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It’s been a summer of travels and lost teeth, scraped knees and sunshine, explorations and accomplishments. Eric finished his PhD (Halleluyah!) and I started a new job. Despite the chillier-than-normal temperatures, we made the most of summer 2014. Here are some of our photos from August. This year, Charlotte’s in Grade 6 and the boys […]
This afternoon, we received a letter from Charlotte, who’s been away at Camp Kanawana since last Monday. She is never far from my thoughts and it was delightful to hear from her. The highly enthusiastic letter describes new friends, various outdoor activities and her signature illustrations of each of her main points. I miss her and look forward to picking her up on Friday, but I’m so happy to know that she’s having such a good time. The proof’s in the punctuation; every single sentence in Charlotte’s letter ends with at least one exuberant exclamation mark!
We just got back from a week at the beach in Ogunquit, Maine, followed by 2 days in the beautiful city of Boston. The seaside was a delight: wide sandy beach, ocean waves & sunny days left us all tanned and relaxed. When the weather was less cooperative, we took field trips to the wonderful Children’s Museum in Dover, New Hampshire and “York’s Wild Kingdom”, a zoo/amusement park just down the road from our house in Ogunquit.
In Boston, we packed a massive amount of sights into our short visit; not only did we wander through the Boston Common, Public Garden, Fanueil Hall and some of the Freedom Trail sights, but we spent hours at the incredible New England Aquarium, the Museum of Science and even the Fine Art Museum. Adding those days in Boston definitely softened the blow of leaving Maine!
Charlotte’s spending the next two weeks at stay away camp! She’ll sleep in a cabin and spend her days swimming, hiking, canoeing, rockclimbing, making friends and hopefully having a wonderful time.
Grandma and Poppa came down to Montreal to help transition us all into summer. Elijah and William finished kindergarten on June 20th, and Charlotte’s classes ended at noon on June 21st. We all took advantage of Friday’s gorgeous weather to play some soccer and visit our local waterpark. Summertime, we are ready for you!
Me: “Charlie, it says here that giraffes communicate using super low-pitched noises, like ultrasounds, so they can talk to each other from kilometres away, just like elephants. Isn’t that cool?”
Charlotte (unimpressed): “Yeah, but what are they saying?”
Charlie does yoga at school at least once a week, and she loves it – she says it’s ‘relaxing’, and she is hoping to add a yoga class to her after-school enrichment activities next term. She’s got little-kid names for all the poses, like ‘snake’ and ‘tree’ and ‘cat’, but she even enjoys sitting and ‘meditating’ with her eyes closed:
Of course, Elijah and William love to copy their big sister, so she has two willing disciples whenever she wants to run an impromptu yoga class. Here are all three kids, valiantly ignoring the mess they’ve made of our living room:
Charlotte shows Eli a new pose:
Elijah and William sometimes practice yoga at daycare too, although not in these particular outfits (don’t they look beautiful, though?):
Both boys have embraced their feminine sides, apparently. Not that this stops them from being as rough-and-tumble and messy and active as always; they just want to look like “pretty, pretty princesses” (in William’s words) while they’re tearing through the house.
…and we’re back! We’ve been busy as always, so I’ve got an enormous backlog of pictures – we’ll see if I can get them all posted today. A quick summary of the last 2.5 months: Summer involved a 10-day trip home to Ontario, as well as camp for the kiddos, passing McGill comps for Eric (who’s now officially a “PhD candidate” in his program) and lots of moping around and worrying about jobs/money from me. Then September hit, and I found myself suddenly hired at a local private school to teach full-time: English classes for grades 8 through 11, and a grade-8 Ethics course. Charlie’s now in grade 2, the boys have ascended to the ‘yellow room’ at their daycare, and Eric’s working at an addictions clinic 3 days a week. Charlotte’s also taking dance classes again, and the boys have weekly swimming lessons. Considering that our poor old dog, Elsie, had to be put to sleep a few weeks ago, and that September also involves various curriculum nights, meetings, etc, it’s been a non-stop month of hectic craziness.
But! Now we’re in October, and we’ve all started to adjust to our busy lives and our new schedules. We had a visit from Grandmaman and Grampa last weekend, and my mum (Grandma) is here this weekend, which is always nice. There’s more (always more) excitement on the horizon, too, with Elijah and William’s 4th birthday (and party) fast approaching, as well as Hallowe’en (which of course requires costumes for all)… oh, and I’ll get to write report cards at the end of October, for the first time in my teaching career. Fun, fun!
Without further ado, here’s a pictoral history of our summer/September 2010:
Elijah (on the left) and William are endlessly amused by each other:
Eric gave them haircuts last week, and now they’re looking extra-identical again, even to us. This is compounded by the fact that neither of the boys are quick to correct us if we call them by the wrong name; you’d think it would matter to them if we mix them up, but most of the time they shrug it off. Not to say that they’re difficult to distinguish, most of the time! Elijah is currently obsessed with the CD player and requests endless repetition of specific songs (“Momma’s taking us to the zoo tomorrow” by Raffi is the latest craze). He is gentle with the pets but nervous around bugs, and adores Spiderman and Buzz Lightyear, as well as various other little plastic figurines which are scattered around the house. Here, he’s propped up a couple of his ‘guys’ so they can look out the window while he’s at daycare:
William is a much more rough-and-tumble kid than Elijah; he’s often covered with dirt or food, and is far more likely to poke or touch something disgusting to investigate it (such as the giant dead cicada we found on the sidewalk recently). William walks around singing all the time, loves playdough and cars and trucks, and tends to play by throwing or bashing things. Will also follows his big sister Charlotte around, and is happy to be directed by her imagination, so he winds up pretending to be a puppy, or a hatching dragon, or a put-upon husband, or a superhero, depending on her mood and inspiration for the day. Here’s Will snuggled up with Charlie, looking at a book:
I’ve been accompanying the boys to their weekly swimming class with their daycare, and it’s actually been quite fun to get in the water and swim with them and their classmates. Here’s a picture their teacher took of the three of us on Wednesday, although of course neither of the boys is sitting still:
Charlie’s just finished a two-week session of a camp held at her school, run by McGill; it was fairly structured, and basically involved each group investigating a theme, then creating a presentation for the parents on the last day. Charlotte’s group (which was composed of 17 boys and only 2 girls, with the other girl absent today!) studied ancient Egypt, so she learned all about mummies and pyramids and Egyptian mythology. The class created a giant, textured map of Egypt, put on a play about the gods (Charlie played Isis), wrote messages in hieroglyphics and built model pyramids, mummies and canopic jars. Charlotte was very excited to share her new knowledge and skills with us! You can see her here in the top left corner, behind the map of Egypt, wearing her ‘Isis’ mask on her forehead as she gets ready to present to the parents with the other kids:
The kids also attended music, gym and science “classes”, and we got to listen to them sing in a musical presentation about clowns (which I won’t post here, since it was high on the enthusiasm scale but a little low on the production value). In their science groups, they learned about simple machines, and did all sorts of experiments to investigate the properties of wheels, inclined planes, levers, pulleys, screws, etc. Here’s Charlie demonstrating the principle behind different types of screws:
The house is awfully quiet during the day while the kids are off at camp and daycare, and that’s just the way we like it! Eric’s working hard to complete his PhD comps, which are due at the end of July, so he’s focussed on that most of the time. I’ve gone from being on summer vacation to being in job-hunting mode since I found out last week that my school isn’t renewing my contract, so I’m not relaxing as much as I’d anticipated. I’m doing my best to use my network of contacts and get in touch with different people who might be able to use my particular skill-set, because I’d really like to stay in the same field. Basically this means working with kids or adolescents with learning disabilities, teaching them various skills and strategies to help improve their reading, writing, math, organization, studying and learning in general. I’m looking at cegeps and tutoring centres as well as public and private schools, so hopefully something with work out before too long.
In the meantime, I’m doing my best to enjoy the summer and stay positive and busy. Yesterday we got our second basket from our CSA (ie Community Supported Agriculture; we paid a lump sum for a share in an organic farm’s produce, and every other week we get an enormous quantity of beautiful vegetables), and now we’ve got tons of zucchini, green onions, beets, kale, turnips, broccoli, lettuce, sugar-snap peas and cucumbers. I have to be fairly creative to use up all the veggies (especially since the boys are super picky about new foods), but I’ve just baked a couple of loaves of zucchini bread, which I’m sure everyone will eat. I also baked the kale with olive oil and sea salt to make “kale chips” (which Eric actually likes), and I’m going to roast a bunch of the root veggies for our dinner tonight, along with a nice roast chicken. Yum! Last time, I was faced with a huge amount of garlic scapes, so I went online and found an amazing recipe for “garlic scape pesto” – it turned out to be delicious on pasta! Here’s a picture of the finished product, along with some leftover scapes – some of the pesto went in the freezer, so we’ll be enjoying it again soon:
Over the past week, the kids’ activities have started to wrap up. Charlotte performed in a sweet little recital with the rest of her dance class, which I surreptitiously videotaped in 30-second increments (so the dance police wouldn’t stop me; I wasn’t supposed to capture the performance on film). The little girls, almost all in pink, showed off the routines they’ve been working on over the last few months: some ballet, some tap-style, some modern dance. Charlie is not the most coordinated child, and she was often a beat behind the music as she followed the steps, but she danced with a huge smile on her face, sang along to the music, and generally demonstrated a sense of joy that made me think about re-enrolling her in the fall!
Here’s a small portion of one of her more modern routines:
The boys had their own end-of-year performance at their daycare. They wore coordinated outfits, and we all sat in the audience while they trooped in with the rest of their class, ready to wow us with their singing and dancing skills. Of course, once Elijah spotted me in the audience (which happened about half-way through their first number), he immediately abandoned his classmates and sat on my lap for the rest of the show. William stayed a little more involved, but spent a good portion of the performance playing with the helium balloons which decorated the hall.
Here’s a quick movie, showing Elijah and William acting out some animal noises, looking around… and holding hands, completely unself-consciously. So adorable!
My in-laws were in Montreal this weekend, so I’m sure I’ll have some pictures to add over the next couple of days… stay tuned!
life after twins? 