Backwoods Wife

All muscles and smiles!

Riley: "Look Mommy! Muscles. Strong!"

December sunshine!!

Terms of endearment

Hendrik said to me this afternoon, "You're my little hippopotamus Mommy." :)  I love that boy!

Grammatical peril

As my self-professed "nerdy" sister has pointed out, I had used the wrong form of it's/its twice during my last post.  I went back to correct this and noticed that not only had I made grammatical errors, I had given two posts in a row with the same title.  Both are remedied now.  Yikes!  No more late blogging.  Especially when one has a head cold. :) Thanks Lindsey!  (I always asked Lindsey for grammar help if I was in doubt.  She is the grammar queen!  Did I mention that I am 2 years older and should have 2 more years of practice? ;) ) Here is the rule for those of you who were wondering: Might I be so bold as to point out the incorrect usage of "it's" on your recent blog post... "it's" (with an apostrophe) is only EVER used as a contraction of "it" and "is", such as, "it's going to be a lovely day." When you want to indicate a possessive pronoun, the proper form is "its," which on its own indicates possession, hence you don't need an apostrophe. "the sun and it's summer warmth" should be "its summer warmth" "Spousal sabotage at it's finest!" should be "at its finest."

Summer weather in September

It is bea-u-tiful around here!  Summer is back - we had +25C today, and the same is predicted for tomorrow, and high teens and low twenties for the rest of the week!   :)  (Normals are +13C during the day and +3C at night.) I am going to take full advantage of the sun and its summer warmth.  I'm going to paint the floor of the front porch this week, and hopefully the trim around the bottom of the house and the exterior of the porch as well.  Yay! As for light summer reading, I am almost finished with "Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator" by Roald Dahl.  It's both funny and preposterous and I wouldn't expect anything less!  I've been reading a little bit every night for the past few nights and so far I haven't dreamt of vermicious knids (pronounced by Mr. Wonka as "k-nids").  My favourite Roald Dahl book is still "The Twits".  Spousal sabotage at its finest! Off to wash the floors so I can spend more time enjoying the great outdoors tomorrow...

Summer in September

I am so ridiculously behind in posting (and taking!) pictures at the moment.  In homage to it being the start of a new school year, I will be doing some homework.  I'm hoping that by the end of September you'll have had a chance to see many of our summer happenings and projects.  Besides, summer here was WAY TOO SHORT so we don't mind reliving it already! ;) Let's start with the seriousness of Abby shall we? [gallery] Yes, there is a small child under all of that yogurt! NOTE:  All of these thumbnail galleries are clickable if you wish to see any photo larger.  These may or may not be some of those sort of photos, it may depend on whether or not you are a grandparent of the yogurt coated baby!

We. LOVE. blueberries!

[gallery] Yes we do! :)

A wood stove day

Another cool, very wet day today.  Actually, there isn't a bit of sun forecasted until Friday.  Blech.  It was cool enough in the house this morning that a fire was warranted.  I went outside and gathered some firewood and fired up the generator so I could run the washing machine and dishwasher.  Doing laundry in 94% humidity is almost counterproductive.  It takes days to dry indoors. I'm hoping the fire in the wood stove will help dry things out a bit.  I'm tired of looking at laundry racks in our living room!   Still a better alternative than hanging clothes outside though! :) I think we will dig out some puzzles today and break out the hot chocolate.  Hendrik has been asking to do "a tricky puzzle" for a while now.  Translation: he wants to do one of my 1000 piece puzzles!  We'll put out an assortment - 25s, small wooden puzzles, and one "tricky" one.  I'm going to try my own version of Lee Valley Tools' Puzzle Roll. [caption id="attachment_1087" align="aligncenter" width="250" caption="Lee Valley Tools Puzzle Roll"][/caption] I have a bunch of fleece upstairs that I think will do instead of felt, and I'm sure I can find a roll of some kind as well.

Family vacation

We are currently on vacation in BC!  We were delighted to be able to get here in time to celebrate Dwayne's mom's 60th birthday and also the 25th wedding anniversary of one his aunts and uncles.  The kids got to spend several days playing with their cousins, which was wonderful, as we don't see them very often.  It's been a couple of days since we left their place now and Riley has started asking for Elijah.  The asking was actually prompted by a picture she saw at the mall of a boy with curly blond hair.  Ever since then she's been wondering where he got to! It has been rainy here the last couple of days but we haven't been completely thwarted in our plans, we just rearranged them so that the rainy day plans happened first.  We went to an indoor playground of sorts called "Jumpin' Jiminy's" .  As Riley would say, "It's great fun."  Hendrik roared around until his face was glowing a pinkish red and he still didn't want to leave.  Abby loved the big slides as much as her big brother and big sister but wasn't thrilled that the slides were often out of sight on the climbs up to them.   Next door was "Nellie's Dutch Deli" where we picked up some yummy things for our mid-afternoon lunch - fresh potato salad, pepperoni, gouda cheese, and of course, stoup waffles.  I also found a nice set of glass cannisters for my kitchen at home! Today we had a visit with Dwayne's Uncle John out in Duncan.  The kids had a blast running around in his backyard, checking out his garden, and talking the adults into taking turns playing tag or ring-around-the-rosie.  I took a number of pictures but they are on "real" film so I won't be posting them until I get the roll developed later on this week.  Abby was thrilled to find that Uncle John had an apple tree in his backyard and even more ecstatic to discover some that had fallen from the tree onto the ground.  She clutched the same little apple for well over an hour and then proceeded to nibble on it on the ride home to Nanaimo.  We think it must have been rather sour though as she wouldn't actually bite off an entire piece and she seemed to cough a little whenever she bit into the apple! (This tree's apples don't typically ripen fully until late fall.) Tomorrow Dwayne goes to help his brother out on Gambier Island as he is building a small cabin over there.  Mom, Dad, the kids and I will likely go to a nearby lake to splash around a bit and play in the sand.  There is also the playground at the beach just down the hill that Hendrik is anxious to check out.  Lots of possibilities! I should be sensible and go to bed.  Notice I said should.  It may not happen. :)  I have too many interesting books on the go right now!

My boredom is someone else ' s luxury...

Tonight I spent about an hour cleaning out our refrigerator and freezer.  I took all of the shelves and drawers out and scrubbed them, and wiped down the walls inside.  I have always found this a very tedious task and do it only when necessary.  I find it, dare I say, BORING.  I wound up talking to myself (not out loud - everyone else was sleeping - hee hee!), trying to keep focused so I would not abandon my task.  Well, I soon talked myself out of boredom.  Here is why: Our family actually has a refrigerator that needs to be cleaned out.  There are a lot of people throughout the world who do not have a refrigerator at all, or that do not have enough food to warrant owning a fridge.  What use is a refrigerator if you are starving? We have constant access to clean water.  This evening I simply turned on the taps in my kitchen to get water to clean the fridge.  Many people do not have access to clean water, or have to travel great distances each day to obtain it.  The fact that I had clean, hot, running water in my home to use for cleaning and bathing would be considered miraculous by some. Although I might find the task of cleaning our refrigerator less than mentally stimulating, it represents how fortunate we are.  I don't have to worry that I won't be able to find food for my children to eat tomorrow.  I don't have to worry about our food spoiling, but if it did spoil, I could afford to replace it.  We have plenty of clean water.  We have modern conveniences of electricity, time saving appliances, and a safe vehicle.  We have a home. There is much to be thankful for while doing our chores...