No appreciation for the classics

DH heard Meghan Follows being interviewed on the CBC the other day, and we're highly suggestible, so we ended up watching Anne of Green Gables.

The movie was wrapping up, the girls had already looked at me to check if I was crying when Matthew died (and to laugh at me) (no, not all the girls, I have blessed/cursed S with the inability to sit through almost any show without tearing up about something), Anne had announced that she wasn't going off to school, and she was walking dreamily through another field.

Sorry, I guess that last paragraph should've had a big spoiler alert before it, but really, the book has been around for 100+ years and the movie was broadcast 30 years ago, surely to goodness you all know by now that Matthew dies...

Anyhow, so Anne was walking through the field, Gilbert was approaching on horseback, the music was swelling...and DH and K started giggling. So I gave them the stink-eye. And they giggled again. So I said, "Guys, it's the last, like, two minutes of the movie, can you just NOT?" And they giggled AGAIN.

Movie ended, I was in full happy ending afterglow, and DH explained to the other two (who, of course, just kept saying, "What are you laughing at? What are you laughing at?" for the rest of the movie) that when Gilbert was approaching on horseback, he had leaned over to K and said, "Imagine how different this scene would play out if Gilbert was riding a giraffe?"

Which led to a full five minutes of:

"Imagine if he was riding a monkey?"

"Imagine if he was riding a pig?"

"Imagine if he was riding an ostrich, holding on for dear life?"

And finally, "Imagine if he was riding a unicorn Pegasus? And then the Pegasus was pooping rainbows?"

Missed Opportunity

I was at a stop light the other day, and a girl pulled up next to me with her windows down and her crappy thumpy music BLARING.

You know the kind, where your windows are all the way up, but you still can't hear your music because of the THUMPA THUMPA.

The light turned green, and suddenly my dear 101.3 (the heartbeat of South Western Ontario) played Tie a Yellow Ribbon!  And I really, really, really wished it had come on 15 seconds earlier, so I could've rolled down my windows and cranked it, and then given my traffic neighbour this face:

Serge Thomann/WireImage

To show her that I was also rockin' out. In the loser cruiser. To Tony Orlando and Dawn.

Parental Guidance

I've been out at rehearsals lately, so the girls have been spending some quality time watching TV with DH. So luckily I missed these two conversations.

1) DH got hooked on a show called Naked and Afraid. There was a marathon on, or something. If you're not familiar with it - this is a show where strangers are dropped in some remote location - naked - and they have to survive for some ridiculously long period of time. Also, DH couldn't recall if there is money on the line. People would do this for kicks?? Anyhow, the important thing to note here is that everyone is naked, but their private bits are blurred out.

So, they were watching an episode with a guy who, in DH's words "must've had a gigantic package" because S finally had to ask, "Pop, why do they keep blurring out that guy's butt?"


2) DH and E were watching a show on Discovery last night, and a commercial came on. They watched in silence, and at the end she said, "Pop, I don't understand - why is that boy getting a car, and what's Cialis?"

Cross that one off the list

Thanks to another mom's status update on Facebook, I found out the girls were learning about where babies come from.

(They certainly weren't offering up this information on their own.)

When I asked them what they'd learned at school that day, they casually mentioned that they'd started learning about it, but there was more to come.

Oh, did I mention that one of them was sick that day? So I practically shoved her out the door the next day, not wanting her to miss any of this, because God knows I was in no rush to have this conversation...

So days go by, and nothing is mentioned.

Finally the other day we were driving somewhere and I asked what they learned at school that day.

Silence.

"Did you learn about where babies come from, and that's why you don't want to talk about it?"

"Yes."

Later on, they started to tell me more about it.

"And then someone asked if you can choose to have a baby, or how you end up having a baby."

"And?"

"And then the teacher TOLD us! And we giggled. Because he even used the word!!"

"What word? Penis?"

"No!"

"Sex?"

"YES!"

Pause.

"So....we know, Mommy."

Pause. Meaningful look straight at me.

"We know....."

How the other half lives

I went to a work event the other day, and one of the presenters was a person I recognized from high school.

I knew he had gone to an Ivy League school after high school (with a scholarship, I think)...when I read his bio, it turns out that yes, he got his undergraduate degree from Harvard, and then he got his Ph.D. from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

I was telling all of this to DH last night over dinner, and we were marvelling at how intelligent and focussed one would have to be to achieve such things.

At which point S said, "May I please change the subject now?"

Me: "Sure, what would you like to talk about?"

S: "M was telling us about this video of gymnasts at the Olympics where someone has dubbed it to make it look like they're all farting..."

DH: "Oh, man, we've gotta see that!"

I'm 97% sure that the same conversation was not happening at the Rhodes Scholar's dinner table last night.

Free labour!

I had two goals yesterday: get groceries and clean the bathroom.

(Spoiler alert: I accomplished neither.)

The second goal was especially important because, when I tried to remember the last time I thoroughly cleaned the bathtub, the best answer I could come up with was "before Christmas."

But when I realized it probably wasn't going to happen, I did my best impression of a multi-tasker and put the kids to work. Before each of them went in for a shower, I sprayed the cleaner on the tub, threw a washcloth on top, and told them to skate around while they were in there and get cleanin'.

Also, fun fact about me: if I get out of the shower and put my hair in a Turbie Twist,

and then get distracted by cleaning the damn tub, and my hair ends up drying completely in the Turbie Twist, when I eventually take off the Turbie Twist, I look like this guy:

That was lovely. Loud, but lovely.

I just came home from rehearsal and everyone is asleep.

I got ready for bed downstairs, then came up to my bedroom to find K sleeping in my spot. She and DH were snoring away, and she was sleeping so soundly I didn't want to disturb her, so I climbed into her bed.

As I lay there listening to E and S snoring, I was so filled with love. Lying in that cozy room, lit by the two bedside lights we've been using since we brought the girls home from the hospital, I thought about how lucky I am to be in a house with so much life and love in it. I listened to the rhythm of their wheezy, whistling breaths, and I thought about the fact that moments like this are fleeting, and the girls will be out of the house before I know it, and I'll look back on tonight and wish I could relive it one more time. I looked at their angelic little faces, surrounded by so many stuffed animals they were almost completely camouflaged in the cuteness.

And then I thought, "This snoring is driving me nuts, I've got to go downstairs and get some sleep."