festival of fools and snow forts

The family took in the Festival of Fools at the Forks today and got our faces painted. We saw some of the free children's entertainment and got a special balloon as well. It was lots of fun just walking around and looking at all the "bling".

Recently as the weather is warming, I have been taking more time to take the girls outside to play during the day.

Good ol' fresh air and exercise walking, sliding and climbing makes for a two tired little girlies and wonderful sleep for all. They help me shovel and follow animals tracks, watch the birds to name a few things.

We worked on our snow fort today that began as a snow drift from the winter storm this week. Check out the peep hole!

my facebook addiction?

So one day I hear about this new Facebook phenomena in the news a couple of years ago and decided to check it out. I got immediately hooked. It was funny I was signing up for all the junk applications and getting tons of people to " Add me as a friend."

People who I went to the same high school and haven't seen for ages were popping up here and there. I began to see that some of these people were glorifying who they were and what they were doing. Did I really want to be seen as that as well? My life is much better than when I was in high school. Considering where I came from and my growing years I think that I am doing really well.

One day I really thought about it and realized that they weren't really my friends as I never see them day to day or in the past year let alone in the past decade. I became selective. No offense to those I have left behind, but those days are lonng gone.

It is amazing how even doing "status updates", which most people do to let "their peoples" know what is currently going on has become something bigger. The "Twitter" addiction?

I refuse to get hooked on the Twitter network, besides I don't have a "crackberry".

These days I am content playing mousetrap and continue to let my few people know how truly I find the weather awful. I am not really addicted, I leave that term for my Starbucks lattes. MMMM.....coffeee!

Fix You

Recently, I bought tickets to see Coldplay in June here in Winnipeg. Last year, I was close to flying and buying tickets to see Madonna, but held off when I hear Coldplay was coming here. I always laugh when I hear saying "soccer moms in minivans" listen or like them. Here I am a soccer mom!

When I first heard them was when "Rush of Blood to the Head" was out in 2002. It was a difficult time of my life. I was faced with possiblity of death of my mother. In the fall, I was pregnant and lost it. I was very devastated on every level and not one of my friends, who were all having kids at this time, had experienced that. After my girl was born and the happiness we felt, we discovered the next year that our dog was sick with cancer. After watching him suffer for six months, we sadly put him down so that he would suffer no more.

"Fix You" was out as a single after all the sadness was all said and done. It sort of became my own personal anthem for surviving it all. Seeing Chris Martin and the boys in Ottawa in March 2006, I realized how personal that album had become to me. Driving to the hospital many times and being pregnant and listening to it in my car.

I feel truly blessed to be a mother of two wonderful girls and have tickets once again to see Coldplay.

Can I get some wine with that?

Today, I was thinking about how certain things, evoke certain memories such as a really nice red wine. To me that smell brings back memories of swaying fragrant eucalyptus trees and the vineyards in the warm breeze in the Hunter Valley of Australia. Another smell that evokes a memory is plumeria. The smell is so intoxicating and add a beach with an amazing view of another Hawaiian island as the sunset. In our city, we don't really have smells that evoke memories except for maybe lilacs or other flowering plants in the spring.

I always have a rush of memories return to me, when I pick up a bottle of fine Australian wine and that is mainly due to the fact that we took special point to book a trip to the Hunter Valley while we were in Sydney years ago. We also made a point of taking an additonal trip to Maui when we were in Hawaii.

I am so glad we did this before having kids and we hope to do these kinds of things with our kids in the future and so much more.

Another nice happy thought....

Today I was reminded how lucky a mom I am when both my girls came up to me at the end of the day after the make-up had come off and told me point blank "Mommy, you are beautiful!" I told each of them that they are beautiful as well and how much their mommy loves them.