Friends

I always thought of running as a solitary sport, not something that you did with others.  Boy was I wrong.

When I first started running, I did a learn to run program and made my first running friend.  Sheila could have run faster then me, but stuck with me every week. We then ran our first 5k together.

When I decided to train for my first 10k, my friend Donzella offered to train with me and ran the 10k race in a torrential downpour, getting me over the finish line long after I was ready to give up.

Since then I have made so many more running friends.  

Friends who run in the rain with me; friends who wake up before the sun so that we can drive to races together; friends who join me at the track on a Sunday morning while I run 50+ laps.  Friends who finish their race and double back to help me cross the finish line.  Friends who are always at the finish line to cheer me on. 

Friends who give me a gift to remind me every day that I should believe in myself.

Friends who believe in me.

Oscar's 2013

We broke from tradition this year and didn't have a theme for our Oscar party.  Other years we've had Ribs and Potatoes (2008), Indian (2009), Indian #2 (2010),  Thai (2011) and last year's Mexican.

This year we had a small gathering, just us and one other couple.  These are the friends that we spend all of our holidays with.  We didn't have Christmas with them this year as we spent it in Ontario.  So we decided to have a full turkey dinner for Oscar night!

No one can resist Hilary's turkey!  Luckily we were all able to stay awake after such a feast and we made it to the very end of the Oscar's with very full bellies.

My virtual tribe

I’ve been chatting online with people in forums and other social network areas for more than 12 years now. The first forum I joined was a TTC (trying to conceive) group on WebMD. When we found out that we would be adopting instead of conceiving, I switched over to adoption forums. Through them I have forged friendships that have now spanned more than a decade. I’ve only had the chance to meet one of these friends in person, but that doesn’t change the depth and level of our relationships. We have supported each other through the adoptions and births of our children, deaths of our loved ones, school and parenting issues, celebrated our health and been there for each other through our illnesses. It has become a virtual tribe, with all of us spanning  the 4 corners of the globe.

This week I received a parcel from one of my virtual tribe members. Liam collects nutcrackers. At Christmas we have more than 20 that get displayed around the house, and he has a small army of them that live on his shelf year round. Even with all of the variations that he has, he has always wanted a metal one that could actually crack nuts . When he was much younger he actually broke a couple of the wooden ones, using them to try and crack his almonds open. So awhile ago I put out a plea to my online group of friends, asking that if anyone ever came across a metal nutcracker, to let me know.

Guess what was in the parcel?

I love my tribe!

Food, food and more food

For more then a year now we have been planning a cooking day with our friends Sandy and Jason.  We would split the cost of groceries, split the chopping and stirring and then split the end results.  We thought we would make some pasta sauce, a stew, maybe a curry - all things that could be frozen and heated up for a quick meal after work.

Well yesterday we finally got together and did it.  Here's what we ended up with:

• 10 hours
• 4 people
• $120.00
• 9 dishes that made:
• 32 meals &
• 5 desserts
• 0 injuries
• way too many dirty dishes!

click on the picture to see the labels

Sandy and Jason brought over their nifty vacuum sealing system.  Hilary was a little hesitant to put liquids into bags, but it really did work!

It was a long and tiring day, but households have lots of food in the freezer and we're all game to do it again in a few months.

Party Mamas- Halifax Style

Have you seen the show Party Mamas?  It follows people around as they plan the biggest, craziest most extravagant (and expensive!) parties for their kids.  One recent episode showed a California Mom throwing a Christmas party in 85F degree weather complete with real snow and a reindeer.

I watch it in fascination of something I will never, ever do.  Liam's had 1 actual birthday party that involved sending out invites to people who aren't on our extended family list. And any birthday that he's ever been invited to has been pretty standard.  Pick a location - bowling alley, museum, pool etc.  Enjoy the facility for 1 hour and then have cake and presents in their party room for 1 hour.  Go home.

This weekend Liam got invited to a party at a bowling alley.  The party was for one of his friend's older brother, who was turning 11. It was a night time party (7:00-9:00) which seemed late to us, but hey, Liam is 7 not 11, so what do we know?

Soon after we arrived, we realized that this was not your ordinary bowling party, where there are 1-2 lanes reserved for the kids and the party room in the back.  The ENTIRE bowling alley was decorated for the birthday.  A table was set up as you came in and the birthday boy was handing out name tags and tickets for door prizes.   They had bowling contests, dance contests, hula-hooping contests.  There were tables of chips and snacks and drinks set up and they eventually brought out 3 cakes.  They had a pinata that they actually let the kids whack with a stick instead of pulling the safe little strings at the bottom. This is a friend from school and we recognized kids that spanned at least 7 different grades. Our rough count, since they were a blur of activity, was 40+ kids.  The birthday boy was on the PA system asking if people had song requests to be played and handing out prizes when kids won tickets from the carnival games.  It was then that we started to figure out what was going on. The family owns the bowling alley!  I had wondered what it would take to get regular league bowlers to give up an entire alley on a Saturday night.

While this party was no where in the leagues of the Party Mamas, it was certainly the most lavish birthday party we've ever been too.

A new era has begun

Up until yesterday Liam HATED the telephone. Conversations with Grandma were "Hi, I love you, Bye!" when the ear piece wasn't anywhere near his head. He refused to talk to anyone on the phone no matter what.

This has all changed!

Liam rushed in from school on Friday demanding to know where the phone was. Apparently he had set up his very own play date. This is a play date in the high tech age. 2 kids meet online at Club Penguin and wander around there aimlessly while they chat on the phone with each other. I was intrigued to see how this was going to work for my telephonophobic child.

He got over that fear pretty quick! They chatted and played for over an hour! Now this is an older kid, neither Hilary nor I have met him and we don't even know his last name. We do know that he goes to Liam's school and that he is an Old (so grade 3 or 4) and that they started chatting on the bus to swim class about Club Penguin.

This is Liam's first friend that he has made completely on his own without any involvement from Hilary or I. He did meet another friend at summer camp this summer, but that one involved me calling the boy's mother and setting up a play date for them.

And for the first time ever, the phone rang today and a young boy politely asked "May I please speak with Liam?"

I thought we would have a few more years before our phone line was tied up by the kid all day long. Guess I was wrong.

I can't believe I'm writing this for a girl!

Ohhh the laments of a seven year old boy!

There is a little girl in Liam's class that has a crush on him. They've been in the same class for the past 2 years. Klara likes to leave him little notes, usually covered in cutesy red hearts.

Now Liam has always had both girls and boys as friends. He's happy playing with dolls and Littlest Pet Shop toys and he's happy using those same toys to mount an infantry attack against his Star Wars characters. What can I say, some boy things seem to be ingrained.

7 year old girls are all about being giggly, gawking at boys and playing pretend wedding. 7 year old boys all run in horror! The idea of a girl liking them, or wanting to be their girlfriend is just too much. And don't even bother trying to explain that one day they are going to want this attention!

After a day full of unwanted adulation from Klara, Liam had had enough. He grumped about it the whole way home. When he stopped and declared "I HATE Klara" I knew that I had to say something. HATE is not an acceptable word in our house, at least not when used towards people. You can hate war, you can hate injustices but you cannot hate someone. So we stopped on a cold sidewalk, in the near dark to talk about this. He agreed that HATE may be too strong, but he really, really, really did not like Klara!

His school uses a great method of discipline to help kids work through problems between them. Anyone involved in some sort of tiff with another student has to go to the resource room and write the offended student a letter of apology. So while Klara did not hear Liam say he hated her, I figured it would help the seriousness sink in if he had to write her a letter.

Needless to say, he was horrified! In his mind writing anything to Klara may as well have been his declaration of undying love*. He huffed and puffed and sobbed his way through the letter, finally declaring "I can't believe I'm writing this for a girl!

* I did not give Klara the letter. I figured it was just better for everyone!

Friends re-visited

I mentioned in a post a few days ago about Liam's friend who had moved out west. We got a call out of the blue on Friday night that they were in town! We got to spend Saturday with them. Even though the boys hadn't seen each other in over a year, they picked right back up and were best buds once more!

Lost Friends and New Friends

I lost my first friend when I was 9. She and her family moved to Montreal. I went to a very small school; there were 10 of us in my grade. 4 girls and 6 boys that all started together in kindergarten and pretty much stayed together until grade 8. There were a few changes over the years: Sonia moved away, Anne skipped a grade, a few new faces would join for a year or two. But for the most part we had a lot of stability in our group of friends. Outside of school I didn't have any friends unless they were the children of my parents friends. We lived in the country and there were no other children to be seen. So it was not surprising that I found it difficult to make new friends since the opportunities were few and far between.

Liam however has already "lost" 2 friends and is about to lose a 3rd. Life is much more nomadic and international today then it was when I was a kid. Liam's friend Aiden and his family are moving to Australia next month; his friend Timothy and family moved to Saskatchewan when the boys were 3 and Madison is now living in Cape Breton.

Up until about 6 months ago Liam was very shy around new kids. He would make me go up to them at the park to ask them to play with him. Last year summer camp was mostly an awful experience for him as he went to different places each week and the age ranges of the kids was HUGE (6-12 years old, way too big of a range, especially if you are the 6 year old).

This year we tried to cut down on the number of different camps he went to and found ones with better age ranges (7-9). He even did one week of camp at his school where he got to spend the week with buddies from his class. At the other camps he was coming home and telling us that he had made friends, but could never remember their names and didn't really seem all that keen on them. Until this week.

Monday he came home from his first day at "Super Spy Camp" and declared he had a new best friend named "C" and that "C" liked Mario and had a DS and loves Transformers and on and on and on. "C" sounded perfect! Then Tuesday we heard more about "C". Hilary and I were both intrigued as this was the first time that Liam seemed to be cultivating a friendship all on his own. But alas "Super Spy Camp" is only 4 days long so we were preparing for the disappointment of another lost friend.

Turns out that "C" had a lot more in common with Liam then just toys and games. He too has a lot of trouble making friends and had gone home each night nattering on about this boy named Liam who was his new best friend. So on the last day of camp the boys exchanged phone numbers and made sure that their mums met at the end of the day.

"C"'s mom was beyond ecstatic that he had made a friend. "C" has autism, on the high functioning end of the spectrum, but has never made or had a friend before. We don't know what clicked with Liam but they are 2 peas in a pod. They called us up last night and asked us to go to a movie with them. Liam bounced for a full hour before their arrival "Are they here yet? When will they be here?" Once we got to the theater "C" and Liam held hands to walk through the lot and were inseparable for the rest of the night. We all came back to our house after the movie and they boys just kept playing. I don't think I've ever seen Liam spend so much one on one time with another kid without there being at least one minor disagreement or rough spot.

Plans have been made for the next play date and thus a new friendship was born!

Blast from the past!

A while ago I wrote about Opening Pandora's box - reconnecting with someone from the past, and whether or not that would be a good idea. In the end we did reconnect through email and Facebook. So far it has worked out okay... we've caught up on each others lives and seen some recent photos. And that was enough for me.

But the internet (especially Facebook) has a way of letting the past find you.

For example, I give you Exhibit A:Can you guess which one is me? There are 2 rows of girls, and if we number them from left to right, tell me who you think I am.

I have just reconnected with 8-9 people from that picture on Facebook. This was a grade school picture, a split class of grade 7-8. The emails are flying around as everyone gets caught up and suddenly there are plans for a reunion, or at least a get together this summer. Some still live in the city we grew up in, some are close and others, like me, have moved far away but still make it back to visit family every year.

So it seems that the past is coming back... as long as the fashions and hair styles don't!

Best Friends

I have some of the BEST FRIENDS in the whole world. Folks that you can call up in the middle of the night and they will be there. People who help you move on long weekends. Friends who come stay with you after you have surgery and empty your drains. That kind of best friends.

Today I was blessed with help from 2 of these best friends once again. Hilary and Liam are away in BC on vacation, so I decided this would be the perfect time to move some furniture around. Specifically move Liam's bed downstairs to the spare room and move the bunk bed from the spare room to his room. Seems simple enough.

I knew that I could not move the beds by myself, so I called up my friends Sandy and Jason. Sandy just announced that she is 12 weeks pregnant (YEAH!) and wasn't feeling up for furniture moving, but Jason volunteered. Within an hour and a half of his arriving both beds were in their new locations, safely and securely put back together. (I made Jason climb up on the bunk bed and bounce about to ensure it wouldn't collapse.)

In order for the bunk bed to fit in Liam's room I had to take down his ceiling fan and put back the original light.

Ceiling fans + Bunk Beds = decapitated child *

I put up the ceiling fan, so I didn't think I would have any problems getting it down. The light itself is a simple 2 wire job - one black, one white. Basic electrical stuff says connect the blacks to blacks and the whites to white and Presto Mundo you have light!

Which I did and I did have light. Small problem though, I couldn't turn the light off. It was somehow not connecting to the light switch. Hmmmmmm.

I tried various combos like white-black and black-white but had the same problem because the box in the ceiling had an extra black wire and a white wire that someone had added black tape to. And since I'm alone, it was starting to be a lot of work to climb up the step stool, rewire everything, go downstairs, flip the breaker on, go back up, curse the damn light, go back downstairs, flip the breaker off and repeat.

So I called my great friend Brandon. Brandon is a carpenter so I figured he had to have some experience with this stuff. He is my go to guy for all things broken in my house. heck, he even came over and built our deck for us 2 years ago.

We talked it through, he drew a diagram of what I was seeing and said "Okay try this". And guess what? It worked! We have light AND the power to turn the light off without having to use the fuse box every time.

Brandon Rocks!!

It's great to know that we have such amazing friends and I can only hope that we can return the favours.

* This myth was actually busted by Mythbusters

The stuff women bond over

Recently a group of my online friends shared various stories of our first periods, our most embarrassing periods and how we overcame the formidable obstacle of buying pads for the first time.

Then ran into this post and I realized that period stories are a great way for groups of woman to bond. Something we almost all have in common and something that most of us have been dealing for quite a while now.

You might even say after 20+ years that we should be experts at it. Even for those of us with completely wacky and wild cycles, we still have the basics down pat, whether its pads, tampons (okay maybe not those new fangled cups, I don't have those down pat, I can't ever imagining a time that I would want to use one)

Having done this for so long now, I stopped reading the labels and inserts quite a while ago. I’m an expert after all! I buy the same brand and size month over month and don't think much of it. Until yesterday. For some reason the side of the box of tampons caught my eye and I decided to read the Toxic Shock warning label. I'm sure I've read it before but what really surprised me was the chart telling you which size tampons to use based on their absorbency range

Absorbency	Absorbency Range
Light	Less then 6 Grams
Regular	6-9 Grams
Super	9-12 Grams
Super Plus	12-15 Grams

Interesting. But what does it mean? After much Googling to do some math conversion I finally figured out that 9 grams is only 2 teaspoons. Hmmmm…… so how does one figure out just exactly how many teaspoons worth of tampon you will need? Unless you are willing to use the above mentioned cup and then be willing to go a few extra steps, I'm just not seeing a simple solution. And isn’t the point of the chart and the warning to help save lives? You would think they could make it a wee bit easier to understand!

So I’m going back to my blissful expert ignorance and I’m ignoring the side of the box once more.


PS Anyone know why my HTML for the table left so many blank lines before it?

Monday update

The play date with Liam's new friends was great! Of course the weather didn't cooperate (it is the Maritimes after all!) Within 5 minutes of arriving and heading to the back yard to play, huge black clouds rolled in, thunder shook the house and the skies opened up!

So the played inside. The kids are a 7 year old girl and an 8 year old boy. They all had stuff in common (playing secret spy, hide'n'seek', Power Rangers and cars) and played well together. The hour was over quickly, with phone numbers exchanged and promises to do it again soon.

And since it is the Maritimes, the weather cleared up by 3:00 and was hot and sunny again. Liam and I set up the obstacle course and he had fun running through it a few times before his next set of friends arrived.

However when they got here the kids all decided to just do the Slip'N'Slide portion of the course and had a blast! After an hour we had to stop them and bring them in because they were starting to turn blue. The down side of the Slip'N'Slide is that it is hooked up to the outdoor hose, so it's constantly running cold water. These friends and their Dad ended up staying for dinner, so the fun continued in the house.

Needless to say it was a pretty easy bed time last night.

Wipeout - Liam style!

I hate to admit it, but we've become addicted to a summer game show: Wipeout. We tape it (it's on past Liam's bedtime) and then watch it as a family. Liam loves the obstacles and of course would love to try them all out.

So now that it's stopped raining, I'm planning a Wipeout Obstacle Course in the backyard for Liam and some friends this afternoon (not the new friends from the last post. I don't want to scare them away on their first visit!).

My obstacle course so far is this:

1) walk across a balance beam (a 4x4 2 inches off the ground) while being doused by a high powered water gun.

2) pick up the skipping rope and jump 5 times while someone kicks soccer balls at you

3) bounce on the medicine ball till you get to the slide

4) go down the slide

5) belly crawl under the hamock

6) slide down the Slip'n'slide

7) Dig through the sand box to find the hidden jewel.

If I pull it all off there will be pictures later!

Overcoming shyness and meeting new people

We live in a great neighbourhood, but the one down fall is that there are no kids on our street. Pair that up with Liam going to a private school where most kids who attend live outside of the city, and it can make for some long and lonely weekends.

There are kids that live on the neighbouring streets. Hilary and Liam see them when they walk to school and have even gotten to know first names while stopping to chat with the other parents in the mornings.

So yesterday Liam and I took the plunge. We walked up the street, hung a left and knocked on a stranger's door to ask if the kids could come out and play. Luckily they knew who we were (or at least knew Liam since I don't walk him to school very often) and were very excited at the idea of getting together. Unfortunately they were just getting ready to go out, so we've set up a play date for this afternoon!!!

Hopefully this will be the start of some great friendships. And the sun is even coming out after 4 days of rain!!

Everyone has bad days

I get that, I truly do. I have my fair share of them.

And yes, sometimes the karmic gods conspire together to rain down crap on your life. Days, weeks, months when it seems that the old adage "if it can go wrong it will" apply to life.

I am usually the type of person who, when I ask "How are you?", I am asking because I honestly want to know. I really do care about your answer, not just flapping my gums because it is the expected thing to say.

But come on now!

It gets to a point when someone only ever has negative things to say that I start not listening and not wanting to know. When not a single day goes by without a "woe is me" attitude, when nothing even remotely good can happen to a person, then I start to not want to be around them anymore.

I have a co-worker who is in this self-pitying rut. We used to have lunch together every day, laugh, share jokes and stories and just generally have a nice 1/2 hour break in the middle of the day. Now, I am going out of my way to avoid her. I don't want to spend my lunch hour listening to her drone on about every little thing that is wrong in her world. I want to talk with someone who shows some interest in me and what is going on in my world too. I want to go back to my desk after lunch feeling refreshed and recharged, not drained and pulled down.

I wish I could help her. I don't know if she is suffering from depression, or some other diagnosis. Any attempts that I have made have always been shot down with "you wouldn't understand", or "it's much to bad to ever be fixed" type answers. So I will continue to eat my lunch at my desk, say hi to her if I see her in the hallway and hope that her life soon takes a turn for the better. She deserves it.