family

cue drumroll

Introducing Glen:

 After a couple days of brainstorming names and another couple days of debating them, the top two contenders were Graham and Nathan. And then I suggested Glen. Oh. Glen. We were all instantly sold, except Foster, who is still calling him Nathan. He’ll come around. Or he won’t and the poor dog will never really know what his name is.

Glen seems to be settling in well and is having a ball with Mia, who also seems happy to have someone to do dog-type things with (butt-sniffing, running in circles, pleading to stay indoors) and doesn’t smack her on the head for no reason, like Murray the bully cat. For his part, Murray seems pleased to sit back whenever Mia and Glen are horsing around and watch the show. It’s a good deal all around.  Meanwhile, the sole surviving fish is thinking, uh, hello, still swimming all alone over here.

To give the young lovebirdsdogs a special place of their own, I bought a nice, plush cat bed yesterday and look:

Tandem snoozers.

our new addition

Please welcome _________________, our as yet unnamed addition to the family:

 He came to live with us yesterday, which was also his six-month birthday, and quickly learned we take a lot of photos here.

I don’t think he minds, though. Especially since he is the mellowest dog ever. So far he has spent 90% of his time with us contentedly riding around in someone’s arms.

He’s spent the remaining 10% of his time romping around after Murray and Mia, who are at last united in their distrust of the cute new arrival.

He came with the name Ben, which we really liked at first and thought we’d go with, but by last night we were all wavering on whether he really seemed like a Ben, after all. The girls and I are partial to Graham (with the added benefit that his nickname could be graham cracker, natch) and the menfolk are partial to Nathan or Nate, for short. Other names in the running are Owen, Joel and Wes. It’s a tough call. Any votes? Any other recommendations?

irritation – it’s what’s for dinner

Now that the kids are getting older and are having friends over more frequently, they’re also inviting those friends to stay for supper occasionally. This is both good and bad – good because it reminds me how much I like my children in comparison to all other children and bad because in order to make that comparison, I have to endure the presence of other children. Nah, I’m just being nasty. Mostly. The majority of the kids’ friends are nice and sweet and polite, if perhaps a little too honest by times. As in, “Wow! That’s a lot of dirty dishes!” Etc.

Charlotte had a dinner guest one night this past week who, when confronted with homemade bread – the bread seen above, BREAD, I might add, MADE WITH MY VERY OWN HANDS – asked, “How do you guys eat this stuff?” Uh, thanks, kid. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

The very next night, Anna had a guest – a lovely young lady we like very much – who asked me to please make the pasta with sausage dish I’d made the week before since she’d sampled it from Anna’s thermos at school the next day and thought it was delicious. Flattered, I re-created the recipe and happily served it, at which time our guest said, “Oh, I’m a vegetarian.” Um, you know what sausage is, right?

I’m thinking that our next dinner guest will receive any food of his or her choosing – from the backyard. Anything you can find, dearest, it’s all yours.

all hallows’ eve

So last night was Hallowe’en, which is not my favourite occasion, partly because I don’t enjoy stumbling around the neighbourhood in the dark, but mostly because I object to giving away mini chocolate bars once they are in my possession. My kids, however, insist on being kids and indulging in inconveniences such as having friends, requiring clean clothes, and trick-or-treating. Sigh.

So they dress up like gypsies:

Like Anna, seen here at the far left. She wasn’t impressed by my insistence she wear tights under her skirt, but tough. It was cold here last night. I won’t identify Anna’s friends in case their mothers don’t approve, but fortunately their faces all seem to be either disguised or obscured anyway.

Here’s Foster and Charlotte:

Foster is dressed as Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon – a last-minute costume pulled together when I realized at about 3 pm that the rain wasn’t going to stop and the costume he and The Boy Wonder were carefully creating out of cardboard (Captain Rex from Star Wars) would certainly be ruined. Cardboard + rain = an unhappy boy with a soggy cardboard helmet.  Charlotte is Velma from Scooby-Doo, in an outfit she put together entirely by herself. Pretty good, huh? I LOVE projects that don’t require my assistance.

Despite the rain and cold weather, we had more than twice as many kids as usual. Go figure.

How was your Hallowe’en? Did you play any tricks?

settling in

So I’m still trying to settle into the new site – hanging my pictures on the walls, figuring out where exactly the furniture should go, and so on – but the boxes of all my old stuff still haven’t arrived. And by boxes, I mean files on a hard drive. My archives, to use a term that gives my collection of pet photos, lame status updates and rants about the weather a fancy name.

Since he had a problem with my totally inefficient plan of cutting and pasting HTML, post by post, The Boy Wonder is valiantly trying to figure out how to transfer all my old posts to the new site in one shot. And one shot (to the back of the head) is probably what I’m going to get if I nag him about it one more time.

In the meantime, please feel free to leave comments about what works and doesn’t work for you, both literally and figuratively. For example, on my desktop computer, the site’s colour scheme is a range of vibrant greens with a nice, sand-coloured sidebar. A sandbar, if you will. But when I looked at it on my laptop this morning, I was disappointed to discover the greens are flat and washed out and the warm sand colour a pale grey. Bleh. It makes me wonder what others see. Is it my laptop screen that’s off or is my desktop monitor overly bright?  Should I quit worrying about it and go do some dishes? No. Should I go to bed? Yes.

at last

After bugging The Boy Wonder for a couple years to re-do my blog, I finally got sick of waiting and decided to do it myself. Et voila! (I was going to write ‘Et viola!’ but worried you might not realize that’s a joke. It’s one of my pet peeves, as you can imagine. One of my 23,000 pet peeves.)

Anyway, to make a long story even longer, I started fooling around with designing a new site during my fourteen seconds of free time every day and, two months later (with a little bit of last-minute help from The BW), here it is. It’s still a work in progress – as am I – so please be gentle.