Mean

If certain people around here don’t stop calling me mean, I’m going to take it personally and start acting that way.

The ugly truth

People who know me, or who read this blog, hear me moan bitch complain about the tiny-ness and claustrophobic-ness of this house occasionally sometimes all the time. We live in a 2-bedroom bungalow that has a basement with two additional rooms and a large-ish space which functions as the kids’ play area.

But it’s still a 2-bedroom bungalow.

Because of the pipe backup into part of the basement and the renovators currently in the basement doing stuff, I have more clutter upstairs in our everyday living space.

Here I would like to offer PROOF that my complaining is valid and completely justified. This is a picture of the state of my living room this morning:

Scheduled Canadian kids are not worse off than the unscheduled European ones

I have been thinking a lot about stress, scheduled kids, and why we North Americans may not necessarily be worse off than some of our European parent counterparts. There are many differences, and I can see clearly as a former European child that this is a true statement, at least how it pertains to my family.

I grew up as a completely unscheduled kid in Switzerland in the 70s, so I can relate on many levels what these articles, posts and books talk about when referencing the ‘relaxed parenting style’ of French or other European parents. But this does not mean I agree.

For one thing, we live in a completely different world today.

What did YOU drink for breakfast?

This morning a funny thing happened to me. Although of course initially, I didn’t get it.

Bad mood

Like some other people, I don’t bake much. (Andrea @missfish comes to mind, I think Sharon @SharonDV too said something to that effect at some point)…it has to do with measuring and exact amounts. Not me, at least not in the kitchen.

But I am in a blah, horrible, depressed, icky mood so I baked cookies. Then I ate one, and it wasn’t baked long enough (even though I followed the instructions exactly).

So then I ate another one. And stuck the rest of them back in the oven.

When your kid is hurt in school

The other day, I picked up my child at the usual time when his teacher told me that my son was in the office because he was hurt.

A whole bunch of scenarios went through my mind at that time. Hurt how bad? Who hurt him? Did he get into a fight?

Score-keeping in kids’ competitive sports

Do kids as young as 7 care about scores, and statistics? Do they really?

I made an enlightening, rather perplexing discovery about this exact topic with my own kid.

On the second day of back-to-school my children gave to me…

…a whole lot of yelling.

Blah.

Yesterday was bliss.

Growing girl

I shudder at the thought of that girl being able to reach a phone, any phone, and dial a number (or I guess these days it’s punch a number) and make calls.

She does this now with some help (which theoretically means she has permission to call grandma). Still….

Last week she asked for the phone to talk to my mom and then left the room, phone at ear, looking very important. She came back to say ‘Nonno said to leave a message’ which means the voicemail kicked in. I told her to leave a message. She departed again chattering something I couldn’t hear. Then she pressed the red button to hang up and that was that.

The occasional appeal of indoor playgrounds

Today we took the kids to an indoor playground called Balls of Fun.

I have to commend the ingenious idea of the people who invented these indoor playgrounds. They are fantastic, and we’ve been taking the kids since they were toddlers to this, and similar places.