Quiz Night at school

I usually don't enjoy quiz nights here in England, because I know nothing of football, cricket or rugby (nor do I have a burning desire to) and there is a large gap in my general knowledge of English history and geography. (Although that is improving with everyone of my children's homework assignments that I have to help with.)
But I felt obliged to attend last night, as we are committed to the school's activities and this was a fundraising event.

Answer I was proud of:
Giving a good guess on something I knew barely anything about: the film called The Great Escape. It's one of those films that your spouse will insist is a classic, but I view as just another war movie, so I wasn't really paying attention to the film's ending which described how many soldiers actually escaped in the end. Something was telling me three for a reason and I was right! (Unfortunately, I deferred to the men at the table and they got it wrong.)

Answer I knew I should have insisted on:
The question was Sago vs. Sarko, what is it? The French Presidential elections, of course. But Orest insisted I put "prime ministerial" instead and we lost the point. Aaarrggghh!

Answers where I was no help at all:
British sports, of course. And two of the music questions really stumped me, but to be fair I'm not a fan of boy groups (Take That) and I don't know all the words to Eleanor Rigby. (Question was "Who picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been?")

Answers on the tip of my tongue:
Who takes the silk? Of course I should have known that since I was at Lincoln's Inn a week ago where they told us that this phrase describes a lawyer being called to the bar. (Luckily someone else at our table knew that one and we got the point.) And the other one was the only tube stop with 6 consonants in a row...which I managed to get after racking my brains: Knightsbridge!

Overall we came 7th out of 12 tables, so not complete morons, but could use a brain brush-up.

Cool shot of Orest heli-skiing

Did I mention that after dropping the kids home from their weeklong ski trip on Saturday, that he turned around and left the following night for another ski trip?

This time it was heli-skiing with business colleagues for 2 days, and as you can see from the photo, it was magnificent. (He's the one at the right bottom of the photo - kicking up powder.)

(Personally, I think he gets too much skiing and then complains that it's still not enough.)

The best laid schemes

The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
--Robbie Burns
(Translation: The best laid schemes of Mice and Men, oft go awry,And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy!)

Unbelievable! Here I was, alone at home for a week with no kids or husband and how many blog entries did I manage? A measly two entries! Pathetic.
Now how did I manage to get a week to myself sans my usual motherly/wifely responsibilities, you ask? And no, we're not on our way to divorce, with seperate vacations and all that. It's just that having left everything til the last minute, I managed to find someone for Orest to ski with, but it was my friend Lisa's huband on his own with 3 kids. (Lisa doesn't ski, so this has been a long-standing tradition in their house for Dad to go with the girls on his own.)
So I thought, "What am I doing being the only woman on a self-service holiday with 6 kids and 2 men...am I crazy?" So I inisisted that Orest would be better off without me and that I'd be happy to stay home on my own.
I was worried about the standard of care that the girls would receive under the Laissez-faire attitude of their Dad when it comes to things like: nutrition, clothing and general care, but in the end I traded those worries for a week of relaxation and a compromise of bringing them home alive, if not well.
So, how did Orest do? He had a lot to contend with, such as the flight landing after the rental car agency had shut and waiting for a shuttle bus at midnight which never arrived; Adriana couldn't control her bladder on the slopes one day; and Adriana wanting to eat nothing but fries for the entire week ("Cuz everthing else is yucky!" so she said.). So he was rather pleased with his performance and I was just extatic that they were home with nothing more than a sore or two on their faces (Adriana scab under the eye from a pole injury; Larysa scabbed over lip from chapping and Stefanie with a major zit scab on her chin - although it could have been mistaken for a pole injury as well).

Grammy watching

They showed the Grammies here last night (we always get everything a day late here - including the Daily Show), here are some quick comments:

The Police-----Wow! What a blast from the past. I remember being at the CNE in '82 during the Police picnic and trying to slip my way past security, because I didn't have a ticket. It was a no-go, so I had to stand beyond the bandshell, about a mile away, and I listened to them play the same song they played last night: "Roxanne". You certainly knew then that they would have the staying power in music that some of the other bands of the era didn't. (Just look at the line-up of openers at the picnic: The Spoons, A Flock Of Seagulls, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, The English Beat, The Talking Heads... Other than David Byrne, has any one heard from these people in the last 10 years?

Doesn't Sting look fabulous? I have it on good authority that he's had no work done, but yet he's got the face and body of a fit 35-year old. I should look so good when I hit 55!

And although I'm not a fan of country music, congrats to the Dixie Chicks for standing their ground when they got slammed for dissing George Bush. Coming away with 4 Grammies, it was a clear message that people should be allowed to have their opinions whether they're musicians or not.

Lincoln's Inn

I recently joined the Canadian Women's Club here in London just to see what they had on offer and signed up for my first event to go and see Lincoln's Inn. It's called an inn, but actually I would consider it to be more of a private club for lawyers.
Our guide was very informative, but despite his detailed explanation on the differences between them, I still don't understand why the English have the delineation between barristers and solicitors.
In any case, the grounds were impressive, with some parts of it dating back to it's inception in 1422. With a Great Hall, Library, Chapel and offices and flats, it was like a mini-campus for law students and their alumni. I could go through the tour with you, but like everything here in London, I'd be hard-pressed to describe Lincoln's Inn with any other adjectives than: "grand", "beautiful", "historic" or "steeped in tradition".

So instead, I will regale you with the little trivial bits that I picked up instead. It seems that Cherie and Tony first met here at the Inn, while they were waiting for a scholarship interview, and thus the bench that you can see in outside the door of the room we are in (behind the gentleman in the trenchcoat) is called the "Blair bench". (You may have to enlarge the photo to see it.)

On our way to the Chapel, we were told that this little building is the smallest 'listed' building in England. First used by the Coachmen to direct horse traffic, it fell into disuse with the introduction of the new main gates and automobile use. They then tried to pawn it off on the grounds gardener, who insisted that she didn't want to work in a "fishbowl". When she came back from maternity leave, it suggested for use as a creche. (I think that was a joke - ha, ha.)

This photo is the "undercroft" of the chapel, where several members of the Inn have been buried into the floor. It was also used by the poor, who would leave their children behind to be looked after by the Inn, and eventually trained in clerkship or service. These children were all given the surname "Lincoln", which makes me wonder about Abraham Lincoln's antecedents?

One last one is an example of 'graffiti in art'. The coat of arms in the photo belongs to William Pitt the Younger, prime minister of England in the 18th century. The artist who made the this stained glass version of his coat of arms, did not like his propensity for capital punishment and scrawled "Gallows Billy" into one of the yellow dots of the shield. Whether it was too difficult or expensive to remove, for some reason the Chapel left it as is.

There are other stories to do with the chapel, and John Donne, its most famous preacher, who wrote about the famous Cadiz bell atop the chapel: "...and therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." (From which Hemingway wrote his famous novel: 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'.

We were also told that this is a great area for filming, because of the Inn's enclosed historic site is perfect for creating movie sets without disrupting local traffic. I will have to see "Miss Potter" with Renee Zellwegger, to check out if I recognise the buildings in scenes where she visits her publisher.

London comes to a frosty standstill...almost.

Wow, what a sight this morning! Stefanie woke us at 5:45 am to see how much snow had fallen (She was really keen not to go to school) and so far it was 2 inches of the lovely stuff. (This is the back garden view from our kitchen.)

By 7:50 am, Stefanie was in a tizzy of confusion over whether to go to school or not (the website saying the school would be open regardless/her friends ringing to say they were staying home), so I told Stefanie that as a Canadian, she was morally obligated to show these English that a little bit of snow wouldn't stop her from leading her life as normal.

She was not pleased, to say the least. (That may have explained the last-ditch phone call from the bus stop saying "my shoes are soaked, I fell over so I'm cold, there's no one on the roads and the bus is no where in sight!")

Larysa and Adriana lucked out however, their school closed for the day. (I think this decision was based on the last snowfall when the teachers who did show up were stranded with children whose parents were stuck somewhere en route and had to remain until 9pm until they were collected.)

I did end up brushing off the car and warming it up to drive Orest to the tube station (even though he did have his galoshes on - they hadn't seen the light of day since we moved here, so they were a bit stiff) and took advantage of the clear main roads and my 4-wheel drive Jeep to run up to Stefanie's school just to make sure she had made it and that they hadn't shut it down.

Poor thing, she'll miss all the fun, Larysa and Adriana with our neighbours have built a fort in front of Anna's house across the street and are eating snacks in as we speak. And I think it's meant to melt by this afternoon, too!

The Captain and Mr. Noodle

We went to see Anthony & Cleopatra by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre on Saturday night with a crowd from the HWC. We first went for dinner with the 10 of us and it was fun because we've all known each other for at least a year, and as everyone knows; in expat terms you multiply it by a factor of 10. So it was like being with friends from college or something.

I'd forgotten the intensiveness of the play itself and after 3 hours, came out of there exhausted from having to concentrate not only on the Shakespearean language, but on the plot itself. As you might be able to tell from the photo, that's Patrick Stewart in the role of Anthony, and he was provided a surprisingly good performance. I say 'surprisingly' because I've known Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise and I thought it would be difficult for me to adjust to him in another character. The "Make it so, Number 1"' and "Engage!" from Star Trek has a certain association of personality that I thought would be difficult to forget when seeing him on stage in a toga and hair(!).

I've been caught out like this before when we went to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the spring. Kathleen Turner was fabulous in the lead role (the one played in the movie by Elizabeth Taylor), but the guy playing her husband George, is better known to most parents of small children as Mr. Noodle of Elmo's World fame. I really struggled to contain my smiles as Mr. Noodle was getting serious on stage and almost laughed out loud when he swore.

I think it's difficult to disassociate certain actors from memorable roles, but I asked myself why was it so hard for Mr. Noodle, but not Kathleen Turner. After all, she's had some pretty unforgettable performances in the Romancing the Stone series, and Body Heat. But I think it's to do with recurring roles in a television show that cements the character's idiosyncrasies for me that makes it almost impossible to see them as anything other.

Sorry, Mr. Noodle....

Burns Supper

This was the first year in many that we celebrated Robbie Burns' birthday, the last being a memorable one at our house here in London 4 years ago with the MacPhails helping us to make it authentic as possible - seeing as we're Ukrainian-Canadians!

This time it was held at our primary school and was a good evening considering that school functions can sometimes be a real bust. But seeing that our headteacher, Mrs. Morrissey, is from Scotland, she was going to make sure it was the best Burns Supper possible. She had the haggis shipped down from an organic butcher in Scotland and had her son pipe in the haggis.

And when Mrs. Morrissey says it's time to do the Scottish dancing, it's time to do Scottish dancing. Barely anyone dared sit out as not to incur the wrath of her gimlet eye and scorching tongue (Robbie's rubbed off on me!). So although few men attended, those who did, were very afraid not to dance. (Saved us the trouble of trying to cajole the menfolk away from the whiskey!)

It was a fun night out and we look forward to spending more Burns Supper evenings in future.

From Dusting & Cleaning to Mugs & Jugs

I've been out every evening this past week, so it's up to my powers of memory to fill up this blog with everything that happened.
First off I was out 3 nights in a row, so that when my brithday evening came along on the fourth night, I was so exhausted that Orest go off lightly and didn't have to take me out for dinner anywhere. I probably need to mention that I was exhausted by having had surgery the night before and spending most of birthday preparing for and hosting a lunch for my friends.

The surgery was a quick removal of a uterine polyp by dilation and curettage (hence the "dusting & cleaning" reference) but had to be done under general anasthetic, so I woke up feeling as if I had had a really great uninterupted sleep. I guess I didn't realize how broken up my sleep is normally, because I'm constantly at the edge of wakefulness at home with 3 children. It's as if my mind is still alert, scanning for any noises that might need examining even though my eyes are closed and I think I'm asleep. It doesn't help that often I get visitors in the night coming to my bed saying:
"Mama, I had a bad dream..." (Well, you shouldn't have watched the 'Scream until You Puke' DVD!")
"Mama, I'm cold..." ("Well that's because you're naked!")
or the best one:
"Mama, my covers are too poofy..." ("Well....What do you respond to that one with?")

It was fun seeing Cammie and Emma at my birthday lunch on Friday. I'd invited them over to sell Boleslawiec pottery to my friends - but mostly so that I could have my own collection on hand to figure out exactly what I was missing from it. (I have problems going over to buy in Poland on my own, because it's not until I get back that I realize that I've gotten the wrong size, or I already had way too many square serving platters and I needed round ones instead.) Their company is called "Mugs, Jugs and More" (completely innocently chosen, I was assured) and I've set them up a temporary website until we can get the business end sorted. So if you feel the need for Bole, check them out at: http://www.freewebs.com/mugsjugsandmore/. (I'll do a link from my blog too.)

Blow me down!

I am blogging today, when I was meant to be away for the weekend in St. Moritz meeting with Orest. What happened, you say? Well, freakish weather caused me to be stranded at London's various airports for the better part of 10 hours.
My day started at the crack of 6, taking Jessie to the park in the dark. That was a trip in itself. I've never walked her in the dark before, but I had the forethought to strap a glowstick to her collar (I know it sounds odd to have a stash of glowsticks at home, but I'm a Mum, you see, and you never know when someone might need one.) and equipped myself with a flashlight. Unfortunately, this didn't prevent Jessie from being freaked out at any approaching form and her barking caused one small dog to bolt out of terror, through the gate and practically onto the road! Many apologies and scolding later...
Made it to London City Airport by 9am (after dropping off the girls to breakfast club at school) only to find that the flight before mine to Zurich had been cancelled. They gave me a boarding pass for my flight, but then looking at the departure screens it said "Indefinite Delay". What kind of information do they think they're giving you with that statement, anyway? Bizarre!
Finally, by 11am, they'd upgraded(?) the status to "Cancelled". I actually felt relief, because I can deal with "Cancelled" a whole lot easier than "Indefinite Delay".
To make a long story short, I spent the rest of my day going by tube (1.5 hours) to London Heathrow airport where they had re-booked me on an evening flight, only to have that one cancelled by about 6pm. 2 hours in a line with hundreds of other stranded passengers, I finally came away with a voucher for future travel. (I chose this option, because the earliest flight they could get me on was Friday evening. Since I was meant to be returning on Sunday evening, I saw little point in even attempting to go.)
By 9:30 pm I was at home with the girls...I may as well have been away the whole weekend, I felt that exhausted!

Christmas Carolling in January

Yes, we are a strange race of people who insist on dragging out the Christmas celebrations until everyone is so sick of the joy of the season that Lent is looking like a fun time.

We went Christmas carolling with the Ukrainian scouts this past Sunday (because it was Ukrainian New Year's Day). We split into two groups (London's too large and the Ukie community is too spread out) and hit about six houses each. Orest and I had our girls and Julia's daughter (also a Larissa) while Julia and her husband Stepan had the boys and their Mums on another route. When we first told Adriana what we were doing on Sunday, she balked.
"I hate kolyadyvannya!" she said.
"But we can't leave you at home alone, everybody's going!" I replied, trying to find the unassailable reason for her capitulation.
"OK, but I'm staying in the car!" I was just happy that she understood that not going was not an option.

(The photo is of the 'zirka' or 'star' which is meant to represent the star of Bethlehem that led the wise men to the baby Jesus. It is carried it from house to house so that the hosts recognize that we're carollers, not some random people coming in to wail at them.)

At the first house, we did our bit, sang three carols, gave the blessing, with Adriana hiding on the floor behind me. It wasn't until the hosts started pulling out the traditional goodies associated with this ritual (alcohol for the adults and lots and lots and lots of treats for the kids) that she came up sniffing the air like a hibernating animal at the first breath of spring. There were cookies, there was cake, chocolates stuffed in their pockets, juices, crisps...It was like Halloween all over! It was at this point I grabbed the opportunity to inform Adriana that she wouldn't be allowed to have the goodies if she refused to sing next time. What a stroke of genuis!
What could have been a disastrous 4 hours of mewling and caterwauling, turned into a child mumbling her way through (but honestly trying to sing) our Christmas carols and actually enjoying herself, while everyone tried to supply her with enough sweets to last the next winter.

We topped the evening off with some Tex-Mex with the Szyszkas, a bit not in keeping with the theme of the day - but who cares?

Circus tricks

As mentioned previously, Orest booked tickets to see Cirque du Soleil (totally inconvenient time to go...see 2nd paragraph) and it was once again fabulous. The children were fascinated by the chinese contortionists, who seemed spineless in form and were able to create bizarre formations stacking body on top of body, balancing on a thigh or a chin or something equally as miraculous.

They also loved the clowns who didn't actually speak English, but "Cirquish", a baby-talk mixture of English, Spanish and French. They were really funny and in most cases language wasn't even needed. Like when one clown came out with a paper airplane making plane noises and then the second one coming up behind him making even louder plane noises with a paper airplane the size of a massive kite (if it weren't made of paper, he wouldn't have been able to carry it over his head like that). The first one, at that point, realizing he's been beat, throws his paper airplane down and stomps on it. Hilariously funny (more so if you were there, I'm sure).

So the scheduling sucked because we were all still getting over our jetlag, and the last thing the children needed was a late night and another reason not to get up in the morning. Also, Larysa was in the middle of more entrance exams for secondary school next year. Saturday was a callback for an exam she'd done in November that I'd never had thought she'd pass. The reason for my doubt was that when she'd finished their first set of exams, the first words out of her mouth were:
"I have to pee!"
"OK, but Larysa, how did you do on the test?"
"I did really well but I had to pee!"
This was all I could get out of her until we found a toilet for her to empty her bladder. Even after that she was unconcerned, while I was sure that all her focus had been trained on her pelvic floor muscles and that she'd tanked on the exam. Who knew that instead it made her focus even more on answering quickly and correctly?
She is one strange little girl!

Back in the saddle again

We didn't have a lot of time to get back to a normal routine after the holidays; one day we were having turkey and stuffing, the next day lunchtime we were stumbling off our trans-Atlantic flight with little sleep, Orest bound for the office and me and girls home to unpack. Upon arrival, we discovered some good news in the form of a letter from one of the schools that Larysa had sat an entrance exam for. She had passed through to the next stage, obtaining a perfect score. Wow, it made the extra Christmas gift of an MP3 player for all the hard work she'd done even more justifiable. The bad news was however, that she'd have to add the callback exam to her list of other exams in the coming week. (Thursday, Friday and now Saturday we booked with exams.)
This was all complicated by the fact that I was starting a Mandarin Chinese language course on Wednesday evening (more about that later), and that we had booked tickets to see Cirque de Soleil for Thursday (more about that too).
It is now Saturday evening, and we have safely negotiated through this challenging week of jet lag, little sleep, entrance exams and various evening engagements. We've taken the evening off and are mooching around the house for the night until we can go to bed.

Veselych Sviat!

To those of you who are scratching your heads at the title of today's blog, it means "Merry Christmas" in Ukrainian. Yes, today, January 6th was Christmas Eve, which was celebrated in the Hrabowych household with the traditional 12 course meatless supper. We've been building up to this moment since we got back from the Van Dusen cottage, with more shopping for gifts and foodstuff to fill up on.
The relentless celebrations have not been quite so relentless, since both Orest and I were taken out for a day each with various procedures. Orest finally decided to get his eyes done. And before you all start imagining that I was threatening him with divorce if he didn't take care of those crow's feet; he had the lasik procedure done which has corrected his eyesight. He's still complaining that it's only 95% corrected, but we're hoping for the rest of the 5% soon.
The following day, I went in to have 2 cavities filled and not having had any done for the last few years, it was more painful than I had remembered. The wierdest part was when Dr. Tomkins said she would put a plastic guard in my mouth for the filling of the second tooth, so to keep away my bacteria-filled saliva. Here I was imagining a hard plastic contraption of some sort, only to be presented with what amounted to a tarp covering half my mouth. It was the oddest sensation having little rubber bands around my teeth anchoring the thin plastic covering in place. At least the thing worked and I didn't get any bits falling into the back of my throat either, which was a welcome change from procedures done in the past.

Happy New Year!

Thanks to the Van Dusens for another New Years well spent and thanks to Dan and Barb for another fast-paced fun-filled evening at the Shed.
It was interesting to note that this was the first year that Adriana made it to midnight to ring in the New Year and the first time in a long time that the boys didn't do their traditional polar bear plunge that night. (They claim it was the copious amounts of champagne drunk, but I suspect they're just gettin' old - too much activities in one day.) They moved it to the next night instead, after a 3 hour (first-time for the girls) marathon of Risk. Since Orest was the only one who had played Risk before, it fell to him to explain the intricacies and of course he won in the end. Somewhat unfair, I think, but as we all stated at the beginning: "It's only a game, it doesn't matter who wins." (Poor Larysa, was inconsolable of course as her own father killed her armies in Asia and then started annihilating her in Africa as well. Doesn't matter that he'd already wiped Stefanie off the face of Europe and killed off Mary's last armies in Asia!)

I'm also happy to report that I spent another disease-free Christmas (having had the 2 week sinus cold before we left England) unless you count the massive cold sore on my lip that prevented me from getting my facial at Mary and my annual spa day at Calabogie. Oh well, there were other things we had done anyway, so I didn't miss it. Orest and Mike spent an equally fun day skiing next door with all the girls. So a great final day to our stay at Green Lake!

On our way to Green Lake

I'm sending this last blog message before we enter the wilds of Ontario where there are no phones, certainly no computers and no running water. (Maybe this is a cry for help instead of a normal blog entry.)

The kids managed to get in 2 days of skiing here in Collingwood, albeit on one run. Orest and I meanwhile, couldn't be bothered to fork over 25 bucks to do the same run over and over and over again. I guess that highlights the difference between the children and us - they don't have such a high-falutin' idea of value for money that we do, they just want to get out there and do stuff. That's not to say we didn't do anything, there was still some quality coffee-drinking, newspaper perusing and napping to be had amongst the older set, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.

We also had the ooportunity to catch up with the Dzulynsky clan...we still have trouble figuring out the family relationship to the Hrabowyches (our children are either 3rd cousins or ours are aunts to theirs or some variant of that). But the children are growing up quickly and it was nice to see them have fun together, especially with big Adia (Ostap and Motria's). Stefa and Larysa love hanging with her, Stefa especially, cuz she loves having a "big sister" instead of being one once in awhile.

C'mon, snow already!

No Snow? How is that possible? Here we are in Collingwood, the land of Blue Mountain and its over 30 ski runs, and all they can manage is a faint sprinkling of dust over the landscape.

We were worried when we arrived in Toronto on the 21st and it seemed that we had brought the typical English winter weather with us (that's rainy and gloomy), but thought it wouldn't last. After spending a lovely Christmas Eve and Day with my brother and his partner without snow, we thought, it's got to get better than this. Boxing Day shopping and Orest's hockey game, still nothing.

Finally, it's D-Day, the 27th, the day we were meant to drive up to Collingwood to do some skiing. and we wake up to a mixture of rain and snow, but with nothing staying on the ground. So, no skiing. At least the hotel now has an indoor/outdoor swimming area with slides next door which we've already taken advantage of.

There is hope though, as we were on our way to dinner with Motria, Ostap and family, we could hear (and feel) the snow-making machines working full-blast as it had finally gotten as close to zero as it's going to get. By tonight, they should be on their way to having a few runs open.

Last-minute Christmas fondling

Stefa, Larysa and I were out last night finishing up their shopping for gifts for their school friends. There we were at Brent Cross at a shop called Fun Learning. As we moved through the shop, me looking at one side of the aisle and the girls looking on the opposite side of the aisle, I felt someone brush up against me. Thinking it was Stefanie trying to playfully get my attention, I deliberately pushed back, trying to give her a hip-check. When I felt no resistance, I turned to see what had happened only to see that I had been sidling up to a complete stranger!
The woman was obviously confused as to why I was trying to bump and grind her, and despite my profuse apologies, probably assumed I was some sort of lunatic intent on feeling up as many fellow shoppers as possible.
It wasn't until Stefanie appeared back and she was able to overhear me telling Stefanie what had happened, that I could see her look of horror change to laughter.
We all had a good laugh, in fact...I feel like we could be close friends now, seeing as the introductory touching has already taken place.

Am I a lousy parent, or what?

I promised myself that this Christmas would be different after the disaster that was last year's Christmas play. Little Adia was in Reception and they were the youngest group participating for the whole show. Thus I was flabbergasted when the decision was made to make them sing their little song from the floor rather than from the stage. Picture it, 60 parents all trying to catch a glimpse or photograph their child behind several rows of other parents. All my photos had bright spots of peoples' hair or shoulders in the foreground, with Adriana this fuzzy little blob in behind it. Poor little Adia was getting upset as well because she couldn't see me either. I frantically tried to stand in the aisle, but Mrs. Morrissey (our head) was quite adamant that we keep the aisles clear for fire and safety reasons. I just couldn't understand why they wasted so much time pratising something that we couldn't even see! I just thanked God that I didn't force Orest to take off work to come and not see Adia, cuz he would have been pissed!

So I wasn't expecting much from this year's performance (even though I made my frustrations quite clear last year) and I vowed to chill out and enjoy it. Through a series of misadventures with dead camera batteries and Adriana's unwillingness to thrust herself forward, I have very little to show for it on the video or still camera. There's a 30 second clip of her dancing and waving a scarf on the stage (what that has to do with the Nativity is anyone's guess) and I have a few photos of her standing in the back row on the floor for the duration of the play(see right). I tried to coax her into the front row, just so I could get a photo of her that looked like I meant to get one of her and not everyone else's children, but either she didn't want to or she couldn't understand what I wanted from her. (I think it's the latter since she inexplicably began singing very loudly.) As I joked with her teacher after the play: "I didn't see her, but I could definitely hear her!"

The following Saturday was St. Nicholas day at Ukrainian school with its requisite performance. All three girls had learned their verses and songs and I was ready at the still camera while Orest was with the video. So Adriana's class gets up to sing a song, and again, she's in the back row with this big kid directly in front of her with a busby on his head, no less! (What this has to do with St. Nicholas, is again, anybody's guess.) Here I am jostling with the other parents in the aisle, frantically whispering to her to move into an open space so I could get a good shot of her, but she's turned in the other direction, facing Orest and the video camera. (I guess she did learn something from previous expereince, but it was of little use to me.) So I got bupkiss on the camera and incurred the wrath of another parent whose child was undoubtedly in the front row and wanted a photo of them, but got my fat behind instead.
On top of all this, Stefa decided to go completely stroppy on us (I think someone told her to stand somewhere she didn't want to stand) and her performance was marked by an aggressive 'hands on hips' stance, followed by flouncing off the stage when finished. Aaah, the teenage years, ain't they a pip?

So what did I learn this year that I can take with me to next year? I did come to the realization that my children are all different. Where I was used to having Larysa propel herself from the back row to the front for any and all performances, suddenly I find myself with Adriana, who is happy to hide behind children twice her size. I also have a child (or pre-teen) who is no longer willing to smile for the camera and wears her emotions like an shield in front of her. That, and I'll have to learn to use some of the camera features like zoom-in for Adia and filtering for Stefa which perhaps may mitigate their issues with photo-taking.

Or I could just smile and enjoy the moment and forget about any and all photographic momentos...I'm sure the other parents could use one less frantic parent in the aisle to compete with.

So much to do, so little time

I am in countdown to Christmas mode deluxe-o!

It's gotten to the point where I am dreaming of everything that I need to do and upcoming events so that when I wake up I think they are all supposed to happen immediately. Today I woke up and was convinced that Larysa was going to the V&A museum with her class (it's tomorrow) and that I had to go to the doctor's for my ultrasound (that's next Wednesday). I just need to calm the f*** down and get a grip.
I think what hasn't helped has been my longest running cold in the history of sinuses ever. I got this over 2 weeks ago, thought I'd gotten rid of it, only to have it return this past weekend. I think I have a Miss Snots-a-lot give me loving kisses to thank for the second series. So my sleep patterns have been seriously messed with and I have not been at my healthiest.
Orest, meanwhile, has just been for a throrough physical and had the woman doctor perform two exams that only a proctologist can. Thus he told me: "I got felt up more by a complete stranger than I have you in the past two weeks!"

Ice Skating on Sunday

Went skating with the Women's Club on Sunday to the Natural History Museum. Every year in London, there are more and more skating rinks opening up. The first year we did it we went to Somerset House (the photo with Stefa and Larysa) and thought, how quaintly English to create this little postage stamp of a rink for people to skate on. The last two years we've been to the rink in the courtyard of the Natural History Museum, only to find the rink equally as small. (The Telescopic photo makes it appear humoungous!)

They claim it's 1000 square meters, but it feels a lot smaller when they let all the people on the ice. As you can see from our family photo below, I am taking the photo and not skating, since I was shopping in the Christmas markets right beside the rink. (Also because I can't skate worth a damn and it causes my flat feet severe pain.) After skating, we went upstairs to the cosy cafe for mince pies, mulled wine and hot chocolate.

Ice skating has been embraced in London as a great winter outdoor activity (something we Canadians clued into long ago!) and they certainly have great historical venues in which to do it. This website shows about ten of the outdoor rinks available in and around London, from the Tower of London (in the moat!) to more natural setting in Hampstead Heath. It's got some great views of the rinks themselves:

http://www.londonnet.co.uk/ln/guide/about/attractions_iceskating.html

Week from hell for Larysa

I have to hand it to Larysa, she's a trooper.

We've been intensely preparing for her entrance exams for the last 3 months, in fact it's been the only thing consuming my time this fall. When I wasn't helping Larysa by giving her practice exams, I was worrying about silently or talking to my friends about as nauseum. I've been quite boring lately.

Last week, she had three exams to sit, two of them half-days, and one a full day of exams. After all of them, she seemed to come out all bouncy and energized. I'm not sure how to react, since when we went through this with Stefanie, her post-exam behavior was quite the opposite: near tears, exhausted and not happy.

Is it possible Larysa is one of these lunatic children who thrive on tests? Or is she just plain loony?

Unfortunately, we won't find out until March 1st, when the results are posted and the schools are offered.

Tower of London - Ceremony of the Keys

Completely forgot to mention our evening tour of the Tower of London. I guess we've been living here so long, that I forget when we do the touristy stuff.
Anway, we were booked to see the Ceremony of the Keys, which is a ritualized way to close up the joint for the night. Aah, but what would the Tower be without its historical rituals? First we had a tour of the Tower by one of the resident Yoeman warders. There are about 150 (yeomen & their families) living inside the tower walls and get locked in every night. That is why they have their own doctor and pub and chaplain onsite. Although what would you do if you had a case of the munchies round about midnight?
For Ceremony, The Chief Warder, dressed in a Beefeater costume, marches his way to the front gate from the Byward Tower. After he locks the Traitor’s Gate, he makes his way towards the Bloody Archway tower, where he is stopped by a sentry. As part of its tradition, the sentry and Warder hold an exchange:
Sentry: ‘Halt, Who goes there?’
Warder: ‘The Keys!’
Sentry: ‘Whose keys?’
Warder: ‘Queen Elizabeth’s keys.’
Sentry: ‘Pass Queen Elizabeth’s keys – Alls well!’

After the traditional exchange the Chief Warder lifts his hat and proclaims ‘God preserve Queen Elizabeth.’ The clock chimes for 10 o’clock as the other Queen’s guards raise their bonnets and say ‘Amen.’ The entire process takes no more than 7 minutes, but has been going on for the last 700 years. Even during World War II, when German bombs rained down on London, the ceremony still took place with the exception of a direct hit, which delayed the ceremony by one-half hour.
I had heard that if you are really nice to your yeoman guide, he might invite you back to their pub, but unfortunately we had no luck regardless of how many hints we dropped! We ended our evening in a local pub with Zim and Michelle and got home by 11:30 pm.

Honk if you're Indian

The mode of traffic in Mumbai was fabulous to behold...no lanes painted and cars battling with trucks and motorcyclists to squeeze into every available inch of space on the road. And all this accompanied by the constant beeping of horns.
Honking seemed to be just another method of speaking with other people in India. Whole conversations seemed to be occurring from the comfort of your own vehicle in a language only understandable to you.

HONK! "Hey get out of my way!"
HONK! "I was here first!"
HONK! "I'm right beside you, watch out."
HONK! "Would you like to go for a curry later?"

It was all quite amusing, except for Orest who claims that these conversations were going on until 4 am out in front of our hotel and easily heard from our bed, where he lay tossing and turning.

The other interesting thing that happened is a narrow brush with fame. Unbeknownst to us, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie arrived in Mumbai at the same time as us (but they were in a private helicopter) and proceeded to stay at the same hotel as us as well (but they were in the Palace part of the hotel, we were in the Tower). That evening we were booked to eat at Indigo, but cancelled at the last minute. Good thing too, Brangelina ended up there instead. (Do you think they took our reservation?)
All weekend long, they seemed to follow us around. How annoying! If they'd just stop stalking us and come out in the open, I would have graced them with an autograph!

More about Mumbai

So since the next day of our stay in Mumbai was Sunday, Orest and I booked a tour guide to take us around the sites of the city. I had read that Mumbai perhaps did not have an abundance of historical sights, but we managed to fill up 5 hours of time seeing the following

1. Our first stop (we only drove by the Victoria Train Terminal, Marine Drive and Chowpatty beach) was a Jain temple up in the Malabar Hills. Our tour guide whisked us through Indian religion fairly quickly, so our understanding of which gods were which was minimal at best. However, it was like entering the local community hall with its vendors in the courtyard selling patties and bread. The rituals involved in worship were very interesting and it was wonderful to be in the centre of it for a few moments.

2. Next were the Hanging Gardens, which were created on top of a reservoir in the Malabar Hills. Although the pruned trees and flowers were pretty, the informative talk from our guide regarding the Parsi (or Zoraostrian) funeral rites was of greater interest. Next to the gardens was the Doonderwadi complex where they would take their dead to one of the Towers of Silence (an open-aired tower) where the vultures were meant to devour the flesh and the sun meant to dry and decompose the rest of the body. (They did this because burying would defile Mother Earth and creamtion would desecrate the fire - all natural elements being sacred.) We took a photo from the hilltop, but it was rather hazy so not much of Marine Drive is visible.

3. The Mahatma Ghandi Museum was next, and here we followed the displays and learned more about the man who spent most of his life fighting for (and winning) the rights of all Indians. Here's a photo looking up at the balcony where he was arrested for his speech incurring civil disobedience.

4. Our last stop was the Prince of Wales Museum where we quickly went through the Indian portion of the displays and spent the rest of the time in the gift shop purchasing lovely prints and cards for literally pennies. It certainly beats the prices at the British Museum's gift shop!

A quick bit of shopping followed and then a lovely evening meal at what seems to be the only funky restaurant outside the hotel; Indigo. Orest and I risked dsysentery by ordering the king prawn starter, but it was too tasty to pass up!

Introduction to the Third World

This may come as a surprise to some of you, but I was in Bombay India (Or Mumbai, as it is now known) over the weekend. "What kind of idiot flies 9 hours to see a country for only 3 days?" you might ask. 'Tis I, the non-eco-friendly gal!
What an experience it was too...well worth the carbon emissions.
When Orest told me 6 weeks ago that he was going there on a business conference, I knew I had to take my chance and start tagging along to see the world. (I'd passed up several other fine opportunities that I'm kicking myself over now.)
With my shopping excursions laid out for me by my trustworthy advisor Lisa (she'd been there before) and other sound advice, I was still somewhat overwhelmed when we landed in this unreal cacophony of sights and smells.
The hour drive to our hotel gave us plenty of opportunities to see poverty at its lowest level, filth at its most exposed and rudimentary building materials (bamboo support structures and burlap used to keep cement wet) like they used 1000 years ago.
We were staying at the Taj Palace and Tower Hotel - the best Mumbai has to offer(see this link to view what I was lead to expect - http://www.tajhotels.com/Palace/THE%20TAJ%20MAHAL%20PALACE%20&%20TOWER,MUMBAI/Pdf/The-Taj-Mahal-Palace-&-Tower-Mumbai.pdf ), but even that was a letdown on first glance. The lobby, with its low ceiling and somewhat outdated style, reminded me of some of the communist attempt at interior decoration in some of the Warsaw hotels. Our room had a permanent musty smell to it that could only be eradicated by blowing up the entire 30-year old tower and starting over again.
It took the rest of the afternoon sitting by the pool to regain my confidence that I had not made a big mistake in coming to India. Looking back, I realize now that I had passed my comfort level - or even more sad - my comfort level has become narrower from my days of backpacking and youth hostels.
And confidence was definitely needed when Orest and I ventured out in the early evening to find a tailor 7 blocks from the hotel. The moment we stepped outside the hotel, we were targeted by beggars- women carrying babies, little barefoot children, crippled men on carts. At first, I was very nervous, having lived with the Gypsy beggars of Eastern Europe who would rob you blind if you let them. But I have to admit that these were the most polite beggars I'd ever encountered. After a quick no to their request for money, they would thank you and excuse themselves for bothering you. The sidewalk sellers were a little bit more aggressive, but having Orest around was an obstacle many of them couldn't surmount.
The other thing I noticed was the amount of stray dogs laying about in the street. And these weren't the feral strays that you'd encounter in Romania or Ukraina, where the threat of attack was always a possibility. These ones all seemed to be lethargically sprawled all over the sidewalk, with nary a care for the multitudes of people stepping over or around them. I almost felt like stepping on them to see if they would react - but luckily I'm not 6 years old anymore...

More to come in the next blog.

Career opportunities

I was putting Adriana to bed the other night and she announced that when she grows up, she wants to be a princess or a teacher.
I gently tried to break it to her: "Well, since you weren't born a princess, you'll have to marry a prince to become one."

She thought about it for only a moment and said:

"Ok, I'll just be a teacher." (I can't figure out what was less appealing; the marrying bit or the prince bit.)

Just as I was shutting the door to her room, I heard her add:

"Or a Dalmation..."

Aaaahhh, the dreams of childhood...too precious to burst their bubble.

Can I afford to be stupid?

In the last 4 days, I have lost 60 pounds (and I mean currency, not weight - I wish!) in total - and I can put it all down to my own stupidity. The first 40 pounds were lost in the form of a parking ticket. I wish I could say that the traffic control person was being an absolute dick, but the real reason was: just as I was getting out of the car, my mobile rang and I forgot that I needed to purchase a parking sticker for my car. Complete moron can't do two things at once!

The second happened so quickly I still have no ideahow. I'd made some DVD copies for a Mum at school and she handed me the 20 pound note just as I was waving off Adriana and Larysa to school. Somehow between school and my car I realized I was no longer in posession of said note!

The question is: can I afford this? I thought back to the days when Orest and I were first married and still using budgets (well actually Orest did the budgets - he just told me how much I could spend per week) 60 pounds would have been my entire week's supply. It probably doesn't help that I still convert to Canadian dollars every time I shell out for something over here - that's over 120 bucks!!

I'm very lucky that we aren't scrimping and saving as we were 20 years ago, cuz I'm getting stupider every day. (20 years from now I'll probably be losing 120 pounds every day because I can't keep my mind on the moolah.)

I did however feel obligated to try and retrieve at least the 20 I lost at the school by asking the school secretary to post something in the school newsletter to see if anyone would come forward and return it. Call it my social experiment of the month.

Burn Guy, burn!

Guy Fawkes night....what an interesting celebration. Bonfires with an effigy atop and fireworks to symbolize the gunpowder that could have lit up the Parliament if not stopped. A classic struggle between the Catholics and newly-formed Anglicans all wrapped up in tidy package of fun for all ages.
We had heard that in Chiddingfold, Surrey they have quite the massive parade, fair and bonfire, so we decided to organize and outing there in conjunction with the Ukrainian Scouts. We first arrived at the old folks home to prepare a bit of games and snacks for the kids and then took a walk down to the village once it got dark.
We arrived just in time to watch the procession of torch bearers (about 400 of them) walking down from the local St Mary's school. They all had to gather around the bonfire, which was stacked up in a teepee shape at least 30 feet high, with the hapless effigy of Guy tied to the top. Then the countdown began and they threw their torches into the collected wood in waves. I was amazed that no one was injured with the massive amounts of torches being chucked, but obviously these were experienced fire-throwers.
As the fire was burning the children got a little bored after the flames had completely consumed Guy, so we took a walk around the green and found that they had many stalls selling food as well as a small fair with rides for smaller children. The girls were most interested in the stall selling all things glowing, and of course we had to buy them each a set of fluffy bunny ears that light up. (what rabbits have to do with Bonfire night is anybody's guess...)
An hour later, they began the fireworks display. With the requisite oohs and aahs, we watched while Jessie cowered at our feet from the noise. After a very good lightshow, we trudged back up the hill where we had parked at the old folks home, had some hot chocolate and biscuits and then home. When we drove by the bonfire, it was still burning brightly, and it's been said that it usually stays lit til the following morning. Amazing!

(The photo above is Adia sitting on the shoulders of our friend Stepan - who did a good job of shouldering others in our party as well.)

Trying to keep Halloween alive!

It's been really weird trying to celebrate Halloween here in England. Over the past four years, the Brits have come along a bit in terms of understanding what it's all about (i.e. there's been a lot more to buy at the local shops), but there's still a lot of confusion around here over what and what not constitutes an All Hallows Eve fun night. So here are some basic tips to help you through the season:

1. You don't have to wear a scary costume! The little ones are already frightened enough as it is, without dressing them up as little Draculas or Elphabas. See my kids: I had SpongeBob, a dalmation and a nerdy geek this year (no, the little green man is not Orest). I still remember Larysa's first year at the school's Halloween disco, dressed as a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, and having some kid come up to her and say: "I'm not afraid of you, you're not scary!" Yeah, duh! Missing the point.

2. Our neighbours around the corner came trick or treating and told me to send my kids around to them when they returned from their jaunts, only to find their house looking dark and with no pumpkin lit up out in front. We then realized that a lot of people here aren't up on pumpkin etiquette and the girls have missed out on a lot of candy over the years!

3. What is the big deal with jack o' lanterns anyway? I think a lot of people still have a fear of sticking their hands inside of juicy old gourd and ripping out the guts to then carve out a design on the outside. I still remember our first year here, trying to get a jack o' lantern contest going at the school, getting numerous phone calls from people who had never touched a pumpkin in their lives. I can't tell you how many times I had to explain the rudiments of pumpkin carving.

4. The amount of backlash I hear over here that this is an "American holiday, and why do they have to supply these little brats with a year's supply of candy anyway?" is quite astounding. Get a grip Gramps, this is not an American invasion of commercial crassness, it's just an opportunity for the kids to dress up and get a toothache all in one night. Besides, all that scary dressing up will come in handy for those vicar and tart parties of the future, won't it?

Still sparking

14 days on the Spark diet website and I've lost 5 pounds so far.

I can't really tell you why it works, but I guess the calorie-counting (and I am not exact by any stretch of the imagination) helps see how big a portion you can eat without going over your maximum every day.

The fitness page also helps. Once I figured out how many miles per minute I was walking it was really easy to convert that to calories burned. Because I don't have a pedometer, it was through an intricate calculation off Google Earth and using the beats per minute on the ipod.

I've also been drinking a lot more water than I'm used to, which has done a number on my skin - it feels like the water is pushing out all the imputirities out through my face and it's breaking out all over. But if it's getting the results I want, I can live with a few spots on my face.

Hair Follies

A friend from Adriana's class at school was having her 40th birthday on Saturday, and the invite said "Think Audrey Hepburn" for how to dress for it. After hearing many of my other friends saying they were going to have their hair done up for it, I thought I could try the same.

It wasn't until they saw how short my hair was at the salon that they began to express doubt as to whether putting it up was even a remote option. Luckily, I had a girl who was game for it, and said my hair was a challenge to overcome. (I felt like the Himilayas at that point.) Several pins (48 various hairpins) ranging in size and ouch factor later, my hair was glued into place, so that not even the damp British weather was going to make it fall down.

So the party was great fun; everyone agreed that I clean up nice, and thank god nobody had any magnets on them, cuz I would have gotten stuck to them head first!

I'm sparking!

Or maybe barking?

Funny name for a website, but check out www.sparkpeople.com It's a free diet site that allows you to load in your data and help you determine an appropriate weight loss plan which includes nutritional guidance and fitness routines.

(A note of warning to my British friends - this is an American site, so there are lots of meal plans based around stuff that's popular in the U.S. For example, I had to load all the dietary info in myself for Yakult because they've never heard of it there.)

So this is it, I've finally decided that something's got to budge (not bulge) and I've been on it 3 days. My goal is to lose (not love - which I typed out in error - Freudian slip) 30 pounds before my birthday in January. Right now it's been great and I've lost 2.5 pounds already, but Christmas is just around the corner with its endless partying and eating and noshing and nibbling, and so on.
Lord, it doesn't bear thinking about! Is there any way to skip the holiday season altogether?

Larysa's birthday

For Larysa's 11th birthday, I wasn't sure quite what to do with her. She wanted the Rainforest Cafe - too expensive, then she wanted horseback riding - also too expensive. She'd already been to the bowling alley millions of times for other birthdays, so that was out.
As I trolled the internet for ideas, I came across a sound studio that hosts birthday party where you go in and record a song (everyone gets a copy of the CD) and then you do some dance moves too that gets recorded on a DVD for you as well. Cool! Larysa has always been a pop star diva in the making, so I thought it would be kinda neat to get it on a CD for her.
Once Larysa had settled on her guestlist - it was really important that she have a good mix of kids, I made these cool invites to look like CDs (if I had an extra few hours to spend I would have laminated them too) and then put them in CD cases for Larysa to give out to the invitees.

Well the day came and I drove up the 7 lucky children to the Sound Studio where they spent the first hour recording the song "Reach" by S Club 7. (Larysa had invited to boys, MacKenzie and Luke, it this seemed like the most appropriate song for both sexes to sing. Somehow I couldn't see the boys wanting to sing Avril Lavigne or Pink.)

Everything was going well until everyone piled out of the recording room and I noticed how ill Larysa looked. I guess the heat and lack of something to drink had dehydrated her to the point that she could barely stand up. But in true Ethel Merman-The-show-must-go-on style, she was able to come round and finish the dance moves for the DVD. Listlessly, but she did it. What a trooper!

So right now, it's 1:40 am, and the girls who stayed behind for the sleepover are obviously not sleeping. So it's up to me to keep at them until they finally drop off.

Nighty-night!

Knife throwing class

Ok, not throwing...But it was still a knife class.
My friend Mary invited a few of us to Divertimenti, which is this lovely cooking school in Marylebone High Street. You had to walk through their kitchen shop to get to where they were doing the class, and I was itching to go shopping. It's one of those types of shops where you can buy mango slicers or something equally as useless, but it's supposed to make life sooooo much easier. I can't resist it somehow - it's having grown up on Ronco commercials on tv. Anything that slices or dices holds a certain fascination for me.

That's probably why I signed up for this course. I've always had the feeling that I've never really understood how to really use a knife properly - that's why I have these cuts all over my hands. Well, we spent 2 hours chopping, mincing, julienning and (not sure if I have this one correctly...) chiffonading, which I think means shredding. (But with a knife of course - which is doubly strange!) In fact, we spent so much time in the preparation, I almost didn't have time to eat the products of your time-consuming work.
I was enticed, however, to purchase a brand-new (read:expensive) knife - after spending two hours with the Global knife, I fell in love with the feel of it. When I got home, I promptly unwrapped it, used it and sliced my finger in no short order.
So I still don't know what I'm doing, but now I'm doing it with an expensive knife and feeling good about the pain I'm inflicting on myself.

Mooncake Festival in Chinatown

This Sunday we took advantage of having nothing to do in the afternoon to go down to Chinatown and have a family lunch.
Unbeknownst to us, it was the Mooncake Festival time, so when we got to the main drag of Chinatown (the only drag, actually) we were greeted by a parade of dragons and paper lanterns to add to the already colourful atmosphere.
The meal was lovely - finally, some decent Chinese food in London! But Adriana was forced to eat nothing by steamed rice and a sliver of bbq pork, since she wouldn't try or eat anything else.
Although we asked our server what the festival was all about, her limited English made it difficult for her to describe in detail what the festival was all about, so we didn't press her.
I've since looked it up on Wikipedia, which describes the 8th month of the lunar calendar was having the brightest moon, and the Chinese having an autumnal festival at the same time to celebrate the end of the harvest. The mooncakes refer to an ancient tale of the Chinese's struggle against the Mongols and using mooncakes to communicate an uprising to rebels on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month.
Interesting....even more interesting was the oriental family sitting across from us, a youngish couple with 2 young boys. They ordered things I had never seen in my life before, but bound to be more authentic than the sweet and sour chicken we ordered. I'd always been jealous of these families that can go to restaurants with young children and manage to be so quiet that you forget the children are there - and oriental families are a prime example of this. With my brood the decibel level seems to increase in public places - it's as if they think that the minute we step outside the house, I've gone deaf and need to be shouted at continuously. Anyways, there's a lull in noise at our end of the restaurant, when all of a sudden, the Chinese Mum yells at one of her small sons who's slipped under the table: "SIT ON YOUR CHAIR, NOW!!" I was so shocked, I looked around at my kids to make sure it wasn't one of mine who'd slipped under their table.
But no, it was definitely hers, as she stood to haul him out from the floor and place him squarely on his chair.
Somehow it made me feel a bit better about my children's behavior until:
"Mama, do all China people have lines for eyes?" (Could she have said it any louder?????????)

Keeping up appearances

Still along the same vein with Larysa....

She was sitting in the office chair behind me trying to give me a head massage when she announced in a horrified tone:

"Mum you've got lots of grey hair! When are you going to colour it to match the rest of your head?"

I was a bit disappointed, because, after years of colouring my roots to disguise my greys, I thought it time to abandon all pretenses, and go 'au naturel'. This was not a split-moment decision, but carefully thought-out based on: economics (I'd save myself at least 200 pounds a year), truth (it's time I faced the fact that I'm no spring chicken) and health (all those chemicals must be having some sort of effect on me).

I tried to explain as gently as possible how I was thinking of leaving it as is, but this just induced an even more horrified repsonse:
"Mum! You can't show up in the playground at school looking like my grandmother!!"

My God, she's just added about 20 years to my age and has now put me in that dreaded category of "parents who mortify their children". We're ready for our own Jerry Springer episode, complete with half-dressed young girl and her blousy still-more-undressed Mom duking it out on national tv - expletives bleeped out, of course.

Girl, you'll be a woman soon

Poor Larysa!

At almost 11, she seems to be on the verge of becoming a woman. She's got all the emotional roller coaster feelings associated with budding adolesence, but none of the physical manifestations of it.
Case in point, she managed to work herself into sobbing hysterics in the 7 minute ride to school the other day. Why? Because her face was too fat! She doesn't seem to understand that her face still had the baby fat that would disappear all too soon. She was inconsolable.

I just wish she's get her period, so she'd have an excuse for all this drama!

Walking progress

You're probably all dying to find out how I've been doing with my walking tunes that I told you about on Sept 16th's blog.
Well, the first day, my shins started aching (like the feeling of being on skis for the first day of the season) by Absolutely Everybody and I was more than happy when Gus had his open air cafe open early enough that morning that I was able to use the excuse of making polite conversation with him to have a sit down while he made me a 'happy-cappy'.
A few days in, it was Madonna causing the shooting pains up my shinbones - although I've heard she does that to paraplegics.
I am happy to say that I can now last through Follow the Leader without wanting to karate chop my legs to death. I have had to remove Pump It and Vertigo as I discovered they had completely un-walkable beats. Sorry Black Eyed Peas and U2 - I'll leave you on in the car instead, ok?
I've replaced those two with a few more tunes, so this is what the playlist looks like now:
A Little Less Conversation 3:33 Elvis vs JXL
Love Machine 3:25 Girls Aloud
Aint Got No... I Got Life (REMIX) 3:22 Nina Simone
Please Don't Go (Sunshine Mix) 4:39 K.W.S.
Move This 5:02 Technotronic
Absolutely Everybody 3:43 Vanessa Amorosi
First Time 2:40 Sunblock feat. Robin Beck
24-7 In My 911 3:13 Vengaboys
My time 3:15 Dutch feat. Crystal Waters
Ray Of Light 5:20 Madonna
Cha Cha Slide 3:40 DJ Casper
Follow Da Leader 2:32 Nigel & Marvin
Burning Down The House 3:39 Tom Jones & The Cardigans
The Emperor's New Clothes 5:16 Sinéad O'Connor
All I Wanna Do 4:33 Sheryl Crow

I am a bit ashamed of having something as silly as Vengaboys on there, but hey, whatever gets me moving around the park, covering twice the distance, is fine by me.
I'll let you know how it goes....

Murphy's Law?

'Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.' - Murphy's Law

So here I was again, scrambling to get to school to pick up my girls (and Gwen's daughters) on time. I needed the skates for Adia, tennis rackets for Stefa and Larysa snacks and something to drink, and get Jessie in the car for the short trip to the school.
I was losing time because I couldn't find Adriana's skates, only to find out after a quick call to Orest that he had taken all the skates out to be sharpened. Ok, I can deal with that, as long as Adriana doesn't throw a fit that she has to rent a pair at the rink.
Get into the minivan and as I pull out of the drive, I can feel the tha-whump, tha-whump sound of a flat tire. (Why I didn't notice the car leaning over to the front left side, I have no idea.)
So here I go, taking everything (dog included) and moving to the Jeep, hoping that I won't get stopped by the police for having an illegal amount of children in the car.

So was it Murphy's Law or...some more sinister power at work. After all, who took all the ice skates to be sharpened? And who created the bump in the tire when misjudging the width between the other car and the island on the other side of the road on the way to church one Sunday?

Funny how you can be married to a guy for almost 20 years without realizing he's been creating "behind-the-scenes" sabotage, only for it to explode on you at the most inopportune moment.

Adia's gonna be a banker & in my face

The girls have started school and their after-school activities as well. Which leads me to a cute little story of Adriana's lack of trust (probably brought on by her sisters making up stuff to try and get her to do want they want her to do!). I sent Adriana to the tennis court yesterday with a 20 pound note for her to pass along to the coach for Stefa and Larysa's lessons. I told her that she was to bring some change back, as it would on be 15 pounds. Apparently after being handed the 5 pound note for change, she immediately lifted it towards the sky as if she were verifying that it had the appropriate watermark and it wasn't fake. Luckily Kim saw the funny side of this and didn't assume that I didn't trust her not to pass on conterfeit money through my kid.

I had the chance to go to the Sanctuary in Covent Garden the other day with the Australian Lisas x2. (They had birthday vouchers, but I didn't want to feel left out, so I came along too.)After every thing I had heard and the glossy brochure with the picture here, I was expecting to spend a relaxing couple of hours with me mates. But I'll you what I was not expecting: the lady doing my facial to give me the third degree on my beauty regimen.

"Do you cleanse, tone and moisterize twice a day?"
"Uhhh, no." (What I really wanted to say was "I can barely haul my ass out of bed in the mornings, and at night the last thing on my mind would be to have my face feel like a baby's bum!)
"Do you use a masque or exfoliate weekly?"
Same response again...This time I really wanted to say: "Exfoliate my %^&^#%!!"
"Do you have a facial regularly"
At this point I wanted to deck her, but thought that if I did, she might use cement instead of a scrub and then cazy-glue my eyes shut, so again:
"Uhhh, no."

The way she tsk'ed me let me know that I had failed the minimum requirements of being remotely human, but I let her have her way with me and came out looking and feeling years younger. So who am I to complain?

Pandora's box

It's been awhile since I last blogged, so lot's to catch up on....

You may have noticed that I've changed my template somewhat and added something along the side here called Pandora. It's a website that allows you to create your own radio station by building off one artist or song that you like. My first choice is an R&B type station because I typed in "London Bridge" by Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, and the second one is more of an acoustic-y, reggae, salsa type of station I got by typing in Lily Allen. You can either listen to my two stations or have fun creating one of your own. (It eliminates having to listen to adverts, at the very least.) I got into it as I've been downloading our entire CD collection onto the computer to have it then downloaded onto our Ipod. So far I've got almost 4 gigs done (2.5 days of listening - which makes being stuck on a desert island with my Ipod a little less boring) and another tower of CDs to go! I don't know if this is another one of those "make-work" projects because somewhere along the way I've forgotten why I was doing it in the first place.
Oh, I know! I was trying to come up with the ultimate "walking playlist". When I walk Jessie every morning, I noticed that I could cover a lot more ground if I could find some up-beat tempos to walk to. After a few days of trial and error, (which included walks where either I was walking as if I were slowly advancing up the wedding aisle or booting it so fast I was getting shin-splints) I finally came up with the ultimate playlist. I even have a built-in pauses in the tempo for those absolutely necessary poo-retrieval moments - which is assuming I can get Jessie to cooperate and do it in the exact same place every morning...

Here's the playlist if anyone's curious to see what gets me moving around the park:

A Little Less Conversation 3:33 Elvis vs JXL
Love Machine 3:25 Girls Aloud
Aint Got No... I Got Life (REMIX) 3:22 Nina Simone
Absolutely Everybody 3:43 Vanessa Amorosi
My time 3:15 Dutch feat. Crystal Waters
Ray Of Light 5:20 Madonna
Cha Cha Slide 3:40 DJ Casper
Follow Da Leader 2:32 Nigel & Marvin
Pump It 3:33 The Black Eyed Peas
Vertigo 3:14 U2
Burning Down The House 3:37 Tom Jones & The Cardigans Huge

Back home once again

Arrived back home on Monday evening (took the day flight back from Canada for the first time). It's been a laid-back week with the kids exploring their toys after 2 months away from them, and just going out when absolutely necessary.
One of the more necessary items on the agenda was preparing for Adriana's 5th birthday party on Saturday. We had planned for it to take place at home in the back garden, thinking that the weather would cooperate (as it had done last year), and that we would have no problem entertaining 30 - 5 year olds for 3 hours.
God must have been laughing at me hysterically as I chewed on my fingernails listening to the weather report all day Friday and seriously hoping that when the nice weather lady said "showers over most of England, Scotland and Wales for most of Saturday", that she didn't mean to include London as well!
"How I am supposed to keep 30 children occupied for 3 hours while not letting them outdoors at all - at the risk of tracking in mud from the rain and windswept garden???" These thoughts kept me awake most of the night.
The next morning was a frenzy of last-minute re-juggling of the Dora Adventure to be held indoors, with the guest bed being Star Mountain (subbing for the trampoline), Adriana's bunk being the Troll Bridge (subbing for the Little Tykes slide) and the upstairs hall being Crocodile Lake (subbing for the toddler pool outside).
As 1 pm approached there was one light drizzle and only 12 out of the 30 invited showed up. So for the last hour of the party, we threw open the patio doors and released the horde to play outside until their parents came to collect them via the side gate. (We still weren't going to let them track dirt back inside - we're not dummies!)
So next year rather than rely on the obviously inept weather reports or the changeable English weather, I'm having her party at an indoor play area.

No more stress for Mama!

Ukie Festival

Our last weekend here and we're spending it at the Ukrainian Festival in Toronto. After finishing up our stay at the cottage with George and Andrea and their boys Kristian and Michael, we drove up late last night to get a headstart for the Festival's parade at 11 the next morning. (Even had time to get Adriana's hair cut at Melonheads - great name for a kid's hairdresser - while she sat in the pony chair.) Here's a picture of her in the bonus helicopter ride after ther haircut.

The festival had the requisite rides for the younger kids, the 2 concert stages and lots of booths selling food and souveniers. Let's not forget the beer tent - which I was unable to spend too much time at since I had children with me...

We also came down to Peter and Tom's place to celebrate Adriana's birthday with some cake and presents. Peter's cake (as he had warned me) looked a bit odd because the icing refused to stick to it, so we decided it looked more like a muffin top instead. very tasty, in any case.

Family history

I had the oppotunity to visit with my Uncle Vasyl and Aunt Bozena the other day at my step-mum Sophia's cottage and finally heard in detail some of my family's wartime history. (I probably should have either listened better to my father while he was alive - but I was young and stupid and he wasn't really interested in dredging up the past either.)
I knew that my father was captured by the Germans at the age of 20 and was shipped off to the occupied territories, but wasn't sure exactly where and was a bit unsure of the details of how he re-joined his family later. It turns out he was shipped to eastern Prussia (which I know know is northern Poland - near Gdansk) and worked in a factory of some sort. Later, the rest of his family (mum, dad, and 4 brothers and sisters) were captured by the Germans and shipped off to the German/Holland border where they were forced to re-build railway lines which had been blown up during the war. My grandmother and grandfather spent back-breaking days gathering up rocks and then re-aligning the tracks upon their supports. 2 years went by and my grandmother took a chance and begged her German commandant to write a letter to his counterpart in Eastern Prussia to bring her son there to rejoin them; promising that he was a diligent worker, like the rest of the family.
When my father was ordered to the commandant of the camp, he was worried he'd done something wrong and was deeply afraid he'd be shot. When it turned out that he was being shipped to meet the rest of his family, he was overjoyed. As my uncle puts it, it was God's will that he was shipped when he was, because apparerently he was on the last train going west before the Russians attacked and rousted the Germans. If he hadn't been on that train, he might never seen his family again and I certainly wouldn't be sitting here writing this blog! Thank God for Babsia taking the chance and getting her son back.

Holes and ends

I don't know if it's the bug spray, the constant bike riding, or what, but everytime I turn around, Adriana's got another hole in the crotch of her shorts, capris, or underwear! How many times have I seen her lounging on the sofa, absent-mindedly picking at the threads around a gaping hole between her legs? Not sure what to do about it, since everytime I sew it up, it seems to unravel again. At least it's not as bad as the incident that the girls reminded me of when I went to pick up Adriana from school last spring and she met me at the door with a wave. Doesn't sound bad, does it? Well, imagine the wave consisting of Adriana's arm stuck in through the waistband of her trousers and coming out through the yawning gap in the non-existant seam in her crotch. I can remember the sheer goofiness of her pose outweighed my embarassment of her doing it in front of a crowd of mums, so I just had to laugh!

Other than holes everywhere, our summer has been progressing smoothly. Had the requisite trip to Canada's Wonderland, and have been hanging out at the cottage, cutting away decades of tree branches and trimming hedges. Orest leaves tomorrow for London, so he's making the last repairs to the cottage before he leaves. I'll be here next week when I'll have to slowly start packing things up too. God, the summer has flown by!

Green Lake funnies

We just got back from our visit to the Van Dusen cottage, just want to thank Mike and Mary for hosting us yet again. The girls had a great time catching up with Ciana and Elise, and now Adriana has some summer memories of the cottage to add to her winter ones. Speaking of which, Adriana was the cause of much hilarity at one point that I almost bust a gut! Adriana was eating her lunch one day and asked Mary innocently: "Why does your cat not come to the cottage?" I guess her question was worded a bit confusingly, so Mary parrotted it back to confirm it. "Why doesn't my cat come to the cottage?" Adriana replies with "I don't know!" Classic Abbot and Costello "Who's on First" comes immediately to mind, as Mary tried to repeat the question again to make sure she understood the question. Mike and I just cracked up, me so hard, tears came to my eyes.
Another source of laughter (or frustration for Larysa) appears to have come with apparent inability to row a boat. I took Adriana out in the rowboat, at her request, only to find that whichever way I rowed, we always seemed to head into the shore. After several attempts, with Adriana howling in fear ("Mama gonna crash!!!!"), I managed to get the rowboat back to the dock. At that point, Larysa appeared and said she'd be willing to try the canoe with us, maybe we'd be able to successfully navigate around the lake in that. Within seconds, it became apparent that I had no idea what I was doing, and we ended up in the shore several more times, with Larysa's howls of "Mom, I thought you said you could steer?!?!" adding to that of Adriana's. It took about 10 minutes of backwards and forwarding to finally get the canoe into it's mooring place and I topped the whole misadventure off by doing the classic splits of one leg onboard and one on the dock with me in the water in the end. Oh, the shame!

Busy preparing and enroute to Green Lake

It's amazing how your body gets used to the lethargic days of just lounging around the cottage. It's not until you have to actually DO something that you realize how little you've done. Like the other day where we had to pack our stuff and get out of Toronto early enough on a Friday before the long weekend in order not to get caught in the holiday traffic. We'd decided to spend the day at our cottage before heading off to Mike and Mary's cottage. I, however, could not spend the day at the pool, but had to do a load of laundry in town (that one of my daughters had inadvertantly left at the cottage a few days before), do a load of grocery shopping to take to Mike and Mary's, and buy a swimsuit for one of my daughters (3 guesses as to who forgot both the dirty laundry and the swimsuit - rhymes with Farysa) who felt that packing rocks in her backpack was more important than making sure she had something to swim in.

We left our cottage at 5pm and stopped along the way at a diner that we've always thought we should stop into, every time we drove up to the Van Dusen's cottage. So even though Stefa was desperate to get to see Ciana & Elise as soon as possible, ("Don't they have a drive-through???") we forced her to sit through a meal at Kelly's diner on highway 37, just north of Tweed. Although this place was in the middle of nowhere, they had a good menu and quaint atmosphere. They had liscence plates on the walls from just about every province and a few states as well, so that kept the kids occupied for the entire wait for food trying to figure out which ones were missing. The one disparate piece of the rural decor was a head shot of Natasha Richardson, with her autograph saying: "Thanks for a great party, it was fun! All the best, Natasha." Who knew that in the wilds of rural Ontario lurks a party swank enough for the likes of Natasha and her fellow thespians?

Shopping and diving

Last week we spent from Wednesday on in the city, catching up on clothes shopping, movies (Over the Hedge, Pirates of the Carribean) and city living. People often ask me why I shop for clothes here in Toronto, when London is much more fashionable. Well, I aint my Mama's baby for nothin'! Even though I resisted the tactics of the 'Queen of the Bargain Hunters' as much of possible, some things have stuck. Like not spending double the cost per item. I picked up a cute tank and shorts set for Stefa at Jacob Jr. that cost me $14. Tell me where I could get the equivalent in England for 7 pounds? Maybe the bottom of a bin in a charity shop, but who's got the time to rummage around for something decent.

Another reason we came back to the city was the influx of people coming to visit. Orest's brother Roman arrived on Wednesday afternoon, and then Orest himself arrived on Friday evening for his 3 week holiday. The males got together for a day of golf at the cottage on Sunday and we've stayed on from then. Good thing, too - there was another heat wave in the city, with tempareatures reaching 37, or 45 degrees with the humidex. We're sitting around the pool with the warm breeze coming off the lake and the water to cool us off with. We both know there's things we should and could be doing around the cottage, but the weather is just too damn nice. At least I can claim I did one job today: I helped Orest turn the grip bars around on the diving board. Apparently, every year, there's a 50/50 chance that these bars get installed correctly. So I guess this year, we're on the wrong 50% this year and we had to take them off and install them back so that they were actually of some use when going up the ladder. I'm surprised the Health and Safety Inspector didn't catch that earlier, but as it's already caused two accidents (including one to Adriana), we knew it should be fixed.
When Adriana fell off the diving board, it was a classic parental moment. First someone else's child slipped, hooked her leg onto the rail and ended up suspended upside down until we could assist her off. As we're trying to assess her injuries, I can see that Adriana is still running on the diving board and call out to her, not once, but twice: "Stop running, can't you see it's slippery and dangerous on that board??" Two seconds later, Adriana slips off herself. (Luckily she landed on her feet, but there was a bit of bump in behind her ear where she touched down on the concrete diving block.) It is just so satisfying to say: "See! Didn't Mama tell you not to run? Are you going to listen to your mother next time?" It's like providing the ultimate justification for my role as mother.

Summer reading

7 16-grid Su Dokus
8 books
4 back episodes of CSI
4 back episodes of Without a Trace

I just wanted to share some of the books I've read. Not all of them have been good, but these 4 I can recommend. Frank McCourt's Teacher Man (if the author sounds familiar, he also wrote Angela's Ashes) is an autobrigraphy concerning his time spent as an English teacher in the NYC school system. It's a must-read for any one in eduction, and for me it's a confirmation that you don't have to be young when you start writing - Frank was 66 when he wrote his first novel. Next, I read Wicked (on which the new musical is based). It's interesting how the author fleshed out an entire world from the shell of the Wizard of Oz. Even the witche's name; Elphaba, is a tribute to Frank L. Baum, the author of of Oz. The novel is quite a dark analysis of the nature of evil, and it's hard for me to imagine it as a Broadway musical. My next recommendation it The Birth of Venus, a story of a woman in 1400's Florence, who becomes Michaelangelo's lover. It would be lovely to see the city to see if anything remains of 15th century Florence. Lastly, I've just finished The Devil wore Prada, which was not as good as I thought it would be. I thought there would be less suffering and more revenge. The heroine seemed to be a glutton for punishemnt and humiliation and it went on for alomost 400 pages. By 200, I was ready to smack her and say: "Why are you putting up with this?? Give the woman what for and get out of there!"
I'm fresh out of reading material and was forced to read the newspaper (yuk!), I'll have to get into town toute suite!