We took the kids to my parents cottage for the weekend and had a great time.  The bugs were not nearly as bad as the last time and the weather was pretty perfect too.

.

Jeremy went to his friends cottage so we drove an hour to go pick him up on Saturday and ended up spending the day there.  This family has a wonderful spot with a big boat, water trampoline, target practice area with plastic bb guns and a candy store that the kids can ride their bikes to.  Basically it has all the things that we don’t have, so when the family asked if Jeremy could stay the whole weekend, we allowed him to.  The kids spent the day riding in the boat, and tubing.  It was such fun.

.

It was strange leaving without our eldest son, but we knew we were leaving him in good hands.  And talk about having extra room in the van! A whole seat was available to pile stuff on, and Jack enjoyed sitting alone back there. 

.

We enjoyed our stay at our cottage, but it was strange without our boy.  Although he is a very good kid, it was, admittedly, a lot easier with only four kids.  There seemed to be less conflicts among them, as he and Paulina tend to always have differing opinions.

.

We did our usual walks, swims, fires, drives and fun. The little ones all got sunburned under their eyes because they have such a bad mother.  I am still horrified by the raccoon like rings under their eyes, as that is exactly the spot where I have had skin cancer removed myself.  Anyway, I’m trying to forget about that.

.

The drive home was thrilling with tons of traffic, at times completely stopped dead on the highway until we turned onto sideroads.  It took us much longer to get home than usual, but thank God for dvd players!  Hubby blamed me for making us stay longer to go canoeing that morning, but really it was him that wanted to go and made us leave the cottage later.

.

We entertained ourselves on the road by doing tongue twisters- try saying ‘toy boat’ or ‘fresh fudge’ ten times fast.  It’s not as easy as you might think, and extremely frustrating. 

.

The highlight of the trip for me was pulling into Wendy’s for something to eat and observing a young family with three kids strapped into car seats in the back seat of their car.  They were all very young and the newborn in the middle was a mottled red with his screaming,  and the parents looked frantic while trying to warm a bottle and get him to stop.

.

I remember those days well.    Those were the days that my hubby swore we would never have more children, let alone ever leave the house again.

.

But we did.   And now that everyone is older, and can pretty much buckle themselves into the car, life is much easier.  Especially when we only have four kids instead of five.  Four is the easy life, let me tell you!

Just returned from a few days at the cottage with the kids and my mom.

. 

We had great weather, little rain, lots of swimming and running and unfortunately lots of ravenous bugs that craved our blood and wiggled their way into our hair, ears, shirts, pants, shoes, and well, everywhere.

 .

Now that my mama is feeling so much better thanks to her new COPD meds, she is power walking every day in the hopes of preserving her 24% lung capacity.  So of course, we kindly offered to accompany her each night after dinner-that is, until we saw a good size bear trotting down the road one afternoon.

 .

After that, the kids weren’t too keen to go for walks anymore, which was really annoying.  We have always known that there are bears out there, we were in the woods for goodness sake, but there IS something about seeing one that makes you a little nervous.  We know there are moose and deer too, but there is something about a visual that strikes a chord in your brain. It was kind of like when we were in Mrytle Beach happily swimming around in the ocean, until we starting finding shark teeth in the sand, then a few of us (me) found boogie boarding not quite so fun after all.

 .

Luckily Jack had brought along his bear detractor device, aka his mp3 player and speaker.  The player is loaded with lots of current tunes and when turned up nice and loud, we felt certain that any bears within hearing distance would run the other way.

 .

I know that after hearing Justin Beiber sing ‘Eeny Meeny’ over and over again, and Lady Gaga belting out ‘Poker Face’ repeatedly into the forest, I wanted to run the other way myself.  But I couldn’t, because if I took off into the woods without the bear detractor device, and the bears didn’t get me, the bloodsucking, disease carrying pests certainly would.

 .

If I can figure out how to shrink a photo I will post a photo of all of us in our bug ‘gear,’ face nets and all.  And yes, the gear was necessary.  By Tuesday, I had lost track of how many bugs had flown into my eyes, up my nose and into my mouth. 

 .

Note to self-always raise the hood of your bug jacket and zip around your face when singing along with ‘the Beib’ in the woods, this being especially important when walking around with a permanent cloud of gnats swarming around your head and face.

What did you do for march break?

.

I took the gang to a movie and an indoor playground and then hubby and I took them up north near Haliburton, Ontario, to my parents cottage for a few days.  The amount of stuff that we packed is incredible, even though every time I swear I will pack less…We each have our own bag.  We each needed a winter coat and a big sweatshirt, hats and mittens.  We each had two pairs of shoes/boots and a pair of slippers.  That’s 21 pairs of shoes.  That’s a lot to be sitting at the front door, let me tell you!

.

Basically our days went like this-get up, eat, clean up, play outside, eat, clean up, play outside, eat, clean up, watch a movie, eat, go to bed.  It’s a good thing we don’t go up there more often or we might all have serious weight issues.

.

Yes, I slept in every morning and yes, my whole family teases me because I like to sleep in.  Aren’t they mean?  Can it really be called sleeping in when my bedroom is right off the living area, the door is bi-fold and there is a constant stream of children coming to see me who want to know when I am going to wake up?  I think not.

.

I am lucky, though, that my hubby is so amazing and likes mornings.  He got up with the kids (even though he didn’t really need to) and made them eggs for breakfast each day.  He then washed all the dishes too. Then I rolled out of bed, made toast and tea and he cleaned that up too.  He’s like the energizer bunny, so I admit that I do take it easy on the weekends and holidays when he is around.

.

The kids didn’t want to come home on Friday because we were having such a great time.  We got to borrow our neighbour’s dog, a 7 month old golden retriever named Tucker, and so there was a lot of excitement.  He is beautiful and we had so much fun with him that it made me sad that we will never have a dog because of my allergies… there is something about kids and a dog, you know?  He had even more energy than they did which was nice, and they didn’t want hubby and I to play with them when the dog was available to chase every stick that they could throw. That was nice too!

.

The kids did make us play ‘capture the flag’, which basically meant that we divided into two teams, and each team hid a ‘flag’ for the other team to find in the woods.  Our ‘flags’ were the empty marshmallow bag and a small rope.  I couldn’t find a damn thing, although I did twist my ankle in a quicksand-like mud hole and almost lose my boot.  It is amazing how much fun the woods can be when there are no mosquitos and black flies dining on you, and no sign of crazed coyotes.

.

The drive home was fairly enjoyable, with only two bouts of car sickness, and thankfully, no barfing.  Now all our clothes and jackets reek of smoke from the fire-even my watch stinks!  I think we absorbed the smoke, which is really gross, but the marshmallows and the memories made it all worthwhile.  The kids were so tired in the car that I didn’t even need to offer to pay them to stop talking to me this time, which was nice…Silence can be expensive when you have 5 kids.

I really wanted to call this post the following, but it wouldn’t fit, so here is the real title of this post:

.

Who wants the sand and sun, when you can have a rustic cabin in the woods, slush and wild animals who want to eat your children when you turn your back to hang their sodden snowpants up to dry?

.

So march break is approaching..in fact, it’s almost here (for us Canadians anyway!)

.

The kids are thrilled to be off…Sabrina is counting down the days until we head north to the cottage, our first trip up since September.  I thought it would be fun to take the kids tubing at a local ski resort, but my dreams have been dashed as apparently most of the snow is gone, or will be by the time we get there.

.

My mother called me during her visit to the cottage a couple of days ago, to tell me that the snow was rapidly disappearing, mud is EVERYWHERE, the lake is thawing and oh, yes, there are warnings about an increased number of wolves and coyotes in the area.

.

Hmmm…sounds like a dream march break!!!I am going to be locked inside a cottage with five children and a Tim Horton’s coffee deprived husband, eating and watching movies day and night…We can forget about tubing, walking, hiking or playing outside, because either we will drown in the thawing lake or be soaked in the melting snow, lose our boots in gloppy mudholes, or be attacked and dragged off into the woods by starving, aggressive wildlife.  And I thought we only had our usual worry of skinny bears, waking up hungry and cranky after a winter of hibernating in a drafty cave…

.

The best part is, there is no dryer at the cottage, so when if snow pants and clothes get wet, they stay wet…Woohoo, I can’t wait!  It doesn’t get much better than that, does it?  Who needs to go to sunny Jamaica, Florida or Cuba for vacation?  Blech!  That really doesn’t appeal to me at all!  Honest…(and if I keep telling myself that, maybe even I will start believing it…)

.

(And yes, re the word ‘GLOPPY’…Don’t bother getting out your dictionaries, I made it up…)

.

Cottage, summer 2002-This pic was 'pre-twins' and I thought I was busy then!

My twins definitely get the short end of the stick by being the babies (#4 and #5) of the family.  It definitely goes along with the story that you boil your first child’s pacifier, wash it for your second child and blow on it for your third.  By the time you get to your 4th and 5th children, you just want peace as quickly as possibly so you jam it back in their mouths and quote the 5 second rule.  Do you know what I mean?  There are no instant diaper changes with your 2nd, 3rd, 4th or fifth child.  Jack was lucky to get his diaper changed even once a day!  When it sagged to his knees I would realize that I hadn’t changed it for hours. 

.

When Paulina, my eldest, was a toddler, she was only allowed to watch educational television.  As a result, she watched Sesame Street every single day.  I will never forget the day I realized how great Sesame Street is.  I was lying on the couch nursing Jeremy, who was a newborn, my eyes closed, when I heard Paulina begin to say the letters of the alphabet. Actually she was sort of shouting them. So I cracked open my eyes and peered at her. The letters were flashing up on the tv, with lots of catchy music and colour, one after the other.  But what really shocked me was that she was shouting the NEXT letter, before it was said or shown on Sesame Street.  I felt amazement and shock that she knew all of her letters.  Beyond playing with the foam letters in the bathtub I had never made any serious effort to teach them to her… And then I felt guilt, because why hadn’t I?

.

This brings me to my little ones.  Gregory and Sabrina have really never experienced Sesame Street for an extended time period.  For one thing, it airs when they are at school in the morning.  But mainly they haven’t been exposed to it, because when the tv is on, their older siblings are home, and Sesame Street does not interest 11, 9 and 8 year olds.  Actually, it horrifies them because they think they are far too old to watching a ‘baby’ show like that.

.

What does interest them, however, is the Family Channel, so as a result, my poor educational program deprived babies have watched more Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place and Zack and Cody, than Sesame Street. 

.

Do you think they knew their alphabet at 16 months?  Ah, no!  I love Sesame Street and I want them to love it too.  I miss Sesame Street, with Elmo and Zoey and Baby Bear!  I want to watch this show again, I am sick of teenagers with attitude and their stupid pranks and sarcastic comments.  It is time for me to take back the tv-maybe tomorrow I will attempt to tape an episode (this would mean that I need to locate a tape somewhere and see if the vcr still works).  But will they watch it, or have they been forever tainted?  Maybe I will watch it.  I swear that I have seen a segment that was from when I watched as a child-could it possibly be that old?

.

Can you tell me how to get?  How get to Sesame Streeeeeeet? How to get to Sesame Streeeeett??

.

I’m going to sing this song all day!