beach beauties

July 2009 English Bay

a year ago....

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of the day Wade cut off his dreads. He had been growing them for 7 years. He did it to raise money for our dear friend Sandra, creator of the dreads, godmother, doula, photographer, family to us. Sandra had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was both unable to lift her camera (and hence work) and her arms to do dreadlock maintenance.



We had a birthday party and a fundraiser for Sandra to help her cover her living expenses during treatment. We had hoped to raise a thousand dollars. The dreadlock auction alone raised $2845.00



Sophia refused to get rid of the dreadlocks. They are still in a plastic bag in her closet. I can't look at them, it grosses me out entirely.



My brother Matthew mc'ed the auction and did an incredible job. We were utterly, completely, entirely amazed at the response. Sandra is such an incredible person and her generosity and the good that it unleashed was overwhelming. All tolled, the fund raising came to just over $13,000.00. The story of Wade cutting his dreads for Sandra made the local news. We thought it was just a party and a haircut. By the grace and joy of God, it turned out to be much, much more.

This, friends, is what Oprah likes to call "the ugly cry".

Today, December 8th, is Sandra's birthday. I'm overflowing with gratitude (and tears) to be able to write these words: Today she is cancer-free. Happy Birthday sister-friend. I love you so.



Wade is more handsome than ever. He says except for his short time in Thailand this past summer he's been cold ever since. Good thing Sandra bought him a nice warm, scarf.

I CAN!

Today while getting Eleanor dressed she pulled out a whole stack of shirts. I said, "Eleanor, you only need one shirt."
E: "No, Mum, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5!"
M: "You can't wear five shirts Eleanor, how about two?"
E: "No, Mum, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5!"

Mum helps Eleanor tastefully layer 2 shirts.
E: "No, Mum, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5!"
M: "You can't wear five shirts Eleanor."
E: "I CAN!"
M: "You can't"
E: "I CAN!"

I then choose to walk away.

I was wrong actually, she can. Here she is wearing 7 shirts simultaneously...

...while triumphantly eating Hawkin's Cheezies.

She gets an idea in her head, and she sticks to it. Right now, it often vexes me, but I gotta say I really like that in a girl.

overheard conversations

Sophia's getting a run for her money in the hilarious quote department these days now that Eleanor is chatting fast and furious.

Overheard conversations:

Eleanor: "Give dat Fofie."
Sophia: "What's the magic word?"
Eleanor: "Abracadabra."

While drawing with new markers, Sophia shows off her reading skills...
Sophia: "This colour is called 'Hot Pink' ".
Eleanor: "It going to burn me?"
Soph reassured her it would not.

At preschool prayer time:
Eleanor: "Thank you God for Mama and Daddy and for Mama's boobies."
When her teacher (after recovering) asked why, she said "So Pax can eat and live."

Never to be outdone, today when playing with the new My Little Pony play house, Sophia noticed there was a desk with an office. She told Eleanor that her Little Pony was busy filing her taxes. She also asked me to take a movie of her the other day and, I quote "blog it on facebook." A child of the new millennium, indeed.

Pax has started smiling, and today at his six week check-up, weighed 13 lbs 10 oz. Today I laid him on the floor for some "tummy time". He is so relaxed he lifted his head twice and fell asleep in the middle of the floor. The dude abides.

it's your call

Okay folks, I'm now going to take a poll. Over the last two days Wade has worked back-to-back 12 hour shifts. Which of these things makes you most convinced I am just still getting the hang of parenting a newborn (who weighed 12 lbs 8 oz at his check up today!), a very active 2.5 year old and a 5 year old who hardly ever stops talking (for real, she had to hold her breath today to stop herself from talking.)

a) the girls' preschool teacher called and left a message sayng she was so sorry to have sent one of my girls home without their underwear yesterday, she hadn't realized they had gone to the bathroom and left some wet undies in there until after we went home. I had no idea one of them came home with no panties on.

b) tonight we went to get dinner from a drive-thru and I left without my food. I took the drinks and drove off and then Sophia said "we only got water?!" and started to cry. Pax and Eleanor were already crying, hence my already muddled brain. The lady at the drive thru looked HORRIFIED when I went back.

c) I just found the laundry money in the fridge.

Happy Birthday Sophia!

April 27, 2008

Today, August 26, 2009

I didn't mean to stop blogging, it just sort of happened...

But I'd like to re-commit to starting again, I looked through some old posts today and it's such a great journal of my life with my gorgeous kids. And speaking of kids, we've got another one... Pax Henry Hawk Pallister was born August 12, 2009 and he's a dream.

I'll be posting more about him and our lives these days soon, but for now - this... this little blog started as a celebration of all things Sophia, so here's a shout out to her. In 29 minutes it will be exactly 5 years (August 27 2004, 12:01 am) since this gorgeous child came into the world. She is such a gift to us, and is really coming into her own as a big sister, a big kid, a really enjoyable person too.

Today she put on a dress she was given for her 3rd birthday that was too big for her at the time... I remembered taking a picture of her wearing the dress last year against our kitchen wall and thought I'd take another picture in the same dress in the same spot today to see how she's grown in the last year... can you believe the difference in 16 months? No wonder we think she's getting taller in front of our eyes... because she is.

Happy Birthday Sophia, we love you!!!!

vocab & other bigness.

Yesterday Sophia said:

"I have to get some more resources for my goldfish's room." and

"Look at the new technique I'm trying."

Yep, still 4 1/2.

And Eleanor went pee and poo on the potty. 3rd time for pee, 1st time for the poo. Oh happy day, I may not have 2 kids in diapers at the same time come August.... oh, can I dare hope?

She is now two, and officially fancy. Will publish some b-day pics when our camera cord returns from it's current journeys.

BUT WAIT... there's more (added Feb 25)

Yesterday Sophia got a paper cut, but after getting a band-aid for it, demonstrated by miming in the air how good it was that the injury would not effect her ability to work the remote to the DVD player. I was unable to hide my amusement.

And then... we were on our way home and we saw a flock of birds flying overhead, and she said,

"Every night, at sunset, all the birds gather at a restaurant to celebrate the day I was born." We were suitably impressed.

time for bed

This book was one of the first that Sophia was ever given, Time For Bed, by Mem Fox. It is so beautiful. It was a gift from our dear friend Sandra, and I highly recommend it.

Last night Sophia read a whole page in the book all by herself. It said:

"It's time to sleep, little bee, little bee. Yes, I love you and you love me."

It was so exciting. I hugged her and she said, "I really am getting ready for kindergarten!"

25 things.

There has been a bit of a trend amongst my friends on facebook lately to do these "25 things" lists. Normally I wouldn't bother, as my computer time is so much grabbed in tiny increments these days, but I so enjoyed some of the things I learned about really dear friends I spent a chunk of my Sunday working on this (took 3 or four sittings!)

The only trouble with me doing a "list" is, as my friend Jamie Arpin-Ricci once said about me, I am not a sentence communicator, or a paragraph communicator, but a chapter communicator. So, here goes.

1. I was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, but my parents moved from there when I was a baby, so I don’t remember it. However, even though I am quite good at spelling, I still panic when I have to spell the place I was born on any official form and almost always spell it with “e”s where the “i” should be. I even had to use spell check for this sentence. (I got it wrong. Again.)

2. I have an older brother and 2 younger sisters (Matthew, Elizabeth and Caroline) who I am very close to in age and love a lot. When we were little we wanted to repel down the side of something, like mountain climbers on their way down a rock face, so we tied a rope to my brother's closet bar and threw it out his second story window and took turns scaling down the side of our house with his friends. My Mum was only alerted after she became aware something was wrong when we all ran up the stairs. And then ran up the stairs. And then ran up the stairs. The closet bar was really bent.

3. I like my feet.

4. During my YWAM DTS and SOMD I spent more time with my pal Barry Houser than I did with my husband. Not out of anything untoward, only because Wade didn’t do DTS with me, only our outreach. (He was doing “errands” and “maintenance” with Phil.) I still really like that YWAM is a place were a Canadian Catholic clothing-store manager and a gun-owning Mennonite truck driver from Pennsylvania could become the best of friends.

5. I have several ‘before-I-die’ destinations. The Grand Canyon at sunset. (Okay, I seriously just started to cry when I typed that. Weird.) A Cirque Du Soliel performance; to go anywhere in South East Asia; to visit many friends in Australia; and pretty much all of continental Europe, especially Switzerland and a vineyard in either France or Italy where I have been befriended by the owners and they have invited my family in and they are feeding us a very long, beautiful supper with lots of wine and food of indescribable simultaneous simplicity and complexity of flavour.

6. Once, at a life changing meal in Spain with lots of wine and food of indescribable simultaneous simplicity and complexity of flavour, I was so happy and amazed, that by the end I declared if I tasted anything else that was good, I would surely cry. At which point, my dear friend Mike Davies, one never to deny a challenge, insisted I taste his liqueur. I did indeed weep with joy.

7. My friend and adopted sister Sandra, so inhabited the above story (#6 ) when I told it to her, that later on she was confused as to whether or not she had actually been at the dinner. People like that are like oxygen to me.

8. I can tie the stem of a maraschino cherry in a knot with my tongue.

9. My first concert was En Vogue and MC Hammer, 1990. Oh, no it wasn’t - it was the Beach Boys, with my Dad in 1985. (I was 12.) We rode our bikes. I was confused by the the funny smelling cigarettes.

10. My favourite concerts were, Peter Gabriel - the “Us” tour, with Jan; and seeing Coldplay for $10 with Dave Laird, Heidi Sand, Ange, Vern and Ralph before most people in Canada had ever heard of them.

11. The people who were with me during the most embarrassing moment in my life, which I did actually have a nightmare about afterward, are all tagged in my facebook note. If you're not sure of it's you, it probably wasn't you.

12. Pretty much every time I hear the opening bars of “Misty Mountain Hop” by Led Zeppelin, I think it is the perfect song to be playing right then.

13. I once yelled at a large airplane full of people. There were these old dears behind me from Australia and they were really panicked about missing their flight and I had totally become to sympathetic to them by hearing them talk. So we landed and the the steward asked everyone to remain seated so the old dears could get off first and people waited about 30 seconds (of course) and then stood up and the old dears were only about four rows up and they were panicking and I couldn’t take it. So I yelled at everyone to sit down. Everyone did, and remained seated until after the old dears were long gone - until one man looked at me and said “Can we get up now?”. I was mortified at the time, but now I’m so proud of me.

14. When I was young, I memorized the entire soundtrack to the movie “Annie” and remember singing as I was walking down the road, secretly hoping someone would discover me and make me famous. I also had an elaborate fantasy about being on the TV show “Kids Are People Too” because I had been selected to be the child star of the next Star Wars film (this was before “Jedi” came out) and in the movie, (and on the show) I could do karate.

15. I am quite a good cook, but almost every time I make a sauce, I ask my husband, who is an amazing cook, to tweak it. He almost always adds brown sugar, or vinegar, or both, no matter what kind of sauce it is.

16. I spent very long hours in front of the mirror as a child developing the ability to make my tongue into the shape of a three leafed clover and to avert my eyes to one side, then cross them, then switch them to the other side.

17. My maiden name is Payne. The family history is that my great-grandfather’s last name was Barrington, but he died in the war leaving my great-grandmother pregnant and unmarried, so we bear her maiden name, not his. My sisters and I thought Barrington was a far classier name and used to pretend we were high powered business executives with our office, Barrington Inc. My sister Lizzy was Cassandra Barrington and I was Antonia (aka Toni) Barrington.

18. I am kind of obsessed with the Oscars. I started watching it with my Mum when I was a kid, who you used to explain to me the politics behind the votes. My best friend Lee-Anne and I have watched it together for years, even though she moved to Calgary over 9 years ago. We take notes and compare fave moments. We have special snacks (pringles and cream soda) and we take it very seriously. No matter how old I get I can not resist doing fake Oscar speeches afterward. I can not believe I just found out my friend Jessica has been to the Oscars 10 times!!!!! Not fair.

19. I’ve been married for 11 1/2 years to Wade who is so amazing, and I love him more all the time, and the longer I’m married to him the more grateful and amazed I am at having a good marriage with someone who loves me so well.

20. In college I was a theatre major, and hung out at a blues bar a lot, where a lot of friends who were musicians played and live blues music still makes me really happy, which is not really the point of the blues, but I’m just generally a pretty happy person.

21. I love surprises but have had very few in my life. I had one surprise party once, but I was sick and it was pretty mellow so I actually almost forgot about it. Once my sister Lizzy and her friend Sarah surprised me when I lived in California. And once my friend Houser came (on his honeymoon!) and showed up on my doorstep and really, really surprised me, because he promised a long time before he would do it one day. And he did.

22. My middle name is Helen, my Mum’s first name. Eleanor is named in honour of her and my grandmother, Ellen.

23. I love, love, love to go to the movies. I don’t go very often since we’ve had kids. To me there is something so special about going and sitting in the dark with all these strangers and you all go on a journey together and there is popcorn and soda and red Twizzlers and you just escape everything for 2 hours. Watching a video is not even close.

24. When my friend Jan or my Mum make me tea and toast they get it right every time, and it is difficult to explain how perfect it is. One time my niece Kelsi said, “Granny makes the best toast.” and as silly as it sounded, she is right.

25. My favourite colour is robin’s egg blue.

look at this

This is Sophia wearing button and zip pants. She used to be afraid of button and zip pants because they bugged her. Now, not only is she wearing them, but today she did up the button and zip all by herself. I know. Stand back.

She has been watching a video from the library called "Get Ready For Kindergarten" where they teach you to tie a bow for your shoes. She has been getting the cross over part, but she hasn't gotten to the bow tying yet. (You know, where you cross the bunny ears.) Today she was pretending to tie this bow, which her dad helped her with. I'll keep you posted on her progress.

lately

Lately we have...

...gone to Wade's Mum's wedding in AB. It went pretty well. We love spending time with W's brother and sister and their families, and seeing our good friends the Alexanders. I also saw my friends Tannis and Kim and it was so amazing to see them again after 9 years! Wade and his brother walked his Mom down the aisle. They were very good at it. Handsome, too.



... registered Sophia for school. (Here's Nori in front.) We are still wanting to do home schooling, and have found a program we are really excited about at a local elementary school. Soph will go in September (yes, she'll be 5!) and go 2 days a week for specialty and group subjects - this term the kids there are doing art, gymnastics, quilting, french and worm composting. How east van can you get? Then the resource teacher helps us develop a curriculum for what we want to do at home the other 3 days and we get some funding for that too. I feel way better about the fact that we have figured what we'll do since our baby is due a week before Soph turns 5....






... celebrate our friend Jacqui's birthday. Yay for Jax, and a reason to have a tea party.




... wash Eleanor's hair. She keeps putting stuff in it. Like a purple stamp pad, which coloured her whole face and left these cool punk rock purple streaks in her hair for a couple days, and whipping cream, as this video shows.

..think about getting Sophia an agent. This what she was doing a lunch for Wade and I today and I offered to take a video of her. This the kind of stuff she comes up with on a regular basis. Love that kid.

happy new year!

I can't believe it's been over a month since I last posted! December was absolutely crazy busy for us, but in lots of great ways.

Here's some of what's been happening:

~ The fundraiser we did for our friend Sandra was an overwhelming success. Wade's dreadlock auction raised over $2800 and the whole event and subsequent gifts came to over $13,000. We were all totally overwhelmed. It wasn't just the money, but also how moved people were by the action of Wade giving up his hair and us throwing the party. It seemed like there was a holiness to the whole thing that people from all different parts of our lives were aware of, whether or not they seem to have much interaction with God on a regular basis . We thought we were throwing a party and getting a haircut, but it just expanded. We were even on the news!

~ Wade preached at church and played with his band there too, cooked a turkey for the church dinner, had 2 very successful Christmas craft fairs ( I worked one which was fun.) We taught on the YWAM DTS for a week, said good bye to our DTS billet Peter and got ready for Xmas with my parents. We also had some sort of Christmas party or event every day from the Tuesday - Sunday the week we taught, the week before Xmas - whew!

~ We found out that we're having another baby in August of 2009! I also found out that on your 3rd pregnancy your body decides you need a belly way faster than the 1st and second time - I'm only 8 weeks, but my button and zip pants are already to tight - hooray for elastic waistbands! We're all pretty thrilled. Sophia and I think maybe we'll have a boy, Wade's pulling for his third girl (of course we don't really care, as long as it's a baby). If we can, we'll have another home birth, we so loved how peaceful and normal and lovely our home birth with Eleanor was.

~ We had a great Christmas, quiet, with only my folks and then Sandra came for dinner. I was really so excited to give this Xmas - I surprised Wade with an Ipod touch, and made robes for both our girls. I got lots of lovely things too. Sadly, I felt (and still feel) nauseous almost all the time, so every time I look at any Christmas decor or think about snow I feel pukey - I'm so glad to be in California right now...

~ Oh, yeah - right now we're in California. We came for our dear friend Ralph's wedding to the lovely Katie. Ralph lived with us for a long time, from when Soph was a baby til she was 2. We have known Katie for years too, and it was an amazing day yesterday. Sophia was the most excited flower girl you ever saw, Wade was a dashing kilted groomsman, I did a reading by Keats, and Rachel did a reading from Romans. It was very relaxed and fun and California-y. And Ralph did very well, having all those people look at him for such a long period of time - and he danced, in public, and to our knowledge he was not under the influence of anything except loooove.

I have managed to lose my camera, but the excellent Tim Farmer made sure he was taking lots of pics for all of us, (especially you, Ange!) so I'm sure as soon as he and Rachel get off the plane after their day of flying today they'll be passing those on ASAP!

Speaking of Rachel and Tim, they met us off the plane and we spent New Year's Eve together talking, eating snacks and just getting to know Tim and catching up with Rachel. Rachel and Tim are SO well suited to each other. We just fell in love with Tim and seeing him and Rachel together was so lovely. They are so in love and so comfortable together and just their body language even sitting next to each other is great. I loved just watching them, and they both got on with our girls so well, it was so hard to say goodbye again yesterday!

New Year's Day Emily and Josh came down to the house where we are staying and spent the day with us and Rach and Tim too. Sophia decided everyone needed to do princess art class and had everyone all around the table drawing for ages and ages. Wade made an incredible pasta meal, and we played Cranium and talked and laughed and laughed and laughed. Because, as anyone who knows Rachel knows, when Rachel is there, everyone feels like they are the funniest person in the world, because she has the most continuous, spontaneous, genuine laugh in the world (as far as my research has shown.)

Also, Josh is just funny all the time and Emily was just perfect Emily - so great, and so normal to be with her, with everyone actually, even after such a long time. Emily's photography is also getting more and more amazing. You should check out her website www.halflightimages.com. She took these pics of our girls, great shots that capture their personalities well.

Well that about wraps it up - we'll be here for another few days and then in a week and a half we're off to Wade's Moms wedding in Alberta - but more on that later - in the mean time...

Happy New Year!

Sophia bowing after performing "The Tired Boy and the Lullaby Mermaid" an original work
by Sophia J.J. Pallister and P. Wade Pallister.
Image Copyright 2009 HalfLight Images

A classic Nori face.
Image copyright 2009 HalfLight Images