Molly's Feet Again

We returned to Sick Kids again yesterday and the verdict is that the casts weren't doing enough to stretch Molly's achilles tendons. So she's scheduled for surgery on January 25th.

Bad News:
- Surgery isn't ever fun
- She'll need casts for 4-5 weeks after surgery, and they might have to be the long ones
- She'll need to wear AFO braces until she's about 6 or so. They would look something like this. They would fit inside her shoes, wouldn't prevent any activity and can be easily removed for something like swimming.

Good News:
- Her prognosis is excellent. He expects to get her ankles to 10 degrees past 90 degrees and doesn't expect that future surgeries will be necessary
- No casts from now until late January. Great for swimming in St. Lucia. Great for winter sports until then.
- Better to deal with all this stuff while she's 4 years old instead of later.
- As always, she's completely calm about all this stuff.

Visit With Santa

We had our annual visit with Santa at Mariposa this morning, complete with cookie decorating, face painting, hot chocolate and marshmallows, and looks of wonder at the arrival of the bearded guy.

Requests to Santa:

Jacob - a pirate, a castle, and a zamboni

Molly - a princess and a fairy (yes, she's still a feminist work in progress)

Zoë - a pirate and 2 zambonis (later amended to a dinosaur and snowshoes)

What Passes For Excitement Around Here

I should lead with answers to some questions I've received on recent posts.

• While Molly is undoubtedly a genius, I may have misrepresented her talents a little. She did write that "story" and came up with the words herself, but we helped with the spelling of almost every word. She knows maybe 20-30 words (and just as many Chinese symbols!), but would not have been able to make "dispatcher" a recognizable word.
• Kids passports arrived in the mail today. Why passports you asked? St. Lucia with my sister's family for the first week of January. And hopefully a visit to Tiff and Eric in upstate New York in 2012 (if I write it then hopefully I'll make it happen).

On with the exciting events of our lives:

1. Beaver attack. A decent-sized tree fell down outside our house on Halloween. Possibly aided by a beaver's gnawing. We axed it into about 4 logs and limbed it. The next two nights the beaver(s) dragged the logs away. A few nights later it(they) took down 4 saplings right outside the back door. The beavers seem to be building a lodge (surely not a dam?!) in the little waterway that separates our "island" from the mainland. None of the lost trees were favourites and our view is quite improved so no major loss (yet).

2. Sleep habits. Zoë has always had sporadic but regular difficulty getting to sleep. For the past few months this has involved temper tantrums, jumping out of bed, raging for 5-60 minutes. This was driving us crazy because there was nothing we could do to calm her down or prevent the problem or help fix it. During our recent visit to Priya and David's they suggested a reward program. Mild skepticism was vastly outweighed by helpless frustration so we gave it a shot. Every night of going to sleep with no tantrum earned her a star and a Melissa & Doug stamp. Six stars meant she earned a night sleeping in Molly and Jacob's room. She succeeded 6 out of the first 7 nights! And in the subsequent two weeks, there have only been one or two minor incidents. A set of six stamps cost $11. So now we're kicking ourselves for not doing something like this earlier! And Priya and David are our new heroes! Problem solved, until the next problem.

3. Books. We seem to have caught up on our tv shows (Downton Abbey, Justified, Mad Men, Treme, and two vampire shows that I'm probably too embarrassed to mention by name). So I've been reading more books.

• The Sisters Brothers, Patrick DeWitt. Very rare (for me at least) for a book to garner so many awards and still be a great read. This is old fashioned western. True Grit meets Lonesome Dove. With just enough literary stuff to justify a bunch of masters theses (and apparently enough to satisfy the stuffy bunch who give out awards). The brothers themselves are great, unforgettable characters.
• The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes. Julian Barnes is smarter than you. And he'll smugly remind you of this on every page. That's my usual opinion anyway. I thought his A History of the World contained 2 1/2 brilliant chapters and 8 going-through-the-motions ones. Arthur and George was too clever for its own good too. And Flaubert's Parrot got the throw-across-the-room treatment. So, I'm not a fan but he can write so well that I gave him another chance. And The Sense of An Ending has some really thought-provoking passages and messages about memory and perception and perspective. I can see why it won the Booker. But I can't really recommend it, unless you're into that kind of thing.
• Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon. Loved it. If the crime/detective genre had more books like this I'd be all over them. Great set-up. Imagine Israel lost the 1948 war and the Jews are given a 60 year lease for Sitka, Alaska. That lease is coming to an end so the community is in disarray. And our drunken, detective protagonist is working his last case. It's brilliant and funny.

And if you're looking for book recommendations, my other 2011 great reads were:

• City of Thieves, David Benioff. During the siege of Leningrad, two young men are arrested for looting and face a "choice" of death for treason or completion of an impossible mission - to find a dozen eggs for the army colonel's daughter's wedding cake. Best page-turner I've read in a long time. Just a great story.
• Hunger Games trilogy. Can't wait for the upcoming movie. This isn't just Young Adult Fiction, it's gripping, imaginative, powerful stuff. And yes I do channel my inner Katniss Everdeen every time I'm struggling on a long run.

Two New Casts

Here are a couple of photos of Molly at Sick Kids with her new casts on. Check out the stylish pastels!

Her feet/ankles seem to be responding to the casting but it's still 50-50 as to whether she'll need surgery. We go back again in two weeks. As always she's being a trooper about the whole thing - quite unfazed. It helped that the kids (and Kate) had a fun morning with Alison, Dan and the cousins, while I went to the passport office (new passports for all the kids, including Zoë's first Canadian one).

Halloween Photo

Oops, forgot to post this at Halloween. A cowboy on horseback, a flower fairy and an alligator. Other Halloween iterations included Jacob as a pirate and Zoë as a dog, unicorn and lion.

And in case you're thinking that Junior Kindergarten doesn't involve any real learning, here's Molly's latest writing sample.

Jacob Hockey Video

On Wednesday, Jacob had his first hockey session with sticks. Molly had to stop playing this year because of her casts (this point may seem obvious but Kate keeps trying to concoct crazy schemes for her to be able to skate in her casts).

Here's a video to show where Jacob's at - already a big improvement from the start of the year. And he LOVES hockey.

Remembrance Day for 4 Year Olds

I was a little nervous that the school's version of November 11th might differ significantly from my pacifist tendencies. For example, there is a Canadian Forces poster on the Remembrance Day bulletin board that looks like a recruiting poster to me. But, from what I can gather, the school assembly focused mostly on peace, the impact of war on families, etc. The twins even came home with the story of Sadako Sasaki and her origami cranes.

Two exceptions (and the school is probably responsible for the first, but definitely not for the second!):

1. The kids are insisting that Canadian soldiers are always the good guys and their job is to tell everyone to "drop their guns". Wouldn't that be nice.

2. Jacob: "There's one good thing about war. Poppies grow when there's a war."

EDIT:

Subsequent to this post, the twins came into the kitchen where I was making a coffee.

M&J: We learned a song at school about the soldiers
Me: How did it go?
M&J: The soldiers went to war, the soldiers went to war, they went to war and died for us, the soldiers went to war
J: But they didn't die for us. We didn't tell them to go to war
M: We should make a better song
M: How about, "The soldiers went to war, and they didn't die." That's a better song.
J: It would be better if it was "The soldiers didn't go to war, they didn't go to war, they didn't go so they didn't die, they didn't go to war"

We appear to have survived the school system for another day!

Building Blocks

In a rare calm moment, Kate and the kids constructed a Kapla Blocks extravaganza. Definitely our best, most consistently-enjoyed toy purchase.

Short Cast Video

Here's the little video showing Molly in action on her new short casts.

We had a fabulous weekend at David and Priya's. Not many friends will host a family with 3 young kids, knowing that everyone is going to wake up an hour earlier than normal because of the time change. And we don't sleep on good days! But fun was had by all.

New Casts

We were back to Sick Kids yesterday, and, earlier than expected, Molly is out of the long cast. The doctor was happy with the "tweaking" of the positioning of her right foot. So now the focus is on stretching her achilles in both ankles. Here's a picture of her in the two new short casts. Check out the hot new colours:





And see what she can do in them. Quite a difference.

Video will have to wait...oops

Zoë's Dragon Day

On Sunday we celebrated Dragon Day, marking two years since Zoë joined our family. Alison and the cousins were up from Toronto to join in the fun.

- Dragon Day breakfast of pancakes, fruit and ice cream!?

- Presents!! Warm pj's and housecoat as Winter Is Coming. Plus a sign for her door.

- Kate's masterpiece: a dragon for Dragon Day

- A Great Wall of China, castle-cake, being decorated by the cousins

- The full dragon, on parade. The Chinese dragon is believed to live underground, with the mountains being his scales and the wind his breath. So, for a Chinese-Canadian dragon, each piece shows a different part of the Canadian landscape, with mountains, prairies, forests and ocean. Yes, Kate is going for the "best Chinese mother" award.

- And here's a rousing rendition of "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain", which we sing every Dragon Day, inspired by Anne Tyler's hilarious adoption novel - Digging to America.