Month: October 2013

Happy Halloween from me, Lumpy Space Queen and my daughter who just woke up, GRUMPY Space Princess.

BEHOLD MY NEW HAIR! I’m super happy with it, I don’t think I’ve had purple hair since high school and I love it! This is just for Halloween and then I’m going to let it fade, hopefully to lilac, but for right now I’m really enjoying having dark hair again. Honestly if it wasn’t for my ever-lightening natural colour I’d keep it dark forever, but I just can’t with the upkeep.

I’m also enjoying the fact that since I’m just going to let this colour fade I CAN WASH MY HAIR AS MUCH AS I WANT. With the blonde it would start looking brassy after two or three washes so I’d only wash it once a week IF THAT. But last night (the same night I dyed it, normally a huge no-no for me) I washed it THREE TIMES. It was glorious.

Anyway. I’ll hopefully have better pics later today or maybe tomorrow, including Gwen’s costume on Tiny Buttons.

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Gwen likes dogs the most.

She’s figured out how to pull the bins of daycare toys open. Her favourite thing to do is to get out the cars and drive them across the keyboard of that old computer.

She’s definitely becoming more particular in her likes and dislikes, especially when it comes to things that make noise.
Likes: the vacuum cleaner, her VTech Learning Farm Walker when it’s turned off and doesn’t make any sounds, when people come over to our house and talk to her
Dislikes: when I pull packing tape off a roll, when I staple things, her VTech Learning Farm Walker when it’s turned on and makes animal sounds and plays music, when people try to talk to her when she’s in her stroller

If I give her a mix of foods she’ll pick out her favourites and leaves the rest. Yesterday I gave her a bowl of cheerios and cheddar penguin crackers and she daintily plucked out all the penguins while rejecting the cheerios (which were eventually thrown on the floor for the dogs).

She’s outgrown her bath support- we were actually supposed to stop using it when she could sit on her own, but until recently she was content to lay back in it and get washed. We’ve now entered the unfamiliar territory of a loose baby flailing around in the tub (I never had this with Sym as she HATED baths unless her dad or I went in the tub with her), and her last few baths have been a struggle for all of us. We ordered a bunch of bathtime accessories and last night things went much more smoothly!

Counterclockwise from top: Skip Hop bath spout cover and stacking bird bath toy, Munchkin bathtub grippy dots

Babies! They have difficult personalities just like everyone else!

clockwise from top left: blood oranges; orange-ginger salmon, quinoa & peas; chicken, cucumber & tomatoes, honeycrisp apple slices

Gwen had a baby friend over last week and they both wanted the other’s snack instead of their own. This was the aftermath:

On Monday afternoon I took Gwen out with me to go pick up the very last birthday present I needed to buy.

I think she might need bangs. Her scarf is actually my favourite hat, which she somehow managed to tear open at the top? idk but it’s a baby scarf now.



We stopped by the beach and it was CRAZY HOT in the sun.

Last week Sym came home from school on Monday SUPER EXCITED because the very next day marked the return of Pretty Little Liars AND the premiere of Ravenswood, it’s spinoff. She spends Tuesdays at her dad’s so we made plans to have a mommy/Symmie night on Wednesday, where we’d eat nachos and watch the shows.

The nachos were good; the shows were ridiculous. Pretty Little Liars has always been ridiculous (that’s why we love it!) but Ravenswood is just… idk. FIrst of all, the writing and acting were ATROCIOUS, and I know some people are keen on watching it for Tyler Blackburn /Caleb Rivers, but his face looks all bloated and weird. Like, Matthew Perry bloated. And finally, can we stop for a second to talk about how the show makes ZERO SENSE. Like it is set in the same world at Pretty Little Liars, which is presumably a real world-type universe, but now all of a sudden there are CURSES? And GHOSTS? What even the hell, man.

In conclusion Ravenswood was terrible, and we’d probably keep watching it but the freaky drowning victim ghost caused Sym to deem it too scary, so it’s going to be a no.

I had Sym pick Gwen’s outfit on Friday and she dressed her as a little storm cloud.

A rare photo of both of my daughters. Both of them have birthdays next week and while I have the presents aspect sorted out (which I should, seeing as how I starting birthday shopping in MARCH) I need to get on the decorations. I want to have star-shaped Mylar balloons (someone in my house has a phobia of regular latex balloons) but they are kind of stupidly expensive? Like five dollars for ONE balloon??? idk, there are a couple dollar stores near my house that sell them for less but I don’t think they have plain silver ones. I DID find a site that sells them at wholesale prices (sixty-five cents each!) but they probably wouldn’t arrive in time (I should have started looking into this sooner, obviously) and I’d have to get a helium canister. Do you rent those? Buy them? WHERE DOES HELIUM EVEN COME FROM???? So complicated.

I’m pretty much finished our Halloween costumes (Gwen is Lumpy Space Princess; Taylor and I are being Lumpy Space King & Queen). In time-honoured tradition I’ve made them from sweatsuits & t-shirts, because I value comfort over authenticity.

Got these pins in the mail from MerBulltique and I’m IN LOVE. I put them on my coat as soon as I opened the package!

Toughest of all the babies. If you make this face at her (including the heavy breathing that goes along with it) then she’ll do it back at you. Which is what Taylor and I were doing, on a busy sidewalk, in order to get this pic. Rolling my eyes at myself right now. Remember when she always had that crease at the top of her nose though?

Getting my free flu shot, what fun. Every other year of my life I’ve gotten sick right at the start of the flu season, before shots were available (being surrounded by kids will do that), but hopefully I’ll be able to avoid it this year. Something I DIDN’T avoid was getting food poisoning from terrible cheap Chinese takeout on Saturday night. This has happened to me before, WHY DO I NEVER LEARN??? Taylor and I watched Beetlejuice and then I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, gross. I still felt weird on Sunday but went out to run errands anyway, which was probably a mistake but OH WELL.

Schemes I’m scheming for this week:
• plan and make the aforementioned birthday decorations
• finish fixing my bathroom wall so I can hang up my nail polish shelf!
• make a decision about Christmas pajamas
• actually do the diy I planned to do with Sym on Saturday but never did because we were too busy shopping, oops

Have a good week, everyone!

This sandwich is absurdly good. It’s basically a pie, tbh.

-2 pieces bread, all I had in the house was boring white bread but whatever you like is fine
-1/4 to 1/3 of a honeycrisp apple, peeled and sliced very very thin, I’m talking 1-2mm here. I used a small organic apple from the farmer’s market and it yielded enough slices for two sandwiches with plenty left over for the baby to throw on the floor
-goat cheese
-fig jam

On one piece of bread layer crumbles/slices/smears of goat cheese with slices of apple. Spread fig jam on the other piece of bread and put them together. Cook in your own favourite cheese sandwich technique- I’m an animal so I cover them with butter and fry them in a pan but you do you.

If Georgie is really desperate she can squirm under this retractable gate, and I’m sure Claire could jump over it if she wasn’t so lazy. Gwen is completely thwarted in her attempts to get into the hallway and rummage through my Sweet Valley High books and the cat’s litterbox though.

So many people think babies & small pets don’t mix but Gwen is gentle with them 80% of the time (the other 20% she still has the unfortunate habit of grabbing their hair), and they are almost always gentle with her. Even Claire, who is very very old, is sweet with Gwen now.

Read this!

I’m not really into graphic tees for Gwen but I like this one a lot!

Maple syrup & asteroid impacts.

A heartbreaking/funny/honest read.

What Gwen wore, up on Tiny Buttons.

LED stickman baby is cute but also terrifying.

I was on my way home from the store yesterday and a person drove past in a smart car blasting- BLASTING- Love is a Battlefield.

Honestly the music people choose to blast out of their cars is an endless source of delight for me. Earlier this year there was a guy parked outside of the liquor store listening to a song with very explicit and non-euphemistic lyrics about blowjobs. Amazing! My favourite though, was this guy I once saw in a huge, lovingly restored 1970s muscle car, and over the rumble of the engine you could hear that he was playing Arcade Fire.

So anachronistic!