Thursday, 20 February 2014

So Long Phoebe

We have had a great gal staying with us for the past six months. Her name is Phoebe. Today she goes home and we will miss her terribly. She is from Taiwan and she is studying tourism. When she came here she studied English at a school for a few months, then she got a job! She worked at Tim Hortons.

This pic is of her watching her first real hockey game. Not sure she loved it. LOL


Saturday, 8 February 2014

Why I Write

I have felt a little blue this week. It has been coming on for a while. Different pressures are weighing down on me. I feel discouraged about some things I don't know how to fix and don't really want to deal with. Logically, I realize isn't helping the situation.....but I can't seem to make myself fix it.

Then I decided to write about it.

Suddenly I feel such a relief. I feel a resurgence of energy. Maybe I can handle this!

That is why I write. It brings clarity. It helps me see possibilities. It helped me feel hopeful.

That is why I write. It is therapeutic! 

It is practically a miracle.

Thursday, 6 February 2014

Science Fair

I am so proud of Peirce. He has been working diligently on his science fair project. He figured out what topic he wanted to focus on, organized his experiments, he recorded the data, he worked diligently on his tri-fold and on his presentation. He really put a lot of thought into it. So proud of him!




Tuesday, 4 February 2014

Happy Birthday To Me!

Another year has rolled around. 48?! Wow. I never knew it would feel like this. I don't feel like I think 48 should feel.

I had a great day. Celebrating a birthday, when you spend all day with 8 year olds, is a beautiful thing. They get birthdays. They are confident that it should be a special day and they remind you of that all day long. They spend a lot of energy trying to secretly work on cards for me (I just pretend I don't know what it is they're working on during any spare minute and reces.....luckily it was indoor recess today - more time for feverish drawing, colouring and writing). I couldn't walk down the hall without 3 or 4 happy birthday wishes being thrown my way. It was fun. Not only that, my husband showed up with flowers and chocolates and a mushy card!



Then I came home and we went for dinner. The kids had bought me presents: earrings and all sorts of great stuff for feet! I was taken care of from head to toe! Eating out was wonderful. After, Allen made me go and finally spend one of the gift cards he gave me for Christmas (I am sooooo not a shopper. I have to be forced!) I am grateful for his bossiness. It was fun to get some things for myself.

Then, when I got home I had a few cards that had arrived in the mail. What a great surprise. One was from my best friend. She wrote asking how it felt to be 47. 47? Silly friend. She is losing it in her old age. Then I realized she was right. I actually am only 47!! She has always given the best gifts. This year she gave me the gift of a younger age. I probably would have gone on for months thinking I was 48! Phew!!! Saved by a birthday card!

Monday, 3 February 2014

Baby Steps

I wrote on my teaching blog about a Nerdlution goal I had set. One of my two goals was to spend 15 minutes a day cleaning, FlyLady style. This means that every day I will spend 15 minutes de-cluttering, cleaning and sprucing up something in my house. I set the goal on January 31, thinking that I'd focus on this for the next 50 days.

I started off with a bang and did nothing on Feb 1 and 2 *Hangs her head in shame*

Today when I got home I decided I could afford 15 minutes and got to work on the back entry. I should have taken a picture.

No I shouldn't have. That would be embarrassing.

Let it just be known that we had piles of shoes, piles of dirt, mismatched mittens, scarves strewn everywhere. I decided I would just work on one corner and aim to get the floor clean. Funny enough, in about 5 minutes it was finished. So I decided to work on the closet floor. Soon another 5 minutes was gone and it was clean. There was still 5 minutes left!! So I did a real good sweep of the rest of the back entry. Then I had a couple minutes left so I pulled out the mismatched sock bucket out of the cupboard and lo and behold I found about 6 pairs I could put together.

Done.

What a difference!

It's kind of embarrassing and rather dumb that I let it get to be such a mess when it's really very easy to clean. I should know better by now. Life just gets a little crazy though.

I think I just might do it again tomorrow.

Imagine if I really did do this every day?? My family is going to be astounded.


Sunday, 2 February 2014

Westerns!

Jill has really been working out a lot this last semester. She took a Sports Performance class at school which is basically a super hard workout class. She took yoga. She started twice a day workouts one day of the week. She also started swimming with the older kids in the club. All this meant that each day she worked out for more than 3 hours. They weren't pansy workouts either. This is some serious working out! It really pushed her and you can tell she has gained a new level in fitness. She has been eating right. She goes to bed on time (and then nags us to get to bed too because we're usually being too noisy for her!) She has done what she needed to do.

Her goal was to get a Western time in swimming. (If you're a smuggle like me...you probably need to know that in swimming first you get B times, then you get faster and try to get an A time. Those are provincial standards. Once you have A times you try to push yourself further to meet the Canadian Western qualifying times, and then after that it's Canadian National times)

This past weekend was the weekend to do it. The meet was called Alberta Open. Jill had some good swims on Friday and took time off every race - the best of which was 18 seconds on her 400 IM!

On Saturday she had 50 fly. Fly is her favorite stroke. She started off with 50 free and did it in 29.9! To break the 30 second barrier was a really big deal. When 50 fly rolled around  she did awesome again and took off time - but missed the Western time by 0.2 seconds. What a heart breaker! Lucky for her though she came in 14th place so that meant she got to swim in the finals in the evening. She talked to her coach and decided to skip the 400 free and go home and rest up for the finals in the evening. And wouldn't you know it, she totally smashed it!! She soundly beat the Western time.

Way to go Jill!! Now she's off to Vancouver for Westerns. She's a big girl now!