2013 is over. Crazy, huh? I can't believe how fast this year went!! So much happened, and yet, it was a relatively uneventful year.
It started out pretty innocuous. We didn't go anywhere special for the first part of the year. In March, we went to Florida for the break. We had the apartment to ourselves, so it was nice. Squish got to visit an American dentist and have a tooth (with an abscess underneath) extracted. Thank Gd we had insurance. We got it all reimbursed and the guy at the Target Pharmacy managed to find an insurance plan he could put her antibiotic through, thereby making the grand total for her entire script a whopping $6.
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| Squish at the Main Street Children's Dentist in Plantation, Flordia |
May was Mother's Day where I received many wonderful gifts from my family.
June was June. It was pretty quiet. Banana had had her educational assessment, and we learned that she is super smart (we knew that already), but has a learning disability in that she has a poor working memory. What that means is that she knows what she wants to say, and has the answer in her mind, but if you ask her to write it down, she loses all concept of punctuation, grammar and the like. She scored between the 75th and 98th percentile in memory, vocabulary, reading comprehension and every language based test. She scored low when she had to apply that knowledge. So we waited for the psychological assessment to happen in September to determine whether the rest of our instincts were going to pan out to anything.
After the big July flood, The Hubs and his twin brother went down
to the train station to bring snacks and water to the people being
shuttled from the stranded and flooded GO Train.
July the girls went to Ashreinu Day Camp, a Jewish Girl's day camp in the city. They also turned 10! We hit double digits and their Champagne birthday!! We celebrated, of course, with champagne (ok, sparkly wine, but real wine).
We also had a huge flood (relatively speaking) in Toronto after a torrential rain storm. One of the commuter trains - GO Transit train - got stuck on the tracks when the tracks started to flood. Water came into the train and stranded all the passengers - about 1400 people. My friend's husband was one of the passengers, and was going to be stranded at the Oriole station as that is where, when they started bringing people off the train by boat, buses were going to be taking the passengers. The Hubs and his brother went to see if they could shuttle people stranded by the storm. Since they couldn't get anyone from the train, they went to the station where the passengers were being shuttled and brought with them snacks (our entire snack bin full of the kids snacks - granola bars, rice krispie squares, etc) and fruit, as well as a case of bottled water, and handed it out to people getting off the train. They were on the news!! One of the passengers complained that there was nothing for them when they got off the train, and many were stuck on the train from about 4:00 until well after midnight by the time all the passengers were taken off the train. This passenger did mention the "two young men" who were handing out bottles of water and snacks. I'm very proud of the Hubs and his brother.
August was Banana and Squish's foray into the world of overnight camp. They went for almost three weeks. We had to pick them up early simply because my sister decided to get married!! LOL!! Yup.
We also had a huge flood (relatively speaking) in Toronto after a torrential rain storm. One of the commuter trains - GO Transit train - got stuck on the tracks when the tracks started to flood. Water came into the train and stranded all the passengers - about 1400 people. My friend's husband was one of the passengers, and was going to be stranded at the Oriole station as that is where, when they started bringing people off the train by boat, buses were going to be taking the passengers. The Hubs and his brother went to see if they could shuttle people stranded by the storm. Since they couldn't get anyone from the train, they went to the station where the passengers were being shuttled and brought with them snacks (our entire snack bin full of the kids snacks - granola bars, rice krispie squares, etc) and fruit, as well as a case of bottled water, and handed it out to people getting off the train. They were on the news!! One of the passengers complained that there was nothing for them when they got off the train, and many were stuck on the train from about 4:00 until well after midnight by the time all the passengers were taken off the train. This passenger did mention the "two young men" who were handing out bottles of water and snacks. I'm very proud of the Hubs and his brother.
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| Getting our stuff onto the bus to camp!! |
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| The Bride and Groom |
My baby sister decided it was time and she married an amazing guy. My new brother-in-law, Avi, is sweet and funny. I look forward to time spent with them always.
Just to add to her amazingness, my sister also received her Masters of Art from the University of Toronto in November.
September meant the beginning of another school year - Grade 5 for the twins this year!! As always, they were in separate classes, so the chaos of finding their teachers was minimized only because we had only one grade to find. Based on how chaotic it was on the first day, I can't imagine what people with kids in different grades felt like. Let alone my friend with 4 kids in 4 different grades!!
At the end of September, I started a new job and while it's part-time, I love it.
Sometime between October and December (I really don't remember when) Banana had her psychological assessment and we were informed that she is ADHD-I This means ADHD, Inattentive Type. She's not hyper. She doesn't get up and move around the room, but she is easily distracted. I kept up with her teachers to make sure she was getting on ok in class.
November was an early Chanukah and we celebrated with family.
December meant school break. I chose not to take any time off during the holidays, so made arrangements to have the girls looked after during the days that I worked. I did take one day off, and we went to Buffalo with my brother and sister in law and their kids. It was a nice 5 day trip where we did some shopping and were successful in finding dresses for the girls to wear to a bat mitzvah we had in January.
And I think that pretty much sums up 2013.
We're a month into 2014, and I'll let that be another post.
Happy New Year!!!!
Just to add to her amazingness, my sister also received her Masters of Art from the University of Toronto in November.
September meant the beginning of another school year - Grade 5 for the twins this year!! As always, they were in separate classes, so the chaos of finding their teachers was minimized only because we had only one grade to find. Based on how chaotic it was on the first day, I can't imagine what people with kids in different grades felt like. Let alone my friend with 4 kids in 4 different grades!!
At the end of September, I started a new job and while it's part-time, I love it.
Sometime between October and December (I really don't remember when) Banana had her psychological assessment and we were informed that she is ADHD-I This means ADHD, Inattentive Type. She's not hyper. She doesn't get up and move around the room, but she is easily distracted. I kept up with her teachers to make sure she was getting on ok in class.
November was an early Chanukah and we celebrated with family.
December meant school break. I chose not to take any time off during the holidays, so made arrangements to have the girls looked after during the days that I worked. I did take one day off, and we went to Buffalo with my brother and sister in law and their kids. It was a nice 5 day trip where we did some shopping and were successful in finding dresses for the girls to wear to a bat mitzvah we had in January.
And I think that pretty much sums up 2013.
We're a month into 2014, and I'll let that be another post.
Happy New Year!!!!
