists for each room in my house. I'll use my computer desk as an example:

-Throw away all yogurt containers, kleenex, and candy wrappers.
-Put floppy disks and old laptop into storage
-Put socks into laundry
-Put toys into bin
-Create somewhat attractive filing system for "important" papers.
-Get ink for laser printer
-Put up a shelf above computer for miscellenous DVD-roms, books, etc.

The beauty of this strategy is that once you've created a list, you feel as if you've done some work, and you can take a break and play a quick game of Spore or Family Feud Online Party.

Apple Picking

Today our good friend Amy took us apple picking at Chudleigh's in Milton. Not only do they have apples, but also a petting zoo, straw maze, and a big pile of sand with toy trucks in it. It's a good thing that Amy was there, because she has better luck with weather and thus we had a perfect fall day. She was also on hand to take cheesey family photos:

At the petting zoo there was some excitment when two of the sheep got loose from their pen and had to be rounded up and tackled by the teenage girls that worked there. I can imagine this sort of thing happens a lot since it is the only petting zoo I've been to that doesn't have a double gate at the entrance.

We rode the tractor to the orchard and picked a ridiculous amount of ridiculously big apples. William had fun running down the aisles of trees and eating apples that were the size of his head.

BTW: Amy, the pie turned out fabulously

Post-a-day Marathon Day 1

My husband tells me that I should be posting a blog entry every day. He says this will generate interest in my blog (though I'm not sure this was ever my goal). I think he just wants something to read when he gets bored at work and, this being the turkey-day long weekend, he probably won't even read my posts until Tuesday. At any rate, this is today's entry in my new one-post-a-day marathon.

Another thing my husband/critic showed me is this website he heard about on the news: www.voteforenvironment.ca The goal of the site is to keep Harper out of power because (they say) he's bad for the environment. I'm sure you can think of your own reasons not to vote Conservative, but this site prevents you from having to think (bonus!). Just type in your postal code and they'll tell you who to vote for based, for the most part, on which MP has a chance of beating Harper's lacky in your riding. The site is telling me to vote Liberal, which I probably would have done anyway, but in some ridings they'd rather you vote NDP. Or you could vote based on looks. Both strategies are equally likely to change anything.

Voting Based on Looks 2008

I just finished watching the English leadership debate (and, of course, like the keener I am, watched the French one yesterday). It seems like just three seconds ago that the last federal election was being held, but here we are again. This year the networks have chosen to give us a cosy, round table discussion format. Most likely because this year we've added Green Party leader Elizabeth May, and they only have four podiums in the store room. I think my commentary will be of special importance to voters, because while many news media outlets will no doubt comment at length on what these guys (and gal) have said, only I will focus on the important issue: who looks the most prime-ministerial-like.

So, in alphabetical order (for fairness):

Stéphane Dion, Liberal Party (first from the left in the pic above): Stéphane Dion looks like the kid who would get beat up a lot in school, maybe not that tough but very smart. This is because he's quite slender and wears glasses. As a former glasses-wearer I'm always mentally trying-on other people's glasses. I think Stéphane's would look good on me, but I don't they're doing anything for his tough guy image. I also noted how flawless his complexion is; either the make-up and lighting guys are brilliant (and Liberal) or Stéphane has the complexion of a twenty-year-old. So I looked it up: he just turned 53 on Sept 28th. Happy Belated Birthday SD!

Gilles Duceppe, Bloc Quebecois (fifth from the left, but who cares you can't vote for him): I've said it before and I'll say it again: vampire. With Halloween coming up, he might just be the candidate that people are drawn to. Again he wore his pinstripe suit but he looked much more Dracula than mafioso. This is probably because, with the round-table format, he leaned forward a lot like Nosferatu coming in for the kill.

Stephen Harper, Conservative Party (fourth from the left): I couldn't help but stare at the current PM's lips the whole time. Was he wearing lip gloss? Or perhaps he is made of plastic after all and he's starting to melt. He definitely has a joker-grin going on. During the French debate, Steve won hands down for best tie (shiny blue and stripey), but during the English debate the tie situation was more equal across the board. Oh, and he wore a tiny Canadian flag pin, which is good, because it's important for the prime minister to be patriotic.

Jack Layton, NDP (third from left): He still looks like a kindly uncle, even when he's yelling across the table at Steve. People with no hair and mustaches always look extra-friendly. He does agree with the PM on one point at least: fashion. His tie tonight is very similar to Steve's French debate tie.

Elizabeth May, Green Party (second from left): At the French debate, Liz dressed like a school librarian, complete with cardigan and ridiculously over-sized costume jewelry. For the English debate she wore a power suit so you could see she means business. She still looks like a school librarian from the neck up though, with glasses that aren't nearly as fashionable as Stéphane's and uncombed fly-away hair.

So based on both leaders debates, I have decided to vote for....drumroll...undecided. I will admit leftish leanings, so that means no shiny joker lips. Other than that, everyone wore very nice suits, so I'm just not sure.