We are old skool Thomas the Tank Engine fans. We have Thomas Lego, Thomas books, a Thomas ride-on trike, Thomas stuffies, Thomas t-shirts, and two really big bins of wooden tracks and engines. Tristan received his very first Thomas the Tank Engine wooden train for his first birthday a decade ago, and we’ve been hooked ever since. One of my favourite family adventures ever was taking then three-year-old Tristan on a road trip to see A Day Out with Thomas in 2005. He still talks about it!

It’s not quite the same as A Day Out with Thomas, but this weekend the Thomas & Friends Live Show is coming to Ottawa! If you’ve got wee fans in your house, you won’t want to miss this one. Thomas & Friends Live will be at the St Laurent Centre on Friday June 22 and Saturday June 23.

Take a ride to the island of Sodor when Thomas the Tank Engine rolls into town! Sit back and enjoy, or get up and dance to the wonderful songs and music of Thomas & Friends™! Catch Thomas & Friends™ live on stage at St. Laurent Centre – admission is free! There are two shows daily at 11am and 2pm.

If you’re not in Ottawa, here’s a complete list of the Thomas and Friends Live tour dates and times (click here for a bigger version):

Don’t forget, you can get a new personalized Thomas e-story every month on the Start Making Tracks website. Lucas still loves these – and they’re free! (And I spent a little too much time on this site watching Thomas’s eyes follow my cursor. Just a wee bit creepy, IMHO!)

Disclosure: I am part of the Fisher-Price Play Ambassador program with Mom Central Canada and I receive special perks as part of my affiliation with this group. The opinions on this blog are my own.

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I read this story in the Ottawa Citizen this morning and I cannot stop thinking about it. It’s about an in-school daycare in Hunt Club – a regulated, licensed, let me repeat IN SCHOOL daycare – where two daycare workers were fired after “three or four” kindergarten kids were TAPED TO COTS with masking tape when they didn’t settle down at nap time. “It is unclear how long the children were restrained with the masking tape or exactly where it was applied but the parent who contacted the Citizen said mouths were taped and that it happened on more than one occasion.”

I need to take a deep breath every time I read that. Holy hell, if that were Lucas? You would have heard me bellowing all the way downtown. How on earth does that happen in a licensed daycare in a public school? It would be horrible and totally unacceptable in a private home daycare, no doubt about it, but seriously – in a school? And these people were accredited early childhood educators, according to the story.

I’m just about done my daycare years. In fact, except for a week at the end of this summer, we’re pretty much officially done with daycare. After a long decade laced with wonderful caregivers and horror stories, we’ve finally made it through the other side. Normally, I’d take this opportunity to rant (again) about our collective need for more licensed, regulated daycare spaces but that’s exactly what this was. As if finding decent, affordable child care was not one of the most difficult challenge a modern Canadian parent faces, now we have to worry about this sort of thing?

By the way, I never did get around to blogging the follow-up to my conversation with Lucas’s school about skipping him ahead to Grade 1 or keeping him in senior kindergarten for September. After meeting with his teachers and the principal and reflecting on all your comments (thank you so much!) we decided the best choice for Lucas would be staying the course and keeping him in kindergarten. The reason I mention this now is that the whole idea of the imposed afternoon “quiet time” for naps or resting was my last bone of contention.

Not only do I think Lucas is way beyond needing a nap at this point, but if one were imposed upon him he’d be up half the night. The teachers, who happen to be parents of young children themselves, are sympathetic to this and promised that no naps would be forced on kids who didn’t need them. I have heard of other full-day kindergarten schools, however, who send home “tsk tsk” notes when kindergarteners do not settle down and sleep during the afternoon rest period. Never in my wildest dreams, however, could I imagine something like taping the children to the cots!

So usually I’d end a post with a question to invite your comments like “what do you think” but I’m pretty sure I know what you think on this one. I mean seriously, the question I would really like answered is “how does this happen” and “how do we make sure it never happens again”?

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These past few weeks have redefined the word “busy” for me. There have been several presentations for work and outside of work, class trips, celebrations, BBQs, meetings, and everyone in the family has been taken out by one illness or another. I kept taking pictures through most of it, although I think I did miss a day or two, but I’ve entirely forgotten to blog about them. Here’s a couple of my favourites in a catch-up post.

Considering the number of family portraits I produce in a year, you’d think I’d be better at cranking out one or two of my own family every now and then, eh? So I made sure to snag the opportunity when I had everyone (more or less) cleaned up for our dear friends’ wedding anniversary recently to get this photo of the five of us. I do love it!

Speaking of wedding anniversaries… you know the kind of friends in your life who are the very first ones you call when something goes wrong and also the very first ones you call when something goes right and you can’t wait to share the news? These are those friends for me. We’ve all been friends since high school and they are so deeply woven into the fabric of my life that they are definitely more family than friends. And they celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary this week (how is that possible when we’re all still 17 years old?) by renewing their vows. How wonderful is that?

We’ve discovered a new favourite path for family walks along the Rideau River, so whenever we get a break from the rain we try to get out for a wander.

Speaking of rain, at least it has been good for the flowers. These are columbine in my mother’s garden.

And also speaking of rain (oy, the rain), when I saw this guy in Starbucks on a rainy morning, I kinda had to take his photo. I’m not usually one for surreptitious street photography but I love how this came out!

I know people spend a lot of time trying to get rid of dandelions, but I think they’re lovely, especially when they seed.

(Sorry neighbours!)

Is it summer vacation yet?

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When I read Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto in 2008, it radically changed how I thought about food and eating. I took to heart then and still try hard to live by his simple prescriptive advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Every time I visit the grocery store, I think about his tests to ensure you are consuming actual food and not just foodlike substances: “would your great-grandmother recognize it as food” and “don’t eat it if it has ingredients you don’t recognize and/or can’t pronounce.”

Because I was so deeply moved by In Defense of Food, I knew I would like his latest book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. About two months ago, I read an interesting interview with Pollan in a blog on the NY Times. In that interview, he said:

“Cooking is probably the most important thing you can do to improve your diet. What matters most is not any particular nutrient, or even any particular food: it’s the act of cooking itself. People who cook eat a healthier diet without giving it a thought. It’s the collapse of home cooking that led directly to the obesity epidemic.”

When you cook, you choose the ingredients: “And you’re going to use higher-quality ingredients than whoever’s making your home-meal replacement would ever use. You’re not going to use additives. So the quality of the food will automatically be better.”

I believe that, wholeheartedly. I believe in just about everything Pollan in preaching, and so I was delighted last week to be stuck in the car for drive across the city long enough to catch all of Jian Ghomeshi’s interview of Michael Pollan on the radio program Q. Pollan discussed Big Food and how (pardon me as a paraphrase from my memory of something I heard a week ago) any industrialized food production will automatically choose the least expensive (and therefore lowest quality and least healthy) ingredients, because companies are all about making profits. But to cover up the fact that they are using marginal ingredients (think of the quality of cheese and flour, for example, used to make a frozen pizza) they add all sorts of other things that are salty or sugary or fatty because when our body detects those things it says YUM, and those salty/fatty/sugary additives mask the meh of the mediocre ingredients. And it’s those salty/fatty/sugary additives that are the problem, the huge problem, the biggest food problem of them all.

Jian Ghomeshi asked Pollan about adding things like butter, gobs of butter, to a home cooked meal to make it tastier and Pollan said that you basically can’t go wrong with home-cooked food, and no matter how much salt you shake out or butter you slather on, if you are cooking real food you are ingesting a mere fraction of what you get in pre-packaged Big Food foodlike products.

This makes so much sense to me. SO much. I totally buy this argument. Eating at home is a touchstone in our family. I’m also a rabid believer in the whole “family dinner” concept, and while we do takeout pizza about once a week, we mostly eat meals I cook at home.

Before we had kids, cooking dinner meant taking a box from the freezer or fridge and making it warm. I’ve come a long way since then, I have to admit that much. But as I am listening to Michael cursed Pollan and nodding my head in agreement, I am beginning to think critically about what “cooking” means in our house. I think about how I make spaghetti and meatballs, for instance. Box of (whole wheat, natch) noodles, jar of sauce, frozen meatballs from M&M. Um, okay, so not exactly home cooked. But my veggie primavera with noodles and fresh zukes, peppers, snowpeas and mushrooms – I cook all that from scratch. Well, except for the noodles. And the jarred pesto. Hmm. Oh wait! Fajitas, my specialty, with guacamole from scratch and Farm Boy (but fresh, dammit!) salsa. Totally from scratch. Except the spice rub on the chicken. And the prepackaged tortillas.

Damn. There is almost nothing I cook that doesn’t come somehow from Big Food, that is not processed. Even hamburgers with meat I go out of my way to get from the local butcher (ethically and sustainably farmed!) goes on buns from a bag beside beans from a can.

I want to make the good choices, I honestly do. I have a local, organic CSA farm share, for god’s sake. I am trying.so.hard. But I stood in the grocery store the day after I listened to that interview and I was paralyzed. What can I buy? What can I make for dinner? How can I possibly conceptualize and home-cook from scratch seven dinners that all five people in my house will eat and not completely lose my ever-loving mind? And then do it all again the next week? And the next?

By the time I reached the check-out, I had completely capitulated. Not only were the usual suspects in my cart (cans of beans, jars of sauce, those amazing chicken dumplings from the freezer section) but also several signs of my utter resignation: sugary cereal, frozen waffles, a bag of chips so big it needed its own shopping bag.

Curse you, Michael Pollan. Curse you for opening my eyes, eyes which I thought were already wide open for the love of god, and making me think about eating all over again. I’m afraid to read your bloody damn book in case it makes me think even more because my head may just explode.

Deep breaths.

Now that we’ve eaten the can of beans and the pre-prepped macaroni salad, I’ve shaken off my ennui and vowed to try again. If I’ve made the leap from simply heating crap up to making large swaths of most of our meals, I can incrementally start to cook more and more from scratch, right? Maybe even start with the basics?

You think the family will mind if we have home-made from scratch spaghetti sauce on noodles from a box four times next week? Because the older I get, the harder it is for this dog to learn new tricks.

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Im doing a presentation to a group of parents next week on Internet safety. I’ve got my information all pulled together and I’m putting it into a powerpoint slideshow. I’d love your input on either things that worry you or actions you’ve taken at home to make sure your kids can surf safely. We’re mostly talking about elementary school aged kids, and I’m mostly focusing on the junior years (Grades 4 – 6).

To me, there are five major risk areas:
- stumbling across (or searching out) inappropriate content
- phishing, malware and malicious downloads
- inappropriate disclosure of private information
- cyberbullying and stranger danger
- unexpected costs or bills from things like in-app purchases

I’m choosing to mainly focus on privacy and cyberbullying, because these are behavioural issues more than technology issues, and because they are the ones that worry me personally the most. But have I missed any other significant risk kids face online?

I’ve got a set of 10 tips for safe family surfing, which I’ll share after the presentation. (Disclosure: still fine-tuning those!) But would you care to share the steps you take to “cyber-proof” your kids? (Hmmm, I think I just came up with a new title for the presentation. “Cyber-proof your kids!”) As a parent, is there anything you would like more information about?

And just out of curiousity, do you use parental controls on your computer?

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This question inspired by Lucas, my precocious junior kindergartener. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was dancing with glee at the idea of him benefitting from all-day kindergarten. I knew he was more than ready, and I wasn’t sad about not having to pay one last year of daycare for mornings.

Alarm bells started to ring in my head when I found out a few weeks ago that they seem to be doing away with the idea of junior and senior kindergartens for a blended kingergarten group. I was fine with everything else in the program, like what seems like a Montessori-influenced emphasis on play-based learning, and larger class sizes supported by an ECE, and the day split into English and French.

I have real concerns, though, that my already advanced (IMHO, at least) February-born boy will be in a class with some kids who will be only three years old in the fall. He can already read and write and do simple math. Heck, I wanted to enroll him in JK a year early, just because I knew he was ready. Having just shepherded two boys through the primary grades, I’m very confident that he’s academically capable to start Grade 1 in the fall. I was worried about separating him from his peer group, but he is in a JK/SK split right now so in fact he will have some of his current classmates in his grade whether he starts SK or Grade 1 in the fall.

This has churned up all kinds of interesting questions. While I know you don’t have the insight into what’s best for Lucas, I am very curious to know your experience and opinions about skipping grades and split classes. Do they even skip kids ahead any more? It was common enough in the 1970s that I have a few friends who skipped grades. I was never that hard of a worker, although school did come easily enough for me when I bothered to try.

Moreso, though, I’m interested in your thoughts about split classes. I am genuinely worried about Lucas stagnating for a year because the teacher (and ECE, I suppose) will be trying to meet the needs of kids across a giant spectrum of capabilities. I had a really interesting conversation over coffee with a friend who has done a lot more research on this and she said it’s a myth that they put the more capable and advanced kids in the lower end of a split class. She is of the opinion that being in the older group in a split or mixed class teaches kids leadership and compassion and empathy. While I can appreciate that (although I admit, it hadn’t occurred to me) I think I would rather he be learning math and reading skills. It’s not an either-or, I know.

And here’s another question all tangled up in the same quagmire: is it better to challenge a child or let them excel? If I were to ask the school to consider skipping him ahead to Grade 1, I’d be raising the bar for him and he’d be working to play catch-up. If I wait a year, I think even Grade 1 will be easy for him – he picks up SO much just from his older brothers, and from the terrific daycare we have. If he’d been born 40 days earlier, he’d be enrolled in Grade 1 anyway. So is it better to leave him and let his confidence grow so he thinks school is easy and fun rather than challenging him to rise up to what I am confident he can do? What if the easy path doesn’t lead to confidence but boredom?

So mamy questions! The easy path is, of course, to just let the years play out, and have him go ahead with his year of SK in September. But I can’t help wondering if I am doing him a disservice by not taking this chance to give him a boost which I genuinely believe would be in his best interest. I wouldn’t consider skipping a child in an older grade unless there were some truly extenuating circumstances – I saw first hand how kids can react to kids who fail and who skip from a social perspective and it’s wasn’t pretty then. I wouldn’t expect it to be better now. But to skip SK into Grade 1 seems more feasible, especially if I know he’s already well equipped for the challenge.

Lots of issues wrapped up in this one, eh? I know there are a good handful of teachers reading, I would love to hear from your perspective. And parents, what do you think about the “challenge vs confidence” question, or the whole split grade thing? Oh heck, while we’re at it, could you haul out your crystal ball and tell me the right answer? Because I’ve been around and around on this one and the more I think about it the more unsure I get!

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Have I ever mentioned that I won our school district’s speech competition when I was in Grade 7? I have always loved public speaking. I’ve been really lucky in the last few months in that I’ve had a terrific number of opportunities to do what I call my “blog and pony” show to internal GoC audiences, talking about how we’re using social media to connect with Canadians in a government context at work, but this opportunity was especially exciting for me. I had the great honour today of speaking at the Social Capital Ottawa conference on a topic very dear to my heart: how to find, use and share photos online without getting sued. (Remember my infographic?) I love this topic because it’s at the intersection of a whole whack of things I’m passionate about: social media, blogging, sharing and photography.

This whole experience has been a HUGE learning curve for me – and I thought I was pretty knowledgeable when I proposed the topic! I learned SO MUCH about copyright and how not to violate it. Did you know, for example, that the DMCA does not necessarily apply in Canada? Or that “fair use” is an American concept and different from our Canadian “fair dealings”? Or that “royalty free” does not mean “free”? (Okay, I knew that last one, but I didn’t know it eight years ago when I started blogging.)

But I learned some other really neat stuff, too – like how to build a Powerpoint deck that doesn’t have 800 words on every slide (unlike almost every Government of Canada internal “deck” I have ever seen), and how to share a presentation on slideshare, and how to administer a quiz and record the results in real time using Google docs, and how to use storify to capture a story on Twitter. And now I’m going to wrap it all up into one big bundle and blurt it out here for your adoration.

This is my presentation from slideshare. I wanted to include enough information on the slides so that you’d be able to get the important bits without actually attending my presentation at SoCapOtt. But there’s enough extra stuff that if you would like to know more, I’m happy to bring the presentation live to you or discuss any of the finer points should you have any questions!

And here’s what some of the people attending the presentation had to say about it, as captured by Storify. (There’s several pages, so you have to click at the bottom to read more.)

(How awesome are these tools? I’m so excited to have the chance to play with them!)

Oh, and about the “quiz” in the presentation? I am SO ridiculously pleased with myself for that one. I liked the quiz idea right from the start, to use some real-world examples of circumstances people encounter every day online. When I originally conceived it, I had imagined handing out pieces of coloured bristol board to all participants and having them hold up a green card for true and red card for false. So quaintly old skool, right? I really wanted people to do more than just sit there and listen to me. Two days before the presentation, I was at a completely unrelated training session, and they used Google Forms and a Google Spreadsheet for a very similar purpose. So I spent most of my afternoon yesterday figuring out how to do it myself. Cuz there’s no time like the very last possible minute, right? And sweet Jebesus, IT WORKED!!

So if you’re curious, here’s the quiz questions and answers:

“I’m just a mom blogger with 15 followers, 10 of whom are relatives. My blog is basically an online baby book. All these fancy copyright rules don’t apply to me.” FALSE!

You find an image you love on a website and want to share it with your graphic designer. You pin it to your inspiration board on Pinterest. Can the photographer sue you for copyright infringement? YES!

Copyright means that you have to pay to use an image. FALSE!

You find a yummy recipe for kale chips on a foodie Tumblr and want to share on your blog. You can use the photo as long as you credit Tumblr. FALSE!

You have a website for your small home-based business, but you don’t have a shopping cart on your site. Can you use an image under this Creative Commons license if you credit the source? (See deck for CC license image.) FALSE! (because it says “no commercial”)

Facebook will consult you in cases of disputes over images before revoking your business page. FALSE!

It’s always okay to use an image if you hotlink to the source or make the image clickable to lead back to the source. FALSE!

Removing a watermark from a photo and then posting it is a much more serious violation than simply posting a watermarked image. TRUE!

You’re legally protected if you put a disclaimer on your site. FALSE! (In fact, you’re sort of calling attention to the fact that you plan to break copyright on your site. Not a good plan!)

Any responsibility for the use of copyright images lies with you as the site owner and not the person who designed your blog or website, even if you were not the one who searched out, downloaded and included the image. TRUE!

As long as you remove a copyright image immediately upon request, the owner of the copyright cannot sue you for compensation or damages. FALSE!

Did you learn something new?

So I have more to say about this. There’s so much that I wanted to cram in and I just ran out of time. Did any of the slides pique your curiousity? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the presentation form or content. As I said, the topic is dear to my heart, so if there’s enough interest I can expand some of these slides into an actual blog post. Another post I want to write soon is on the topic of protecting your own images when you put them online. Any other related topics you’d like to talk about?

And how fun is this? Thanks to the gig at Social Capital, I was recently asked to do a presentation to a local school community about kids and Internet safety. Stand by for another blog post on that topic. Man, I do love a captive audience!

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Remember the Fisher-Price Million Moments of Joy site? I mentioned it a few times earlier this year.

I love coming up with posts for this project because it sends me poking through my archives, both online and in my stacks of photo albums and shoeboxes, looking for favourite old snapshots of the boys when they were wee. This has got to be one of my all-time favourites – Beloved playing with baby Simon, who is maybe three or four months old.

I can’t look at this picture without smiling. It reminds me of those sweet moments that are about the laughs, the joy, the sheer enjoyment of each other’s company. I love the look on Simon’s face (“Daddy’s crazy!”) and I love that it captures how terrific Beloved has always been with the kids and his special ability to make them laugh.

Raising babies is hard work. The sleep deprivation, the neediness, the sleep deprivation, the stuff you have to haul around, the sleep deprivation — did I mention the sleep deprivation? But it’s these moments I love, the moment when they are so clearly enjoying each other’s company and a quick cuddle. There are many, many things I adore about my family, but our collective ability to embrace silliness is one of my favourites.

Fisher-Price invites you to share your moments of joy on their Million Moments of Joy microsite.

And don’t forget that even though life can be chaotic, overwhelming and exhausting, there’s always time for a little bit of silly.

Disclosure: I am part of the Fisher-Price Play Ambassador program with Mom Central Canada and I receive special perks as part of my affiliation with this group. The opinions on this blog are my own.

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What’s at the heart of a neighbourhood or community where families live with young children? It’s not the mall, or the grocery store or even the coffee shop. Often, it’s the local park or community centre.

Community spaces benefit kids of all ages. Parks are exciting places for toddlers, maybe one of the first places away from home where they can learn to clamber up on to the brightly coloured play structures, and zooming down the big slide for the first time is a milestone in itself. Older kids play grounders and tag with classmates and kids from other schools. Young teens, free at last from parents watching from a nearby park bench, occupy their after-dinner and after-homework hours at the skate park. The park on our street in Barrhaven is where I met most of our neighbours – it was the only place any of us were standing still in the same place long enough to share more than a cheery wave on the way past.

Some of my best childhood memories revolve around the parks and playgrounds in the neighbourhoods where I grew up. Back in those prehistoric days, our parents didn’t take us to the park – we’d ride our bikes there after dinner and play until the streetlights came on. On a lazy Saturday, we’d venture further afield, checking out the playground in the next neighbourhood over. It seemed like miles away, but looking back it was just a few blocks. I’ve still got that love of exploration, come to think of it!

The folks at Kraft and TSN seem to understand the importance of community spaces at the heart of a neighbourhood, because for the fifth year in a row they’ve teamed up for the Kraft Celebration Tour. They’re inviting Canadians to nominate their favourite community space to win $25,000 toward a community project that improves an existing space or helps create a brand new one. Playgrounds, skate parks, community centres, sports fields – they’re all eligible for this terrific project that supports both community gathering spaces and active living.

To nominate a community, Canadians are asked to submit a short essay and up to five photos explaining why their community deserves to be a part of the Kraft Celebration Tour and how the $25,000 community award will go towards the creation or improvement of a local community space. The essay should also touch upon how the award would help promote community spirit, a passion for sports, and an active lifestyle. You can read more about it on the “How it works” page on the tour website. You’ll have to move quickly if you want to nominate a community though – nominations are only being accepted through June 7. That’s next week!

I was curious to see if any local projects have been nominated so far. It looks like only one Ottawa project has been submitted, but it sounds like a wonderful cause to support. Three local elementary schools (Pleasant Park, Hawthorne and Marie Curie) have teamed up for a joint submission, seeking funds for playground equipment for their schools and neighbourhood. You can read more about it on their nomination page.

On June 30, TSN and RDS will announce the 20 finalists selected by a panel of judges. Then it’s up to Canada to decide the 10 winning Kraft Celebration Tour stops via 10 weekdays of head-to-head online voting beginning July 8. You can follow the tour and support your favourite nominees on the tour’s Facebook page, and you can read more about the tour on the Kraft Celebration Tour web page.

I love it when the opportunity for a sponsored post and a cause dear to my heart align! Will you make a nomination? If you do, please let me know so I can support your community!

Disclosure: I am participating in the Kraft Celebration Tour Blogger Campaign. I received compensation as a thank you for participating and for sharing my honest opinion. The opinions on this blog are my own.

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This is fun! A couple of months ago I was asked to contribute an article about why I blog for Ottawa Parenting Times magazine. The article was published this weekend, so I can finally share with you. How fun is this?

The issue is jam-packed with other great info about family activities around Ottawa – if you didn’t get one in your Ottawa Citizen on the weekend, you can pick one up around town, and I hear it will be an insert in the Globe and Mail this week, too. Or you can check it out online - look for profiles of three other great local blogs, too! (*waves to Becky*)

Thanks to Peter and the Ottawa Parenting Times!

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What a week! For the long weekend, we zoomed down to London and Windsor for a wedding – more about that in a minute – and a crazy-quick visit with family, stopped off in London for more family, and then zoomed back home again. 1750 km and 18 hours in the car over four days – my kids are awesome road-trippers! There was so much photo fun to share that it took an entire week to share.

The kids were amazing in the car. We left Ottawa at 8 am on Friday, drove through an earthquake (didn’t feel a thing) and barely stopped until we arrived on the other side of the province in Windsor in time for dinner. There were a lot of electronic devices, a whole whackload of “are we there yet?” and a lot of this going on:

The bride and groom live in a little town just outside of Windsor called Amherstburg. They have a gorgeous place right where the Detroit River opens on to Lake Erie, and we passed a fun morning playing there before the wedding.

(Not our dog – he came with the beach!)

And then there was a wedding! How sweet is this? Beloved’s dad and his girlfriend have been together since before Beloved and I met. They happen to share the same birthday. On their mutual birthday last year, she asked him to marry her! And they say it’s the younger generation who are throwing tradition to the wind. So this lovely couple, my sweet in-laws, tied the knot during a beautiful afternoon ceremony on a deck overlooking the river. You couldn’t ask for a more perfect day for a wedding.

Adorable, yes?

And then, we zoomed on over to London for a quick visit with my brother and his family. I heard it was cool and rainy here in Ottawa, but it was summery perfect in London. The freshly opened pool was fresh enough that the kids were welcome to go in but there was no way I was dipping anything more than a toe into it. Brrr!

And then up early the next morning to be back in Ottawa in time to pick up Bella at 6 pm. Phew, what a trip! A sunny, warm, colourful, wonderful trip filled with family, love, laughter and fun – it doesn’t get any better than that. If you’d like to see more from the weekend, there’s a set on Flickr with more.

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3. This week in pictures: Catching up!

I love the serendipity of how this worked out. Just about the time we found a cache of old video clips of the boys as babies and toddlers, my friends at Fisher-Price announced the launch of a new contest where you can share your favourite photos and videos of your babies’ best laughs.

One of these days, I am going to make a mint on those funniest videos show with this old clip of Tristan and one-year-old Lucas and the world’s funniest blue balloon. Go ahead, press play – I dare you not to laugh!

Baby belly laughs are THE BEST!

So here’s where Fisher-Price comes in. They’re launching a fun new Laugh & Learn site that offers webisodes, fun games and activities, where you and your wee ones can meet the Laugh & Learn characters. To celebrate the new site, Fisher-Price is also launching a Best Little Laugh contest, where you can upload your favourite baby laugh photos and videos and win fun prizes.

Head on over to the Best Little Laugh site to enter the contest, or just to admire the photos and videos! If you’re inclined to enter, you’ll be eligible to win one of eight weekly Fisher-Price prize packs that will include a Laugh & Learn Crawl Around Car, a Laugh & Learn Love to Play Puppy and a $100 gas card for mom & dad. It may take up to 24 hours for your content to appear, so please do be patient as they moderate the queue.

Disclosure: I am part of the Fisher-Price Play Ambassador program with Mom Central Canada and I receive special perks as part of my affiliation with this group. The opinions on this blog are always my own.

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You know I love Ottawa family fun. You know I love free. What’s better than free family fun in Ottawa? This weekend, celebrate International Museum Day on Saturday May 18 with free admission to a few of Ottawa’s best museums.

Courtesy of our friends at the spectacular Museum of Nature:

Celebrate International Museums Day with free admission to the Canadian Museum of Nature this Saturday, May 18. Kick off the May long weekend by immersing yourself in the wonders of Canada’s natural history heritage. See how you measure up against a blue whale, the largest animal on the planet; marvel at the sparkling diversity of Canada’s minerals; get up close and personal with creatures as diverse as dinosaurs, polar bears and hissing cockroaches.

Be among the first to see the newly opened Canadian Wildlife Photography of the Year exhibition. There’s plenty to inform, inspire and amaze adults and children alike in each of our galleries. (Regular admission is still required for the museum’s 3D cinema, now featuring Flying Monsters).

The International Council of Museums created International Museums Day in 1977. Now, over 30,000 museums worldwide from 100 countries officially recognize this important day in May.

It took a bit of digging, but I also figured out that the Bytown Museum offers free admission for International Museum day as well, and the National Gallery also offers free admission but as of today their website says they’re celebrating International Museum Day on Sunday May 19.

Other great local museums like downtown’s Currency Museum and Manotick’s Watson’s Mill are always free.

What’s your favourite museum in Ottawa?

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Since I blogged about my delight in following Canadian astronaut and ISS commander Chris Hadfield back in January when he was kibitzing with Captain Kirk, it seems only natural that I’d share this with you, too. Best music video EVER!!

How could I not adore Commander Hadfield and what he has done during this mission? He’s at the intersection of everything I love: photography, social media, space, wicked fun science, razor sharp wit, a strong sense of play and an aw-shucks Canadian pride. Plus William Shatner and David Bowie on the side.

Thanks, Commander, for 144 days of wonder. Your mission has been a gift to all of us.

(Also, that’s two YouTube videos I’ve shared in a week. What is happening to me????)

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Tulips, kids, fuzzy puppies – talk about an easy week for taking pictures!

Do you even need a narrative for this? First there was one silly kid on a stump.

Then there were three silly kids on some steps with a puppy.

Then the puppy rolled around in some flowers.

Oh, did someone say flowers?

Then I had to go back and revisit one shot because I knew I had it almost right but not quite right.

What’s that, you say? More puppy? Well alrighty then.

It doesn’t get any easier than that, does it?

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Hey! Did I mention I’m doing a presentation at Social Capital Ottawa this year? I am so excited about it! And it’s a topic that is becoming more and more dear to my heart – how to find and use images for your website, blog and social sharing without violating copyright and getting sued in the process. It true that I have a vested interest in this issue from a photographer’s perspective, but I also think this is something that should be of interest to anyone who blogs, has a website or has ever shared a photo on Facebook or Pinterest. Here’s the session description:

Royalty-images aren’t free: finding and using images online without getting sued

There’s no doubt that images make web content more compelling. Studies show that content with imagery generates more social shares, more comments and more interaction. But what if it’s not your photograph? How do you find great images you can use, legally and at low or no cost? Can you use photos from Pinterest, Flickr or Google Images on your site — without the permission of the photographer? Can you get sued for doing it? In this session, we’ll answer these question and more.

Here’s a few more questions we’ll examine in this session: Does providing a link or credit to the source allow you to use a copyrighted image? Why aren’t royalty-free photos actually free? What is “creative commons” and how can you use it to find photos you can use? Can you use a photo if you digitally alter it? What do terms like fair use, public domain, attribution and copyright really mean for bloggers, Facebook page authors and website owners?

In this session you will learn strategies for finding great images that you can use on your blog or website, and how to protect yourself from serious legal consequences from running afoul of copyright legislation.

Following this presentation, participants will know how to find quality imagery to augment their blogs and websites, both for a fee and for free. Participants will have an understanding of some of the legal and illegal uses of imagery on blogs, websites and social sharing sites like Facebook and Pinterest. Participants will also have a greater understanding of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) the risks and consequences of violating copyright law in Canada.

I won’t steal my own thunder by replicating my presentation here. That would also presume, incorrectly, that I was ahead of my usual procrastination curve and had the entirely of my presentation ready for public consumption a whole week ahead of when I’m supposed to hand it in. I did, however, want to dazzle you with my mad infographic skillz. I’ve got a vested curiousity about infographics as I’d like to start seeing us use them at work, so this was a perfect opportunity for me to see how easy/difficult it would be to pull one together. (Verdict: difficult to organize the information in my head ahead of time and figure out how I wanted to lay everything out but fairly simple to actually create the infographic. I used Piktochart for this.)

Feel free to pin and share – I designed this one for sharing!

My first infographic. I’m so proud!

As we get closer to the conference (it’s June 1, have you bought your tickets yet?), I will leak share a few morsels of the content, and I’ll probably write it all up in a bit more detail afterward. I’m saving the good stuff for the conference, though, so you might as well come!

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So, how ’bout that weather, eh? We had seven months of winter, two transitional weeks of spring and BOOM! Summer in May. And I am totally fine with that.

I don’t know whether it is the warmer temperatures or long hours of sunshine or just the fact that I’ve finally shaken the ennui that’s been dogging me for months, but my world was incredibly photogenic this week. (If you follow me on instagram, you’ll see what a prolific week it was.) Here’s my favourite signs of spring summer this week:

Hard to believe the daffies were still just waking up last weekend, but they were.

On Sunday, we celebrated the triumph of summer over spring with one of our favourite fair-weather activities, a ride down to McHaffie’s flea market near Morrisburg. We didn’t actually buy any of these things, but I loved each of them. Raise your hand if you had a suitcase record player like this when you were a kid. *raises hand* Mine was green.

I already told you how amazing We Day was, but I still owe you a post from the boys. It’s coming, I promise!

We are spending a LOT of time in the backyard. She’s an excellent fetcher!

And then not only did the daffies wake up, but the tulips did, too!

I’ve been wandering around, Instagramming downtown on my lunch breaks. These were all from the same day, but I thought they were shareworthy. The scaffolding on the National Gallery is fascinating to me. Apparently they are turning the scaffolding (necessary for repairs on the window seals) into some sort of secret art exhibit to be unveiled later in May. I’ll keep you posted! In the interim, I think the scaffolding is a bit of an art project in itself!

The Ottawa River may yet spill her banks enough to flood the bike path at the base of Parliament Hill, but I’m pretty sure the basement of the Parliament Buildings will remain safe and dry.

Bikes! (I chose this one as the official photo of the day.)

And last but not least, we paid our first visit with Bella to the dog park in Manotick. It’s still pretty mucky and I am not yet ready to let her off leash lest she (a) make a run for the river or (b) run off home with a better family. While Bella was a little overwhelmed by all the other dogs, Lucas loved the park!

So apparently it’s summer now. What are YOU doing this weekend to celebrate?

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The free world might be caught up in the compelling drama of Downtown Abbey or Game of Thrones or even Mad Men (at least I’ve seen a couple of episodes of that one) but I have noticed that my television consuption has skewed away from shows with plots and narrative arcs. Who has the attention span for that these days? And anyway, then I’d have no time for Auction Hunters, Storage Wars or Pawn Stars. My name is Dani, and I am addicted to junk shop television.

It’s hardly a surprise. One of our favourite family activities has long been scouring the countryside for vintage crap at local flea markets. It’s not even so much about the stuff as it is about the thrill of the hunt for the stuff. (Although some of the stuff has been awesome. My darling old Underwood typewriter, for example, or the red wagon I use in so many of my photo shoots. Neither of which would have made a ripple had they been discovered in a locker on Storage Wars, but both of which give me great happiness every time I look at them. One woman’s treasure…)

Not everything at the flea market is awesome, some of it is just scary

Given infinite resources of time, space and child patience, we would happiply spend every weekend hunting through flea markets, visiting auctions and rifling through dusty shelves at antiques and second-hand shops – to say nothing of the now-ubiquitous spring yard sales, church bazaars and the crap people simply leave at the end of their driveways. (Most of my porch furniture was acquired this way!) But really, how many butter boxes do we actually need anyway? I have this weird container fixation, and I love vintage stuff. Things at the intersection of the two like butter boxes, vintage suitcases and old wooden crates drive me into paroxysms of covetousness even though I have no place or need for any more. And let’s not even TALK about all the old camera gear out there. Thankfully, a couple of episodes of Canadian Pickers or Auction Kings scratches my treasure-hunter itch without tapping my far-from-unlimited resources.

I know they like to play the drama and the personalities in these shows, but I find that part tedious. Never mind the people and their petty conflicts, tell me more about the stuff. The stuff fascinates me! It’s not just about the valuable stuff, the lost Tom Thompson everybody hopes is hiding in their grandmother’s attic, but about why we have the stuff and why we want the stuff and why we hold on to and sell and forget we even had the stuff. I think that’s why I like Pawn Stars and Auction Kings and Canadian Pickers best of all of them – they give a little bit of insight and history of the stuff, and why it’s interesting or valuable. It’s what the stuff tells us about ourselves that fascinates me.

What do you think? Are you a picker-wanna-be? Do you hang out in the second-hand shops hunting elusive treasures or are you an armchair picker like me? Or are you totally skeeved out at the idea of anything whose provenance is unknown, preferring factory-fresh new stuff instead?

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I am about a quarter of a century older than the demographic that We Day seeks to motivate and inspire, but it would have been impossible to attend yesterday’s amazing national We Day event in Ottawa and not leave feeling like you can change the world. As much as the day’s events spoke to my inner 15 year old girl (who is, truth be told, never very far from the surface) I found myself considering the We Day messages and speakers through a maternal lens.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you know it was a very exciting day for Tristan, Simon and me. Together with a few other blogger families, we were invited to cover the event and given media access to some of the celebrity activists and supporters thanks to TELUS. Through a partnership with Free The Children, TELUS is helping to inspire young leaders and build a community of young people dedicated to positive social change. High on my list of “best parenting moments ever” is watching Tristan pose a question to Free the Children founder Craig Kielburger himself – which I will let HIM tell you about in a separate post. But here’s a shaky shot of my boys patiently waiting their turn in the media line.

Proud of my boys! Tristan asked @craigkielburger what he can bring back 2 class from #weday. CK said ‘u are not 2 young, u can do anything’

— Danielle Donders (@DaniGirl) April 29, 2013

If you missed my earlier post (and endless Facebook and Twitter updates yesterday) you might be wondering what exactly this We Day thing is all about.

Free The Children is the world’s largest network of children helping children, with more than one million youth in 45 countries involved in their innovative education and development programs. Through domestic programs they educate, engage and empower hundreds of thousands of youth in North America, the UK and around the world. Their international projects have brought over 650 schools and school rooms to youth and provided clean water, health care and sanitation to one million people around the world.

I’ve loosely followed Craig’s story and his Free the Children movement in the media for years. I knew they did charitable and educational work, and I knew through the We Day programs at the boys’ school that one of their primary goals was motivating young people to “Be the Change” in their world. The subtext I missed before attending the National We Day event, though, was how that empowerment works on an individual level. Yes, it’s about providing clean water for Ghana and schools for girls in Africa – but it’s also about having the courage to speak up on behalf of a classmate, about making small but meaningful choices for a better world, about having the courage to know yourself and be true to yourself. Powerful stuff for a pre-teen audience – but truly, who needs that message more than students at this complicated age? And what better way to reach them than through a rocking event with 5000 screaming peers?

I think I personally was most touched by the story of Spencer West. His legs were amputated below the pelvis when he was five years old. I keep trying to imagine what that must have been like for his family, thinking about my own five year old boy. Clearly, Spencer overcame unimaginable odds stacked against him, and in 2012 he climbed Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro - on his hands.

Spencer West @ #weday : just because the world tells you something is impossible doesn’t mean you have to believe it. #telusforweday

— Danielle Donders (@DaniGirl) April 29, 2013

We had the chance to chat with Spencer during the media scrum, and I wish I could have talked to him for about three more hours. This quote was one of my favourites of the day:

Q to Spencer West: how has your life changed from #weday? “It has become beautifully overwhelming.” #telusforweday twitter.com/DaniGirl/statu…

— Danielle Donders (@DaniGirl) April 29, 2013

Here’s a couple more vignettes from the day.

Jillian Vanstone, national ballet principal, says changing your thinking is hardest and the start. Make a difference in just 1 life. #weday

— Danielle Donders (@DaniGirl) April 29, 2013

.@alungstory says it was the tweet generation who made a difference in her story. Together we can make the change. #bethechange

— Danielle Donders (@DaniGirl) April 29, 2013

Rob Stewart at #weday: there is more technology in yr smartphone than got us to the moon. U can do it. Fight for something u luv & be a hero

— Danielle Donders (@DaniGirl) April 29, 2013

Most of the Grade 6 class from the boys’ school earned tickets to We Day through their actions on a local and global level. Through one initiative, the school raised more than 170,000 pennies when the Mint announced the penny phase-out earlier this year. For their efforts, they earned a shout-out from Craig Kielburger during a pre-show interview on CBC Ottawa Morning and a moment in the spotlight during the show itself. I’m just glad I had my camera in my hand already! I was so proud of them.

Perhaps one of the biggest celebrities present was actor and activist Martin Sheen. I have to tell you, I was pretty excited at the possibility of meeting him, having never missed an episode of the West Wing. We were standing in the corner, more or less trying to stay out of the way but still have a good sightline to where he would be answering questions, when Martin Sheen “snuck” into the room.

He was supposed to go to the backdrop and start answering media questions, but to everyone’s surprise – most spectacularly, my own! – he walked straight up to me with his hand out for a handshake and introduced himself. He asked me “Who are you here with?” and so of course I introduced him to Tristan and Simon. I’m not sure that’s what he meant by the question, but he seemed delighted with the answer and went on to chat with them about how wonderful the day was and whether they were enjoying themselves.

Eventually, they got him to where he was supposed to be answering questions (after he stopped to chat with a few more people on the way) and he said the other quote that resonated deeply with me for the day:

Wow. Martin Sheen: we think we are trying 2 make a better world for our children. #weday makes better children for our world #telusforweday

— Danielle Donders (@DaniGirl) April 29, 2013

One of my favourite moments of the day was watching his “handlers” try to get him out of the media room and back to where he was supposed to be getting ready to deliver his address to the crowd. Despite their best intentions to move him along, he kept shaking them off and stopping to chat with anyone who looked like they were under the age of 25 about why they were there and what they were doing. It was truly delightful and more than a little bit funny. Hey, when you’ve been POTUS I guess you prefer to decide when and where you are going.

I was also please to find out that I’m not as much of a dinosaur as I might have thought. While I only recongized one or two of the musical acts by name, I was delighted to find out that I did in fact know the songs, if not the bands. In fact, the boys and I agreed that we’ll have to add a little Shawn Desman and Kardinal Offishall’s Turn it Up to our iTunes collections. This was Kardinal Offishall Turning it UP for the big finale at We Day:

There was so much more – environmental messages in Rob Stewart’s Revolution (click through and watch the trailer!), organ transplant messages from Ottawa’s own Hélène Campbell, a voice from Canada’s northern people and a reminder that Canada is taller than it is wide from Inuit speaker Terry Aulda, anti-bullying messages from visually-impaired teen Molly Burke, RBC’s ONE DROP initiative – the single resonating theme of the day was that there are a myriad ways in which a single person can make a difference, and that a seemingly small action can have enormous and occasionally unexpected effects.

The definition of “changing the world” has changed for this generation, for the children we are raising today. When I was a child, it meant that you grew up to be an activist or someone in a position of power, or you were one of those extraordinary young people like Craig Kielburger himself, who drew global attention to a cause he was passionate about. What I’m realizing is what our kids seem to know intuitively, and what We Day is promoting: you don’t need a megaphone to make a difference, and you don’t need to be famous or powerful or have a lot of resources behind you. Social justice isn’t about petitioning on Parliament Hill and letter-writing campaigns, it’s about the choices you make and the way you live your life every single day.

Choose organic and local produce. Choose to hold a door for someone rather than let it slam. Choose to donate a bag of used toys to charity rather than dump them in the trash. Choose to spend 20 minutes of your time promoting a cause rather than playing a video game. Choose to turn off the tap while you brush your teeth and turn off the lights when you leave the room. Choose to speak up to defend someone rather than stand mutely by and watch bullying happen. Like the pennies collected by the boys’ school, each small act on it’s own may seem so insignificant as to be worthless. However, when you start stacking them by the thousands and hundreds of thousands, they have unmistakable, undeniable worth and value.

Also? It was a really fun day.

A hell of a day, in fact, don’t you think? But wait, there’s more! Stand by, the boys want to tell you about We Day from their perspective next.

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Despite my best efforts so far, the family stubbornly refuses to ban me from the kitchen. One would think that more than a decade of mediocre cooking would at least leave them looking for an alternative, but they seem to show a remarkable tolerance for unremarkable food.

A few weeks ago I played what I thought was my best card by setting the oven on fire. Alas, I fell short once again of my goal. My family, in fact, barely raised a collective eyebrow, and certainly made no move to banish me from the room at the domestic heart of the house.

Realizing the need for more drastic measures, I have once again attempted to set the oven on fire, this time by strategically dumping a pan full of bacon and grease into the bottom of the oven. I have nefariously gambled that the combination of safety hazard and waste of a pound of perfectly good bacon will be enough to force the family into action. If nothing else, I have ensured that a residue of bacon grease will remain embedded into the sides of the oven drawer and its collection of baking sheets and muffin tins well into the next decade.

How much more of this torture can they withstand before they are forced to take action and remove me from the kitchen for their own good – and mine?

Edited to add: And I clearly did an excellent and thorough job scouring all traces of bacon drippings from the stove.

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