Dear Celebrity Chef;

Your children are not toys, they are people. Please show them that you respect them as individuals by giving them real names...not naming them like cartoon characters. I understand that you feel the need to give your kids 'different' names...but it is hard to retain your dignity when your middle name is Boo.

Read here:

dlisted

Tuesday.

I made carrot cake today! Healthy, whole wheat, low-fat carrot cake. With great big globs of cream cheese icing on top to counter act the healthy goodness. Yum. Kylie ate 6 mini-cupcakes as soon as she came home from school.

Scott is on holidays this week, and we have lofty goals. Today, we went to ReStore to buy some cabinets for the garage and then we went to Home Depot to find a laundry sink. We found the cabinets... but left Home Depot empty handed. In place of the laundry sink, Scott moved the cutest little 4-drawer dresser to my laundry room and he's going to install an old bathroom sink that we have kicking around the garage. The dresser came from the Bissell Centre years ago...I think we paid $10 for it. It's solid wood, not that particle crap that's everywhere now.

Another goal for this week is to paint a dresser for Sam, but the dresser in question is really really old and in cruddy shape. But again, solid wood. Pam has picked a colour called "Sleeping Beauty Pink" but it's more like Pepto-Bismol Pink. Ew, it's awful.

Speaking of dressers, Kylie and I painted her dresser a really pretty shade of purple this summer. I have pictures somewhere...dunno where. It turned out really well, and Kylie did most of the work herself (with guidance, of course).

Jake was home sick today. He was the oddest shade of green and just sat like a lump on the couch for most of the morning. By the time he went to bed tonight he was feeling much better...now Scott is looking sort of beige. I think it's time for bed :) .

Later, taters :)

My anal approach to grocery shopping.

When we moved into this house, we bought a large bulletin/white board from Goodwill...or maybe it was Restore, I forget. Anyway, we got the big idea to use a Sharpie to section off permanent columns and then use the wipe-off markers to write our ongoing lists. This is what our board looks like:

There are lists for Wal Mart, Superstore and Home Depot. There is also a space to keep track of how much allowance I owe the kids and I can erase those amounts when I pay them out. There is also a list for Dollarama, but not this week. Anyway, when it comes time for a trip to Superstore I transfer everything that I need to this list:

Scott made it for me in Excel, which I have absolutely no idea how to use (and no desire to learn, either). The list used to be in pretty good order until Superstore renovated, so I should really move around a few sections on this list. When I get home from shopping, I erase all of the items on the white board (leaving the items that Superstore was sold out of, so I can pick them up on the next trip). The list is formatted to print 2 to a page, and I use the back side of newsletters and junk that the kids bring home from school.

I find this stuff absolutely thrilling lol...