SNL - Ford Hybrid Commercial

As my hubby was checking out hybrid car leases online, I asked him if he would consider a Toyota after all of the trouble they were having last year, with recalls and mechanical problems. He said he might, and then I remembered this SNL commercial parody. It's super funny, check it out.

If you are not in the US and can't watch this video (like me), you can also watch it here. The audio is a little off but the video quality is good. Enjoy  : )

How Many Times Will I Have To Do This In My Life?

Having children means that you have to do a lot of cleaning. I mean A LOT! Actually, CONSTANT is a better word. Because if you want your house to be as clean as those pre-kid days, you'd have to be cleaning day and night. Or maybe it's just me. I clean up a room and it's like the children have clean room radar. I can almost hear the little dee-dee-dee-dee sound of said radar going off in their heads. "Room is clean... Room is clean... Must rectify" *said in a robot voice, of course* and they immediately go right behind me and mess it up again. So sometimes I ask myself (about specific cleaning tasks), how many times will I have to do this in my life?

It first started out with questions like:
- How many times will I have to clean baby poop (or pee) off of the carpet, my clothes, the car seats or any place where poop can leak, squirt, or ooze onto?
- How many times will I have to clean spit up, or barf, or drool off of those same things?

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Then it became:
- How many times will I have to clean up spilled or thrown baby foods off the floors and walls?
- How many times will I have to clean mushed up bananas, avocado, carrots, peas, pasta, etc. out of this d@mn high chair (because it had so many weird, little crevices that made it so hard to get clean)?

Mind you, I didn't mind cleaning up this cute face of course, it was just the darned high chair that bugged me.

And a little later it was (and still is):
- How many times will I have to vacuum up crushed crackers and cookies from the backseat of our car?
- How many times will I have to get on my freakin' hands and knees and clean up spilled juice (that you have to go over a bunch of times, otherwise it's sticky for days)?

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And now it's:
- How many times will I have to put back the couch cushions, and pillows, and blankets after the monkeys have made forts, or beds for their stuffies, or have just decided to throw everything everywhere just for the fun of it?
- How many times will I sweep up crumbs that get tracked to every corner of the house, because my kids do not understand the meaning of "please eat that at the table, don't walk around the house eating food!"?
- How many times in my life will I have to pick up little game pieces, or Polly Pocket doll clothes, or other teeny tiny toy parts (that toy companies seem to love to include in toys these days), that are scattered all over the house? Does every little girl toy for ages 3-8 have to include beads, or sequins, or tiny shoes, or tiny combs and brushes, or small elastics, or teensy barrettes? Why so many freakin' accessories? Does my daughter really need all of this kind of crap?

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Anyways, I am not trying to whine over here, I just want to legitimately know, how many times? A hundred? A thousand? A hundred thousand? Inquiring minds want to know. Then maybe I can steel myself for that number and say every once in a while, only fifty more times to go, and I'll never have to do this again. Though I'm betting that when that day happens I'll be crying about how my kids are all grown up, and where did the time go, and oh they grow up so fast! Because really I don't want to speed up time and I don't want them to grow up yet. I guess I just wish had a magic wand or that special nose twitch from Bewitched, to magically make it all clean. That would be just perfect.

Which kid messes are you tired of cleaning up? Do you wonder any of these very same questions? Or do you have different ones, perhaps?

Oh, and here is one mess I never thought I'd have to clean up. Thankfully, I only ever had to deal with it once. My son had gotten a hold of a crayon and decided to chew on it and turn it into a crayon paste while I was making dinner. He wasn't even two at the time. I didn't know crayon could be turned into a paste, but now I know. It can!

I Am Joining The Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup

Have you ever heard of the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup (GCSC)? I hadn't, until last year. It's pretty much what you would expect from the title. People join together to cleanup shores around lakes and rivers and the oceans, all across Canada, for a few weeks in September. After reading about it, I thought it would be a great thing to participate in. It would be good for me and my family, good for my community, and especially good for the environment in this wonderful and beautiful, coastal city I live in, called Vancouver. I thought, wouldn't this be a great lesson to teach my children? It would help me to teach them about giving back to mother nature, the way that she gives to us everyday. I always tell them about how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful place, with mountains and the ocean and so much to do outdoors. But isn't it also great to teach them how to take care of this place and not to take it for granted?

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 I was really stoked to do it last year, but then life stepped in and changed my plans. Not to make excuses, really it was just that a bunch of other things came up. Two birthday parties and an Aunt that wanted to see the kids on the particular day we signed up for. It ended up being a crazy day of driving all over and visiting and kiddie party madness, but it was a great day. I was really bummed that we didn't get to do the cleanup though, especially because I was telling everyone that we were doing it and I was asking friends if they wanted to participate too. So I made a promise to myself that we would do it next year.

And next year is here. I just signed up today. I am going to do it right this year. I was even contemplating being a site coordinator and taking on a whole area to organize by myself. But I decided to be realistic and just participate this year and see what it's like. If it's something I think I can handle on my own, then maybe I can be a coordinator next year.

Doing this kind of thing is important to me. I took an Environmental Studies program in college and it was really eye opening. I learned so many things in those two years. One thing that really shook me up was seeing a picture of a lake that was turned into a dumping ground for electronics. People would come there to find parts to sell, or scrounge for copper or other metals in the stuff that was dumped there. It was so filled with junk that it didn't even look like a lake anymore, it looked like a garbage dump, but it was just filled with electronics. I was looking on the internet to see if I could find that same picture (which I'm sure is really old, I saw it at school, about nine years ago), and I couldn't. But I did find some other horrible pictures. Like this...

The Citarum River in Indonesia

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And this...

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I really don't want the beautiful place, that my family and I call home, to end up like these places. So I am doing my part to help. If you feel inspired too, and you live in Canada and want to join, click here to find a cleanup site in your area. If you don't live in Canada, but want to help out where you live, here are some other shoreline cleanup programs:

• International Coastal Cleanup
• California Coastal Cleanup
• Clean up Australia!
• Project Aware
• The Daily Ocean

This list is from the Other Resources page on the GCSC website, which has tons of useful info if you want to know more.


"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." - M. Gandhi

Whole Foods Parking Lot, Rap Video

This video is awesome! A friend of mine, Mina of DeTox... the devil in the details posted it on Facebook the other day and I thought it was so hilarious I had to blog about it. "It's gettin' real in the Whole Foods Parking Lot!" Hilarious! Check it out, and happy Friday : )

*Warning there is a swear word in the video, just one I think. So use caution if you're watching this with little ones*

"Pay my 80 bucks for 6 things, and get the heck out!" LOL

Rockin' The Bump

Thanks to Shell, at Things I Can't Say, for having a Rockin' The Bump link-up. I've never done one of these before but I thought it looked like fun. So I'm joinin' too, why not?

 Here is me rockin' my first bump, at five months along.

Here I am posing with my nephew, who is now eight years old. How time flies!

Here I am during my second pregnancy. I'm holding my son while we were on a family outing at the Aquarium.

And here I am almost a month before I had my daughter. I was so huge, people would ask me if I was having twins!

So go on over to Shell's page and see all the other mommies rockin' their bumps. There sure are a lot of cute bumps out there!

I Am Guest Blogging!

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I am a Blogger Buddy! A dear friend of mine, Kyra (you may remember her from this post, or this post), of The Scribe's Desk, has asked me to be a guest blogger for her "Blogger Buddy Thursdays" today. I am so excited! I have never guest blogged before, so this is a first for me. Please go on over to her site and have a look around. She is an excellent writer and a fantastic blogger, she's been at it for years (and she even has her own children's book out, called Tale of the Lost Swan Egg, which is wonderful). I love her blog and her writing and I bet you will too. I am very honored to have my post up on her site today. I hope you enjoy it  : )

Bring On The Summer!

Spring and summer are my favorite time of year. A whole six months (sometimes a little less, in this climate) of warm weather and being outside and really, just not having to stay in, makes for wonderful days. These are the days that memories are made of. I even love the smell. The fresh, sweet, spring night air is intoxicating to me. I breath it in deep and just feel better about life. I hate being stuck inside, but during the winter it rains a lot, so I find myself to be a bit of a hermit for half the year. I know lots of people still get outside in the winter here, and we do to some degree, but the rain makes it so hard (for me) to get out and be active. Also the short winter days just make me feel a little depressed, and if it's constantly raining (which sometimes it is) and grey, than it can feel a bit like perpetual dusk.

I am not trying to bad mouth Vancouver, or our climate, because if you can get through the winters, the spring and summer certainly make up for it. Vancouver is gorgeous in the summer, everything is green and people are out everywhere enjoying life. It's like the city wakes up. There are so many more things to do and it brings on a level of excitement that you just don't feel in the wintertime.

So, with that being said, bring on the summer! Bring on beach days, and carnivals, and barbeques and the water slides. Bring on camping, and birthday parties (both my kids have summer birthdays), and weddings and water parks. Bring on days at the lake, and car-free street festivals, and Playland and spending time with friends and family. I want to do it all!

This weekend finally felt like summer, it was hot (not too hot) and we got out and really enjoyed it! We went to Jericho Beach, with family, on Saturday and a carnival for my daughter's school on Sunday. It was a great, full weekend.

Here are some pictures of our beach day with the cousins. The weather couldn't have been more perfect.

 My daughter and niece are the same age, and will be starting Kindergarten in the fall. How are they that old already? Where did the babies of the family go?

I love how my son's eyes are peaking out behind his sunglasses here. It's almost like he saying I am wise beyond my years, and I know things you don't.

What beach day would be complete without a child trying to bury themselves in the sand?

 The sky seemed extra blue that day.

 My nephew was excited to show me this crab leg he found.

My daughter was saying "come on mom, hurry up, lets go down to the water."

But then, as soon as she realized I was taking pictures, she started posing. I wonder where she learned that from?

I found this teeny, tiny, little pink shell on the beach and gave it to my daughter. She was so happy, she loves pink and she loves teeny, tiny, too. 

 I told my nephew to start flexing for the shot, and he did a superb job I think.

I had to take a picture of this tree, the way it looked in the light, it was just glowing. It was begging for me to take it's picture.

So what kinds of things are you excited to do this summer?

Worst Concert Performance Ever

After reading a post by Melinda of Finding the Humor, she got me thinking about my childhood. Then I started thinking about when I was a teenager. And then, because Melinda and I share a common thread of liking old school hip hop (I found this out while commenting on a post of hers), I started thinking about some of the awesome concerts I went to when I was in my teens and early twenties. Like Digable Planets and Beastie Boys and Pharcyde, to name a few. And that then made me think of the worst concert performance I ever saw.

It was the summer of 1994, and I was 18. For my best friend's birthday, I bought her and I concert tickets to Reggae on the Island, a weekend festival in Ladysmith, BC (on Vancouver Island). I had gone the year before and had such a good time, that I really wanted to go again. So we packed up our camping gear, took many buses and the ferry over, and camped all weekend long. We had a blast, there were lots of great performances and we basically danced the whole time. But one of, if not the main reason we went, was because we both loved Maestro Fresh Wes. He was one of the headliners to perform and we were super excited. We loved him so much, we'd listen to his album, "Symphony in Effect", all the time. We even made up our own lyrics to one of the songs, "Just Swingin" (yes, we were silly teenage girls, doing silly teenage girl things, always).

Anyways, when Maestro came on, we were right up front, so we could see everything. And like I said, we were super excited. Until he started singing. He was doing "Let Your Backbone Slide", except he was lip-syncing! He had the exact song from the album playing and he was jumping and dancing around pretending he was singing it live, but it was so totally and utterly obvious that he wasn't. And then the lamest thing ever happened (even lamer than the lip-syncing, if you can believe it), he stopped singing (or pretending to sing) halfway through, and the song kept going for another thirty seconds. He stood there until someone turned it off and then he said something ridiculous like, sorry I have to go. And then him and his buddy hopped off stage and didn't even leave! They just stood around chatting to people in front of the stage for like ten minutes! So the crowd that payed good money to see him, got half a lip-synced song. Worst performance ever!

I got a little vindication for this a few years ago. My hubby has a good friend who is actually friends with Maestro (small world, I know) and they were hanging out with him, and a bunch of people, at Lucy Mae Brown (an old lounge/restaurant in Van), one night. To make a long story short, I guess he (my hubby's friend) said something to Maestro about that old concert. I don't know what was said, or what his response was, I just know that someone gave him a hard time about it for me. It's a small justice, but I'll take it.

I decided to dig up some old pics from that concert and scan them. The quality isn't that great, but, oh well. You can even see in the back ground that there is no one playing any instruments and there's no DJ or anything.

I don't know why he's carrying a towel around, it's not like he worked up a sweat performing half a song. Maybe he has an excessive sweating problem or something. Actually, maybe that's why he had to go.

And here's one of the crowd, just for fun. We really did have a great time though, regardless of the Maestro debacle. All the other performers were great, and we met lots of fun people on the trip too.

I'll leave you with a little question, what is the worst concert performance you've ever seen? I'd love to read some great stories.