Pottery and polka-dots: a celebration of Six

Yesterday, we had a birthday party for a very special little girl who is enjoying her last day as a five-year-old right now.

This was the first time we did Mallory's birthday party away from home. I have to admit, it was really easy. We coordinated the invitations, balloons, food and drink, and party favours, and they did the rest. I did really enjoy not having to clean up both before AND after the party.

The party was at our local pottery-painting studio, which didn't open all that long ago. Since we don't have a wide range of options as far as birthday locations go, I was happy to see them come to town. I don't know how much foot traffic they see through the week, but yesterday our party was back-to-back with at least two others.

The kids made a commemorative plate, with Mallory's handprint and the thumbprint of all of our guests, and then they each got to choose a piece to paint from this wall of unfinished ceramics.

The pieces will be fired this week and we'll pick them up on Friday to deliver to her friends.

Mallory digs crafty stuff, and especially anything that involves painting, so my fears that the group may have been on the young side were really unfounded. She loved it. 

Liam loved it too, but I think he was so afraid of messing up his perfect masterpiece that he didn't do what he originally planned to do with it - he took his hockey puck coin bank (of course) and painted it black and drew on a small NHL logo. The end. I thought he was going to do something a lot wilder and crazier, but I know all too well how paralyzing the perfectionist tendency can be.

We opened presents before we had cake, to allow one straggler a little more time to finish her project up.

Mallory received lots of wonderful gifts. Most of them were Barbie-themed; that's still her big 'thing'. She also got some Monster High dolls (for when she is ready to move onto that) and some crafty stuff, including a gift card to the craft store. That's a shopping trip she is really looking forward to!

At Mallory's request we had 'vanilla cupcakes with homemade icing'. She has really been underscoring the 'homemade icing' part. Last year when we made the rainbow cakes in a jar, I used a can of Duncan Hines frosting to save some time, and she didn't like it and won't let me forget it. I use Amy Sedaris' vanilla cupcake recipe and my own winging-it icing, and these things are like crack to me. I may have eaten four of them yesterday. Blech.

All in all, I'd say Mallory had a pretty good day.

Happy birthday, sweetie girl. You are so loved.

Pre-Easter festivities

It's been a good Easter. I may or may not have had a slice of coconut cream pie for breakfast today.

I haven't uploaded today's pics yet but I do have these from earlier in the weekend. The mandatory cousins-all-together-one-of-whom-is-trying-to-get-away shot.

Finally, we had two days that felt like spring. We played outside in shirt sleeves. We went for our first outdoor bike rides in almost six months. It was awesome.

We coloured eggs, and Liam has been eating them like they are candy. Which is a good thing, because we made 16 of them and he is the only one in the house who will eat a hard boiled egg.

This is his Easter bunny impersonation.

The regular hockey season is over; now Liam is playing in a 4-on-4 league, which he really likes... so far.

The sideboard needs to be packed away now, and I am not sure what to put here next. The next holiday that I have decor for is Canada Day, but three months seems like a long time to have those Mounties standing guard. I need to find some generic spring/summer decor to fill in I guess.

Mallory wore this bunny sweater for three days straight this weekend.

We did an egg hunt. Last year we did it in shorts and t shirts and the grass was green and the trees had leaves on them. This year, everything was brown... but at least there was no snow.

We think there is still a chocolate egg in the back yard that hasn't been found yet. That will be a nice treat for one of us someday when we are out there doing yard work and finally come across it!

Happy Easter to all... I am wiped, and heading to bed early!

Since we came home from March Break

Since we came home from March Break, I've been a little bummed. Wouldn't life be better if it were all vacations, all the time?

 St. Patrick's Day fell right after we came home.

Mallory dressed herself in pants AND a shirt that are both way too small. But they were green, and she insisted that she was going to wear them. I don't think she took a good, deep breath in all day.

Since the shirt advertises "Homemade Snowballs 5 cents each", she opened a snowball store, with styrofoam balls and the old toy cash register.

Liam wanted End-of-the-Rainbow parfaits and I bought the stuff to make them, and then we both forgot about them. (Chad was sick in the midst of this, which is part of what threw us for a loop.) He was just as happy to have them the next day when we finally remembered.

Then, it snowed. UGH!! I think this was March 21st... and we had even more snow a few days later. A far cry from the last week of March 2012 when the temperature was over 80 degrees for the entire week.

At work we celebrate March Madness with Meat Day (don't ask). Everything has to have meat in it. I took the opportunity to try a recipe I'd bookmarked for bacon-peanut butter-banana bread. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't as good as regular old banana bread (or, my personal fave, banana bread with mini Reece peanut butter cups in it - YUM!)

Mallory played ringette for the last time, and practically danced home. She is so over it.

She says she doesn't want to play again in the fall. Why do I feel like the moment we sell off all her equipment, she'll change her mind?? 

I was at the kids' school and came across Liam's essay about March Break on the bulletin board. It was awesome. Every Monday he's supposed to write 5 sentences about his weekend and he sometimes struggles to come up with 5 (as we all know - he's a man of few words). But the March Break essay is a page and a half long - he literally could not stop writing, he was so excited.

And that brings us to now. I finally feel ready to tackle some projects from my list. We have birthday parties to prepare for, a picture wall to finish in Mallory's room, and some sewing that I'd like to get to before the weather turns warm and I start spending every spare minute outside. Not sure which one is going to get top billing, but I'm hoping to make some progress on something this weekend.

The doublewide and the shark tooth, in one fell swoop

When Mallory's teeth first came in, we were surprised to see that she had a doublewide - a single large tooth where two normal teeth should have been. (I would link back to when I first wrote about it, but it's come to my attention that The Powers that Be have *poofed* my old blog. RIP, TooManyCooks - The Original.) Recent trips to the dentist assured us that she would more than likely replace that doublewide with two regular adult teeth when the time came.

A month or two ago we noticed that she had a new adult tooth coming in in the doublewide's spot... but the doublewide was still there. The new tooth was coming in behind. It turns out that it is called a 'shark tooth' when the teeth start to create multiple rows like this, and thankfully it's pretty common and often fixes itself. Such was the case with Mallory. It did not take long for her original doublewide baby tooth to loosen a little and just this week, it fell out - probably the shortest lag between first loosening and then falling out of any of her teeth. Our hope is now that the adult tooth will work its way forward a little as it grows in, though who am I kidding - our kids did not receive any favours in the dental genes department, so I am sure we have orthodontics in our future regardless.

Not to mention, the adult tooth is pretty much the same size as the doublewide baby tooth. If she does indeed sprout another regular adult tooth, I have no idea where it will fit.

She also lost one of her top center teeth while we were away - hence these pictures - so she has been raking it in from the tooth fairy lately! (If you embiggen the first shot, you can just make out the two rows of teeth on the bottom.)

A hard lesson to learn

Liam came home from the Bahamas with a couple of souvenirs, notably a shark tooth necklace and a stuffed sea turtle. But what he loved the most is a handful of Bahamaian coins that I have to admit I thought were pretty cool, too. They're similar to Canadian coins and worth just about the same amount, but the pictures on them set them apart - a pineapple, a starfish, a sailboat, etc. Wouldn't you know it... Liam took the coins to school on Monday to show his friends (unbeknownst to us) and now they are gone. He says he put them in his desk before gym class and that when he came back they weren't there. He is pretty upset about it.

On the one hand, I think this is a good lesson that you don't take your valuables (or 'dearies', since these coins were worth a grand total of about forty one cents) to school. On the other hand, the poor kid is crushed.

He just admitted this loss to us tonight and I am not sure what the teacher can be expected to do about it now, but I will give her a call tomorrow and then if the coins don't turn up, I will probably place an eBay order. For about five bucks we can replace the lot of them. Thank goodness we live in the day and age when this is possible - a few years back we would have been plain out of luck. I am pretty sure Liam has learned a lesson here and will be more careful in the future!

It's better in the Bahamas

We are just back from a March Break getaway. This was the year that we finally gave in and followed the hordes down south for a week and my goodness, am I ever glad we did. We had a wonderful time in the Bahamas. Aside from one little girl throwing up all over the Air Canada check-in desk at the airport, we couldn't have asked for a better trip.

The 2013 season is underway

Chad and I were out of town this weekend for the Burlington Chilly Half Marathon. We did this race once before, in 2011. Last year I was sidelined by pneumonia and running it was the furthest thing from my mind, but this year I have been relatively healthy, and it seemed like good incentive to stay in shape until spring.

Of course, these things always sound fun in advance, and then Jan and Feb and the reality of training in the winter set in. For about six weeks I totally lost my outdoor running mojo and I spent many hours on the treadmill instead. Fortunately this period of time coincided with me discovering 'Breaking Bad' on DVD and I watched five seasons worth of TV in about six weeks, including several long runs that consisted of multiple episodes back to back to back. In fact there was a week or two when I was ready to blow off my long run altogether but then I would get a new DVD and be so looking forward to watching it that my run got added back to my calendar.

Anyway, the point of this race for me is just getting to the starting line. I hold no illusions that it's going to be a PR. I had a bad race, relatively speaking; I just didn't feel as good or strong as I did at my last. The funny thing is that I was only about 45 seconds slower today than I was in Detroit. That's me; no matter how good or bad of a day I am having, I really only have one pace.

The weekend as a whole was a success though. We had to be in Burlington for packet pick-up by 3 p.m. Saturday afternoon, and the rest of the day was ours... kid-free. We went to IKEA to pick a few things up, then swung by a mall where we were free to browse without kids whining about wanting to go home. We enjoyed a nice dinner at a restaurant without a children's menu and then back in our hotel room, we ordered two movies that we have been wanting to see and never managed to get out of the house for while they were at our local theatre. And after the race, I indulged in one of my very favourite limited-time-only treats. It was easy to justify after finishing 13.1 miles: