It's a nice day for a white winter

Finally the snow has arrived! We have been living in a land of yellow grass and mud since the beginning of the year. I hate my boots as much as the next person, but come on, it's January in Quebec. The kids have only been out on the sled once this year, and they love playing in the snow. There's a bit of a cold snap, but it's supposed to warm up a bit by the weekend so hopefully we can go out and sled in the park and make a snow duck or two.
One of Ben Christmas presents was a child's guitar. A music teacher comes in once a week at daycare and she plays the guitar and sings. Ben loves her guitar, and so we figured that he would love one of his own. We were right! We brought it in for show-and-tell a couple of weeks ago. It took Ben a few tries, but he finally shared it with his group. He sat on a chair and played and sang the ABC song.

When we heard this and saw the photographic proof, we were floored.

It's hard to know what Ben will be able to do when he gets older. Most autistic adults that I've heard of don't have careers, just limited jobs that aren't long-term. Wouldn't it be nice if he could become a musician and do something that he loves?

My hypochodriac officemate returned to work last week. I haven't seen her since before I left for mat leave, and she's just as much an energy-sucking life force as ever. We had a disagreement about the lighting (I finally had someone rip out the flourescents from above my desk) on day one. Last Tuesday she was already here when I arrived. She told me that she used my hand cream (it was sitting on my desk, no big deal), and then complained to me that she didn't like the way it smelled. This pretty much sums her up. I am staying optimistic and looking forward to many more funny incidents like this to pad my pathetic blog.

Resolution update: No juggling practise, but we made waffles last weekend and had enough to freeze for Ben's breakfasts this week. I put all my friends' names in a hat and will be pulling one out for writing to this week. I'm also back on track with the weight thing - yay me!

Goals and Schemes

I don't do resolutions for the new year, it always seems a bit pushy of myself to impose something to "fix" or make myself "better" than the year before. Really, what the hell is wrong with the me I am now? This year, I have goals. They are mostly silly, but should keep me entertained for the year:

• Learn to juggle - I've always wanted to be able to juggle, but I'm lazy and you can't just start juggling stuff without practising. This year, I am going to practise and learn this useless skill. I have some balls and have already started trying to throw one back and forth from hand to hand and catch it consistently. It's not going to be a quick process, hence the whole year thing. 2008? Chainsaws!

• Make more waffles - I bought a waffle maker in November. Ben eats a waffle every morning with reasonable consistency. If I make them, I can start slipping some nutrition in them on the sly so we can wean him off those supermarket freezer waffles with the nutrition of cardboard. And who doesn't want more waffles in their lives?

• Keep losing weight - This is a classic, but I've been pretty good so far, and since I started last year, it's just a continuation of something I already started, more of a goalette, really.

• Appreciating my friends - This is something that you can't do enough of. My friend Libby started sending me handwritten notes last year and it really impressed upon me how much more it says than sending an email. I shall be sending sneak-attack notes to people, be prepared, my handwriting kinda sucks and I tend to babble. No, really.

That's it, four things is really quite enough, and that juggling one is really going to take up a lot of my free time.
Wish me luck everyone! What are you gonna do?

Back

It was a great holiday, but not in the restful kind of way. Christmas was wonderful, everyone packed into our very tiny place for cheer and into our tinier diningroom for a feast. There were way too many presents, but we loved them all. We had snow the day after Christmas and over the holiday we had some fun playing outside.



The snow didn't last though, and now it's back to green and brown with a projected high this weekend of 16C and rain. It's just wacky.
Ben is back at daycare. Yesterday was his first day with a new shadow. Bea is very nice and I think that Ben will do well with her. He only took one nap the entire holiday, so it was no surprise that he didn't nap, but he did wake up everyone else which isn't good.
Work is really slow this week, a lot of people won't be back until next week. On the bright side, it took me 18 minutes to get from the daycare to my office chair.