Blog Update

So this blog is pretty much dead at this point, but it has so much history from our Girl's births that we need to try and maintain it until we migrate the content and contents out to some kind of scrapbook or other permanent home.  Sadly, every time I look at it, the comments have gone wonky in some ways.  The most recent issue centers around Blogger changing our domain to .ca because we're Canadian, but Disqus not being able to make complete sense of it.  I think I have it fixed for most of the threads, but a few seem to be missing the "comments" link.  Posting this more to see if comments work for new posts going forward or not...

Getting Closer!

As our professional team gets closer to having all of the necessary pieces in place, it is finally time to get shovels into the ground for the next chapter of our family's life.  Ahead of getting equipment on the ground to start installing underground utilities, we are pleased to announce that we will be holding a ground-breaking ceremony next Saturday (May 11).

Modernizing...

It's funny how far behind the times we had gotten...  Since Christmas we have upgraded the main PC to something capable of playing modern games, a new vaio laptop, an iPad mini, and a full sized iPad (4th Gen).  It has taken some getting used to, but we are quickly discovering the appeal of modern tech...

Success!!!

After countless months of the comments being AWOL following the closure of the Echo comments platform, I have managed to recover every comment and have loaded them into Disqus.  Hopefully, with this restoration, we will be motivated to post more often!

Transitioning to a better way of life

As many of our friends and family area already aware, we are working with a group of fantastic folks to build a new home for our family. The project is called Dragonfly Cohousing and you can read all about us here.

As part of this project, we have just recently sold our home and moved into a rental property to allow us the necessary liquidity to purchase our unit when construction completes (Currently looking to be Fall of 2013).

Yesterday, we received the exciting news that our development permit application had been resubmitted to the City of Calgary for assessment.

Another Year

It is hard to believe that it has been another year since I posted. Rebekah just had her 3rd birthday last week. I'm finding it hard to accept that my littlest baby is 3 already. In the fall she will be starting 3 day a week pre-school. She is so excited to go to preschool. I don't think I have to worry about first day jitters with her. Not that any of my other kids had a problem. I told her before Christmas that if she went pee in the potty and wore big girl panties she could go to preschool. She very gladly took me up on the offer and when Santa brought her panties for Christmas she refused to wear diapers. She succeeded though, so now we go to a parented preschool one day a week, and she loves it. It is so cute when she sings along in the class, as she sings her own words whenever she feels like it, and louder then everybody else.

Hannah turned 6 back in December. We had a swimming/bowling party with some of her school friends. It is amazing how independent she is getting. I can often rely on her for help now, and can trust her to do things on her own. Sometimes it is difficult to let her go, but when I give her my trust she generally does even better then I hoped. She is enjoying Grade 1. It was a rough start to begin with. She was really tired by the end of the day, and while she was loving going by the time we saw her at the end of the day she was a bit of a grouch. Things are better now though, and a earlier bed time has helped with waking up in the morning. She is doing amazing in math, and reading. Struggling a bit in talking french, but her teacher has assured us that, Hannah is just being lazy. She has an amazing french vocabulary, but generally chooses English because it's easier. Personally I can barely count to 10 in french, so for me what she knows already is amazing, and she gets great amusement out of listening to me try to read her books.

M has been with us for almost 2 years now, in fact it will be 2 years at the end of April. She turned 4 in December, and is currently going to a preschool 5 days a week. We are hoping to hold her back a year, so next year she will be going to a modified kindergarten so that the year after she can do a full kindergarten before attending grade 1. She loves going to school and is doing great there. We work on learning the alphabet and counting at home, and she is starting to be able to recognize her letters. But while she doesn't really like sitting to learn her alphabet she loves running around. M has the most fun when moving, whether it is running from one end of the house and back, pretending to be a horse or just jumping on the couch, she loves to move. We joke that she's going to be our Olympian. Soccer starts in a couple of weeks for all the girls, but I'm confident it will be M who will enjoy it the most.

Sara-Lyn will be 5 in December and she has already told me her birthday party is going to be at Stir Crazy. I'm not sure if that will work out for her, but she can always dream. She is absolutely loving preschool, and is looking forward to going to kindergarten next year. She is doing really well with her speech and we no longer worry about her at all. The speech therapist that we are working with this year has assured us that Sara-Lyn wont even need to see anybody next year. She has caught up to her peers. She has started learning how to read, and I am always shocked by how many sight words she has. She is just starting to be able to sound words out, but she has 100s of sight words and can read many books by herself.

Our last one is J, he has been with us 9 months now, and will soon be leaving us. He is being adopted and should be moving from our home by mid-May. We are going to miss him, but it will be good for him to be with his sisters and forever family. He has recently figured out how to move chairs around to reach things that he shouldn't have, and I have to say for the first week I am just going to enjoy not having to put the chairs on the table after each meal.

Drop-side cribs banned...

Drop-side cribs kill 46 kids over the past 10 years and they ban them (millions upon millions of them), while the CDC reports that 77 children aged 1-3 died between 2000 and 2007 from accidental firearm discharges and every American is still allowed to own a gun... Why not put the onus on the companies that manufacture the sub-par rails and guides to provide quality parts, perhaps by getting rid of the cheap plastic and go back to good old fashioned metal? And where does a parent's responsibility end? We had a guide break on our crib (right around the time of the recall, and after 3 kids had already outgrown it) because I leaned on it with most of my weight while trying to get Rebekah out of the back corner. What did we do about it? Took the side with the broken rail off, used the crib as a toddler bed and ordered a replacement part for when the next baby came along... There are so many things wrong with this new "initiative" that I'm not even sure where to start...

1. We have recently been considering our impact on our world and have begun following The Story of Stuff and I can't help but think that somewhere, somebody is more worried about how they can force people to buy new cribs instead of buying them from garage sales, hanging on to them for generations, or passing them on to other new parents
2. I also am forced to think about how widely the same poor quality plastics that created the broken guide dilemma are used in other consumer products and how much of a backlash it would cause if they forced crib manufacturers to use a higher-quality (read as more expensive) replacement, both in terms of increased manufacturing costs and in terms of consumers realizing that there are options to the cheap plastics that have become pervasive in consumer goods...
3. Wondering about the intelligence of forcing new parents (who already may be struggling to make ends meet) to go buy a brand new crib because they can't get a used one any more...