Adventures in Mama-Land

Rosh Hashanah Meal Plan Meal Monday Tuesday Wednesday Day   Parents Round Challah (fresh?) Salmon Leftover Soop Blintz Loaf thing Crunch-E-Cheez     Night   Simanim:                 ~ Pomegranate                 ~ Dates                 ~ Apples                 ~ Fish head                 ~ Carrot                 ~ Beets                 ~ Bee nest honey Judy   Simanim! Round Challah G fish (tri...

So, like I always tell the kids... "you could celebrate your English birthday - if you were English." Elisheva's is a little weird because she was born "between the days" (after the sun starts to set, but before it is completely finished), so we observe it on the 8th of Teves. And here's a great "bulk" calculator that lets you do a bunch of dates at once! http://www.hebcal.com/yahrzeit/ So here are ALL our dates to 2018 - print and cut and paste prominently to be sure you don't miss even one! (I like this because it becomes very clear that our birthdays are on the SAME day every year...): Fri 10-Oct-2008 GZ's Hebrew Birthday (11th of Tishrei) Fri 24-Oct-2008 YM's Hebrew Birthday (25th of Tishrei) Sun 04-Jan-2009 EC's Hebrew Birthday (8th of Tevet) Wed 14-Jan-2009 JM's Hebrew Birthday (18th of Tevet) Sun 08-Mar-2009 NR's Hebrew Birthday (12th of Adar) Sun 23-Aug-2009 TM's Hebrew Birthday (3rd of Elul) ...

Called the dentist and there was no answer, but I just checked back here and my first appointment isn't until October 28th... yay! I have now written them on the new calendar - hooray!

But things are somehow looking a little less bleak on this warm, sunny afternoon. Here are some pictures of our happy family from this past summer! Meanwhile, yes, the oven is still broken, and there's no way we can pay for it before Yom Tov, so there it is. I sure do hope the downstairs one still works. Ted is turning on the gas and testing it when he gets home (late) this evening. Supper: Tuesday: Chili with cornmeal plus bisquik biscuits baked on top, Eden brand refried beans, mushroom barley soup from a tin that was so awful... that was the day YM & I went to the allergy doctor. More on that later. Wednesday: OMG, omg! The best, best, chicken stir-fry ever. Made a not-too-sweet stir-fry sauce based on fresh squeezed orange juice and chicken soup. Plus oven-baked fried rice, which was when I discovered the oven was broken. I made the oven-fried rice with mostly sticky rice and a little basmati - YUM! It was so perfect! And then, tonight (Thursday): Ted's worki...

Oy, the oven is broken after working fine last night and I was going crazy trying to figure out what was for supper and I finally decided oven fried rice - ah, the irony.  Everything works except the BAKE feature - self-clean, broil, etc.  That can't and won't be a cheap fix and we have NO MONEY at the moment at all.  My mother pointed out we have an oven in the basement... oy... maybe get Ted to light the pilot at least so I can accomplish some Rosh Hashana baking.  It's not even kosher down there.  :-(((   Meanwhile, Naomi Rivka didn't sleep at all after being exhausted after lunch and finally I was about to get her up and she said I should change her diaper because she had a "kakkie" in it (who knows how you spell that???  weird that I've been using the word for however-long and never stopped to spell it out...).   Anyway, I went ballistic because she'd been awake the whole time and could have asked to go to the potty.  Whi...

Found at the curb! But one of the wheels is totally not useable... waaah! Letter w/attachments to Peg Perego Canada: I'm attaching pictures of a lovely old-style pram/carriage that has been passed along to us. The only problem is - as you can see - the wheels are in rough shape, and one doesn't hold air at all. I'm wondering whether it would be possible to purchase new wheels - or, even better, used wheels from old, broken carriages - at your Pickering location, and if so, how much they'd cost. (p.s. Would it be possible to find out the name of this model to help me locate the wheels I need?) Thanks in advance! Jennifer M.

This is my Garden Mood right now, by the way... everything's dying, and there's nothing I can do to stop it. That's why I'm loving this Jamaica Kincaid book. She hates winter, too. Loves the other three seasons, but just does not see the point in straining to find "winter interest" when the things that are interesting in the winter are mostly bleak and depressing. Glad I don't live in Vermont like she does - I imagine you'd be more desperate than even we are here... Off to watch more House, M.D. :-)

Turns out I already mentioned the Ottawa trip the other day. So disregard where I explain the whole thing all o ver again. You're nice that way; I'm sure you'll understand.

I am only slightly miffed that my mother is terrified of catching my cold so she didn't offer to help out with the baby or anything today. I don't know if "miffed" is the right word. Annoyed, definitely. Somewhere between "miffed" and "po'd". Honestly, she has a right - she has to keep herself healthy; I know that. Would have been nice if she'd offered, though. Or if somebody had. A fairy godmother: "I see you're feeling crappolish. Want me to take the baby for a walk for an hour?" It was a beautiful day. It would have been a nice walk - for somebody. Instead, I took him, and it was fine. I'm just whining. But that's what blogs are for , right??? :-)

to enjoy my Shabbos alone - gack.  My regular allergic stuffiness and sniffling has been replaced by the extreme sneezing and snottiness of a cold - what a delightful change of pace.  So I was all alone with the baby all night and all day and too miserable to enjoy a nice late night of reading... :-(((   Had to pause there and sneeze a bunch of times.  Must run now to sneeze some more.   Achoo.  At least the constant sneezing keeps the baby amused.   THE BABY TALKS - UPDATE!   He heard someone sneeze yesterday and signed NOISY, which he also does for trucks going past, etc.  He has also spontaneously signed BOOK and CHEESE.  He signed CHEESE when I served him some, even though I hadn't served it in a while and hadn't signed it first.  He also signs BIRD and DUCK and uses two fingers for DUCK so it looks different from BIRD.  (he uses the top fingers only, so BIRD just looks like a wiggly pointer finger)...

"Loving my current book - My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kincaid! It's a fascinating and nuanced reflection by this well-known author on her garden and many related subjects. HOWEVER... despite bearing a Dewey number 635 on its spine (being a gardening book, hence the title), and despite my frequent haunting of our library's gardening section (Dewey number 635) I would never have found this book if it hadn't been sitting on a cart. Why? Because the author is black - so it's shelved in the Black and Caribbean Heritage section. Not only does this totally defeat the purpose of the Dewey classification, but seems to reflect the worst kind of paternalism (ie "black people need their own section of the library to feel confident and proud"). I feel betrayed by the discovery that I may not find excellent books by black authors in the "regular" sections of the library. What if I'm looking for a book of guidance on a medical topic, but some authors h...

Well, it will be one year, anyway. That's what the oncologist said, though my mother said she introduced herself as a medical (as opposed to surgical) cancer specialist. My father's always told us he never had grandparents, so I guess it's like Dr Laura always says: you get two chances to be in a parent-child relationship (or, in this case, grandparent-child)... once when you're a kid, and once when you grow up to be a parent (grandparent). So if life gives you lemons - in this case, the holocaust to take away all his European relatives - my father has spent the last fourteen years making the most fantastic grandfather lemonade. Ugh. What a lousy, strained metaphor. I thought it was an empty cliché that they actually tell you how much time you've got left. I feel like I can barely complain; I mean, one year sounds like a ton of time. One more Rosh Hashanah. One more Chanukah. One more of everybody's birthday. I told YM - without specifics - to enjoy the ti...

At the Children's Garden tonight, it was getting dark too quickly to have storytime and I was cutting up the watermelon for Claire, quite distracted by the thousands of annoying mosquitos swarming around my head when all of a sudden Naomi started screaming & crying. I went over to find out what was wrong with her, and felt a shudden, sharp bite on my arm... and then all hell broke loose as every single child began screaming and crying. LITERALLY. Every SINGLE one of the dozen or so children there burst out in screams and tears, erupting from the garden, some shedding clothes as they went. It was a wasp hive, apparently lurking in the composter, that had gotten both angry at having weeds dumped on top of them throughout the evening and perhaps riled up by the scent of the watermelon circulating in the garden. The wasps embedded themselves in some kids' clothing and a couple of adults' hair. Claire is very allergic to wasps... luckily, she didn't get bitten. And ...

To the Shepherd's Pie for a moment. I just want to mention that this was absolutely knock-your-socks-off Shepherd's Pie... fabulous! I know it doesn't look appetizing at all in the picture here, but I used two secret ingredients, in addition to starting with ground turkey because Fortino's had no other ground meat. Secret ingredient #1 - a big jar of babyfood squash (Stage 2, if it makes a difference), and Secret ingredient #2 - little tiny cubes of mango. The weird thing is, I asked Ted to name the secret ingredient - and then I couldn't find a single piece of mango. There was a WHOLE mango in this thing, all cut into cubes, and every single cube simply vanished, leaving behind a subtle yellowy sweetness. Very subtle, because it was a pretty underripe, nasty mango. I used it basically because I wanted to see if I could grow out the pit as yet another Winter Gardening project. :-)

Suppers: Sunday: BBQ at parents' place Monday: Shepherd's Pie, garden beans The tomato seen here is from the garden but I don't remember what it is... Gaaah! Maybe Purple Cherokee??? No idea - how horrible! We had two of the Blanche Beauté tomatoes on Sunday evening at my parents' house. I read somewhere online that white tomatoes just taste pale but to me, they tasted delicate and quite nice. However, I am totally into the dark, smoky, black and purple tomatoes at the moment. Not enough of them ripening to keep me happy - aaargh. They're just sitting there, shivering their bunnies off. (whatever that means) Tuesday : Broccoli quiche, farmers' market Fingerling potatoes, split pea soup and - yes, more peas, frozen ones this time, on the side. Wednesday (tonight): Salmon loaf with basmati rice and tinned french-style beans, crispy cinnamon oven-baked tortillas afterwards.

...All around, all around... And the green grass grew all around! 7 days to germination! Not bad, compared to up to a month for some lawn grasses... What look like snowy patches around the grass is actually bare patches where the soil has washed away during the past week's rains. Let's all hope there's enough soil for the grasslings to start rooting. And that I didn't make the newspaper too thick and the grasslings can push their nice strong native clod-busting roots through it and not just fade away because it's too shallow. Ugh, I'll never forgive myself if it all dies out within a few days.... :-(((

I know it's a few days late, but I just realized I had these pictures in my camera... Wednesday: Farmer's market supper: orange "cheddar" cauliflower, corn, potato-leek soup, Ace bread, and milkshake!!! The cheddar cauliflower tastes nothing like cheddar, but retains most of its lovely orange hue. I roasted it with curry powder and olive oil... delicious! Thursday: Family supper: Mommy took Nanny down to the hospital, so Daddy and Abigail came here. I made the world's most delicious pasta sauce with a medley of Children's Garden tomatoes... then wasted it on a bunch of Fettuce. It came out tasting overly dry and exactly like tinned tomato sauce. Not bad, just not stunning, the way the sauce was on its own. Quel Disappointing. Shabbos: Family again! With Mommy and Sara here this time. Standard issue. Chicken (shake n' bake sugary bbq sauce flavour, which was a huge hit!), kugel (undersalted), corn. Oh, mushroom crepes were the outstanding hit of...

Submitted at the Baskin Robbins Canada website: "My husband & I filled out the online survey at baskinrobbins.com/feedback and received two $1 off coupons.  Today, we took two of our children with us to the Yorkdale Mall BR location.  I placed my order and then handed the server one of the coupons.  Despite the fact that the store was actively promoting the "fill out the survey, receive a $1 coupon" offer, she refused to honour them, saying she'd never seen them and her boss wasn't there.  I asked her to phone her boss, and she refused, insisting that we must pay the full total until finally, we walked away, leaving our ice cream on the counter and our kids very disappointed.  I have never received such awful customer service in a BR location - ironically, in return for reporting a rave review about our treatment at our LAST BR visit (at Woodbine Centre), and I wanted to let you know how very upset we were by this inc...

Hey - I just noticed yesterday:  Eli has teeth .  My goodness, it makes a difference to one's appearance to have upper front teeth.  They're implants.  I'm so happy my parents could afford them and my mother followed through getting them for him.   So it's malignant.  I'm thinking I'll tell the older kids pretty soon - they'll notice anyway - and wait a while for the younger ones because they're pretty clueless.   Blah.  I'm making everyone a big pot o' fettucine to cheer them up, though.  With children's garden tomatoes.   This development - the tumour, not the pasta - ought to keep my mother busy.  She's constantly busy caretaking the entire family.  Between Nanny, Eli & my dad, she's always running around looking after somebody .  (which, when I'm feeling immature, pisses me off about when I'd just had the baby & could barely walk, let alone do the laundry, and she didn't ...

With my lousy battered-by-babies brain and memory, the only thing I remember about September 11, 2001, is arriving at my desk and then the phone started ringing... it was Jeremy (up early in Calgary time!); the world was ending and something felt very right about that call... we talked for a long time, watching the video stuff on the Internet as the second plane came in... and wondered how it was all going to end.   Baby awake, parcel here,   <3 J

This is a wonderful spider who turned up in our front garden. I only noticed it after I watered and saw that the water droplets had beaded up all over her web... beautiful.

I can punish Ted more effectively by making a faaaaabulous supper with delicious fresh veggies from the marmers' farket. Not sure exactly how that would punish him, though. Unless I told him he couldn't eat any.

Oh, no... SO tired. Woke up stuffy & miserable at 3:30 for the 120th time in a row and then it took over an hour on the sofa to fall back asleep. THIS HOUSE IS KILLING ME... just not fast enough; it's taking its time, little by little. And then the baby woke up at 5. He doesn't wail in the morning now, just kind of whimpers - it's a low-grade crying, so hopefully that means he's getting used to the idea that 6 a.m. is the absolute earliest we will have anything to do with him. Anyway, after I took him into the bed at 6 and nummied him, of course I fell back into the most deep and precious sleep. So then didn't get up with the big kids, and I felt SO sick I got entirely pissed off at the universe. Ted's job is awful, but at least he gets sick days. Oh, and a paycheque. MY job is the closest thing to slavery that exists in this country... long hours, hard, active days with ZERO compensation and ZERO benefits; including no right to call in sick if I fee...

As in, "Is he vominating, mama?" You can always count on a week of everybody being sick (last week, and not me, thank goodness!) to expand her vocabulary in new and interesting ways! (it came up today because I was whispering something to the baby and I guess that's what she heard me saying... which I take as testimony to my calm, cool exterior under very strained circumstances - that the baby could be puking all over the bed and all I do is calmly whisper something to him and wipe him up with a towel!)

p.s. my father has a tumour.

Me: Let's take it upstairs and put it in the pushke - if we find money in the laundry, it's not ours, we put it in the pushke. Naomi: If there's an old man in your house, you can give it to him. If there is an old man in your house, you puuuuuut it in the pushke, and then he takes it out! Okay, then. Since last Sunday, she's gone totally off brisses, her fascination of the last almost-one-year... she's now making weddings. She'll walk in and announce "I'm getting married!" And everybody had better pay attention OR ELSE. She seems to think a kallah is the most pedantic kind of teacher, because her weddings always come off sounding more like an ultra-bossy circle time. Where she gets to stand on a steppy-stool and announce repeatedly, "okay, guys - guys, okay!" Elisheva said she doesn't think they say "guys" that often at a real wedding. Her weddings can also get very loud. Oy.

Okay! Maybe the FOURTH time's the charm. If this post works, I'll fix up the formatting later. Not like anybody reads these things anyway... sigh. And by the way, I $#!% hate Picasa because this is my second time typing this in and the interface is so buggy it crashed in the middle of my longest, most heartfelt post in a LOoong time... >:-(((( SO: here's what I did today - besides hang out at Riverdale Farm for their annual Fall Fair (no, it's not fall yet, but it was a good fair anyway and we really must go back next year... although there are so many things I say that about and then we never get around to doing it.) Full album here: http://picasaweb.google.com/Jay3fer/lawnrepair I cannot believe all that green stuff is gone. I mean, it wasn't grass, but now we don't have it at all. Keep your fingers crossed... can one say tehillim for a lawn? Supper: We had the O'connors, and as my mother says, they were delicious. Chicken things on sticks, marinated in...