Bopper

Last year we had a robin come and build many nests under our deck. It chose the best one and made it the home for it's babies. This year we have had the same bird back and she made a nest in the exact same place. Her babies have hatched and she is keeping a close eye on them. Which means close encounters with us and the birds. One time the bird even pecked Torin right on the but and pulled out a tuft of his hair. The bird carried it around in his mouth life a trophy. The bird swoops at Torin and Torin swats at the bird. The bird swoops at Darryl and Darryl swats at the bird. Luckily the baby bird is growing and hopefully the war in the backyard will be over





Till Tomorrow

Jenn

Picture A Day

One of my new years resolutions was to take more pictures. I haven't been doing so well with it, so I thought I'd challenge myself to post a picture a day on the blog for a month. So for the month of July my goal is to post a picture everyday. If I do it, I'm going to reward myself with a new lens.

So here is todays!



Till Tomorrow

Jenn

Lilith Fair

Yesterday I had the extreme pleasure of attening Lilith Fair. It was a really fun day. We got to hear lots of live music, which is one of my favorite things. I got to spend it with 3 of my favorite ladies and I got to sing and dance my heart out.

They had tents with lots of "good" for the world products. I bought some delicious fair trade chocolate and got some free tampons.

We enjoyed Kate Miller-Hiedke and her song about not wanting to be friends on facebook with your ex boyfriends. Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, were also outstanding and loud, much louder then expected. Ash Koley was also a really good act and although we were far away we were bopping to her songs.

After that we headed to the main stage for Colbie Callait, Erykah Badu (who I didn't really enjoy). Then came Sheryl Crow. She was really good live. Her son came up on stage and was dancing with her and it was so cute. She has so many good songs and sang alot of them.


After Sheryl was Sugarland. I'm not a big country fan, so I wasn't sure about this act, but they put on a much better show then I expected. She had so much energy and could really sing (even though I'm not crazy about her twang). Very good live



Lastly was Sarah, and oh Sarah she has such a beautiful voice. I was sad that there was a strict curfew and her set was short, but the songs she did sing were so lovely.


One of the other really great parts of it all was being with 3 of my favorite women. We had such a good time and lots of laughs.

Till Tomorrow

Jenn

One Super Dad

We had a lovely fathers day weekend with Darryl. We went to Coras' for breakfast on Saturday morning and Sunday the boys made Darryl some breakfast and we got him some of his favorite things, jujbes and coffee.

But no things can show Darryl what a great dad he is. Both Darryl and I grew up with traditional Dads. They worked and our Mom's stayed at home and spent the majority of time with us. And although I do just work part time and spend more time at home with the kids, Darryl is such a great dad. He is always looking for the teachable moments. He loves to teach the kids. He is also so FUN. He loves to play with the kids and making them laugh. Even Lucas asked the other day if Mom could go to work all the time and Daddy could stay home with them.

He is one awesome dad, I picked a really good one.

Till Tomorrow

Jenn

The Graduate

On Friday last week, Lucas made us all proud by graduating from preschool. Not that we thought he would be a preschool drop out but proud that he made such a good impression with his teachers and effort with school. He loved school and it loved him. He is a great student who loves to learn. I am already looking forward to many other proud moments.

Till Tomorrow

Jenn

From Dirt To Dinner: Berries, Or Lack There Of

When Beth over at Total Mom Haircut announced that she was doing a project to promote eating local food I was all over it. I LOVE to garden and every year a our vegetable garden is full of vegetables. Usually we have enough we are giving it away. Our only issue with particpating in the project is that things do not come into season here until later then our neighboors in the south. Here are pictures of my current blueberry, strawberry and raspberry bushes.

I was glad this year we moved the strawberry bush to a place it could grow and stay, so we won't get a ton of berries this year, but in the years to come there will be more and more.

Our raspberry bush usually does pretty well. There are never enough raspberries for me as they are my favorite.


This is the first year for the blueberry bush. We will see what happens. I don't really think you can grow blueberries in Alberta, but I'm up to try anything.

As for the recipie and using local foods, it didn't really happen this time. Our favorite thing to do with berries, is just eat them. But here is my favorite blueberry muffin recipie. As you can see from this previous post, if you use frozen blueberries they come out purple, but they are still delicious. Most of the ingredients come from Toronto or the United States (california). Which is not local. But better then Chile.....

Till Tomorrow

Jenn

Rainy Mood for the Rainy Weather

It's been raining for a month here. Not quite for a month straight but it feels like it. Today my mood was just as bad as the weather today. I don't usually use this venue to complain but today I damn well am going too.

What I am feeling the most down about is my triathlon. yeah that's right I am suppose to be doing a triathlon in 3 weeks. 3 weeks. I am nowhere near as ready as I was for my last tri. I have been running more but my overall endurance is not where it should be. I'm not sure if I should just say forget it or try to get up the motivation to do exercise more. It's just with the horrible weather it's been hard to get outside. It's also been hard to do it by myself. When I did it last year my mom did it with me and we helped to motivate each other, but it's hard this year with no partner to do it with.

Next thing to complain about is the dentist. I had to go today and I hate going to the dentist. I would rather have a needle or write a test, or speak in public then go to the dentist. So I was thinking about it today. Why do I have to go? Even today they said, oh it's been a year since you've had x-rays, we should do them again. I say no, that's okay. Why they ask? Are you nervous of the radiation? To which I laughed. No I say, I am not having any issues with my teeth so I don't think it's necessary. She gave me the cock headed look. Even the dentist gave me a hard time about it. Plus this time not only did they clean my teeth and scrape them they did the scaling, which turns your gums into a pin cushion. Really I can't believe I voluntarily pay to go there.

Next with all the rain the traffic has been so crappy.

I miss my husband. The commuting takes up too much time.

Okay I'm done now. I know things could be much much worse.

Jenn

New Favorite Chocolate

I love chocolate. I really looooooovvvvvveeeee chocolate. I like to have some of it every day. Usually in the evenings with some tea. But I know chocolate is not that good for you. So I find the "healthiest" chocolate. I use to really enjoy Dove. But on my WestJet flight last month I tried the Lindt 70% chocolate and it was so good.



So it's my new favorite.

Till Tomorrow

Jenn

Body Worlds

Last week I had the pleasure of going to the BodyWorlds exhibit here at the Calgary Science Center. It was a really amazing exhibit. If you haven't heard anything about it, it's an anatomy exhibit where they "plastinate" dead people and demonstrate different parts of their anatomy. It's neat because each body is giving a name based on the position it's placed in.

For example this "guy" would be called the skateboarder

And this guy might be called the "gymnast".

I also really liked this one

Then on a board beside it they would show you where all of the muscles that are well demonstrated are.

There are also different body parts demonstrating disease. For example there is a healthy lung, a smokers lung and a lung with coal miners disease.

As well as being impressed with the exhibit I was also really impressed with myself. I know alot about anatomy. It is part of my job, but still I know a lot of anatomy.

If you ever get the chance to see this exhibit and are interested in the body at all I would highly recommend it.

Till Tomorrow

Jenn

Father's Day Weekend #1

This weekend we celebrated my dad's father day. We did so by making him shovel lots of dirt. =) Then fed him dinner. We are putting in a patio underneath our deck so we needed to move out some of the grass and dirt. Mom and Alexis also took Lucas to Spruce Meadows and got this great picture of him watching the horse jumping.


Till Tomorrow

Jenn

Shazam!

A friend of mine made me a new CD, she like eclectic music, like I do so it's been fun for me to be introduced to to new music. The problem with new CD's is that when I put them in itunes I don't know the artists or song titles. But someone very smart made an app for the iphone which listens to music and tell you the name of the song. It is a really helpful app. It's called Shazam and it's free and fantastic. If you have an iphone and don't have this app, you should get on it.

I love my iphone. It's so smart.

Jenn

Stanley Cup Playoffs

I'm a Calgary Flames fan. The Flames didn't even make the playoffs this year, so I haven't really been watching the playoffs, but I have been watching the Stanley Cup Final. I forgot how nerve wracking the playoffs are. I'm watching it right now and have said my god a whole bunch of times. I don't even have anything invested. I do hope Chicago wins, but man it is nerve wracking.

Oh good, Chicago won! That was a weird goal, no one knew it!

Life here is getting back to normal for a couple of weeks, before summer comes and then everything will get all mixed up again. Things here are going well. We are getting use to Darryl and his commute to work, I am back to working 3-4 days a week, rather then 6-7 shifts a week. I'm so happy to be around my boys again. I had a big project at work that is done and summer in on it's way. So things are looking up over here.

How is June looking for you?

Jenn

Gardening

It's the time of year for one of my favorite hobbies: gardening. This year in Calgary has been very very wet and not very sunny. All of our grass is green, which is good for dry cow town, but my plants all seem smaller and less flowering because of the lack of sunshine.

I love all kinds gardening: my two favorite things to work with in the garden are perennials and vegetables. I love to eat the food that I grow, even though last year we grew too many zucchini's we still ate most of them. This year we are growing: potatoes, carrots, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini, green onions. We also have a raspberry bush, blueberry bush and strawberries growing in the gardens as well. I'm not sure that we will get any blueberries but we'll see what happens.

Here are the vegetable gardens, each year we hope to put in more (and there is one at the side of the house, with a strawberry patch as well.

I also really like perennials, they come back every year, you can buy them really small and they get bigger and bigger. You can divide them and share them.



Here is a picture of our front garden, again mostly perennials. We have no lawn out front, becuase it is so small we decided just to do flowers. I have lots that are ground cover out front: sedum, clover, woolly thyme, phlox, creeping Jenny





This is our side garden, it also is a perennial garden. We have some vines: virgina creeper, 3 swedish columnar trees, a raspberry bush and lots of other perennials.


These are the two side gardens, mostly shade, so hostas, coral bells, ferns and ligulaira grow here.

This is a picture of the ligulaira, which is doing really really well. It's a plant that I took a piece of from Tammy's garden. Last year I wasn't sure how it would do, but it is one plant that has been loving the lack of sunshine.

On the other side there is a little more sun, so we have some lilac bushes, blueberries, peony and a dahila.

I'm hoping to have more sun this weekend, so the garden will continue to grow.

Till Tomorrow

Jenn

My Awesome Kid (aka Lucas's Monthly Newsletter)

It's been ages since I've written some monthly newsletter, but I have been spending more time with the kids and feeling lots of love for them lately, so here is a post about Lucas.


I've been feeling episodes of of that kind of crazy pride, where your heart feels like it's going burst you are so happy. I think one trait of Lucas's I have been loving lately is that he is a great students. Teachers, coach's and other parents love working with Lucas. He is good listener and does what is asked of him. He is excelling at most everything he tries. He is doing really well at socceer. The first time he didn't want to take the ball from the other team, but us and the coach talked to him and worked with him and now he is great at it. He is one of the best kids on his team. He listens and feeds off our encouragement and continues to get better and better.



He is also doing really well in school. His writing is getting better. His teacher says she's one of her favorites. Again I think because he is such a good student.



He loves to sing. He loves the songs from Glee, especially the fast ones. His favorite has been Ice, Ice Baby. The other day he asked me not to sing it so he could listen to all the words. I see so much of his personality from Darryl it's nice to see some of me in him.



Speaking of Darryl, Lucas and Darryl are going to be the best of buds as Lucas continues to grow up. Lucas loves to play video games and lego and all the things that Darryl loves to do. They love to read the same kind of books and dig in the dirt.

I feel so lucky to have such an awesome kid.

Till Tomorrow

Jenn