Canada has just beat the US for the gold medal in Olympic men’s hockey so we’re feeling pretty patriotic here tonight! We didn’t get to watch the game (we don’t have cable TV), but I followed the action with a combination of Twitter, Facebook and good, old-fashioned CBC radio. Charlie was very excited to hear that we’d won another gold, and was doing a little victory dance for the Canadian team. She did a school project on “Patinage artistique” (ie Figure Skating) and has watched a few videos of Olympic events on Youtube, and she’s a big fan of Team Canada.
We had a very short visit from my dad last week, who flew in from Las Vegas at 9pm, then out to Toronto at 9am the following morning… still, he got to have a nice breakfast with us before the kids went off to school/daycare, and everyone was thrilled to see Poppa. Here’s Charlie sitting with him, right after she woke up (hence the extra-messy hair):
Charlotte’s on March Break this week, so she’ll be attending a “camp” at our local Y. She’ll get to swim, snowshoe, play, go sledding, cook, sing songs… hopefully it’ll be a fun, relaxing week for her. She’s caught a nasty cough from her brothers, but she seems to be over the worst of it and should have plenty of energy to burn at the Y. I’ve only got one more week of work until my school has March Break (which is two weeks long for us), and I must admit I’m looking forward to the holiday. I’ve completed 2 weeks of full-time teaching, and I am feeling fine, so hopefully this virus is entirely vanquished and behind me. I did manage to pull a muscle in my back this weekend, so I’m hobbling around like a little old woman, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re chasing three kids around!
As for “the brothers” (Charlie’s name for Elijah and William, since she still can’t tell them apart), I can officially declare them potty-trained. They wear underwear all day long, and very rarely have accidents anymore, although we still travel with an extra pair of pants, just in case. My husband has taken the extra step of teaching the boys to pee standing up, which is fine, except that their aiming skills are still developing… As I’m sure you can imagine, neither Eli nor Will is achieving 100% accuracy, and the area behind, around and in front of our toilet is receiving regular sprinklings of pee from our enthusiastic (but easily distracted) little boys.
Here’s a picture we snapped this evening: William’s adapted their step stool (which my father made for my brother when he was potty-training) into a potty-side table, so he can read his magazine more comfortably while he has a poop:
Finally, here’s a video of the three kids painting with watercolours. You can see that Elijah holds his paintbrush with his left hand – we think he’s a lefty!