Ten Thought Tuesday: March 28th

1. Do you take a look at the posts people read via your stats sometimes?  Last Sunday I noticed that someone had read my post from 2 years ago on Biaxin.  Some poor soul out there is desperately trying to find a way to get their toddler to down the darned medication.  If you’re reading this, best of luck!
2. After practicing getting into baby bear mode for the past week, Elliot managed to pull up on his own yesterday.  He was so proud!
   

   Baby bear

   

   Pulling up
3. I realized yesterday that my contact me page sends people to an email that I don’t use anymore.  I found four email that had been sent over the past year to me via the contact form.  I’m bummed because I missed out on four guest post requests that would have been really interesting.  Now, I only have to figure out how to change the address.  Does anyone have an idea how?  At worst, I’ll just contact someone at live chat.  I hear they’re life-savers.
4. Yesterday, I finished going through all of my clothing.  I’m planning on writing a separate post on the process, but I will say this: I never thought of myself as having a lot of clothing, but oh boy, the process put things into perspective!
5. Saturday was our weekly movie night.  We watched Moana together (am I the only one who loves this movie and who can’t seem to get the music out of her head?).  I’d seen it once before when I went to the movies with Charles and still enjoyed it thoroughly, as did everyone else!

   

   Everyone is enjoying the movie.

6. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the human body adapts.  After suffering from really sore calves for three days after doing my first transition run I haven’t had any soreness since – this despite doubling my run time to 2 min run/ 1 min walk.  I also had significantly less trouble with my breathing.
7. The weather seems to be on a warming trend (finally!).  For the next week, the highs are forcasted to be on the plus side even dipping into the double digits near the start of next week.  P.s.: I’m doing a happy dance right now.
8. Tonight we’re eating some chili.  Yummy!  I’m planning on trying to cook the beans in my slow-cooker, because each time I make red kidney beans, they always seem to turn out crunchy.
9. I saw that Star Trek Beyond has come out on Netflix.  I’m eager to find some time to watch it.
10. I received the steam mop I ordered last week.  I felt like a kid who’d just received a much coveted gift and I couldn’t wait to try it.  I am super happy with it.  I love how easy it it to clean my floors now!

What’s on your mind this Tuesday?  Feel free to comment of link up to a random thought post of your own!

Ten Thought Tuesday: March 21st

1. I want to take the time to thank three amazing bloggers for some award nominations.  Valerie, Cheila and Tami nominated me for the Liebster, Cramm and Blogger Recognition Award respectively.  I haven’t had time to post yet, but I’m working on them!
2. I just realized that Elliot hit the 9 month mark yesterday.  How did that happen?
3. Today, we’ve got a packed morning.  We’re in need of changing the windows to our house so my husband and I are going window shopping (quite literally ha!) after driving the kids to daycare.
4. Tomorrow is Elliot’s 9 month well visit.  I really love his doctor (who’s actually not a pediatrician but my GP).  She’s fantastic and has taken Charles and Amélie as well.  I am very happy because I’ve never been satisfied with the previous pediatrician.
5. Last weekend, Charles went to a sugar shack with my sister and her boyfriend.  He slept over at her place on Friday evening, then, the next day, took the subway and a coach bus to get there.  He was ecstatic because he loves the guy so much!

   

   Hard to tell who’s happiest to be there!

6. I just ordered a steam mop to replace the Swiffer and traditional mop we have.  I am ridiculously excited over the purchase and can’t wait to try it out.  I’m certain it’ll make my life a lot easier.
7. On Sunday I ran my first transition run.  Considering I ran twice as long as I should have by accident, it went really well.  I was following the advice to run at 180 strides per minute, but will have to tone it down as it is too quick to be a sustainable pace for me currently.  I have to say though, my calves were on fire yesterday and they’re still sore today.  I’m eager to see how today’s run will go.

   

   Notice the funky shape of the shoes? That’s what makes them so comfortable! No more scrunched up toes.

8. I’m not sure what I want to eat for supper tonight.  What are you guys eating?
9. I had my first taste of matcha tea on Sunday.  It was peach-flavoured, it was iced and it was yummy!  I’m seriously considering buying some to make at home.
10. Over the weekend, we went to the library to get some new books.  I’m so happy because I’m rediscovering my love of reading.  I picked up the second tome of the Deathnote manga.  What are you currently reading?

What’s on your mind this Tuesday?  Feel free to comment of link up to a random thought post of your own!

Ten Thought Tuesday: March 14th

1. Well, it’s close to bedtime, but I’m finally getting around to writing my TTT post!

2. I just got back from a run.  My husband encouraged me to go despite the crappy weather (I’m like 3 minutes driving distance to the gym).  I’m pretty sure that it’s because he doesn’t want me in the kind of mood I get into when I don’t go out for my run.

3. Elliot is now very mobile.  Besides doing a zombie crawl like his big sister did when she started to get mobile, he can now push himself up to a seated position when he ends up on his tummy and is pulling himself up to a kneeling position whenever he can.

4. I want to sincerely apologize to Mother Nature for assuming that Spring was on its way.  This morning, I was greeted with this sh*t.

5. Over Spring Break, we had a blast.  My husband was even able to get a couple of days off and we went to the Ecomuseum with the kids.

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6. Kids can sleep in very weird positions.  Amélie in particular is always funny to look at when she’s sleeping.

7. Talking of naps, Charles needs less and less of them.  Though I know he rarely sleeps during nap time, he always  goes to his room for quiet time.  He always brings some “friends” with him.

A couple of books for nap time!

8. I’m really happy, because I’ve managed to read a couple of books this month.

9. My vacuum cleaner has been having a lot of trouble lately.  I realized that I’d never cleaned the filters since buying it.  Oops!  The vacuum works like a charm again!

10.  Post run selfie with a chocolate cookie, because I totally deserved it!

What’s on your mind this Tuesday?  Feel free to comment of link up to a random thought post of your own!

Ten Thought Tuesday: March 7th

1. This week is Spring Break which for me means “break from the normal routine of having a baby at home and two at daycare”.  I am home with all three kiddos all week.
2. Today I’m going to go see my grandparents with my mom and the kids.  Yay!
3. On Saturday, my husband, the kids and I went to see some friends.  With this unusual break in routine, the littles went to bed a lot later than usual.  Now, I usually insist that the kids go down at their usual time no matter where we are, but I decided to make an exception on Saturday.  Oh boy, we’re still playing catch-up with sleep and are going through ungodly amounts of crying, screaming and hysterics.
4. On Sunday we went to the sugar shack with the kids.  They had a blast!
   

   

   

   
5. I’m finding that though I enjoy the theme and story of the graphic novel I rented at the library last week, I’m having a lot of trouble getting through it.  It’s so unusual for me to read a graphic novel and I find that there is too much visual information for me to handle.  I’m determined to finish it though, so I may find I change my mind by the time I get to the end of it.
6. Elliot’s nights are driving me nuts.  Besides the fact that he’s got a cold and is most likely teething (again) he spins around so much now that he can go from tummy to back and back to tummy that he either ends up with his head stuck in the corner of the crib or bangs his head on the bars whilst attempting to return to lying down on his back.  Urgh!
7. In case you missed it on my Instragram feed (@mtwotm) here’s a picture I snapped of Charles spontaneously giving his little brother a great big hug.  Such a sweet boy!
8. Tonight, we’re eating crockpot chili for supper.  It is deeeeeeeeelicious.  I’m going to have to share the recipe with you guys eventually.
9. I’m going to have to go buy some new running shoes soon.  What a shame.  Hahaha!
10. I’m listening to an excerpt of “How to Lose a Marathon” whilst writing this.  It isn’t easy.  Usually, when I write in English and I want to listen to something, I listen to something in French so that my brain doesn’t get confused.

What’s on your mind this Tuesday?  Feel free to comment of link up to a random thought post of your own!

Ten Thought Tuesday: February 21st 2017

1. Yesterday, Elliot hit the 8 month mark.  What!?!  This is my third child and I still can’t get over how quickly they grow.  I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to it!
2. The little guy is working SO hard on crawling.  He just really wants to be able to explore and follow his big brother and sister.  But because of his determination, he face-plants very often.  His head has quite a few bruises and prunes and over the weekend, he got a bloody nose after a particularly hard face-plant.  Oh well, he keeps at it despite it all.
3. Last weekend’s tame weather has me optimistic that I’ll be able to go run outside soon(ish).  In the meantime, the indoor track has reopened so that’s where I’ll go this evening!
4. My house is a mess.  I really need to get it under control.  I don’t suppose anyone could send me some motivation?
5. Yesterday, I received some cloth panty liners I ordered from a Canadian Etsy shop called Harp Diapers.  They look and feel seriously amazing, I can’t wait to try them.  Be on the lookout for a review post in a couple of weeks.

   

   Zelda, Star Trek and Dr. Who cloth pads.  It doesn’t get any better than this!

6. This coming Saturday will be our monthly movie night.  I saw that Finding Dory was on Netflix so I’ll try to convince the kiddos that we should watch that.
7. It’s so great to see the kids growing up with so much love between one another.  This morning, I walked in on them playing choo-choo.
8. Tonight, we’re eating chicken breasts.  I’m not sure how I’m going to prep them or what I’m going to serve them with yet though.
9. This morning, my daughter decided to wear he favourite purple shirt and her Thomas the Train pyjama pants to go to daycare.  Because, why not… LOL.
10. We’ve started having fun with bath time again.  On Valentine’s day, I decided to put some pink food colouring in the bath water and the kids were totally nuts about it.  Now, I let each of them choose the bath water colour and they love it.

What’s on your mind this Tuesday?

Lovely Weekend

Over the weekend, we were lucky enough to have some very lovely weather.  On Saturday, we decided to make the most of the near 40cm (about a foot and a half) of snow we’d received during the week and went out to play in the yard after the kids’ nap.

Charles and Amélie jumped on the occasion to grab their sandbox toys and had a blast in the snow with them.

Elliot was thoroughly unimpressed with his predicament of being stuck in a snowsuit, but he was a good sport and hung out in the fort his dad was building.

I made a snowman with Amélie and wanted to get a family selfie with our snowy friend, but Amélie and Charles wanted nothing to do with it.  So I grabbed Elliot (because he couldn’t do anything about it hahaha!) and my husband and we took a selfie of the three of us.

The kids played a bit in the toy chest and Elliot started to smile as he got used to sitting in the snow.

Afterwards, we decided to bring the kids to Subway for supper.  Here they are, looking tired, and chillin’ while they wait for the dada to bring the sandwiches to the table.

We finished off our day with some ice cream at the shop next door.  Elliot had his first taste of ice cream and to say that he loved it would be an understatement.

How was your weekend?  Do you have any snow hanging around?

Are You A Winger Or A Planner? (+5 Tips to Saving Money Groceries)

Lots of stuff on sale for Valentine’s Day weekend!

Before my husband and I had kids and a mortgage, meals were super easy.  We would either just go to the grocery store and buy whatever we felt like eating during the week or we would eat out (“oh shucks, we forgot to thaw the meat again, oh well, let’s just eat out”).

Then, well, I became pregnant, we bought a house, I gave birth to Charles, municipal taxes went up, sales taxes went up (the combination of the Federal and Provincial tax where I live tallies up to about 15%), electricity rates went up, gas prices remained high despite the crash of the barrel price (we pay on average 1.10$/L which amounts to about 4.16$/gallon).  Yikes!  Though our salaries went up as well, we soon found ourselves looking for ways to keep more money in our pockets (because who doesn’t want more money in their pockets?).

Here are the 5 things that helped us save money on groceries (because groceries are pretty much the only thing we had control over).

• We started to plan our weekly meals.

I created, printed out and laminated a meal-planning sheet and each week we would jot down what we wanted to eat for lunch and supper with a dry erase marker.  Then, it was just a question of jotting down on a grocery list what we needed to buy.

• We started to plan our meals based on what was on sale.

You see, every Wednesday, a Publisac gets delivered to our door.  It’s basically a bag filled with flyers from local stores.  Now, we used to just toss it in the recycling bin.  Eventually, though, we took out the flyers from our local grocery stores and started going through them.  We then took to buying the bulk of our ingredients only when they were on sale.  Then we planned our meals around those ingredients.  This is great, because besides saving money, it also allowed for creativity as we ended up buying stuff we might not have bought normally.

• We (and by “we” I mean my husband) started to do our groceries at 2-3 different stores (all in close proximity to one another)

We’re lucky enough that there are 5 grocery stores (6 if you count Walmart) within 5 km of each other and our house.  This allows us to go to the 2-3 that offer the best prices each week.

• We began buying food and household products that we use regularly in bulk sizes (provided they were cheaper that their non-bulk counterparts – which isn’t always the case).

One of the first purchases we made when buying the house was getting a deep-freezer.  It. Is. Wonderful.  We are also lucky enough to have a storage space under the stairs where we can store extra non-perishable food items.

• We continued to make (pretty much) everything from scratch.

Both my husband and I like to cook, so this has always been pretty easy for us.  But we’ve expanded our repertoire over the years.  No more store-bought pie shells, chicken pot pie or pizza sauce for us!

It may sound like a lot of work, but we did this one step at a time (by the way, did you know that it takes, on average, about 66 days to form a new habit?) and we haven’t regretted it!

How do you do your meal planning? Do you wing it or plan it?

Back To the Ecomuseum – A Review

I know I’ve written about going here before, but I love the place so much that I just had to blog about it again.  (And, for the record, no one is paying me to write about this place, I just feel like sharing my love of it with you guys again).

Little Dude and I went back to the Ecomuseum, last Friday.  This time, we even brought the dada along (because he’s off for three weeks – yay!).  It was an absolutely beautiful day and we got an early start to increase our chances to see more animals.  You see, in summer, the earlier you go the better as when it’s cooler out, the animals are generally out of their shade-filled hiding spots and chillin’ out and about.  And boy did we get to see a lot of animals!

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One thing I love about this place is that it isn’t jam-packed full of tourists.  You don’t have to fight your way up to see an animal and, despite the fact that quite a bit of visitors can be there at any given moment, you never feel crowded.

Another thing I love about the Ecomuseum is that the toddler-paced tour of the place (which, incidentally, resembles very-pregnant-mama pace) takes about two hours to complete.  Trust me, we tried it.

Charles decided to be our tour-guide and walked just a bit ahead of us pretty much the whole time.

Of course, all that walking is tiring, so the leader asked for a few water breaks.

We had many pit stops along the way as we waited for some animals to come out of hiding, looked at some animals, read the information panels and took a few breathers.

Looking at the sleeping ducks.

To cater to the needs of the visitors, each information panel is bilingual (French/English).

Waiting for the coyote to show up.

Just chillin’ (and watching the tractor in the field behind him…)

Comfortably perched in daddy’s arms to see the hawk.

Once we were done outside (where you can see the big mammals, the aviary and the birds of prey) we went indoors for the From Day to Night exhibit where we can see both diurnal and nocturnal rodents, amphibians and fish.

Of course, Mr. Independant did not want to be in daddy’s arms to see the animals.

An albinos turtle!

What else do I love about this place?

1. The admission price is very reasonable.
2. Besides visiting the animals, there are picnic areas and a few paths that you can just take a walk in.
3. The souvenir boutique also has reasonable prices.
4. It’s only 15 minutes away from where I live!

What is one of your favourite places to visit with your kids?

Our Easter Sunday

We had a wonderful day today despite the fact that the little guy is sick.  The weather was very nice and we didn’t have to get dressed in a whole bunch of layers to go outside.  Because, of course, now that Charles knows how fun it can be outside, he wants to go all the time.

I got him dressed and the first thing he spotted when we crossed the street to the park in front of our house was a bird.  He, of course, wanted to get up close and personal and try to touch it.

The bird mustn’t have felt that the little guy chasing it was a predator, because it stayed on the ground and just kept its distance on foot.

After a while, I grabbed my son and walked with him to the park.  He had lots of fun climbing up the stairs, going down the slide, looking at me through the clear plastic bubble window and going on the swings.

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When we got back inside, the little guy had some water and a snack and I had fun styling his hair (because it’s long enough now that I can actually do something with it!).

We also had a lovely lunch with my sister, brother and grand-parents.

As the day went by though, Charles became more and more whiny and his cold was clearly gaining some ground on him.  So, we used a three-fold approach to help him feel less miserable.

1. Lots of mommy cuddles (because, in his book, daddy cuddles just don’t seem to work when he has a cold…)
2. Letting him eat what he wants (because he pretty much outright refuses to eat anything when he’s sick and my partner and I prefer he eats something to nothing)
3. Swapping bath time with a shower with mommy (combining mommy cuddles, a back massage with the stream of water and clearing up his nose with the steam that the shower produces!)

Crossing my fingers for Little Dude to kick his cold in the butt during the night!

How was your Easter Sunday?