melted smoosh

I'm too lazy to take photos of these individual things so I'm sprinkling in a few of my favourite nature photos from my camera roll!  Hope, British Columbia (August 2025) 1) a ginormous baking sheet. 15x21 inches to be exact -- it takes up an entire oven rack and it is phenomenal for baking just about anything from bacon, chicken tenders, bratwurst, and full sheet pan dinners to cookies. I consider dinner a failure if we don't have enough leftovers to eat for lunch the next day, and with six hungry people in the house, I was using two normal size baking sheets shoved next to each other or staggered on different oven racks and it just makes my life easier to put it all on one pan. bonus, my parchment paper fits perfectly on the larger pan so I no longer have to fold over the excess and hoping the folded part doesn't unfurl while cooking and start smoking against the hot oven wall! 

after almost fifteen years of marriage, we know each other sometimes better than we know ourselves (or it can seem that way at least). we pick up on subtle shifts in mood and energy levels and can predict our spouse's response to any given situation with 99% accuracy. we both are easy-going and low-conflict, which means no knock-down drag-out fights or yelling, but we definitely both have our own pet peeves about the other spouse's behavior! I'm sure some of these pet peeves are universal although the roles might be reversed in your partnership... so, let's get into the nitty gritty!  what drives him nuts - the pile of boxes I leave by the back door for him to break down and take out to the recycling bin behind the garage - the state of the minivan; I let it devolve into a giant mess before cleaning it - related: the fact that I purposely keep a supply of extra toys, books, wipes, diapers, sunblock, etc. etc. etc. in the car. he has suggested bringing everything into th...

it's about time for a good old airing of the grievances. while we have ever so much for which to give thanks, sometimes we need the catharsis of enumerating our woes, big and small. (you can read the 2023 edition here.) _________________________________________ first up, potty training.  I buckled down and trained Greta and Cecilia both around age 2 1/2, and it went fairly well (I'm a big fan of waiting until the kid is practically ready to train themselves). Elizabeth turned 2 1/2 near the end of the school year, and logically it seemed like a great time to buckle down -- we wouldn't be driving around to after school sports and activities and we'd have more time at home. I kept waiting for the day when I'd wake up full of excitement and motivation to strip off the diaper and chase a naked toddler around the house. and ... shockingly ... that day never came. then we were preparing for our trip to Seattle in July and it definitely didn't seem like the right time...

life has thrown us a few happy curveballs in the past few months! most important is an update on Cecilia's teeth. Cece brushes her teeth faithfully, but our dentist has explained to us that her enamel is weak so she will always be more prone to cavities. she needed fillings in both lower pre-molars at age five, poor baby. fortunately she's been cavity-free since then, but when her six-year-old molars erupted, they came in hypocalcified; there's a noticeable difference from her other teeth as they are softer and almost crumbly (which sounds horrifying but fortunately they don't cause her pain). the dentist said it likely had something to do with the tooth formation either in utero or as a baby that may have been affected by illness or fever. she's had exactly the same exposure to fluoride as Greta, and Nick and I both have "good" teeth.  anyway, in January she developed an infection in one of the pre-molars that had been filled previously. the pain and swel...

it feels a bit preposterous to sit down and type out a list of woes on my personal laptop, in my own heated house, while my four healthy children nap or play (respectively) and I sip on a San Pellegrino flavored water from a case that a neighbor on our Buy Nothing group just gifted us. and yet. and yet! there has been quite a bit of woe in the last several weeks and I want to complain about it, so I shall.  at the top of the list: car woes. not one, but two of Nick's cars were hit by other drivers within the past month. fortunately he was not injured, but working on his cars is essentially therapy for him -- so he lost not just two vehicles in his fleet, but also the time that was required to deal with insurance and police reports, and the emotional benefit of his favourite hobby.  this car was rear-ended while parked. Nick wasn't actually in the car, but saw it happen -- the driver of the SUV in the photo below was driving full speed in the right hand lane and didn't reali...

looking back now, the only way to describe this summer is to use an abbreviated phrase I used to use in my preteen journal: it f. & d.'ed (flew and dragged). so many things about it were different from previous summers -- since I was on maternity leave, the girls were home except for when they had specific camps lined up. we're so blessed to live in a neighborhood where we know (and love!) most of our neighbors, and both girls have a little squadron of friends their own age. they're old enough now to ride their bikes around a few block radius or go play at a friend's house by themselves as long as I know where they're going. often, four or five kids (mine included) would rush in from the backyard to play, stopping only to heed my reminder to "shut the doooor!!", and stampede upstairs to the girls' rooms or down to the basement play area. just as suddenly they would all stream out the front door on their way to other adventures and the house would b...

  1) Completing kindergarten and third grade. the girls wrapped up their school year on a high note. they loved their teachers and their classes, and have really enjoyed getting more involved in school sports (basketball and volleyball for Greta, soccer and spirit squad for Cecilia). Cecilia's favourite "class" was speech therapy. I was impressed with how much progress she made in articulating her /r/ sounds over the course of the year, and in fact, the speech therapist called me the last week of school to say that Cece's pronunciation is now within the normal range for her age and she won't require speech support in the fall unless something else crops up. selfishly, I miss the absolute cuteness of her little voice, but I know she was self-conscious about it and I'm so proud of her hard work to say her /r/s in the "new" way (the therapist encouraged us to frame correct pronunciation as "new" vs "old", rather than "right...