Category: Uncategorized

This time it’s pretty much all about food. I’m trying (again) to do a better job of actually planning/cooking meals. I really hate it but tonight Sym came home from her dad’s and asked me to defrost some of last weekend’s potato soup for her dinner. I glowing endorsement if I’ve ever heard one. I should start taking pictures of other things though!

On Friday we made pizzas. Taylor had salami and bacon, I had spinach & goat cheese, Sym had plain cheese and Gwen had spinach with no cheese. She’s getting better at eating on her own but definitely has a tendency to cram too much food in her mouth at once.

Saturday morning oatmeal with cinnamon, yellow sugar and honey crisp apples. Gwen had hers with no sugar or milk.

Saturday afternoon perfect fried egg bagel sandwich, everyone else can stop making fried egg bagel sandwiches because I have perfected the art. Gwen was super interested in Sym and I eating and kept trying to sneak a peek but she’s too short.

Some other things I did this weekend…

I cleaned the HECK out of the house! There were a bunch of areas that were just like… awash with clutter and junk. I cleared it all out and packed things away and I even dusted. I KNOW IT’S MIRACULOUS. The house seems a lot bigger now.

Gwen cut her third tooth. It was a really difficult couple of weeks and I wish she’d get a teething break but her fourth tooth is already getting close to popping. Poor baby.

Whenever she manages to sneak past the baby gate into the hallway she likes to crawl into her room and rescue Elke from the confines of the crib.

I brushed Georgie (I don’t do it often enough because she haaaaaates it) and this was my dog hair haul. She looked so beautiful and fluffy afterwards but I had to change all my clothes and vaccum the couch.

Recently on weekends I’ve been spending all my craft time making non-custom banners, and while this weekend was no excepting (although I did make a nice little stockpile of classic colourway “What Is The Point” mini banners) I also made something else: a cardboard box cabin for Gwen.

tbh she’s not really into it but I had a lot of fun making it. I’m still in the process of decorating it but once it’s finished I’ll take some proper pictures.

These photographs of exploding flowers are crazy beautiful.

My friend Jade has a new blog.

Stevie’s sideshow paper dolls are great!

The only real, official, not-ripping-of-the-artist Sara M. Lyons “Whatever Forever” shirt.

I pretty much need this print.

Another awesome calendar for next year.

Head over to Tiny Buttons to see what Gwen wore.

Sharing a sunbeam with a friend ^___^ Dougal doesn’t actually care much for Gwen (he’s becoming old and set in his ways) but Gwen is VERY VERY into dogs in general. I think after Georgie Dougal is her favourite dog (sorry Kichou, but you are too snappy).

I swear, sometimes my brain just doesn’t function properly. You might recall I posted a couple times how difficult Tuesday mornings were for me, with Taylor at work, Sym at her dad’s and me having to get the baby up dressed and fed AND take the dogs for a walk. During those few weeks I was working this was especially difficult as I had to do all that AND get home by 7:45am.

In order to solve this problem I came up with a totally brilliant scheme: to switch Sym’s night at her dad’s from Mondays back to Tuesdays. That way she’d be home onTuesday mornings so she could be in charge of the sleeping baby while I took out the dogs. Genius. Perfect. Foolproof. Except….

WHAT ABOUT WEDNESDAY MORNINGS?? I somehow neglected to consider that now I’ll be home alone on Wednesday mornings, the same as I was on Tuesdays. So like… good job, me.

idk why but recently stuff is just being a butt.

I’m having hard time with my new short hair. Like, I KNOW I chose to cut it off and it’s just hair, it’ll grow back BLAH BLAH BLAH but I had my long hair for a long time (ha ha) and guess it was kind of like a security blanket and also armour somehow? Like now that I don’t have anything to hide/distract from my dumb face I feel like I need to do stuff like tweeze my eyebrows and wear makeup. Ugh. Also even after bleaching it approximately one hundred and fifty times I still felt like it was too dark, so I decided to have at it again. Yesterday afternoon I bought a bleaching kit and when I went to go use it today the frigging bleach powder was missing! So it was useless! But I’d already mixed up the other ingredients so I can’t return it because the store I got it from is a real return policy stickler! Ugh so frustrating. Luckily Taylor was able to pick me up a NEW kit on the way home but I only have a limited window for when I can bleach my hair, ie Gwen’s naptime.

I’ve been trying to be more responsible about meals and actually cook more often. I was pretty successful over the weekend, making oatmeal and pie and a great dinner on Saturday night with chicken and the best roast potatoes I’ve ever made. On Friday Sym requested one of her fave meals, cheese tortellini with 4 cheese sauce (for someone who CLAIMS to not like cheese…), which is easy enough because I just use a storebought sauce. Unfortunately the grocery store by my house doesn’t carry it anymore, but yesterday I was able to find a similar sauce at a different store. This one was a SEVEN cheese sauce, so it should be 75% better than a 4 cheese sauce, right? WRONG. It smelled like old feet, plus the whole thing plopped out of the container in one solid, jiggling jell-o-like mass, which really grossed me out. I couldn’t even eat it, so I didn’t get any dinner. So lame!

I recently watched the movie Let Go (because watching indie “comedies” where everyone is terrible and/or miserable is my thing) and I was disappointed by the parts about Kevin Hart’s Kris Styles, a doctor who was convicted of Medicare fraud. According to the terms of his parole, the character was required to hold down a full time job (that he didn’t need as he was well-off) and due to his record could only get terrible service jobs where people were shitty to him when he was just trying to do his job, but at the same time he was shitty to other people who were just trying to do their jobs. I kept hoping for some character growth, but the movie wasn’t about him, it was about his boring-ass parole officer, so it never happened. I think the movie would have been better if it was about Kris, tbh. He was a much more interesting character than the bland-ass protagonist.

After the HUGE hassle I went through trying to find a new doctor the other month, I finally spoke to my new one about my ongoing back problems. He just recommended I go see a chiropractor? Which I don’t want to do because a) I don’t trust the chiropractic industry and b) money. So now it’s going to be weird when I see the doctor again and I’m like “I need a better solution for my back problems” but what else am I gonna do, find another new doctor? NEWS FLASH THERE AREN’T ANY. Anyway the whole situation is very stressful and anxiety making for me so instead I’m just going to do nothing.

Anyway to make up for this bummer of a post, please enjoy this picture of my adorable baby being adorable. She’s never a disappointment.

When I was in San Francisco I went to the Gap to buy a new pair of my favourite leggings. They are the maternity leggings, and the Gap in Canada doesn’t carry maternity (not even online, wtf). I like the maternity leggings better than regular leggings because they are way more comfortable. I bought a pair last year and wore them to death- I had them on a couple of days after I got back from my trip and the thigh seam just like, totally ruptured, so it’s a good thing I bought a new pair when I did.

ANYWAY. When I was up in the maternity section of the store looking for the leggings a sales associate, and older woman, came over and asked me if I was looking for jeans. I told her no, I wasn’t even pregnant, I just like the maternity leggings better. She nodded sagely and replied “You probably will for a while yet. And have you tried our camis?”

She then started giving me a hard sell about how great their camis are, and how she recommends them to all the nursing moms. I tuned her out, like I always do when salespeople start telling me about things for nursing moms because I’ll admit it, I’m kind of bitter about not being able to breastfeed, and it’s always weird and awkward to explain why to people. To strangers. So now I just don’t say anything.

Just when I was about the vaguely thank her and walk away she brought up a study done in France about how wearing a big ol’ underwire-filled bra doesn’t stop your boobs from sagging, and that she herself never wore a bra. She’d burned hers when she was 16 and she’d put her breasts against a 27-year-olds any day of the week.

Well.

Of course I looked. HOW COULD I NOT??? I still didn’t buy the cami though.

It started and ended with food…

1. Blackberries, raspberries and golden raspberries from the farmers market. Taylor said I could spend between and $20-$40 on berries and then he was shocked when I did, haha. 2. Oatmeal with the aforementioned berries & some local honey. 3. Gwen had hers without honey, and looked very gory by the end of her meal.

4. When I went to freeze some of the berries I found I already had a bunch of old frozen berries, so I did the only logical thing and made a pie. 5. Baby + doggie = ultimate cuteness. Gwen is learning to be gentle with the pets (she doesn’t pull their hair as hard/often as she used to) and Georgie is very patient and loving with her. 6. A berry juice eruption, apparently eight cups of berries was too much for one pie.

7. This baby, who used to be a champion sleeper, has now become a champion of being difficult. We put her to bed, she sleeps for an hour & then wakes up crying. Over and over. On Saturday night she was up until after midnight. 8. The lovely Claire, still kickin’. She actually woke me up this morning by gently patting my cheek with her paw… and then stabbing it with her claws. 9. Google wat r u doin.

10. Getting into things she’s not supposed to get into. I’m trying to teach her not to grab at the PS3 and WiiU but it’s not going well. 11. Pom in a pillow pile. Georgie is very into coziness. 12. Out running errands.

13. Some new banners that will be up in the shop this week sometime. I have nine pastel-to-neon ombre “WHATEVERs,” as well as new colourways for the popular “GO AWAY” and “WHAT IS THE POINT” banners, plus some ready-to-ship “FEMINIST KILLJOYs.” I just need to finish photographing them and edit the pics and write the listings and ughhhhhh. 14. Every year I pledge to make soup from scratch on Sundays and every year… not so much. This year will be different though! 15. The finished product, potato soup with bacon and onion (loosely adapted from this recipe).

A fantastic collaboration between a mother & daughter.

Underground living.

A great round up of pieces for sweatshirt dressing, inspired by yours truly.

I’m so bad at calendars, last time I had one it was on April for months, but maybe it would be different with this one?

Beard Model.

Bat orphans!

A finally, what Gwen wore today.

It’s official: we’ve entered the time of mysterious baby bruises.

See that? That bruise on her cheek? How did she get that? WHO KNOWS. With crawling came scuffed-up knees, and now with standing comes falling and bonking her head/face/entire being. Yesterday she fell over and hit her head so many times I lost count! The last was the most spectacular- we were getting Georgie all riled up to entertain Gwen, and I guess I was a little riled up myself because I threw a (soft-sided, lightweight) laundry hamper at the dog, expecting her to jump forward out of the way, but she unexpectedly jumped laterally, knocking Gwen over. Sooooo I guess that ones on me. Oops.

Earlier in the summer when Gwen was chafing and rug-burning her knees scooting around the house, I had more than one person suggest I buy her baby kneepads, but like… where does that end? Does she graduate from kneepads for crawling to a helmet for standing up? Maybe I should just put her in a giant hamster ball and let her roll around in safety. Maybe we should raise her in a bubble.

She’s realized out that if she is standing up and just lets go of whatever piece of furniture she’s holding onto, she’ll fall down and it’ll hurt. Instead she lowers herself back down to the floor (or if she can’t figure out how to, yells until we come and rescue her). Each time she falls she learns more about how NOT to fall, and I learn more about letting her make her own mistakes. And also about maybe not throwing hampers at the dog.

this pic is from a few weeks ago, I know better than to try and get her to pose for a new one
Today was the first day of school, and after I sent Sym to start grade seven I thought it’d be a good idea to look at her baby pictures and get SUPER EMOTIONAL. It’s just so weird to think that I had a tiny baby, and now she’s practically a teenager (SHE CERTAINLY HAS ENOUGH ATTITUDE). An old friend of her dad’s was in town this week, who hadn’t seen her in years and he was SHOCKED at how much a person she is now. Seriously, what happened to this little squish?

not Gwen
Sym spends a lot of time alone in her room, and sometimes I worry that I’m not spending enough time with/paying enough attention to her. Today I asked her how the first ten months of being a big sister has been, and she said “It’s fine, I get way more ME time now!” ie more time with her annoying mother not pestering her. I guess I don’t have to worry after all.