I just found out my girlfriend’s mom has been diagnosed with liver cancer. It is an aggressive cancer and they don’t believe treatment will help. I can’t believe that one of Emma’s girlfriends will be losing their Grandma. It makes you realize how short life really is. I really wish that all of our family would quit smoking. It is such an unncessary risk. We’re heading out to Fernie this weekend. It’ll be good to visit with Grandpa. You need to hold tight onto those you love and make sure that they know it.

Yesterday marks the day that Emma discovered herself. She was sitting on the change table looking into the mirror as I put her hair into a pony. She pointed at her reflection and proudly said “Emmy!”. I was so excited!!! I yelled out yes honey that’s you and started laughing like a maniac! Of course then she just kept pointing and saying Emmy, Emmy, Emmy. At the next diaper change, she no longer did it. I guess the journey to self realization was very short lived. We’ll see what today brings! We’re planning on going to work to meet Daddy for lunch. Then we have to bake some cupcakes for her friend’s birthday. It’s going to be a big day again for her!

For those of you interested (i.e. New Yorkers), here is a great site:

http://www.poison-ivy.org/

They even have cards and posters available to help you identify it!

For those of you unaware, every summer, my Mum goes home to New York to visit and help take care of her Mum. For the last several years, at some point in the summer, my Mum has been working in the garden and somehow ended up touching poison ivy (in her defense, there is a lot of it there!) This year, the poison ivy was not as bad, but she also seems to have upset some wasps and got stung several times! We wish her well.

Well, as they say, “what goes around, comes around”. Usually this means that if you are mean, people will be mean to you and if you are nice, they will be nice to you…

In our house, it means that Paula gets sick, then Emma gets sick, then, just when you think it is safe, I got sick… Now I have whatever it was that Paula had… It sucks. The good part is that since I just spent the last several weeks taking care of Paula and Emma (luckily Kris pretty much takes care of himself a lot), that nursing is also coming back around. Unfortunately Paula says I make an even worse patient then she does as I have a lot of trouble with the whole “just lay back and let everyone take care of everything”. Last week, I was giving her trouble for similar stuff…

Between Paula, Emma and I all being sick to varying degrees, there has been a lot of us trying to sleep (usually broken up by Emma trying to start another 3am watch TV and party session). Other than taking care of the sick, being sick, and occasionally getting some work done (luckily things were a bit slow there) we really haven’t been up to much recently.

This weekend, Kris has fled with Nana for the safety of Drayton Valley (more specifically Don and Darlene’s cabin at Buck Lake. It sounds really nice! Hope they have fun and stay healthy!

There’s a new line of DEmotivational posters that are just too funny…especially on a Monday. I’m sure a few will make it onto Christopher’s christmas list! Here’s some of my favs:

Adversity – That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable.

Bitterness – Never be afraid to share your dreams with the world because there’s nothing the world loves more than the taste of really sweet dreams.

Consistency – It’s only a virtue if you’re not a screw up.

Change – When the winds of change blow hard enough, the most trivial of things can become deadly projectiles.

Potential – Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up. (With a picture of french fries)

Insanity – It’s difficult to comprehend how insane some people can be. Especially when you’re insane. (With a picture of a skydiver — hint to Mark! who if you didn’t know had a bad skydiving experience and now is robo dad with a metal piece in his leg)

Check out the rest…http://despair.com/viewall.html

Well, it has been one heck of a week!

Last Friday (Aug 10), Paula really got knocked off her feet by the flu, and the weekend was pretty much a write off. Monday, she felt really bad, but went to work anyways and by the end of the day, she felt so bad that we went to the doctor, who said that she will likely be sick with Influenza for at least 10 days… I have been home since then to take care of Paula and the kids (OK, Kris pretty much takes care of himself) So far, we are on day 7, and Paula can hardly talk because her throat hurts so much. I keep sending her to bed for more sleep and making her tea, but there is not really much else to do except wait it out.

Tonight Paula’s Aunt, Uncle and Mom come back from Drayton, and we are supposed to all get together before they leave, but we shall have to see… I know that we don’t want to get them sick, so it may just be me and the kids.

On Tuesday morning, Emma was really hot and even after giving her Tylenol she was at about 100F. So, we also took her to the doctor (she also went last week for an eye infection!). By the time that we saw him, she was looking a bit better, and luckily she seems to be doing OK now. It seems like she got what Paula has and was able to recover way faster. Apparently breast milk has lots of antibodies for what ails Mum. Currently, she is back to herself and wandering around looking for trouble and ways to trash the house.

[Q] “Can you enlighten me on the origin of the expression keep your eyes peeled or pealed?”

[A] It’s spelt peeled, as in peeling an apple. It derives from an old verb pill, “to plunder”, which is the root of our modern word pillage. It came to us from the Latin root pilare, meaning “to take the hair off, pluck” (closely connected with our depilate), but which also had the figurative meaning of “plunder, cheat”, almost exactly the same as the figurative meaning of our modern verbs fleece or pluck. From about the 17th century on, pill was commonly spelt peel and took on the sense of “to remove or strip” in the weakened sense of removing an outer covering, such as a fruit. The figurative sense of keeping alert, by removing any covering of the eye that might impede vision, seems to have appeared in the US about 1850.

Not so disgusting, I guess…

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-kee1.htm

I haven’t been keeping up with the blog or e-mails or anything. Starting last weekend, things got really hectic, really quickly for some reason. Michael came home from Fernie for the first time this summer and we wanted to visit him while he had the chance (he’s gone again). My cousin Darcel came up on Saturday and spent the weekend with us, which was really nice. It’s been a long time since we’ve spent time with her — she’s never even seen Gabriel talk and he’s almost 4 now! Anyways, between visiting these two people, we were really busy. Michael came to Butterfield Acres with us for Emma’s first trip. It’s a farm where you can get really hands on with the animals and pet all of the babies and stuff. She loved it! We had to remove the squeakers from her shoes though because she was scaring all the baby pigs away from her! There are lots of pics of this trip posted. We also had Gymboree that day — just like every Saturday. On Sunday, we went for a walk down by the River and walked up to the ice cream store by Joe’s house. We visited with him there for a little while. He showed up without any shoes! I know what he needs for Christmas now… It started to rain while we were walking back to the car. Luckily, neither Darcel nor us are made out of sugar, so we all survived. The next day (Monday), we took Darcel over to my brother’s to visit. That’s always crazy…three kids, oh vey! They all run around like mad talking and playing together. Emma absolutely loves it! When Darcel left to head back to Edmonton, we went on a hike with Michael at Nose Hill which is a really big park near our house. They’re paving a bunch of paths through it, which is great for pushing the stroller on, but it’s not as scenic as could be.

Emma has invented a new “extreme” sport to be performed while mommy is in the shower. The participant must be in footed sleepers to ensure maximum slipperyness. The goal is stand ontop of the toliet tank. That’s right, the tank, not the seat. She carefully climbs up onto the seat and looks to see if I’m watching. Then, she climbs up ontop of the tank and holds out her hands like she’s surfing. She is such a monkey and loves it when I scream in horror. She has successfully done this twice now and thank goodness has not yet fallen. You can only get out of the shower so quickly, you know. I tried putting stuff on the seat so that she couldn’t climb it but she just took it all off! I don’t know where she gets this insane climbing ability.

Mark is the murderer…of pussywillows that is. He has this idea that having part of his parent’s pussywillow tree growing in our backyard would be really special. He’s tried transplanting it 3 times now. I currently have a cup full of dead branches on the island. Actually, I always have a bunch of dead branches somewhere. The poor tree! Pussy willows are supposed to be the easiest thing to transplant. In fact, that’s what they make root starter out of! Mark is just having no luck at all. Maybe he should put pussywillow tree on his birthday list!

Emma has enough hair to squeeze in pigtails on both sides. Super cute! She left them in long enough to take a few shots. When she took them out a couple of hours later, her hair stayed up. It was the funniest Emma-do I’ve ever seen. It sorta looked like puppy ears or something.