Pee Wee Sport is Upon Us!

Not much more to say really. Last weekend Tom started playing in a weekend soccer league for the 4-5yr olds. Very silly, but good fun.









Oh, and Tom's team, the Eagles, lost 1-0 to the Falcons. Three of the cheating little buggers line up shoulder to shoulder in front of the goal every time the ball gets anywhere near their 1/2 of the field. I don't know how the ref missed seeing it...

Meanwhile, Back in Toronto...

My Saturday pretty much disappeared down a sink-hole of waiting at a very busy tire place for them to get to my ‘non-appointment’ tire needs. Around lunchtime I finally dropped just over $300 on two tires. One to replace the puncture and one to be an actual spare as opposed to the completely useless ‘emergency tire’ we were carrying. While I was there, Jane took the kids for a bit of a walk around downtown Toronto and for a ride on the subway. Lillian’s nap took over the afternoon, and then for Jane's birthday dinner we ate just down the street at a ‘Red Lobster’ which was surprisingly good. The kids had big cups of milk and tasty pieces of baked chicken with some nicely steamed fresh broccoli. They also really enjoyed seeing the actual lobster in the big tank by the door. And then it was back to the still too-hot room to put the kids to bed.

Sunday we went to the National Gallery of Ontario to see the King Tut exhibit, which was very cool. It also had great acoustics, as my less interested children demonstrated, with the result that we got to see the exhibit rather more quickly than we would have liked. After that we walked around the gallery a bit and had a snack in the cafeteria. Late in the visit we discovered the new children’s room, so I stayed there with the kids to give Jane freedom to wander the gallery for the last half hour we were there. Then Jane took Lillian back to the room for her nap while Tom and I went to get a new GPS. Congrats honey! ...for your birthday you get two tires plus labour and a still not coin-operated GPS, all for apx $500. Yay.

Monday, ‘home at last’ day. Just the small matter of a 5 hour drive with 2 small kids, but 1st a stop at the Toronto Zoo. This was the best part of the trip, but even so there were disappointments. Many of the African animals (Tom’s favourites) weren’t out yet, and Jane saw a ‘tentacled water snake’. To be honest, it would have been more aptly named the ‘mustachioed snake’, but I guess tentacled sounds better. The biggest disappointment of the visit would have to have been Lillian’s. We walked around a corner to the baboon viewing window, revealing a big hill covered with frolicking baboons, and her little face fell like a stone. She had thought we were going to see ‘balloons’. I would never have imagined a child could be so disappointed with actual monkeys.

And if you are wondering why there are no pictures of this travesty of a long weekend, its because the camera battery died as soon as we reached Toronto.

I really don’t feel any need to go back to Toronto. I am sure there are plenty of things we didn’t do, but ultimately it’s a big city, we have kids, and most of the ‘big city’ things I like to do aren’t very child-friendly. Plus, for an extra three hours in the car we could have been in New York. We have been to New York and I would like to go back there. And, unlike Toronto, we know people in New York.

So yeah, I suspect that the only reason I will see Toronto again is because its on the way to Niagara.

Up Next , the Dance of the Single Parent!

As I type Jane is flapping (her own description) about the house getting ready for a 10am flight out of Ottawa. DFAIT is sending her overseas for the first time, and I will be home with the shorties for the duration. It was going to be a relatively easy 5 days (out Sunday, back Friday), but a certain volcano in Iceland has buggered pretty well everybody on Earth's travel plans, and added two days to Jane’s travel time. She also get to go 2/3rds of the way around the world heading West, instead of 1/3 of the way around by going East.

I intend to spend my evenings watching movies that I like and she has no interest in, and putting in some serious time painting toy soldiers. I’ll probably also get a spicy pizza or two.

Its going to be a long week.

The Not So Good Friday

We, and roughly ½ of Ottawa, decided to drive to Toronto for the Easter Long Weekend and Jane’s birthday. It was, for the most part, an epic disaster.

Everything started fine. We drove up to Kingston before stopping for lunch. Its a lovely city, the site of Canada’s Royal Military College and generally steeped in colonial era history. It is also where things started to go wrong. We had our picnic lunch on a hillside at Fort Henry, the carpark for which is on the exact opposite side of the fort from the entrance. So, after lunch when Thomas declared himself in need of a toilet, I charged ½ way around the fort to discover if it was open (Good Friday remember) and if open whether they had public toilets. They were and they did. So I charged all the way back to the carpark, collected Thomas, and charged all the way back to the entrance and toilets with Thomas in arms for a thankfully successful toilet break. All of which brought on a rare (and mild) asthma attack. I suffered childhood asthma, and even though it is rarely an issue I keep a puffer in the house just in case. The puffer was of course still in the house.

So, a bit over 100kms of wheezing later, we pulled off for a break at a petrol station about an hour from downtown Toronto. Jane pops the GPS unit into her bag and everybody hops out to stretch their legs for a pleasant ½ an hour. Back in the car for the final push, and the GPS will not start. It continues to not start until Jane goes inside to buy a map of Toronto. While she is inside I discover the coin that has found its way into the SD card slot on the side of the unit while it was in Jane’s bag. Seems she had not put the GPS into its carry case before popping it therein.

*sigh* The thing you need to understand about my lovely wife at this point, is that she is a terrible navigator. Really, just not good at all. And so as we set of into Toronto, the largest city in Canada and a city neither of us have ever visited before, I was a little concerned. She tried very hard, and I know she tried very hard because only once did she send me into the extreme left of the 5 lanes when I needed to take a right hand exit. Only the once. Other than that little mishap we found our way directly to the Hotel where I pulled into a parking space, immediately hitting some glass in the gutter and puncturing a tire. In the middle of downtown Toronto on Good Friday. OK, fine. Its we are in the middle of a completely unknown concrete jungle late in the day on Good Friday, so there isn’t really anything that can be done about it. Everybody up to the room.

…where the air conditioning wasn’t working on the hottest Easter weekend on record. Yay.

And here endeth the first, and admittedly worst, day of the holiday. The rest will follow when I stop twitching enough to work the keyboard again.