What's Up Wednesday: October 2024

October has gone so quickly! I can't believe we're in the last few days of the month. Wasn't it just September?!?!?

I really do love answering the What's Up Wednesday questions every month. I like how they help me reflect on the past month and I love having a monthly record of what we've been up to. I go back and re-read these posts often. The questions come from Shay at Mix and Match Mama and Sheaffer at Sheaffer Told Me Too.

image from here

 

What we're eating this week... Earlier this month we celebrated Thanksgiving with our traditional shrimp dinner and fancy potatoes. It was really good!

Other than that, we've been eating a lot of orange soups! The carrot dill soup on the left looks a little grey because I also used purple carrots in it. And we've had the curried butternut squash soup twice. It's so good!!!

What I'm reminiscing about... Remember two and a half years ago when my parents were our neighbours? Well, I've been reminiscing about that lately :) That was so fun, as normally they live three provinces away from us.

What I'm loving... I am loving Sam and his friends. I love that Sam can independently bike with his friends all over the city and that they still hang out on their elementary school playground, even though they're in Grade 10. When we experienced the Northern Lights a couple of weeks ago, one of Sam's friends' mom took the picture of them in the pyramid on the school playground and shared it with me. Sam is at the top and I just love this photo.

What we've been up to... There was a lot going on in October. Besides the regular dance, school, work, church routine, we also...

...enjoyed the Northern Lights...

 

...had a quick weekend away to the States to watch Willem play in a disc golf tournament...

...watched Rachel for a week during parent viewing at dance...

...went to one of Rachel's three dance performances happening this fall...

 

...and Rachel and her bestie went on a dance weekend away with her bestie's mom. Dave, Sam, and I stayed home and participated in a readathon instead!

What I'm dreading... The "check engine" light went on in our car last night and Dave is calling our mechanic today. I'm dreading what they're going to tell us...

What I'm working on... I'm working on maintaining my sanity while raising teenagers. If you've raised (or are currently raising) teenagers, you may know what I'm talking about :) I'm also working on yard work. It's time to get the yard in shape for winter.

What I'm excited about... As you may have guessed from "what I'm reminiscing about" above, my parents are our neighbours again for the next little while!!! I'm sooooo excited about it!!! It's such a treat to have them living just a few doors down from us!!!

 

What I'm watching/reading... I've been watching our glorious fall colours! They're pretty incredible this year.

 

I've also been watching Sam at soccer and Rachel at dance. I do love watching my kids do their thing.

 

As for reading, I read The Emotional Lives of Teenagers and really enjoyed it. I am currently reading Demon Copperhead. 

What I'm listening to... I'm listening to the leaves rustle as I walk through them to get to work.

What I'm wearing... When we were in the US, we went to Target and I bought the slippers pictured below. I really wish I had bought a couple more pairs because I LOVE them!

What I'm doing this weekend... I think we're hosting my and Dave's parents for a pizza night and other that that, I don't know. Oh, we'll probably be doing a lot of raking as the city is picking up our leaves sometime next week...

What I'm looking forward to next month... I'm looking forward to lots of quality visiting time with my parents! I'm sooooo excited to have them much closer to us. I'm also looking forward to Rachel's next dance performance, and hopefully enjoying some cozy, quieter moments before the insanity that is December hits.

I thought this year with having teenagers, Halloween would be less of a big deal but instead it feels like they're wanting to do all the traditional Halloween things, possibly for the last time. So tonight we're finishing off Rachel's costume and carving pumpkins. Tomorrow night, we're handing out candy while the kids are off trick-or-treating with their friends. I'm going to savour every moment of it because, as I said above, it feels like possibly the last year we'll be doing all this. So I'm off to enjoy.

 

Happy Wednesday everyone!

Falling For Fall

For a few weeks there I was wondering if we were going to get an actual Fall this year. Our weather was unusually warm and the leaves were stubbornly green. However, like a bolt from the blue, all of a sudden last week, our leaves changed and everywhere I looked, fall splendour was on display. So, what follows is a (mostly) wordless post of our incredible fall colours. PS. These pictures were all taken around our yard, or within a twenty minute walk of our house. I didn't even have to look that hard for fall.

Our backyard maple before all the leaves fell off. We spent a lot of time this past weekend raking.

Fall on our street.

My walk to work.

Brilliant colours on the way home from work.

 

How has your fall been?

Three Things

When I saw that Dara at Not In Jersey wrote a "three things" post earlier this week, I knew I had the idea for my next blog post! See Dara's post here. Read on to discover three things about each of us right now, with accompanying silly pictures :) (I got the kids' input on this post so this is all posted with permission. Just wanted to clarify.)

Rachel

1) Rachel's life is all about dance right now! She has six and a half hours of classes, she has 45 minutes of assistant teaching, and on the weekends, she has been preparing for three different shows (which adds approximately another four hours of dance every week). She is currently on a weekend road trip with her dance bestie and her mom to perform in a city about three hours away from here. Did I mention it's all about dance?!?!?!

2) When she's not at dance, Rachel loves baking, specifically chocolate chip cookies. As those are some of my favourite cookies, I am fully on board with this!

3) Rachel has had a couple of orthodontist appointments this month so, unfortunately, she's been dealing with braces pain. Sam was rarely bothered by his appointments but Rachel lives on smoothies and sorbet for a few days after each appointment. I had braces forty years ago and I still remember the ache in my mouth after a tightening appointment so I can sympathize.

Sam

1) Well, it took a bit of extra time, but I feel like Sam has turned into a typical teenager. He's got an active social life this fall. Specifically, he and his friends meet up at the neighbourhood park and ride around on their bikes at night. Today after school, they're all biking "somewhere to get Hallowe'en costumes, so can I have some money, Mom?" I love it!

2) If he's not riding around on his bike with his friends, he's playing soccer in our backyard. The other night we had about half an hour before dance and I went out and kicked the ball around with him. It was really fun! Sam has just started a fall league so I'll be watching him on the soccer fields for the next few weeks too!

3) Sam has also been doing a lot of dishes recently. This is a part of his life he's not as thrilled with! (And lest you think Sam is carrying the bulk of the household chores, Rachel has folded more than a few baskets of laundry and helped out with cooking supper a lot recently.)

Dave

1) Dave has taken someone to a teeth related appointment four times in the past two weeks. Between the kids' orthodontist appointments and his own dentist appointment, Dave is just thankful I'm toothily independent! Hahaha!

2) Dave has been reading more these days. He's read three or four books since the end of September which is unusual for him. He almost always has a book on the go, but except for being in Saskatchewan, rarely devours a bunch of books at once!

3) Dave has been spending a lot of time figuring out phones. He's our family tech person and he had to reset his work phone (which is his only phone) earlier this month so that was frustrating. Thankfully, it's all back to normal now. He'll be in phone purgatory for a bit longer as we just discovered that my and Sam's phone company is going out of business in a month. So he'll be figuring that out over the next few weeks.

Me

1) I am working on reading some very overdue library books. I mostly read on my Kobo but once in awhile, I get library books. And then I don't read them in a timely fashion. My most overdue book should have been returned to the library 46 days ago. Our library got rid of fines during Covid, which is clearly not great for me :) Thankfully, it's a readathon this weekend so I'll have lots of time to get my library books read, and returned to the library.

2) Sam provided this thing about me: "Mom has high expectations for her family which we don’t live up to due to inherent laziness." I laughed so hard because this sums up my family frustrations in a nutshell! Hahaha! By the way, my "high expectations" are things like putting their laundry away, getting to school on time, helping around the house, cleaning up after themselves, taking a shower in a timely manner -- you know, "high expectations" like that!

3) Lest you think Sam and Rachel are the only people in our family with active extracurricular activities, I am joining a staff-student volleyball intramural team!!! We have a new Phys Ed teacher this year and she is trying to encourage some staff-student mingling so a bunch of staff are going to play on volleyball teams with students at lunch breaks. Since my lunch break is during one of the student lunch breaks, I agreed to play. This could be a lot of fun or a complete disaster. Stay tuned to hear the results/find out if I get injured :)

So that's three things currently going on with each of us. This was a fun post to write and I'm going to try to do them more often. I think my last "three things" post was in January 2021 and you can read it here.

Happy Friday, and happy weekend, everyone!!!

Real Life Update

I've alluded to the fact a few times that my fall has been hard. And in my What's Up Wednesday post for September, I mentioned I was dreading some work stuff. Well, the work stuff has passed and I've decided to write some of it out.

As many of you know I am a middle school secretary (Gr 7 & 8 in our province) at a school not far from our house. I really do love my job, most of the time. In Canada, school is funded partially by the province and partially by local taxes. However, those taxes are distributed evenly so every school in Ontario receives the same amount of funding per student. I don't know all the ins and outs of the funding formula but, for some reason, our local board has a fairly significant deficit. And this has trickled down to the local schools.

In mid-September the principals found out that there was going to be a significant reorganization happening due to the funding deficit. This meant collapsing classes (so that class sizes would be larger) and some teachers losing their jobs. Four people at our school knew we were going to have to reorg, and that we would be losing a young, favourite teacher. And we also knew that these reorgs were going to be widespread.

So on top of all the impending chaos coming at my school, I had no idea how these changes might affect Rachel as well. The only person I could talk about this with was Dave, as I didn't know if any of my friends' kids would be affected (and they were), so I couldn't talk about it with them. It was basically two and a half weeks of knowing some major changes were coming down the pike and having to pretend everything was normal -- both at work and in my regular life. It was a very hard two and a half weeks. Plus, I wanted to cry every time I had to interact with the person I knew was losing their job.

On top of all this, once the final decisions were made, I was the person who had to make all the changes of moving students from class to class in a very short amount of time. Needless to say I was very stressed as this all came down the pike, plus sad about losing the teacher.

The transition happened a week ago, and thankfully the bulk of the work I had to do went quite smoothly, although it was an intense day of making it all happen. And then last Tuesday was like the first day of school all over again with new classes, new class schedules, and everyone trying to figure out how to navigate this all.

And although Rachel mentioned that a teacher at her school was gone, Rachel's class wasn't affected and her teachers are all the same, so that was a huge relief.

I am hoping now that this big impending thing is done, work will calm down and I will come home at night less exhausted, with more energy for things at home -- laundry, yard work, cooking, and yes, blogging. Thanks for hanging in with me as I've been mostly absent in blog world. I hope that changes over the next weeks.

10 On The 10th: October 2024

I thought October 10th was going to be a regular, boring day of work and folding laundry but it actually turned out to be one of the more memorable experiences of my life. The Northern Lights were out and we saw an incredible show! However, ten (somewhat blurry) pictures of Northern Lights could be a bit much, so I am continuing with my original idea. On October 12 & 13, we took a very quick road trip to New York state to watch Willem compete in a disc golf tournament with his college team,

Besides watching disc golf, we also stopped at Panera once, Target twice, and Trader Joe's once. We had some fun shopping! I found Sharon McMahon's new book, The Small and the Mighty and Sam found some equally important turkey slippers! Hahahahaha!!!

The morning of the disc golf tournament was rainy but the fall colours were on full display.

Although Rachel is holding two umbrella here, it wasn't too bad and we stayed fairly dry, except for our feet.

The disc golf course was in a park ringed with woods so some baskets were in the woods and some were on a more open field, with some large trees as obstacles. We didn't quite know what to expect but we just followed Willem and his team from hole to hole, trying to stay out of the way. We got to talk with Willem way more than we expected to but also tried to respect his space and concentration.

It was actually so fun to see disc golf played well (as opposed to how we do it! Hahaha!) and also to be having a morning walk in the woods. Also, we really appreciated that Willem's college coach came and talked with us a few times, explaining what was going on and sharing in the excitement.

After the tournament with Willem!

After the disc golf tournament, we grabbed some Starbucks to warm up. Since we had done some shopping, we had to be in the US for at least 24 hours, and we were close to the Pennsylvania border, so we drove to Pennsylvania to eat lunch at Sheetz and so Dave could mail his US ballot. He could have mailed it from Canada but decided to mail it in the US since we were there anyways.

 

And that was our super fun, super short, trip to the US.

 

And for those of you who missed seeing my Northern Lights pictures on Instagram, here's a bonus picture just for you: