Today I was reading one of my fave blogs, Alpha DogMa. I hadn’t been in a little while, so I read back through a few posts, and hit on this one, which brilliantly satirizes the new baby names in her local paper. Go read it, you’ll enjoy it!

Top honours go to her sixth category, “Mommy and Daddy love Scrabble! The Letter-K is worth FIVE POINTS!” which points out such winners as: Kaysen, Kelson & Konar. I laughed out loud at these, really I did. And then I saw Karter. Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago, my youngest sister moved to England. See, she had met this boy and well, you know how that goes, right? We’re all wildly happy for them both – a cuter couple has rarely been known. But now my sister lives in London and I rarely get to see her anymore. In fact, we realized at Christmas that we hadn’t seen each other in a year. WOW!

So yesterday, I did something about it. I booked a flight to London! That’s right…I’m going to London for a week, in April – when the flights are still cheap but the weather is likely to be nice (well, at least it’ll be spring there…here in Calgary we’ll still be shoveling the driveway). Read the rest of this entry »

So I signed my kids up for a 10-week program of skiing at Banff’s Sunshine Village – it’s called Mountain Freeriders and sounded super fun. It was NOT cheap, but we decided it would be a great investment – we are a skiing family, and this would be a chance for the kids to really develop their skills (with professional instructors) while making some new friends on the slopes. Plus: Mom & Dad would get a day of skiing alone — built-in date!

So where does the guilt come in?

Well, two weeks ago was the first session, and I forgot about it. I don’t know what happened…I knew the session started January 6th. I just forgot that that Sunday was January 6th. We spent the day puttering around, running rather pointless errands. When we got home, I saw that we had a voicemail message. When I checked the missed calls and saw SUNSHINE SKI SCHOOL on the display, it hit me. I ran to the calendar. January 6th. I ran to check the confirmation email from the ski school – session starts January 6.

SHIT! SHITTY-SHITTY-SHIT!

It actually took me a few hours to work up the nerve to tell my husband. He had been saying to me, for days, “does the ski club start this weekend?” and I, in my January 6th denial/blindness, would blithely reply, “no, not until next week”. I felt just sick about it.

Well, in the end it all turned out okay, except that my kids get just one less day skiing than we paid for. We packed ourselves up to the mountain this past Sunday, for week 2 of the program. On an interesting sidenote, ten other families had missed the first session; so many that they had a special group in the morning to place all the kids who were just joining in on week 2! That helped mitigate the guilt somewhat.

Ahhh…the joys of being the sole responsible party!

Don’t get me wrong: I love our Wii.

But it does have a way of, erm, hurting people. And I don’t mean that in a HAL kind of way (remember 2001: A Space Odyssey?). The Wii itself is clearly peaceful…but, you know, “the Wii doesn’t hurt people, people wielding Wii-motes hurt people”.

Here’s our injury list to date, after owning the thing for a paltry 15 days:

• Many, many pulled and sore muscles (in the adult population, to be fair): forearms, shoulders, hips, hamstrings and wrists, mostly. Hey Nintendo…instead of bowling and tennis, how about Wii yoga?
• Several cases of dignity. Mine mostly. Girl2 (who is only 4.5) beats me (by knockout no less) every. single. time we play boxing. Husband says, “you know I’m going to beat you” when we pair up for tennis. The whole family tries to conceal their laughter when I tee off for golf. Sheesh.
• A friendship – temporarily. Girl1 needs to learn that she shouldn’t gloat quite so hard when she wins. Eventually one of the friends she invites over will have played Wii before and she won’t always have the advantage over the newbies.
• A shoulder. Girl1 got a wicked bruise (one of those swollen, instantaneous ones) after being whacked in the right shoulder by a Wii-mote wielding friend. Ouch!
• A skull. Girl2 got a right old goose-egg after being clobbered in the noggin by another Wii-mote wielding friend. As soon as I got both girls to stop crying, the friend stood up to try her tennis serve again, and came within a millimetre of clocking her on the other side of the forehead! And man! That girl can whip a Wii-mote at speeds approaching the sound barrier.

I used to think the rule: “thou shalt sit on the couch and not leave it whilst spectating” would protect observers from being Wii-whacked, in addition to reminding all users that, just like in gym class, you have to pinwheel your arms before playing – if you touch anyone…you’re too close!

But noooo!

Honestly: I so don’t want to have to restrict Wii play to times when adult supervision is available, because really: short of having my fingernails removed by pliers (oooh…bad visual of George Clooney in Syriana…brilliant, but ouch!) there’s not much I’d rather not do more than sit in a room of little kids and adjudicate the Wii.

Having said all that; now that the kids are asleep, I think I’ll go downstairs and play Zelda on the Wii for a while – I still need to master the sword spin.

How much do I want this?

Read the rest of this entry »