Yeah, it really is about the kids.

I might've written about this one before, I know I've told the story before, but a quick search of the two relevant blog archives didn't turn up anything, so if I'm repeating myself, please indulge me a bit. Christine and I finished putting together cupcakes for Daniel's not-a-birthday-party tomorrow.  Well, I say "finished" but they're not quite finished.  The finishing touch goes on tomorrow.  Tonight we laid down turf (green frosting), railroad ties (without ballast ... I know, I know) and rails on the tops of the cupcakes.  There will be pictures tomorrow once we place the engines on their tracks. Anyway, so I've been thinking a lot about trains and tracks tonight.  Then I came downstairs to clean up a little bit and spent maybe fifteen minutes working out how to build a couple of circuits from the pieces of Duplo train tracks we have on the play-table in the basement. That inevitably reminded me when we came into possession of these part

Three years old today.  Wow.  He's been super  attached to Percy  in pretty much every form lately, so we got him a new Percy for the wooden railway.  This one doesn't talk ( those are apparently rare as hen's teeth now and more than double the MSRP), but it does make engine noises when the wheels move, and that's pretty darn good by Daniel's reckoning. We asked him what we wanted for supper tonight when we got up this morning.  He might  have thought for a full second before he announced happily, "Cake!" Alright, so we are doing cupcakes for a little play-date we're hosting for him in lieu of a full party on Sunday, but that's two days away, we can't make him wait that long after such a clear and simple request.  So Christine made him a Percy cake. Or at least the best she could do with no special cake-pan, no fondant and essentially no notice.  I thought the result was pretty good considering that's 100% butter-cream frosting

Last Friday night James was pretty sick.  He seemed fine at swimming, tired at supper (but easy to explain because he always goes all out at swimming) and by 11pm he had a fever of 100.7°F.  So that was how last weekend went, James and Christine stuck around the house an I kept Daniel out and amused. By Tuesday it seemed like business as usual, except by 10am Daniel had a fever and had to come home from daycare.  Daniel's fever didn't last very long, he seemed to be more-or-less himself by late afternoon, but I took Wednesday off and the two of us just hung out for the day. So in the morning we went out to the Nature Museum  in the morning (the biggest hit was the dinosaurs, even though that exhibit doesn't have a play area the way some of the other exhibits do) and in the afternoon we settled down in the theatre to watch a movie. Partway through the movie Daniel snuggled up to me and started nuzzling my shoulder.  I swear I thought it was the cutest thing ever.  I sa

I haven't written one of these for a while.  There's a reason for that but nothing I'm going to write down.  Either I (or whomever reads this after me) will remember when revisiting it, or I won't and it doesn't matter either way. So today is Family Day  in Ontario (and something like 2/3 of Canada, I guess?  B.C. seems to have had theirs last week, for example, I don't think QC has one at all ... I don't pretend to have any idea how different provinces deal with such things) and I've been planning for this one for a while now. It was a little touch and go because James had the flu this weekend, he was in very  rough shape on Friday night and most of Saturday, but Daniel and I mostly kept to ourselves and today all seemed quite well.  Actually, today was a really good day for it, too, because it was not nearly as wickedly cold as it has been (-33 °C yesterday when Daniel and I were heading out of the house) but it's the warmest now it's been