Six Years!

By admin

Kaius, you’re turning six this month and you are an amazing six year old!

It’s hard to believe that it was only six years ago that I went through 39 hours of labour (30 at home in a pool and 9 at the hospital), a csection, clothe diapers and 3.25 years of breastfeeding. Between now and then we’ve experienced blue boogers due to playdough being shoved up your nose, a popcorn kernel being removed from your ear by a specialist because the clinic couldn’t get it out, three stitches under your nose thanks to your enthusiasm for throwing water bottles up at the ceiling and looking up as the shards from the light fixture come down on your face, both arms going through a single pane window with not a scratch on you… twice, a visit to the ER in order to get your swollen foreskin back over your penis and various other scars from running in one direction while looking in another.

While you were five we’ve moved three times and it wasn’t easy for you, leaving the people you love and became so attached to.  The first few nights in all of our new places you would cry because you missed whoever we left at our old place.

I thought I might have been doing something wrong when I put you into Grade 1 after only six months of preschool, six months of Kindergarten and a summer off but you’re learning so fast.  You’re reading AND you like it! I can’t tell you how much that makes me smile. Going into Grade 1 only knowing how to print in all upper case letters, your teacher is impressed with how well you’re doing and so am I.

Your sense of humour blows me away, you love to have fun all the time and even though I get annoyed at times when it gets to be too much for me, I’m glad you’re this way because it would be WAY boring if you weren’t.

You’re polite and considerate of other, you usually share whatever you have with someone that doesn’t and you love to tell stories that make people laugh.

You love routine, which makes sense, most kids do and you are MY son

You love your dog so much that you tell me you don’t have a good nights sleep when she’s not sleeping with us and continue to prove it, mentioning it very first when you wake up even when it wasn’t the last thing we talked about before you went to sleep.

You randomly tell me you love me no matter who’s around which in turn gets a few ‘aaawwww’s’ out of pizza shop customers. You missed me so much when I was gone for 9 days you almost made me fall over when you came running to me after school the day I came back.

You love rough housing with Papa at the pizza shop and hanging with Gramma and the dogs at her place.  It’s great that you get to create these memories with them and be close to them.

You’ve invited 22 kids to your party this year after only living here for three months, your whole class (even the one that bosses you around) and your gang of friends from Gramma’s complex including a 9 year old and a 3 year old.

I hope you have a super fun time at your party!  I love you and I’m really proud of of you Stinker…

Happy 6th Birthday!!!

More big changes

By admin

We’re moving to Alberta - land of snow, the mountain time zone and brown grass – blech!

I got laid off…. my Mom is about to have surgery again – she owns a pizza shop so we’re going to go that way and help each other out.   We’ll stay in her unfinished basement.  Kaius will go to Grade One at a school there.  So before I even get there our schedule is going to be school drop off at 9am, pizza shop at 11, school pick up at 3, pizza shop at 4.

Once Mom sells the pizza shop (which she’s been trying to do for a while now) – they are taking off in a fifth wheel and we’re on our own.  Until then, I’m going to work my ass off relaunching my business – I just bought TutorialGurl.com and am excited to see where that goes.

I’ve had this feeling that it’s all been leading up to us going that way for a few months now and I was ignoring it because it’s not my favourite place in the world.  But it makes sense.  I’ll be closer to most of my family.  The only family that is over here is my Dad.

The town we’re going to live in is called Strathmore , 40 kilometres (25 mi) east of Calgary – population 11,000ish. It’s sunny almost 333 days of the year with an average number of 112 frost free days per year.

I found out I was being laid of on August 25th, we’re going to be out of our apartment by September 9th and leaving for Strathmore on September 20th.  We’re dog sitting for a friend at her place for a week and going to WA state for a couple days before we leave.

We’ll probably be there for at least the school year if not longer… it’s cheaper to live out there than here.

I’m going to miss the Vancouver area… it’s home.

All of me

By admin

A few disclaimers:

These are all things that involve issues I’ve dealt with, come to terms with and are working or have worked on resolving and I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I didn’t have the life I’ve had – you couldn’t buy the life education I’ve gotten for free.  I’m not writing so you’ll feel sorry for me.  I’m sharing personal details so you understand where I’m coming from and I’d love for this blog to be a place where my son learns about my life before he became my life. I embrace who I am along with all the things I’ve been through and I’ve always made things happen for myself.  While most things I’ve brought on myself I still haven’t regretted anything because of what I learned or experienced during the process.

Some people are going to be mad that I’m posting details for the whole world to see but this is about me and what I’ve learned more so than what actually happened. I’m not placing blame or trying to ‘out’ people and will try to be as brief as possible with certain situations’ details – sticking to the facts. As they say it’s better to ask forgiveness then ask permission so while I’ve asked for permission or advice from a few key people, there are some people that will probably never read my blog but might not like what I write on it. I have loved and still love many of the people I write about; my family of course (dysfunctional or otherwise) and even though they are ex husbands there is still a place in my heart for them.

Some of this is rather heavy stuff but please keep in mind that I’ve always been a very happy, outgoing, enthusiastic person.  I’m a very social creature and have talked about my experiences a lot as a young adult which I think was important for me at the time.  I’m now 33 and tend to not talk about it as much but will not shy away if someone asks.

I’m going to go in chronological order as best I can – I move alot – always have, at least once a year sometimes more so sometimes I have a hard time remembering what came first.

Mom and Dad divorced when I was 7 years old so between moving back and forth between them with both of them moving around a lot (Dad was in construction, Mom in the restaurant industry) I ended up going to 18 different schools in 14 years of schooling.  Because of all the moving I ended up going to 3 different schools in Grade 5 causing me to repeat Grade 5.  My sister has me beat though, she went to more schools than I did in 13 years of schooling.

Around grade 6 my Mom’s birthday present to my Grandfather was to move to where my Grandparents lived in Saskatchewan.  During that year, I was sexually abused by my Mom’s Dad – he touched the wrong areas on the outside of my clothes and I ran – it happened once and that’s all the detail I’ll get into about the experience itself. I will say that was the year I started gaining weight.  He’s been gone for 16 years now.

I figured out that as a result I was unconsciously making myself unattractive to men by gaining weight.  I think as I’ve come to terms with this issue I’ve worked thing out in my head and by the time I realized what I was doing I was addicted to food and it was/is a comfort to me.  I’m working on it!

This is a work in progress… more soon! Stay tuned!

Kids, email and domains

By admin

I was browsing my google reader the other day and found this awesome post on Dad-O-Matic:
Why Your Infant Needs Gmail – where it’s suggested that you create an email address for your child and send them messages on a regular basis.

I instantly obtained kaiuscooper@gmail.com and suggested that his dad create one for him as well.

Working outside the house has honestly, so far, created a very bad strain on Kaius and I and our relationship… I hate it.  I feel like this will be a way for me to stay connected with him while I’m at work.  They don’t have to be huge long story emails and I know he won’t read them any time soon.  Just snippets, things he says or does that I don’t want to forget – I’m much better at digital versions of stuff like that than paper and pen versions.

Heather over at Dooce.com (one of my favorite blogs) writes a monthly letter to her daughter on her blog – not sure I can do that – I mean Heather how much do you bawl and laugh when you write those – I don’t even know you or your daughter besides via your blog and they turn me into a laughing human water fountain.

Awhile back I also purchased his domain name: KaiusCooper.com – I plan on putting a blog up there eventually and soon he’ll be either audio or video blogging about things he’s interested in.  This is going to be the way our kids connect with each other.

We live in a digital world and posting videos, sending emails and the like are SO easy to do compared to when we were kids, I can’t imagine not using these things (even if you don’t publish them to a website).  I have tons of video and pics that aren’t online (tons that are too!).

So two suggestions… go get your kid an email address (and send them emails) and get their domain name (I use DomainSite.com for about $8 USD and receive no monetary reward for suggesting them).

Enjoy!

PS… stay tuned for some Wordpress articles – I have a bunch written, just have to fine tune and post them