J&M got Maui'd!

Elsy's vocabulary and ability to communicate has been growing in leaps and bounds over the past year, but something that she tends to do a lot is to reverse certain words in phrases or syllables in words. One of her most common phrases is to say "got for" instead of "forgot". Daddy, you got for my gloves. Or saying "is it" instead of "it is". I don't think is it time for baht baht (bathtime). I do subtly correct her by answering with the proper word or phrase, but I know sometimes people will hear one thing and say another assuming that they are the same. I am not worried, but it was interesting to hear.

As I was getting dressed this morning, I noticed one of my golf shirts was hung on the closet door for some reason. I put it back in the closet because I thought Maggie had hung it up from the clean laundry. I was wrong. Elsy came in to the room after I put the shirt back and told me. I picked a shirt for you. Where did it go? Of course I had to grab it off of the rack and ask her if that was the shirt she had wanted me to wear today. Yeah, that's the one! So, now my kid is picking my clothes. I guess it is a logical progression: Mother > Wife > Daughter. Anyone but me I guess is the lesson of this story.

Maggie and I went to the Halloween Haunt at Canada's Wonderland last night and enjoyed ourselves. The weather cooperated and the night was very mild for this time of the year being in the mid-teens (temperature and many of the attendees). We were able to get onto one ride early on before the park filled up. The place was just as busy if not more so than a summer weekend day! Today we brought Elsy with us to Camp Spooky and the attendance was not as bad as Maggie had described the last time she took Elsy to this event last year. The weather cooperated again, being sunny, dry, and rather mild for this time of the year. To celebrate, we had our caricatures drawn with all three of us in the drawing. The quality of the work was not the best, but when number two comes along we will replace it with (hopefully) a better one. While we were waiting for the drawing to get finished, I was holding Elsy behind the artist so that we could watch him colour. Then it hit me. I felt something lik

Thanksgiving is coming up and we will be hosting a family dinner at our house. Maggie wants to have many parties here, now that we actually have a house to host, but our original plan of having multiple summer BBQs has gone by the wayside after the events of the year. I'm not sure if Elsy fully understands that her Gung Gung has passed away. We have not been back at their house that often now that there is no need to look after him. In addition, Paw Paw has been spending time with her various children and has not spent that much time in her own home since. Over the next month or so things will finally settle back down to routine, and we will need to start preparing for the coming winter. We have not killed that many plants we were not expecting to. But our ceders are starting to look a little brown right now. Time to give them some water!

Maggie's dad passed away last week. It was not unexpected, but it we were still surprised. He seemed to be doing better and things were looking up until it happened. The funeral was today. There were a lot of people who showed up. It was a nice service, and it was good that the entire family was able to come out and say our last goodbyes. The weather cooperated with us as well. Not too hot, not too cold. Not to wet, not too dry. Not too windy, not too calm. We set up our house as the main base of operations for the weekend as the funeral and burial were in our city. Elsy is definitely enjoying spending time with all of her cousins. She still doesn't fully understand what is going on. Perhaps one day she will.

So we got our Apple TV back a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, the remote was not included with the device, which makes it quite difficult to use. Actually, you cannot use it. After looking up ways to get around the lack of remote and workarounds to get a iOS device connected to it, I just realized that my old iPad (yes, the original) was possibly set up to connect to the Apple TV! I had purged a lot of the apps, and many no longer work, but I wanted to see if it was still connected after all of these years. So I wired up the Apple TV to the network, tapped a few buttons, and voila! Connection! I will be setting up the Apple TV on our TV upstairs now. No remote required!

So the past weekend was spent mostly cleaning and unpacking. Cleaning the dust off of everything, and out of everything and then opening the various boxes that we had squirreled away throughout the house to fill out the kitchen. The kitchen is the biggest amount of stuff for unpacking so we concentrated on it as we needed to have a functioning kitchen if we wanted to move in. The bedrooms were mostly done and the basement was a little easier to clean up, as there was not much to unpack. However, we had our ducts cleaned over the weekend (which is a wise move after a lengthy renovation). There was a lot of dust and debris inside our ducts and we were happy seeing that all of this garbage was being sucked out of the house. Except when the main ducts were being cleaned. The compressed air that was being used to dislodge the dust seemed to have sprayed the dust back up out of our registers! The guy didn't close any of the registers in the house (just the intakes) and a few of our roo

We had a resident robin at our new house and I wanted do show Elsy the rearing cycle of these birds as they were easily accessible and mature quickly. We have robins nesting out our parents' place just about every year and she did see one nest when she was an infant but I doubt she retained anything. Anyway, yesterday I noticed that the nest was on the ground. It was a very windy day and I was not surprised to see that the whole thing had gotten blown off the light. The sad part was that there were three chicks that came down with it. One larger one, a small chick, and one that was still in the egg. None survived. I was much too late to do anything. I took a picture and my Nest camera even caught the fall on video. Apparently it happened just as we were arriving at the house. (So not our fault?) Well, I hope this doesn't deter other robins from nesting near us. It would explain why the bird was looking forlornly at me when I approached the corner when I first arrived (I didn&

So we went to visit the house on Friday and found the place packed with contractors and kids. They were making a final push to get all of the work done so that we could move into the house this weekend. They stayed at the house pretty late, past ten, but there were still a few things that were left undone. Still the place is move-in-able. The only issue being the dust that was everywhere. They tried to clean up after themselves, but the dust covered every surface, and we spent the weekend removing as much of the dust as we could. I think we were able to clean up maybe half of the house? We are getting there though, so I am hoping that we will be able to start moving our stuff in by the end of the month and taking stock of what we still need to get to furnish the place.

We finally got the permit for the renos yesterday and the beam is now up. Things are progressing very quickly now and the plan is to have is in the house by the weekend. Only four-and-a-half months late!

Yes, both Maggie and I have new jobs: as gardeners! We spent the past couple of weeks working on our gardens. i.e. our yards. Ever since the snow melted, we have been working at cleaning up the yards as best we could. Once the rains stopped we were able to make some progress with cleaning up the leaves and exposing all of the perennials that are now working their way out of the soil. All of our trees are budding, and many of our tulips our coming out. I really do not know what we actually have in our garden, but am surprised by the sheer variety of plant life that has appeared in front, beside, and behind our house! Of course, I have been trying to keep the dandelions at bay, but this is a never ending battle, made more difficult by the distance we must travel each day. I am sure that things will get easier once we move in but for now, we are still getting our feet wet in this muddy past time. At least we know where a couple of the drip hoses need to get plugged in now. Oh, a

So Mama and Yehyeh have gone on vacation leaving the two of us to watch Elsy again. Things have been getting back to routine again, after taking advantage of not needing to worry about food for the past several months. We are looking forward to moving into our own house sometime soon. Elsy does miss her grandparents, but she did adjust very quickly to the new routine. We did prep her a bit, but she's quite a resilient (albeit stubborn) kid.

So I was mentioning earlier that it would have been nice to actively blog about our house hunting and house reno experience, but did not have the time. One thing I would like to add that I had not experienced before was a sewer backup. When we saw the renovations downstairs, the contractors added a back flow valve. I figured that it would prevent any potential sewer backup into our house. Nice to have seeing as we were on a ravine. Now what I did not realize was that these back flow valves are best when there is a sudden and acute backup of the system. However, if there is a chronic blockage, the back flow valve.. it does nothing! When the inspector came by to look at the house, we ran the water, flushed the toilets, etc. Everything looked fine. Of course, the house was not lived in for many, many months. In addition, the house next to us was vacant during that time too. Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. We noticed that the toilet was not flushing well, we were hearing som

So the renovations are still underway. Maggie suggested that we should have written a blog about the whole ordeal so that we, and anyone else, would be able to learn from this experience. Although a good idea, the reality was that we were so busy with the renovations and life in general that we did not have the time to sit down to document all the stuff that was happening and what we were doing about it. In any case, here is where we stand: The bedrooms are mostly done. They just need to finish up with the electrical and networking. The bathroom is mostly done. The last of the tile is going down and the lighting and exhaust fan needs to get in. The cabinetry has been purchased and assembled and just needs to be installed. The kitchen is well on it's way. There is still the appliances to put in place and some cabinetry, but for the most part, it's pretty close, especially now that we have the sliding door installed. The blinds are on order and will be here in month. The side