Ho! Ho! Ho!

Merry Christmas!!!

Elijah and Toviel got to visit with Santa this Christmas season.

(Toviel was unimpressed. And a little freaked out.)

If you look closely at Santa and his round rosy red cheeks you can probably tell who it is. :)

We wish you a very merry Christmas!!

Kitchen Splash!

Pictures of the boys in the kitchen sink, as promised.

(Our lives seem so ridiculous to me right now.)

Talk about making memories!

Return of the blogger

I know, I know. It's been over 3 months since I've written. I'm sure people have stopped coming to my blog, tired of being faced with the same ol' last entry from way back when.

Regardless, I have decided to return to my blogging. I wanted to wait until I had a sense of permanancy in my life, but it is apparent that that may take a thousand years, so I am abandoning my hope of stability and attempting to return to my blogging while my life is in complete chaos. Not that I have any great bloggable material, so don't get your hopes up.
Great hope brings great disappointment.

I am currently homeless, and have been for the past 3 and a bit months, in Edmonton. It's not that we don't have a house. Au contraire. We do. We have this huge house that we are trying to ditch just outside of Calgary, but no one wants to buy it. Part of it is because the market is so soft and prices are dropping like flies (including our home that has come down $80,000 in the past 5 months) and part of it is because the universe hates me.
So back to Edmonton....we aren't homeless as in living on the street, but we don't have a permanent home and we are living out of 4 suitcases, jumping from one person's basement to the other trying to stay together as a family. The generosity of people we have met in Edmonton is staggering and I don't feel bad in saying that people in Edmonton are a thousand times nicer than people in Calgary, even though Edmonton has the second highest crime rate in all of Canada. I am struggling with this lack of "home" and despair over our house not selling. I am now settling into a discouraged mode of being convinced our house will never, ever, ever sell. Or at least that's what I tell myself. The truth is that every time Cris' cell phone rings (which is a lot) I instantly think, "Maybe it's Malcolm telling us we have an offer!!" but I don't say it because for the past 5 months I've had immense hope and it has gotten me no where and I don't want Cris to think I'm as flighty as I am (don't read that last sentence, Cris).

We are settling into our new church family and enjoying that whole process. We are still in the honeymoon stage though.
It's funny how one can be so jilted and promise oneself to never trust another churchy human being to be genuine and truthful with them and then be thrust into a new life with new people and run at them with open arms saying, "I love you! I love you!" I guess I'm so naive. It's probably my parents fault for showing me unconditional love that makes me think that people are innately good.

That is, in a nutshell, where we are now.


Things I like about Edmonton and our situation now are...

1. The whole family has to sleep together in the same room in the same bed. I'm a huge advocate of shared sleeping with your children. Cris has warmed up to the idea, but still likes his bed to be kid-free at night. Here he has no choice so we never argue about it.

2. We are making some mighty strong relationships mighty fast as we are living with people we may not otherwise ever connect with.

3. The space I am in charge of to keep clean is 300 times smaller than our house in Redwood.

4. We have cable tv for the first time in our married lives.

5. I don't have to drive half an hour to get to the grocery store and then another half hour to get home.

6. We qualify for the Leisure Access Pass which gives us free admission to all the City of Edmonton run recreational things, like the zoo and some of the swimming pools. Let's hear a woot-woot for being low-income! Now if we could just get a permanent Edmonton address so we could actually get these passes!

7. People here rock. And people close to here rock as well, like people in Camrose.


Things I don't like about Edmonton and our situation...

1. Obviously I'd like to be living with our stuff in our own place not worrying about where we will go next and what we will do if there is no next place to go to. I hate that Elijah misses his house and his toys and his space and cries about it a few times a week.

2. Edmonton has ugly powerlines and powerstations all over the place and the city planners should all be fired and all the retired city planners should be required to pay back 100% of their salaries.

3. Every Wednesday the city smells like poop. No joke. And occassionally other days as well.

4. The Parent Link Centers here absolutely suck.

5. The roads are in pretty bad condition. And I want to know what is up with all the construction horses. The City has some facination with putting these horses up in abundance in places where only one or sometimes none are needed. And a lot of the time it looks like a plane just flew overhead and dumped them on the ground. Come on people! At least put them up in an orderly fashion, neatly. It stresses me out to see fifteen contruction horses placed willy-nilly all over the road because it looks like something major is happening up ahead, but when you drive past you see that the only problem is that there is a chip out of the sidewalk.

6. I hate paying $1400 a month (sometimes more on those three-mortgage-payment-months) for a house that we aren't even living in and subsequently being unable to afford a place to rent, thus becoming a total mooch and relying on people to house us for free.

7. I have to bathe the kids in the kitchen sink. They like it, though, so it's not all that bad. (I'll try to post pictures)


I'm sure there's more to add to both, but I try not to dwell on the negatives too much because, well, that's just negative. And I try not to dwell on the positives too much because in a year from now when our house is still on the market, we may decide that we just can't do this anymore and move back to our house. Or I might end up in a looney bin crushed from stress and heavily medicated (been-there-done-that) and although that wouldn't be too too bad in itself, it would be horrible simply because I couldn't stand to be apart from my kids and my husband.

Ramble. Ramble. Ramble.

Oh well, it's not like I'm forcing you to read this you know.....

;P

My pretty name

My name is not a very common name. This has become more and more apparent to me the older I get.
It seems everywhere you go, you are now required to give your name. And I am seeing this more as Elijah is growing and I am attempting to register him for programs and playtimes.

One such place is just in a local mall. There is a really cool free "Kids at Play" place with a soft cushy floor and softish foamy vehicles and animals and structures for babies, toddlers and preschoolers to climb on, jump off of, slide down and run around. Whenever we go, I wonder how my name will get spelled.
Usually it gets spelled something like 'Donnell' or 'Donel' and occassionally 'Donelle'. What I don't get is why they use the male spelling 'Don' instead of the female spelling 'Dawn'. So, I have started to, on occassion, just shorten my name to avoid any confusion and tell them my name is just 'Dawn'. And you know what? Those people spell my pretend name 'Don'.

I had to return something to Canadian Tire last week. I tried to speak as clearly and deliberately as I could when telling the customer service representative my name. When I got the return receipt, I discovered that Canadian Tire thinks my name is 'Dona'.

The other day I was in Old Navy trying on some clothes. I do that from time to time. I have this gift card with some money still left on it, so why not hey? They also require your name to write it on the outside of the changing room door.
I told him my name was 'Dawn' and he also proceeded to write 'Don'. He got to the 'o' and I said, "Oh...it's a-w-n, not o-n."
"Oh!" he said, "Awn!" and he wrote A-w-n.
Then he looked me up and down as if he just wanted to see what a girl named Awn would look like.

I don't know why it bothers me so much that complete strangers just can't get my name spelled right. What's funny about it all, is on the times that I am patient enough to stand there and spell it for them, they write it out correctly and almost always without fail (if it's a woman) respond with "Oh...what a pretty name!"
No one thinks Donel or Donnel or Donelle or Donnel or Donnelle is a pretty name, or even Don or Dona or Awn; but Dawnelle, now that's a pretty name!

I won't even get started on the correct pronounciation of my name. It shouldn't be hard to pronounce...it's pretty straight forward, but the general population has an extremely hard time with it. But that's a rant I'll go on some other time.

Birthday #1

We celebrated Toviel's first birthday on July 27th. And then we celebrated it again on July 29th, just for kicks, with some of our friends.

Toviel loved his birthday.

Toviel loved his birthday cake!

You can see in the first picture he has just gotten a small taste and he's thinking its pretty sweet. I believe it was his first taste of whipped cream, which is why he looks pretty excited.

By the end of his cake time, he was totally into it. He was grabbing fistfulls of whipped cream and laughing and laughing. He was plucking those strawberries off the cake and shoving them whole into his mouth, chewing what he could and then spitting them out when he tired of them. And by the looks of it, he ate almost half of the entire cake! Well, he is a growing boy!

Good mess, little Tove. You've made me proud!

Oh....and Happy 1st Birthday!!!

Moving on up....North

So, it is official. Our house is up on the market. We are on the move again. It's the gypsy in us....can't stay in one house too long.
Our eyes are on Edmonton. Cris has accepted a youth pastor position in a church up there. The church is growing and thriving, so I guess that means Edmonton isn't as God-forsaken as I thought it was.

I think God has a sense of humor. Everytime we have gone up to Edmonton, I have had one consistent thought as we drove through it: "I am sure glad we don't live here!"

Now I am working on the next move already. I have told God under no terms will I move to Hawaii. No way, no how. Hopefully His sense of humor kicks in for our next move!

Playing with Fire(pit)

Elijah was playing in the firepit last week.

At the time, Cris was busy creating a beautiful walkway / patio in our yard and I was busy trying to de-clutter and clean the house and occupy our high-maintenance Toviel.

So, for sure....we were closely supervising him...totally. 100%. No doubt about it. C.L.O.S.E. supervision.

It didn't take Elijah long to realize his hands were getting dirty, so he came to the door and yelled, "Mommy!! Mommy!! I need to wash my hands!"

As I was taking his shoes off, I was telling him that his arms and clothes and face were all dirty too. I held him up to the mirror so he could see the soot on his face. FREAK OUT! That's what he did. My little clean freak doesn't like being dirty.

When I was washing his hands off, he was using self-talk to calm himself down. Then he turned to me and said, "It's no big deal, mommy. Just don't hold my face up to the mirror." Out of sight, out of mind I guess.