I was at the gym today with my daughter Eva as we are doing some conditioning before she heads to the B.C. Summer Games in a few days for basketball.
With school out we get to spend some real quality time together and she doesn’t mind being around Mom, even at the gym! It’s pretty amazing. I soak up every moment and find myself staring at her when she isn’t looking; I can’t believe how grown up she has become. Every so often I run into a few old friends who haven’t seen the children in a while and they can’t believe how both of them are towering over my 5’9” stature. I once thought I was tall!
And yes, they do say time flies with kids but I have to disagree; I can remember almost every detail. One moment that I will never ever forget is with my son Lucas, when he was about seven years old. We were at the gas station and he started scribbling a picture of someone with his pencil. “Honey, who are you drawing?” I asked. “You Mom,” he answered. And in the same breath he said to me (and picture his drawing of a person with crazy hair; yes, that was me): “You’re as beautiful as a hippopotamus in a bird bath!”
As it’s our Kids Issue, I had to ask my staff about some of their funniest moments with their kids. This is what they had to say:
“Although she babbles a lot, my 21-month-old daughter Tessa doesn’t say a ton of decipherable ‘words’ yet. But one of the ones she does know, and uses often, is ‘uh-oh.’ One day we were at the grocery store and a middle-aged man was struggling to pull a carton of ice cream off the shelf without toppling the whole row. No luck: a bunch of them came tumbling out of the freezer compartment and onto the floor. ‘UH-OH!’ crowed Tessa, almost lunging out of the cart as she took in the scene. The man turned around sheepishly; ‘yes, that was definitely an uh-oh,’ he said with a chuckle.”
~ Allison, Editor-in-Chief
“My little guy Gabriel is 3 and he has a lot to say, pretty much non-stop actually. I have started to post some of his silly sayings on my Facebook profile to share with friends and family and I call it ‘Daily Gabeism:’ Daddy let’s go in that forestes, I want to go walk in the forest! Mom: what are you going to do in the forest? Gabe: I’m going to get lost with my families! Daily Gabeism: Mom your lipstick is off roading! Daily Gabeism: My ears are too loud for this song!”
~ Jo-Ann, Staff Photographer
“We always made an effort to teach our two daughters independence. So as soon as they turned four and seven I sent them by themselves to the nearby corner store to buy a needed item and of course a little treat. As teenagers, the task did not change but the result sometimes did. Being a mom trying to get to work on time I realized one morning we were almost out of toilet paper. The kids were on the school bus already so I wrote a note for the afternoon: ‘Please buy toilet paper today. Thank you, signed Mama.’ (Money was connected to the note.) When I came home I found a note on the same piece of paper: ‘Sorry, I got shampoo instead. Luv you lots.’”
~ Susi, Seaside Trendspotter
“The funny things our kids said when they were little have become longstanding family jokes. Learning to talk is hard but the mis-pronunciation of words is endlessly amusing to parents: Dinosaur was disonour; magazines were mazagines; tigers were die-dies and for some reason a trip to Butterfly World resulted in the spectacular news that someone had spotted a Ding-Dong – yes, that’s a flamingo, and will be for ever more!”
~ Deborah, Associate Publisher
