Do you know how I know that summer is here? The dirt. I am a Mom of little boys. I am not making any gender claims here. I have no idea if this is the case with all kids, just boys, or just my kids, but BOY OH BOY do my boys get dirty! These…
Childhood
Giveaway: Kandoo Kid’s Personal Products
My kids love getting things in the mail. They adore it. Every time there is a package in the mailbox, they ask if it is for them. (Considering that their Dad is a chronic online shopper of cheap goods from China, the packages are usually disappointingly not for them.) One afternoon they came home from…
Miracle Balm: A Reese and Luke Review
I make kids with sensitive, dry skin. I guess I couldn’t help it. My hands are always dry and scaly by the end of the day. I keep lotion by my bedside table to apply every night and I go through bottles of the stuff at work. My hands crave the humidity of summer and wither…
Throwback Thursday Netflix Style
I kind of went through two separate phases of childhood television viewing. During the first seven years of my life, my family did not have cable. Before I was old enough to go to school, I watched Sesame Street, Fred Penner, Under the Umbrella Tree, and Mr. Dressup in the mornings on the CBC channel…
Distraction
Distraction. Before becoming a parent I thought I understood the term. After all, life is full of distractions for every single one of us. But kids bring a particularly insistent type of distraction. When I was a kid, having to buckle my pants after a trip to the bathroom was a distraction. As a…
How to Brush Hair from a Parent who Doesn’t Brush Hair
Meet Ella. She is tiny, blonde, and she calls my kids “guys”. She adores her Nana (in contrast to her same-aged cousin Gavin who worships his Papa). She’s my niece. She has ridiculously curly hair. I don’t know about other boy-moms but I never brush my kids’ hair. OK, that’s not entirely true. I do…
Mother-Son Relationship on Ice
Cameron hasn’t been a Mama’s boy since Gavin was born. It probably started before that, if I’m being honest. He started favouriting his Dad when I went back to work after his maternity leave. But he’d still cycle back, keeping me as a viable option for favourite parent position. When I left work early before…
How Netflix Saved Earth Day
This week. It all started with Easter weekend. It was a busy one. Saturday morning we went to a friend’s house for a brunch potluck with four other families. By Saturday evening, my parents and youngest sister had arrived. We had them and a guest over for Sunday lunch and then added my other sister,…
Boy Clothes
“I bet you’d like to have a girl.” I hear that a lot. Boy-moms hear that a lot. (I assume girl-moms hear the opposite, as if being a parent to only one gender is somehow not completely fulfilling, which is ludicrous, of course.) Strangely, at the centre of the comments that I usually hear, there…
Is BlackBerry Really an Option?
So here’s some preliminary information about me that will be relevant: I’m an Android user. A Samsung Galaxy S3 to be exact. Before I got this Android for Christmas, I owned an iPhone, a Blackberry, another iPhone, and another Blackberry, in succession. And since acquiring my Samsung Galaxy S3, I had the option to swap…
Cameron at 4
Things change so quickly. Since Cameron’s birthday, I’ve heard the phrase “They grow up so fast” often. I’ve said it. You’ve said it to me. As parents, we say this to try to gain back some of our power over time, as if, by acknowledging its speed we can somehow focus so hard on the…
