lifepassedby.com » Dad

Back to work

kasper — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 04:13:09 +0000

After a sweet 2 week holiday (spent at the exotic…home) I am finally going back to work tomorrow. Feels like I just left, I’m not really sure where the time went. I will say that it was relaxing though.
So I will rewind back to New Year’s Eve when my Dad took us out to dinner. We went to my favourite chinese restaurant Imperial Buffet. I had made the reservation the day before for 5 o’clock and thank goodness I did. You should have seen the mob of people we passed on our way out who were waiting to get seated. We always tend to get to a restaurant as early as we can for little D‘s sake. There is always less of a crowd and we can still get him home in plenty of time to have a decent bedtime. When we got home we opened our Christmas presents – yes we had not opened our gifts from dad or vice versa. Little D had pooped out when opening his gifts on Christmas day so I decided to cut things short and figured we would try again when he was more interested. In fact, he didn’t open his last gift until yesterday afternoon!
Saturday we drove to Paris (no not that Paris) to meet up with my Mum and do a little shopping at Mary Maxim. It’s one of the few great places left to buy good yarn so I go there whenever I get the urge to start a new project (thought I don’t tend to finish as many as I start). My new knitting project is going to be a prayer shawl for my retiring Principal who is moving on to become a pastor. I’m not totally sure it is appropriate as they are usually used for grieving or ill people who need prayers, but I figured he would at least see the thought behind the gift. While I was there I picked up an origami kit I had my eye on, and finally splurged and bought 2 cross stitch kits that I have been looking at for a while.

I have already started on the hands which will be for little D and then I’ll do the feet which will be for baby x.
The biggest news of the holiday is that I managed to get little D potty trained! Okay, not 100%, but pretty close. With the exception of the first night (Monday) he has been sleeping right through the night and waking up in the morning dry, which I think is really incredible. He hasn’t been in diapers since waking up Monday morning and since Tuesday, has only had 5 accidents. Now we’re still having issues pooping on the potty, but peeing seems to be a done deal. I think he daycare teacher is going to be thrilled. I just went out today to get him more underpants so that he will have a supply at daycare instead of diapers. They’re so cute too. I mean they don’t have anyone special on them like spiderman or anything, they’re just so small. I had to get him an XXS, but they’re still a wee bit too big for him. I am prouder than proud can be. I’ve heard the horror stories about how long it can take and all the pull-ups and bed wetting, but I just got him to throw away all his diapers (just figuratively, I’ve still got them bagged up for the next one) and told him that this was it, he’d have to do his best to get to the potty to do his business or he’d have wet underpants. You never cease to amaze me kid, you make me proud!

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Mish Mash

kasper — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 04:36:48 +0000

More social bookmarking. I came across this site called Acobay, that while it is a social bookmarking site, is a bit different. This site aims to connect people via their “Stuff“. For instance, I drive a G5, so I’d add that to my stuff page with a review of the car and then others who have the same car would add their reviews. There is an area to discuss their stuff as well. Though it’s just in it’s beta stage, I think this site has some definite potential. Worth checking out.
Another weekend has flown by almost without me noticing. How the hell does that happen? Today I spent most of the day trying to get my front door knob replaced. When we moved into this house we were only given a single key for the front door, which I suppose was no big deal for the single lady living here, but since there are two of us needing the one key that can’t be copied we needed to do something about it. Moving at the speed of a snail, we finally got around to getting a new door knob and I finally decided it was warm enough today (0° C) to tackle the job of putting the new knob on. The old one was a total bitch to get off. It didn’t behave anything like the new one I was replacing it with, so I had to fiddle with it forever. It always seems that whenever I attempt to do some project for myself I end up calling my Dad up to help me with something I can’t quite do. I hate not being independent enough to do it myself, but I guess I’d rather have it done right. I love the new knob but the only thing that bugs me is that the locking mechanism on the inside of the door is like the bathroom locks where you have to push and twist the handle. The old one had a button in the middle that you had to turn to lock. The old one was easy to see if I’d forgotten to lock the door, but I’ll just have to get used to the new one.
Tomorrow I start my dual jobs. I will be doing my old-new job (wtf?), okay, the VP secretary thing which is new as of November, in the morning. So when I get in at 7:30, I’ll be getting all the supply teachers arranged for any absent teachers. Then from like 9:00 till 11:30 I’ll be across the hall in Guidance where I will be totally winging it since I’ve only had like 2 hours of training and the girl who trained me has left the country for the week. Wish me luck, cause I don’t think I have a clue how to do much over there. Probably would be a good idea to go to bed about 2 hours ago in order to get a good night sleep. Yeah, night.

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Useful site

kasper — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:41:12 +0000

I found this really cool site that is super handy. It’s wize.com. I find myself constantly looking up products and reviewing which is the best one for me. I swear I don’t remember life before the Internet! How on earth did I make a decision to purchase anything? But seriously say for instance you were looking for coffee grinders. You would find yourself at a page divided into categories by use. From there you would end up at a page which lists all the products. Down the left hand side are options such as price and brand to filter your results. Most of the coffee grinders have reviews which I always find useful in making my own decision, plus you can select multiple items and do a side by side comparison. On top of that you can search out the lowest price for coffee grinders and purchase them right from that page. If, like me, you like to do some investigation before making a purchase, then this is the site for you!

My Dad just emailed me (yes from downstairs) to say that his printer is giving up the ghost and that he will be looking for a new one. Now I know that I can do some easy research to find just the right one. I personally haven’t had a printer in quite some time. Though I find them very useful I found that the print quality was crappy after not too long. I don’t print very often, I guess that’s the problem. It would go in spurts. I’d leave the printer for a month or two then have a whole bunch of stuff to do and end up being disappointed with the results. I used to make my own cards and thought it was so much better than simply buying them, but when you end up with gaps in your printing it looks less than professional. Hopefully I can help my Dad find the perfect printer.

Mish Mash

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Mum’s visit

kasper — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:33:54 +0000

My Mum was down for the last 2 days, so that’s why you haven’t seen me around. She always brings stuff for us whenever she comes, and this was no exception. She brought an adorable pair of white overalls with boats on them and a turquoise plastic deck chair (mini-sized) for baby D. She brought me a pot of assorted plants and her old plugin garden lights. We had a great time shopping for plants for my window boxes and pots. I am all gungho to rip out the prickly hedges in the front of the house and plant Spirea instead. It’s going to be a huge job since there are 4 hedges to be removed. Hopefully I can manage to get everything in my mind done before my Dad gets home. I’m going to keep this entry really short because I’m off to plant my window boxes.

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Playstationed

kasper — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:45:53 +0000

Hubby’s birthday isn’t until June 5, but since I always try to get him something really great I tend to start early on the gift. He’s been going on and on about getting a PS3, but frankly we just can’t afford it. I mean, first of all we used to have a Super Nintendo and the original Playstation. Where are they now? Exactly. We eventually got sick of them and they (I believe) are currently sitting out in the garage waiting for a yard sale. Then looking at the cost of the system and then the games on top of that…not bloody likely. I figured the only reason he even wants a system is to play Gran Turismo again. You’d think that when he drives for a living that he wouldn’t want to play games that involve driving. Like I don’t think it would be much fun to play a game that involved answering phones or typing. Just me though.

So I checked out ebay and found an auction that had 23 games, 3 controllers, 2 guitars plus the PS2 with a high bid of $280.00. I tried to see if it was a good deal by checking the cost of the new system with the important games that hubby would’ve wanted from the 23: Gran Turismo 4, Grand Theft Auto (x4), Guitar Hero II, III and Encore: Rocks the 80′s. I couldn’t even find all the games for sale, but suffice to say that the system, GT4, GHIII plus 2 guitars was already over $300.00. So I put in a big of $300.00 max and won the auction for $290.00.

Since the guy listed that shipping would be from Toronto I asked if I could pick it up instead of paying the $30.00 for shipping. Unfortunately Toronto is a big city and he was clear on the other side of it from me. He offered to take $10.00 off if I’d still make the trip, which I did. That was Monday. When I got home I hinted that I had a really great gift for him and maybe he wanted it early. After all it was exactly 1 month to the day before his actual birthday. (I’m so horrible) I just couldn’t wait to give it to him. Besides he has Mondays off and we weren’t doing anything that afternoon. I couldn’t seem to convince him to totally give in, but he he’d think about it and maybe the following day I could give it to him. He was started complaining that he was feeling dizzy by dinnertime and ended up staying home from work yesterday.

Laying it on thick at lunch, I asked him if he wanted a piece of cake for dessert. He said he did, so I asked if he wanted “birthday cake”. He laughed and said ‘fine’. So I got the candle in the piece of cake and sang Happy Birthday for effect. When I got home on Monday with all the stuff I had it stashed downstairs at my Dad’s since he’s out of the country at the moment, so we agreed that he would change baby D and I’d get the gift ready. I made him close his eyes when he got downstairs and I had the games fanned out across the floor and was holding the guitar. When he opened his eyes it took him a minute to figure out what he was looking at and then he asked ‘you got me a PS3?’. “Nope sorry, just a PS2″. At which point he realized how many games there were and he was shocked.

So we played Guitar Hero III a bit downstairs while trying to keep one eye on baby D who was loving crawling around new surroundings. Then we managed to get the very heavy tv (which my Dad gave us since he bought an HDTV, but hadn’t bothered to move yet) up 2 levels to our bedroom, where I got everything rearranged and hooked up. We’ve managed to spend an exorbitant amount of time playing games over the last 2 days (yes he called in ‘sick’ again today).

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More shoes?!

kasper — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:55:56 +0000

So once again I am plagued by the “I let real life get in the way of my blog” guilt. The title of my website pretty much says it all. I really don’t know where my time goes. I haven’t uploaded photos to Flickr in I don’t know how long, mainly because of the daunting task of removing the red eye from the majority of shots. Why when I use the red-eye setting do I still have this issue? grr

Let’s see, what’s been up lately? Well, on Sunday we went to the Mama’s and Chicks Spring Show. I managed to get a free ticket from the woman in front of me who had an extra one. Hubby went in ahead of me while I stayed behind to fill out ballots for the prizes, but when I joined him I thought it was funny that he said ‘everyone’s trying to sell me stuff’. Well duh. That’s sort of the point of the show. I really wanted to get a wrap to carry baby D around, but was told numerous times ‘absolutely not!’. I have gone the sling route before and been totally unsatisfied with them. While I was still pregnant I got a ring sling, which I found fairly complicated to use and just didn’t feel confident enough to be hands free. So then I got a snuggly type of carrier which was seemed too small even though baby D is on the small size for his age, so that was out. Finally I saw a hip carrier at Walmart on the cheap so I tried that one and found that the strap was cutting into my neck so I returned it. The wrap at the show was a ‘Cuddly Wrap’ and hubby was not about to shell out $65 for a long piece of fabric. We did however manage to pick up a couple of things: a ‘Gertie ball’ the ones with the nubbies all over, a travel placemat, and a pair of SqueakyFeet. I love these shoes, as I am slightly baby shoe obsessed.

They have little squeakers in the heel so that with every step you know where your child is (or at least have a rough idea). The squeakers can also be taken out if/when I get sick of hearing that much squeaking.

Monday we all (our little family of 3, plus my Dad and my brother and his wife) went out for dinner before my Dad left for Germany. I’m not much for Greek food, but since my Dad likes it that’s what where we went. It was actually very yummy. I wasn’t overly impressed with my brother and his wife. But then I rarely am. They just seemed so distant. When my Dad tried to talk to them they didn’t seem interested.

Yesterday morning I got a call from my friend Nancy to meet her to go shopping. I didn’t have very long since my Dad needed the car to go out for his weekly lunch date with the guys but I did manage to meet her for an hour. I really wanted to get those foam puzzle mats for the deck since it’s pretty old and I don’t want baby D crawling around and undoubtedly getting a splinter. I had in my mind that they would be multi-coloured, but the store only had 1 set of blue. Nancy mentioned that she has a set of mats with the letters on them and would bring them to our parenting group on Thursday.

As for now, I’ve just gone over everything that needs to be done around the house with my Dad. He (mr. generous) is actually giving us $80 to buy plants for the garden! So we are just about to take my Dad to the airport where he’ll be flying to Germany and staying for 5 weeks. It’s so weird every time he goes though. We get really close just before he leaves. Like we’ve been doing dinner together (our 3, plus Dad) for the last 4 nights. Then over the 5 weeks he’ll be gone, we get into our own routine. Like free car for me – yahoo! And when he finally gets back, the relationship is a bit strained. Hope we can plow through that this time around. Anyway, off to the airport…

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Dust off the old barbeque

kasper — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:39:11 +0000

Yesterday was the second day that I took advantage of the weather and got baby D out in his portable crib. It was another beautiful day and I was trying to get a little more sun to even out the burn I managed to get on my long hour and a half walk on Monday. I love that my son likes the outdoors so much, but then I suppose he’s just a contented type of kid all around. I was only out for about half an hour when my Dad came out and started doing some more yard work. Late last week we worked in the front yard raking the last of last year’s leaves and trimming up the hedges that needed so much help. Yesterday was all about the backyard and pulling weeds, raking the caterpillarery things that fell off the tree and transplanting a hedge from the front yard. I became obsessed with the mini trees that seemed to be sprouting all over the backyard. In trying to get rid of them I cut and pulled out roots that were about 2 inches around. There is some serious root system running through the entire backyard so I wasn’t going to get it all out by any means. When I went out from my kitchen, on the step down to the deck was a brown paper bag. My Dad had bought some bulbs for me to plant. He got purple gladioli and pink lilies. I can’t wait to plant them, but the problem will be the fact that we have no idea what’s already been planted.

By the time hubby got home we had pretty much finished for the day so I got him to cook up some hamburgers and we had our first barbeque. Before dinner I took the little guy inside to get him out of his shorts and tee and put on his jammies since it was starting to get cool. I had to be reminded that it is only April still. Sounds funny, but it just seemed like such a summer’s day.

Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I have been working on and off on bringing back all my old posts. It’s a nostalgia thing really. In reformatting the entries for mysql I came across an entry that mentioned my new layout on August 29, 2005. I couldn’t remember what it looked like so I had a look at my past-domains page but I didn’t have a pic for that layout. Now I just can’t have that! So I ended up spending an exorbitant amount of time getting the pic. Thanks to Web Archive an oh so cool site that records static copies of the internet, and Firebug a very neat Firefox plugin, I did manage to get what I needed. My sanity has been protected, but unfortunately my beauty rest suffered for it. I can’t believe I’m up already considering I didn’t get to sleep until around 03:00!

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What a glorious day

kasper — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 16:44:30 +0000

It is an absolutely beautiful spring (I never thought it would come) day so this will be a relatively short post as I’ll be taking the little man out for a bit of sunshine as soon as he wakes up.

As promised my new layout is FINALLY up. I have slaved over every last little detail and am quite proud of how it turned out. The colours make me happy so hopefully (considering the amount of time I worked on it) it will be up for a while. If you happen to notice anything out of the ordinary or not working properly, please let me know. While I was getting my layout ready I fell back into fanlistings. I used to run 70+ of my own a couple of years ago, and while I don’t expect to run any listings I will be joining a ton I’m sure over the next little while.

I am embarrassed to say that until earlier this week I have relied on my maternity pants immensely. It’s funny but when I go from season to season I can’t for the life of me remember what I used to where last year. It just seems like I have no clothes. I did manage to drag out a pair of pre-pregnancy jeans a while back, but with the exception of sweat pants all the pants I wear are maternity pants. So earlier this week I thought, “this is crazy, my son is nearly a year old (where the hell did the time go?!) and I haven’t gotten my butt out of maternity pants?”. I don’t believe it was ever a necessity to stay in the larger size as much as laziness and fear. But I got up the courage and dug to the bottom of my pants drawer and found my forgotten favourite pants. I was worried about putting them on as they were a bit snug before getting pregnant, but I was delighted to find that they fit very nicely and weren’t too tight at all. This of course gave me great confidence, that coupled with the 2 new shirts my Dad had just bought for me, I decided it was time to do a bit of shopping for my new body.

I really don’t shop very often as I’m usually so disappointed in my body that I couldn’t bare the thought of spending money on it. However I can’t very well continue to wear pants with the big stretchy panel on the front given my son’s age, so I spent a couple of days picking up some great pieces. I spent way more than I wanted to, but I suspect that I was splurging given that the last time I shopped for myself was when I was pregnant. I ended up with 3 pairs of heavenly pants that fit just below my navel and are petite so I didn’t have to worry about having them tailored, 2 tank tops, 2 wrap tops and 2 button-up shirts in springy colours. I am very happy with my purchases and can’t wait to have somewhere to wear them.

I hear babbling coming from the other room, so I’m off to enjoy the sunshine!

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Lazy, lazy, lazy

kasper — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:53:59 +0000

I’m such a slack. I have no idea where my weekend went. I guess between watching movies and working on my new layout all the time just got sucked away. I really want to get this new layout finished up, but it seems that I keep changing my mind about how it should look. Maybe by next weekend I’ll have it looking spiffy enough to put up.
I started doing the Weekend Snapshot and was really looking forward to making myself take some photos so that I’d be able to post along with everyone, but I’ll refer back to the first statement of this entry. That’s right, I’m a slack. We were supposed to go to London to my Aunt’s house for my Mum’s “surprise” birthday. The “surprise” part is a joke because my Gran told my Mum to ask us (my brother & I) if we could come down to her party. Seeing as she already knows about it, it’s not exactly a surprise. I talked to her Friday and she said that she had been practicing looking surprised. I was really looking forward to seeing everyone and showing off how big baby D’s getting, but it got postponed due to weather. We got a dumping of like 25-30cm! As I suspected it was sunny on Sunday and melted the snow pretty fast. That figures. So we’ll be heading south next weekend instead. Since I don’t get out and do stuff much, find myself being inflexible when plans change. So with the family doing nothing interesting over the weekend, I once again have no photo to show for it. We may actually make it out of the house today and drag baby D through the snow on his sled, so if we do I’ll be sure to get some photos up. FYI I don’t post baby D photos publicly (or mine either for that matter), so if you’re interested in seeing them let me know here and befriend me in Flickr.
I did manage to get some things straightened out about my maternity leave. So, I’ve been in to work and done the paper work, here’s how it’s going to play out. I am taking an Infant Care leave after my maternity runs out. This will be unpaid, but I don’t have to return to work. I will return to work on June 30th for 2 weeks until our summer starts while hubby takes 2 weeks holidays to stay home with baby D. When I go back to work my unpaid vacation time (20 days) will be processed and paid out to me which will hopefully help get us through the summer since I can’t claim EI. Then I will be back full time for the new school year in mid-August. The other hitch of this scenario is that my Dad (Mr. Financial) thought I was insane to even consider such a stupid idea when we discussed it a couple of weeks ago. To go without money when we’re stretched as it is would be suicide. It’s true, it will be extremely hard on us but I feel that it’s what’s best for baby D. So on Thursday night we all went out for dinner and while I searched for a good way to break the final news to my Dad, he said ‘so March Break is coming up, I guess you’ll have to go back to work soon’. “Actually no.” ‘Oh, so you are staying off until August?” ‘Yup, got it all cleared through work.’ And that was the end of it. No arguing, no yelling, no ‘you can’t possibly afford to stay home’. It was sweet. So one less thing for me to worry about. Yay! Now I’ll just have to think of something else…

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First tooth

kasper — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 04:03:24 +0000

[flickr]photo:2278861812[/flickr]

Baby D cut his first tooth! Finally. He just turned 10 month old and this is the first. I gave up checking for teeth a while ago, but Saturday afternoon he grabbed my finger and went to suck on it. The sharp little ridges of the tooth actually scared me since I wasn’t expecting anything but gums. Sucking my fingers isn’t something he normally does, so it was almost like he wanted to show me that it was there.

Yesterday was a brand new holiday here. It was “Family Day”. It’s a nice idea I think. I mean there is nothing but miserable snow from Christmas to Easter with nothing to look forward to in between. So to celebrate the day we (my Dad, me, hubby, baby, brother & sister-in-law) got together for lunch at Swiss Chalet (oooh aaaah). I was ready to invite everyone back to our place to play a board game or something, but before I got the chance, my brother asked us back to his place to watch The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Hubby said that it hadn’t gotten great reviews so I wasn’t expecting much, but despite being fairly slow I found it quite interesting. It was a nice day spent with family and I especially loved watching my brother with baby D. Not having any kids of his own and not having any access to any it was cute watching him try to entertain my son.

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