Elspeth and her surprise from Santa on her 8th birthday - Hubuki, a 3 month old chocolate Persian kitten.

We celebrated Elspeth birthday last night as the (now cancelled) school concert had been scheduled for this evening. She was ecstatic with her new pink Nintendo DS & a complete set of pink accessories.

We love you honey!

The newest member of our family, not quite 3 months old. It is 99% pure fur. With some cat thrown in for good measure.

Happy Birthday Princess.

Taken at Sports Day at Ainsley's preschool. Just too cute!

One of the play houses we picked up at St. Phillip's Church Christmas bazaar, this toy house is much loved in its new home.

We have moved all the toys out of the living room and are letting the kids use the front hall as their new toy room. They particularly enjoy using the smaller vestibule area by the front door (we enter and exit by the garage) as their make believe "bedroom", dragging their pillows into the zone. It means that we'll have to rearrange one of the other rooms for our Christmas tree this year but it's nice for them to be able to spread out their toys away from the tv room.

What's Christmas without a ride through the mall in an electric Christmas train?

This time Elspeth was present as we hit Santa's Village before her weekend date with Ben. It was more difficult to get a good picture of Ainsley this time around as she was experimenting with being cute by squinting at the camera.

The results of Elspeth's karate belt test were in this morning and Elspeth jumped the yellow bar, going from blue belt to yellow belt. She'll now be training in the level 2 junior students with green and brown belts. We are SO proud of her hard work!

I have to wonder how many pictures of Ainsley & Santa we'll end up with this year ..

Every year we make a visit to Nanny at the St. Phillip's Church Bazaar (NDG, QC), while she handles the Animal Kingdom stuffed animals table (most of which she makes herself). Her catnip stuffed mice usually disappear within the first 30 minutes and part of the tradition is that she always swears to herself to make more.

It was a massive WIN day for us as a daycare that had rented space at the church up & left one day, abandoning all of their toys. I had had advance notice of this (thank you Nanny spy) and arrived promptly at 10 am when the bazaar opened. I picked up 6 boxes of specialized building toys, some of which Ainsley uses at her Montessori daycare and some of which Elspeth used in Kindergarten at ECS. Plus a castle. Plus a playmobile house (the BIG kind). The HusbandMan chastised me for not getting the entire Playmobile kitchen & household 4 piece set (the big kitchen, fridge, stove, etc ) so that we could use it for a year then garage sale it. I may in fact have to call them to see if it's still available.

There was great company (thank you again pdaughter!), lots of fudge, the most crackalicious cheese sticks, and the most god awful horrible Christmas snowman tea pot I've ever seen, so horrid that I just had to have it. I shall treasure it forever.

Why had I never heard of this? OMG it looks like it cost a few million, the effects and cinematography so close to the originals that it even had The HusbandMan dumbfounded.

The Hunt For Gollum - an unauthorized 40 minute fan film with more from the same people coming out soon. It's available free to download from their site or can be found on YouTube, or just ask me.

Since I don't post much these days (mostly only have the time for random status updates on Facebook), I thought I'd drop this little gem this morning while Miss Clairol does her work.

Over the year, the ECS girls have been paired with various Montreal artists and have created artwork inspired by them. This Saturday at the Just For Laugh's Museum over 100 pieces of the art created through this project will be auctioned off.

The project and results have been exciting and unique for the girls: award-winning film-maker Laura Bari had her class make artworks in Braille; another class created pinhole cameras under the tutelage of photographer Amanda Marchand and then made images with their creations; artist Indra Singh had her students create paintings in acrylic that featured the instruments they play in their music class; ceramic artist Pascale Girardin had her students create a ceramic mobile; portrait artist Joanne Cullen brought her hyper-realist aesthetics to show her class how to create portraits ...

Elspeth worked with Montreal ceramic artist Cathy Reeves to create a collection of ceramic sea turtles, learning about the turtles and her ability to create artwork at the same time.





Only in Grade 2 and her first vernissage ... how cool is that!

Here is the whole Flickr set for Hallowe'en 2009, with the costume under construction, Elspeth posing in it and our Hallowe'en night adventures.

So I survived another costume - and barely. I only started two weeks ago but got very little done the week Tim was in Sweden, resulting in two all nighters. I don't know who was more stressed, me or Elspeth. But I have to say that it was a success, with Mom Elspeth getting lots of attention when she wore it for the day at school and then a classmate's Hallowe'en party Friday night. Last year they did not wear their costumes to school so the Ice Queen didn't get as much visibility as Zelda in 2007 and now the Vampire.

When Elspeth decided that she wanted to be a vampire this year I used my googlefoo to look up various images to get ideas. I have no idea why all the vampire outfits out there are red & black but so be it. We reviewed the pictures and Elspeth settled on a few styles that she liked, setting Mom's job up.

Amusing enough, it was the same pattern that I used last year for the white Ice Queen. It's all in the fabrics and accessories, after all, lol. The black skirt was more flared than I wanted but I sewed it down to reduce the flaring. Elspeth also complained of her outfits being too long in years past (she needs to run across muddy yards at night, after all) so I shortened the red front panel, curving up its corners and that of the black satin, forming slits for her to run freely. The front red panel of the bodice was much looser than needed so the lacing pulled it in, forming a nice ruffled look. The neckline of the front panel was much too low, which I expected from working with the pattern last year but even after adding on a few inches of fabric it wasn't enough; so a ruffled black lace insert was attached, and later studded with clear micro crystals. The sleeves ended at the elbow due to Elspeth’s request of “no.long.sleeves”, though I was able to be sneaky and attach two different lengths of ruffled black lace.

. .

The collar was the hardest to do, working without a pattern and trying to figure out how to get it to stand to points and to attach to the neckline in a both secure and workable fashion. After cutting out various lengths of interfacing I finally got what I thought would work – the entire collar issue was an anxiety ridden adventure though, not knowing how it would turn out until it was completely sewn and attached – many hours later. I ended up sewing on the black outside satin first then putting the ‘bad’ side to the red fabric, trimming around it and then overstitching the red on with tiny stitches. Not easy around the curves and my fingers are a pin cushion now. One side of the collar was attached to the dress with heavy duty quilting thread and from the zipper outward on the other side is a series of 10 or so snaps. There must be an easier way to attach snaps than eyeing it and using tiny loose stitches, only to tighten them in place once everything is evened up.

The beading on the collar was something done the last night. Unfortunately around 1 am I was getting clumsy and there are now a few hundred tiny red crystals underneath our sofa. I knew that the collar would be a make or break deal for the whole outfit; I debated making a spiderweb pattern on it with clear crystals, however not only would it have been too time consuming for my schedule, it seemed that the red crystal theme worked best (the only reason that the lacing on the front bodice has white crystals at the crossovers is because the dressmakers didn’t have red available in that size).

The cape was a simple no pattern deal as I was out of time. Since a cape going around the neck would interfer with the “look” and the choker, and because it would get in the way at school, I found two nice black fabric covered clasps and sewed the flat ends directly onto the dress behind the shoulder seam. It doesn’t have a smooth flow in the back and it a bit too ruffled (no pattern) but is acceptable. Elspeth liked the chokers she saw in the vampire images so I made out from black velvet, attached in the back with Velcro and with 3 red crystals along the front and red micro crystals drapping between them. To keep her warm I purchased a one size too small black long sleeved t-shirt at Walmart and had her put it on under the dress, using a white crayong to line up the dress's neckline, cutting the shirt and then bias binding the edges.

Elspeth practising her teenage emo look.

Lots of theatrical makeup was used, including silver around the eyes. It made an impression not just at school but with Mom & Dad, as she looked so much older than her almost-8 years.

Elspeth & Ben (Wolverine)

On Hallowe'en night we all met up with the local kids at Ben's house around 6, as Nanny was kind enough to come over early to join us for monster face spaghetti and then stay to hand out treats to the locals. Elspeth took off with her age group and was out of sight after the 3rd house, leaving Tim & I to introduce Ainsley to trick or treating but sad to have "lost" our eldest. She found her way back to us after about half an hour, perhaps just to empty her loot bag into Ainsley's wagon, but with Ainsley having had enough by 6:45 and stating quite clearly "I want to go home", we split ways.

Ainsley with Elspeth's older green dragon outfit

Tim & Elspeth only returned home around 9:30, having returned to Ben's for the kids to dump them loot into one massive pile and pull out their preferences, and for the grown-ups to chill with a glass of whatever. Sidenote: is it just a West Island thing were the Moms go out with their kids with wine glass in hand, getting refills at their friends' homes? No kidding - it's like a rule that if you are going out in a group of 8 or 10 parents with the other at home handing out loot, that parent keeps an open bottle by the door. That means 8 or 10 refills along the route. Being one of the only Dad's, I think my spouse is fortunate to have survived without being molested.

Hallowe'en walk with beer in hand!

The entire thing proved too exciting for Ainsley, who was a candy fiend all day "I NEED MY CANDY", for though she crashed around 9:30 pm she was up at 2 am, bouncing off her bedrooms walls, only to settle back to sleep around 9.

Just a little pic to start the week ... Elspeth is third from the right in the back row.

Saturday was family day and we spent the morning walking the trails in Angell Woods, Beaconsfield. The woods are a wonderful refuge for all sorts of animals, from birds and squirrels to skunks, racoons and red foxes. A nighttime walk will give you the occasional owl but lots of bats! This was Ainsley's first chance to run through the woods herself, the last time she was there last summer was in the baby backpack carrier. She did rather well in terms of her footing as the trails are covered with rocks and roots - only a few stumbles but lots of giggles as she zig zagged for 3 km from every pebble, rock and bolder ("mountain!"). Buck and Wicklow are showing their age for while they love the chance to run free, there is a lot more walking than running and even the occasional pit stop for Buck to catch his breath.

The Angell Woods photo set is up on flickr and here are a couple of my favorites.

It took Elspeth all of one minute to have Ainsley running through the house screaming "twik oh tweet, smell my feet". I can't begin to fathom the trouble they will get into in the years to come.

Ainsley & Elspeth had fun watching me unpack some of our indoor Hallowe'en decorations.

The photo set is up on Flickr. It was a beautiful morning, cloudless and cool (but not cold). We were delighted to go with owldaughter's family, Ainsley has been asking for Liam, who in turn had been asking for Elsie! It's amusing how far a little grown-up conversation goes these days for myself & The HusbandMan as well! I think Ainsley was feeling under the weather as she seemed like a normal kid rather than hyperactive. We brought home about 50 lbs of McIntosh, Lobo & Cortland, I'll be making apple everything for a month or even longer, if I get them stored properly in the basement cold room.

Everything is in super clean condition. All original packaging, accessories (down to the SIM extractor) and documents also included. Headphones have never been used. iPhone has 3.01 software loaded.

Please feel free to pass it along to anyone who may be interested!