Month: January 2025

Ezra has had a fever for the past week, poor guy.

Fevers in children suck.  You call the doctor and they suggest waiting a couple of days to see if it fixes itself and to comfort him with medicine.  As a parent you’re helpless to just hope for the best.

Before Christmas he was having fevers around 103 if he didn’t have any medicine in him and that was consistent.  Turns out he had pneumonia.

This time around, it was a bit more manageable…his fever would come in waves.  On Wednesday we even reduced the medicine during the day because his temperature was around 99.  But by Thursday, the fever came back with a vengeance.

To the doctor we went and they found blood in his ear which was a sign that there was an infection and something burst to relieve pressure.  Five days later he’s now on antibiotics.  Hopefully he bounces back soon enough!

Typical sight of Ezra just hanging out in his underwear for the past week, trying to keep cool.  This was him trying to get yogurt off his chest.  Haha!

Have I mentioned I’m a sucker for oral histories before?  Well, Vero knows this and she finds the greatest oral histories involving topics I enjoy.

This was another one of those books that were hanging around the house and I would read a page here and there when I could.  But no more!  2025 is clearly the year to stop doomscrolling and start reading books.

I thought this book had a slow burn of a start.  Things started getting interesting for me when they started playing proper gigs in Seattle.  It was also really interesting to understand how mindboggling it was to be the number one musical celebrity on the planet when you weren’t even thinking of that outcome.

I did find the end of the book a bit weak.  An entire year is fit into two chapters.  HOWEVER, perhaps that is sometimes how oral histories go…you get a lot more information about the time someone spent with a band, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lof of interaction with the band and others once they became huge and were surrounded by security or had to run off to do TV interviews and sign autographs.

For mega-fans of Nirvana, it’s a great read.

Last night I was watching Sierra at gynmastics.  A typical gymnastics class for her lasts 1.5 hours and goes like this:

• Warm up (running around, doing pushups, etc.)
• Move onto different sections of the gym…balance beams, trampoline, tumble track, etc.

Around an hour into the class I notice Sierra’s class come back to the exercise area and doing running drills and pushups and burpees and you name it, they did it.

I’m watching girls collapsing, girls yelling “I’m having a heart attack!” and I was thinking “What is going on here?”.  Sierra looked winded but she kept doing what she was being asked to do.

Turns out the entire class was being punished because most of the girls weren’t listening to the instructor.

Sierra couldn’t believe how she was punished along with the others because she was staying quiet and doing what the instructor asked her to do.

I remember this being a classic form of punishment when I was a kid.  It never made any sense…usually the good people in class aren’t the ones that are going to stand up to the troublemakers and make them follow the rules!  So the good guys get punished for no reason whatsoever.

I was hoping that in the year 2025 we would have more targeted forms of punishment but as Sierra’s body can attest the day after, I guess not!

The past couple of weeks have been quite cold around Ottawa.  When it’s -20 outside, the last thing I’m thinking about is “Oh boy, let’s go outside and have some fun!”

But when I noticed it was sitting around -1 outside on a Sunday morning, I declared to the family “Family!  Today is the day we go to the Castor River for some fun.”

Fun we had.  There weren’t a lot of folks on the trails so we had a couple of good spots to do some great sliding.  I also got to try out the cinematic mode on my phone.  We spent an hour sliding and walking around the trails.

“Ryan!  I’m at the hockey arena with my son this weekend.  You should drop by, we’re right next door to you!”

After getting this text message from Shannon and not recognizing the arena name he sent me, I realized he mixed up Kars with Vars.

I packed the kids in the car Saturday morning and we drove 30 minutes to Osgoode to watch his son’s team play some hockey.

I haven’t seen Shannon in a few years so it was good to see him.  I have to admit a hockey arena isn’t the greatest spot to catch up because our attention was split between the game and the kids!  Haha.  But it was good to see him for an hour.

Sierra trying to choose which toy she wanted.  Those things cost $2 nowadays!

The neighbours pointed out that the creek/river (known as the Palmer River in our house) has frozen over to the point that you can skate on it.  Vero and Sierra went and brushed off a patch to have some fun.

We had a good chuckle at this piece of creative writing Sierra wrote.  I, too wish to be a billionaire.

In my quest to read/finish books in my backlog, I was up early one morning because Ezra had pains in his legs and I couldn’t fall back asleep.  I spied this book on the shelf (quite timely since David Lynch passed away a few days ago) and finally finished it.

I love oral histories.  I think they are the greatest way to provide some historical context.  This book was an interesting read if you wanted to know the in behind the scenes disaster which was the original Dune movie.

One of my favourite parts was learning that a stillsuit from Dune was incorporated into the ending of Evil Dead 2.  No way!

I would have to say that you need to be a mega fan of Dune to enjoy this book because it really gets into the details.

One day I said to Ezra “Don’t you have things in your room that you never play with?  Let’s look at them!”

We pulled out this interactive globe called Orboot and it was quite fun.  We played a quiz where you had to answer questions about certain animals and if you didn’t know the answer, you search for that animal on the globe using augmented reality on the iPad and it will produce some facts about that animal.

Ezra and I were playing with the synthesizer one afternoon and Ezra stumbled upon a really interesting sound that I’m developing into a song.  We sent this video to Abbey and she said “Wow, he’s really concentrating!”