Category: Uncategorized

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!

Just a quick little shop update, I have added a new feather garland and a couple ready to ship mini Feminist Killjoy banners (click the pics to view the listings).

I based the design of these feathers off of a real, actual crow feather I found and scanned. After I scanned it the feather fell into the back of the printer and became hideously mangled- I tried to print something and all these gross feather bits were spat out and at first I thought it was spider legs! Gross. There are nine feathers in 7 different types of black leather and suede.

mini Feminist Killjoy in the new chocolate brown with bronze glitter hearts

mini Feminist Killjoy in a purple gradient (same design as my “The Literal Worst” banner)

Also! All the winners of my mini-poster giveaway, your prizes have been shipped and should arrive in 4-7 business days. Thanks again to everyone who entered.

The toner I use to get my bleached hair not so frickin yellow is dark blue in it’s little pot, but silvery powder blue once I put in my hair. It’s actually a silver toner but my hair never really goes silver- maybe a little the first day but soon it fades to regular ol’ blonde and after that, back to yellow. It’s the same brand as the dye I used to use in the nineties to dye my hair unnatural colours. I used to go through a cycle with my hair: bleach it a million times to get it as white as possible. Get sick of that and dye it some unnatural colour (usually bright red or purple). Get sick of that and dye it black. Get sick of that and bleach it a million times. This is why I had short hair for so long (that and the fact that I used to shave my head every time I had a bad hair day).

I’m having a bad hair day now. I am counting the days until my hair is long again. Right now it’s at this super annoying length where it just looks bad all the stupid time. My hair has a lot of volume. It has a lot of body. It has a lot of wave, in fact if I stopped damaging it with bleach I think it might even be curly. There is also a lot of it in general and as much as I wish I could have short hair that sits still and smooth and neat that isn’t the case. It puffs up unless I glob it with product, but if I glob it with product I have to wash it more often and if I wash it more often the toner fades faster and pretty much the only thing worse than puffed up hair is puffed up hair that’s yellow.

My hair has been pretty yellow recently (the season change gives me terrible dandruff, gross) so on the weekend I toned it again. I left the toner in for pretty much ever, like… I think I put it in at eleven-thirty or so and didn’t rinse it out until after four. It’s definitely almost a little silver now; when Taylor saw it he said “oh yeah, WOW, that is way less yellow!” I used to do this back when I was dyeing my hair unnatural colours, the theory being that the longer you left it in, the longer it would take to fade out. I had friends who would sleep with it in their hair. I never went that far but I do recall one time when I put a plastic cap over my dye-filled hair, put a hat over the plastic cap and went to the movies. It was 1995 and I saw Clueless.

Anyway. I’m planning on dyeing it purple for my Halloween costume this year, and then after Halloween I’m going to wash it a bunch and hope it fades to pastel lilac. Since the whole point of cutting my hair off was to grow it out NOT dyed-dark, fingers crossed I can keep myself from saying “EFF THIS” and going back to black.

Some of the things Gwen has been eating recently…

Roasted Butternut Squashed & Mashed Potato Puree

I like to make single-ingredient purees and then mix them together to create new combinations. I think this way Gwen won’t get bored by eating the same thing all the time. I made these purees using leftovers- the roasted butternut squash was a little undercooked (which is why it was leftover) so I simmered it in some chicken stock before pureeing and freezing, and for the mashed potatoes I added a little water to them so I could more easily scoop them into my ice cube trays. This was 2 cubes of the squash and three of the potatoes.

Roasted Red Pepper Mac & No Cheese

I made this for Taylor, Sym and myself, but for Gwen I set aside some pieces of roasted pepper and a little of the sauce before adding the cheese. She really liked it, and we liked the full, cheesy version!

Winnipeg Rye with Fig Jam

I bought this fig jam to eat on crostini with goat cheese because I’m smug and annoying, but Gwen loved it on bread! She still likes stuffing her mouth with food so I cut the bread into little squares and give her one at a time. I cut the bottom crust off this bread because it’s too hard for her but the upper crust is fine.

Gwen is such a sleeper-inner. It’s weird, literally every person I have ever known that’s had a baby is always like “omg my baby wakes me up every day at six/five/four o’clock in the morning!” Even Sym usually woke up around seven but with Gwen it’s more like 8:30. The day I took these pictures I had to go in to her room and wake her up because it was almost 9 and like… what the hell, baby. It’s not like she stays up super late, either. We put her to bed around 8pm and when we tried an earlier bedtime she just stayed up and cried. She just likes her sleep, I guess. I’m not complaining!

Some haunted houses to make and a possibly (probably) haunted treehouse.

Wine for cats???

What Gwen wore!