a peek inside the fishbowl

Yo’

Any campers out there? Feel like sharing your thoughts and experiences about camping with the little kids? What do you bring, what do you leave at home, how do you survive without losing your sanity? Also, do you have any recommendations about great places to camp in the Ottawa area (okay within a couple hours drive…) ? 

If you were talking to someone who is about to set out for a camping trip, what advice would you give them? Stay at home? Bring a pillow? Bears are not a mythological creature?

I would love to hear anything you have to say on the topic. A potential article is waiting in the wings here…

Thanks!

I am having a little bit of trouble getting started today.

I’ve had breakfast.
I’ve been to the gym.
I’ve had a coffee.

And now, all I want to do is have a long, hot shower, and go back to bed.

I was in Toronto earlier this week, well, not IN Toronto. I was in the Toronto area for about 90 minutes (to pick my mother up at the airport), and then I drove back home the next day.

I spent a lot of time just driving and thinking, sometimes I had the radio on, and sometimes I just listened to the wind whistling. Some of my best ideas occur to me as I’m driving. Proof (at least for me) that it doesn’t pay to be plugged in all of the time. Down time is good time. One needs quiet for deep thinking. It’s hard to think during the chaos of an ordinary day.

Mark pointed out that I have developed a habit of capturing my ideas, which is true. I always have a notebook closeby so I can jot things down as they occur to me, because if I didn’t write them down I’d forget. And yes, I jot as I drive, not a great habit, I know, but I can’t bear to lose a good idea. 

But then I have to go back and decipher my scribbled notes.

This time I wrote “CBC Spark, 6000 photos” (that was a good one – look it up) and “the old ice cream scoop” (which will be a post in the near future).

I also started planning about (what could be) a very very cool multimedia project. But I’m going to need Mark’s expertise for this one. But he doesn’t know that yet. Hmm.

Okay. Back to work. Oh, I also need to plan my special lunch tomorrow. (Speaking of which, check out Porter’s fab dinner.)

It took me a long time – dare I say – YEARS before I discovered a little something that has decreased my stress levels by whole bunch.

Here’s the back story.

I pick the girls up from school every day. And every day we walk home. And every day I used to remind the girls to do the same three things.

1) “Don’t forget to wash your hands!”

2) “Unpack your lunch bag!”

3) “Hang up your backpack!”

I said these things, plus a couple of others, every.single.day.

If you were a thinking kind of person you could safely ASSUME that if I said these things five days a week, sometimes three or four times each afternoon, for an entire school year, they’d REMEMBER that they had to wash their hands as soon as they got home from school.

Nay. That is not so.

If I didn’t remind them – multiple times – we’d be sitting down to dinner three hours later and I’d ask, offhandedly, you washed your hands, right?  I could tell by their faces they had not, and so they’d rush off to the powder room, leaving a clouds of cold germs in their wake, for a symbolic rinsing of their sticky, dusty paws. 

Anyway, yes. I hate repeating myself. I hate repeating myself. What I hate, even more, is the progression that happens when I repeat the same things too many times within a very short span of time.

“Don’t forget to wash your hands,” I say, calmly, casually, as we walk in the door.
“Wash your hands girls,” I’d say, calmly, wondering if they heard me the first time.
“Have you washed your hands?” I’d ask while I’m in the kitchen, after having washed my own hands.

By this time my voice will take on a slight tone, and it will escalate from there.

*sigh*

It finally occurred to me that I could just write down my three things and display them somewhere they can easily see them. We have a white board on the interior side of the front door and now it does all the talking for me. All I have to do is say “WHAT DOES THE SIGN SAY” and they know exactly what do to. And for some reason, they do it. No nagging required.

This little thing has gone a long way to saving my sanity. Hallelujah.