Latest News at Casa Winton Brown

The end of the school year draws near and everything is starting to ease off. First, choir ended, freeing up my Monday nights. Then Delphine's Sparks year ended, then Music Together. Now all that's left is school: Cordelia has two weeks and Delphine has three. They both have "graduation" ceremonies, Cordelia's to celebrate the end of Nursery School and advancement to Kindergarten, and Delphine's to celebrate the end of Kindergarten and advancement to Grade One. Fall 2009 is going to be huge around here.

Cordelia is invited to visit her new kindergarten teacher and see her next classroom the Wednesday after next. As you can imagine, she's beside herself with excitement to be going to the same school as her adored big sister. (And yes, they do adore each other, as we discovered this weekend when Delphine was away overnight and Cordelia kept asking when she would be home.)

The excitement begins anew the week after school's out: the girls are signed up for two weeks of swimming lessons, every morning for half-an-hour. Then we have one honest-to-goodness week off before Delphine has a week of all day camp downtown. The following Tuesday we're off to Sask to spend two weeks with Granny, who the girls adore.

No sooner are we back from Sask than the girls go to the cottage with Baba and Zaida for a few days. It's a small cottage so Blake and I aren't invited this year, which is fine. I like the cottage fine but it's not a must-do. (It just occurred to me that this will be the first time Blake and I have been away from the girls for more than a night. Whatever will we do?)

The following week, both girls are in a day camp nearby for a week, and then we have two more weeks off before school starts again. This summer is the opposite of last summer's unscheduled bliss. We'll have to see which is better. I think I might have overdone it with the camps and stuff this year, but it might turn out to be just right.

Delphine has a loose tooth! There are a couple of girls in her class who have lost lots of teeth, dozens and dozens of them. One of the girls started losing teeth in JK! So of course Delphine is miffed that she hasn't lost any yet. I've been periodically checking her teeth to see if they're loose, and today one on the bottom middle was a little bit wiggly. (It might even be the first tooth that came in.) She was beside herself with excitement.

The bad news is, I asked online how long it takes one of these things to come out once they start wiggling, and apparently it's one to four months. Four months! She might be in Grade One before this tooth finally comes out. It will give me time to get used to the idea of her beautiful tiny white baby teeth being replaced by those disproportionate tombstones little kids are stuck with.

Blake got a job. Well, kind of. He got a four month, full-time contract. With Mozilla—cool. Unfortunately it doesn't come with an office. We've been trying to figure out what he's going to do with himself in order to get eight working hours in every day—since he got laid off he's been consistently doing contract work, but never eight hours a day, so he's been able to hang around the house and get distracted by us without falling too far behind.

He has an open invitation to work at U of T, but that's a significant commute, and I'm not sure whether the undergrads are more or less distracting than me and the girls. There's two hours of free wi-fi at Starbucks, which is where I would go every morning. There's the library—I would go to the library, too, but I don't know if that would work for Blake.

Incidentally, in addition to this full-time contract, Blake still has two other contract jobs on the go, so I might not be seeing much of him for the next little while. Hopefully he can get lots of work done when the girls and I are in Sask.

I think that's all, apart from that I planted some Irish moss and creeping jenny in the front yard between the neighbour's yard and our path. I'm not sure how well it's going to do, but the neighbours two doors down have some creeping jenny which is thriving, so I expect it will be okay. Provided I water it.

Oh, I forgot to mention in my last post that Delphine and my conversation about World Wars ended with a rousing chorus of "Sniper, no sniping!"