My Cricut is My Enabler

I am a creative person. I like to make things. I like to see pieces come together into a whole, especially when it can be enjoyed by others. I hesitate to say that I am crafty because that has a connotation that feels too kitschy for me. I am not keen on wreaths or swags of dead branches strapped together with an elaborate bow or smiling geese with large gingham bows tied around their necks, hanging out in my kitchen for no particular reason. So I say I am creative.
I have been eying the Cricut cutting machine for a few years now. I can't draw or write neatly enough to do my own lettering on my creations and stickers are horrendously expensive, so I've been limiting myself in the way of the types of projects I take on because they will inevitably disappoint due to my bunging them up or them costing more than I am willing to dish out. The Cricut would solve this problem. Admittedly, the cartridges are expensive, but I figured that if I limited myself to 2-3 fonts and bought them online, it shouldn't be too bad.
One day, I discovered software that would allow me to connect my Cricut to my computer and use whatever fonts my little heart desired. Brilliant! For the cost of one cartridge, I had just eliminated the primary drawback to the machine. And yet, I hemmed and hawed.
One day, I brought up how it would help me do a cool project that a friend had made and Dave sighed, "just buy it already!" That's all it took. I spied one on eBay for a fraction of the cost it would be to purchase locally or through many established retailers and I snapped it up.
Since then, I have been a veritable machine! I've made cards, dress-up dolls for Isabel and my two big projects:
A menu board


and an Advent calendar


When Dave came home to find me working on the menu board, he smiled, shook his head and said "it has become your enabler." I suppose he is right.

Martha Stewart, look out!

The quest for lower-sodium foods

It is not a mystery that the dependency of North Americans on sodium for flavouring has gotten way out of hand. You can find lots of low-sodium versions of products that people know to have high levels of sodium (i.e. soy sauce, condensed soup). The problem comes in the form of foods that aren't known to have high levels of sodium, but are sneaking it in there all the same and the items which have dramatically varied levels of sodium, depending upon the brand. My trips to the grocery store are entirely different than they were about 5-years ago and even differ from what they were a year ago. I spend half my trip reading labels and what I have discovered is shocking.
In the deli department, I was looking at cheese. It is "common knowledge" that cheese is high in sodium (my husband has a clip of Mike Rowe, of Dirty Jobs fame, sprinkling a huge quantity of salt into a vat in which he was making cheese). My comparison revealed that the sodium content in cheese (I looked at feta, cheddar and gouda) can range between 140mg and 650mg per 30g serving. One might assume that the lower number is a "low-sodium" product. Not so. Baby Bel Gouda rounds (the ones wrapped in the red wax) have 135mg/20g serving. The feta was where I found the most variation - 290mg/30g serving and 650mg/30g serving.
On to the bakery where bread truly boggled my mind. I have never tasted a "salty" piece of bread and yet many of the commercially produced loaves of bread had more sodium that one of the pieces of cheese listed above. We buy whole wheat bread, which, ironic as it sounds, has higher sodium content on average than white bread. The "low-sodium", "healthy" bread contained 165mg of sodium/slice (note that this more than one whole Baby Bel). The bread we used to buy all the time has 450mg/slice!! I was blown away. How had I not noticed this. How had I been feeding my daughter 900mg of sodium (for a child her age, nearly 100% of her recommend daily sodium intake!) at one meal? And that doesn't even include the sandwich filling.
From here, we move to the cereal aisle. I spent a lot of time in this aisle because Orin's favourite food is Cheerios. He would eat an entire bowlful if given the opportunity. I was hoping to find something with no sodium at all (I mean, who has ever had salty cereal, so it must be possible, right?) or at least something lower in sodium than the 210mg/cup in Cheerios. Much to my surprise, this was one of the better options overall with regard to both sodium and sugar content - it beat out both the store brand and the "organic" brand for lower sodium. The moment you could have knocked me over with a feather though was when I read the Shreddies box. The summary - you would be better off eating frosted Mini-Wheats than Shreddies! I am sure you are surprised - I can tell you that I was. Take a look:

In a larger serving size, Mini-Wheats (on the right) has 10 more calories, the same amount of fat and a smigeon more carbs (made up in the extra 2g of sugar, I suspect). The sodium is where the rubber hits the road for us, of course, and the difference blew me away - Shreddies: 310mg and Mini-Wheats: 0mg. Shreddies has the most sodium by far than anything else in our cupboard (6 different types of cereal). When you consider the fact that I put brown sugar on Shreddies when I eat them, I am sure that makes up the difference in the carbs, meaning that it is likely better for me to consume Mini-Wheats at brekkie than Shreddies. I would never have guessed that. The more you know...

"...a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned..."

"That's for boys." These three words have created a lump in throat and a fire in my heart. Why, you ask? Because they came from my 3-year old daughter's mouth with regard to toy dinosaurs. Still seems pretty benign, right? Not to me. To me, it represents a huge problem with the beliefs with which we are allowing our daughters to grow up. It represents something I have and will continue to fight tooth and nail against because my daughter deserves better. Allow me to explain.
Isabel loved her dinosaur flashlight and to talk about dinosaurs (even though she also claimed they were scaring her as she fell asleep in her dark room). On her Thanksgiving project from school was written "I am thankful for dinosaurs." She seemed to really enjoy playing with the dinosaurs at her school. The few times we've watched Dinosaur Train, she was enthralled by it and talked endlessly about it for days afterward. So for Isabel to tell me, "I no like dinosaurs. That's for boys." breaks my heart. When I asked Isabel why she thought that, she told me that one of the little girls at her preschool told her that she wouldn't play with the dinosaurs with Isabel because dinosaurs are for boys. This little girl didn't just come up with that rule, so she must have heard it somewhere. Not surprising since there are no shortage of widely perpetuated, unfounded and pigeon-holing gender-biased rules out there. I've described just a few below.
Purple - it's (not) just for girls anymore: Orin has a hand-me-down generic fleece sleeper that is various shades of purple and adorned with snowmen. I can't tell you how many times I've heard, "Look honey, the baby's wearing purple so you can tell she's a girl." Not to mention today, a mom flat out told her daughter that the reason one of the boys wasn't wearing purple today (that was the colour of the day) was because "purple is more of a girl colour." Seriously? WTF? Is it not enough that we've made camps of pink and blue, but now we are segregating purple too?
99 Princesses in Pink on the Floor, 99 Princesses in Pink...: At the school's Halloween party, in a class containing 9 girls, all but 2 were princesses (except one who was a "witch princess..."). Isabel was a dragon (see the photos of Halloween to see our AWESOME family costume) and another little girl was a cowgirl (she loves Jessie too, as it turns out). Now, I don't care what other people do with their kids, but my problem came in that when photos were taken, the two odd-girls-out were grouped with the boys and the "princesses" all had their photo taken together. Talk about setting the kids up to see what those two girls SHOULD have dressed as in order to be "girls."
"I'm sorry ma'am...we no longer carry the original red Etch-a-Sketch because we felt it was outdated and too gender neutral.": Alright, you got me. The Toys R Us employee didn't actually say that, but the gist of the statement is accurate. When I went looking for a regular ol' Etch-a-Sketch, all I could find was the pink and blue versions and the mini-version. There wasn't even a home for the original red one. When I asked the employee if they had it somewhere in the store, he said that they hadn't had it in the store in quite a while, "but here's a pink one for her" (pointing at Orin in his purple sleeper *palmface*).
I could go on, but long story short, I feel strongly that we are doing our children (boys and girls, alike) a disservice by sending and perpetuating these messages. Today, it is just nonsense about colours and Halloween costumes, but I worry that tomorrow, it will mean that Isabel will choose to be a teacher (if you know me, you know I have nothing against teachers ;), but fully admit that it is a role typically thought of as female) instead of a paleontologist because that is what she thinks/thought was expected of her. I worry my son will choose hockey instead of ballet because "dance is for girls" and most of all, I worry that my kids will somehow come to feel inadequate or weird because they don't fit the norm. Our kids deserve better.

The Bucket List

Inspired by my friend wildmudturtle's post about her 40 Before 40, I am going to post my Bucket List. It was a 40 Before 40 until very recently, but it started to get big and unwieldy, so I decided to tweak the list and make it a Bucket List. It also seemed sensible since, at nearly 32, I have two very small children and expect to be dedicating a lot of my 30s to raising them and doing family things (not to the exclusion of doing things for me, but I think balanced moms understand what I mean). Without further ado, here's an edited version of my list. Why edited, you ask? Because a few things are a little too private to be shared with the whole of the interwebz. ;) That said, there were only a couple removed and the bolded ones are ones I've completed. Enjoy :)

♦ Get Master’s
♦ Choose a topic and seriously consider PhD
♦ See the pyramids
♦ Tour Europe by train with the kids as teenagers
♦ See Auschwitz
♦ Look into requirements for becoming a lactation consultant or baby-wearing educator
♦ Relax on a terrace in Florence, Italy with a cup of cappuccino and some pastry
♦ Camp through the Rocky Mountains
♦ Roadtrip across Canada
♦ Go to NYC with girlfriends
♦ Go to Disney World
♦ Learn to play violin/fiddle
♦ Learn to speak Mandarin Chinese
♦ Perform a non-chorus role in a musical production
♦ Learn to run and run a 1/2 marathon
♦ Scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef
♦ Go skydiving
♦ Make a piece of clothing
♦ Go whale watching
♦ Learn a style of Latin dance
♦ Make a pie from scratch
♦ Keep a saltwater fish tank
♦ Have a Nova Scotia Duck Toller
♦ Learn to ski
♦ Get phoenix tattoo
♦ Go horseback riding
♦ Take the kids scavenging for fossils in Pugwash
♦ Participate in the Amazing Race (or something similar)
♦ Own one really nice dress or suit
♦ Get my driver’s license
♦ Get jaw surgery & braces (in progress)
♦ Design a distance education course in Advanced Literature (Children’s or WWII)
♦ Try a year or two in a district/department position
♦ Write an short story and have it published
♦ Build a Habitat for Humanity house
♦ Take a photography course
♦ Have a hedgehog
♦ Drive a convertible roadster
♦ Go White water rafting
♦ Shop at a bazaar in a foreign country

A Mind Like Both a Steel Trap and a Sieve

How is it that Isabel can't remember what she ate for snack at preschool half an hour before I pick her up or why she received a time out (after having been informed at the onset), but the girl randomly interjects about her grandmother's forgotten socks (last discussed a month ago, at least)? I honestly don't understand it. It baffles me.

Most recently, she mentioned to Dave, entirely out of the blue, that "mommy slide down the stairs long time ago." This fall hasn't come up in months...probably since around the time Orin was born. The really eerie part of this - she brought it up on the 1-year anniversary of the fall.

Slippin' through my fingers all the time..

I can't believe that it has been over a month since I blogged. It has just been a matter of hanging on for dear life. I am so desperately trying to hold onto time as it slips away - my maternity leave, in particular, is slipping away. I am going back on January 31st and, given the whirlwind that always accompanies the holidays, I know that date is approaching like a fast-moving train. For the record, I am really hoping for a lottery win to make leaving my babies with someone else a moot point.

In the meantime, we have had so much fun that I don't even know where to begin. My family came up for Thanksgiving for a visit and some good food. We've been to The Country Pumpkin a few times to indulge in the local produce, feed the animals and take pictures with pumpkins:



We went bowling - Isabel's first time. She had a GREAT time!


Dave and I went to David Usher in concert:



Then there was Halloween!




Most recently, Orin and I went with my friend Amanda on a shopping trip to the US for a weekend. Nice trip, great deals - we had a wonderful time and made a real dent in my Christmas shopping.