(and everyone else here)
skip down for the cast

I am Canadian, eh?
From the East Coast, Atlantic Canada. It rocks. Except in February.

I am also:
short
dark blonde (now with more grey hairs!)
nearsighted
married, with kids (didn’t you see the other pages? and the photos?)
a domestic goddess
so very Attention Deficit, even diagnosed.

I like:
chocolate, reading, gardening, talking, nice days, shopping, yard sales, polite & helpful children, reality tv, sleeping, attachment parenting, kisses from Ron, making new friends.
I don’t like:
stupid people, whiners, heavy traffic, paying full price, long car drives with whiney children, dial-up, being tired or too cold or too hot.
I can:
cook, sew, design clothing, quilt, whip up a simple web page, crack jokes, cheer you up, stick my foot in my mouth and keep talking!

Things I have done:
Skipped grade one.
Had a teen pregnancy. (that would be my oldest kid )
I had a craft store, both a location in my home and online. I closed it officially in 2001, after five years.
I’ve built a house.
I’ve kept chickens and had a garden large enough to feed our family through the winter. We were big into the homesteading movement.
I breastfed all the kids for varying lengths of time. 2 weeks, 6 months, 18 months and.. Emma is still going strong, although only at night. (Updated: we stopped at 3 years and 3 months.)
I’ve cloth diapered through a cold winter with frozen pipes and a hand-dug well that evaporated every August.
I took Computer Programming at college, finishing one year before I decided it wasn’t for me. And I couldn’t do it very well either.
For a few years, I wrote and published articles.
I tinker with web pages, blog themes, and full blown websites. Sometimes people actually pay me to do the same for them.
I run a free blogging service for homeschoolers too. I still think it’s funny how *I* am tech support.
I read romance novels like candy.

Cast of regulars:
Me (duh)
Ron (the hubby)
The girls - Emma, Meaghan, Sarah
Addison & Kaytlyn - Addy is our oldest and only son, Kaytlyn is his wife.
Mom - that would be my Mom.
Carl - Mom’s hubby.

Kid stuff:
Addison 10/31/87 is all growed up and married. He’s tall & skinny and likes “geeky” stuff like Lord of the Rings and Magic the Gathering. In October 2004 he broke his neck. He considers it a glitch in life, I’m still getting over it.
Sarah - 10/10/90 She is just like me in mannerism. A chatterbox, opinionated and expressive. She is about my height, and thin, but not too thin. The telephone or a walkman are interchangeable on her head.
Meaghan - 11/01/92 She’s on the short side for her age. She’s my quiet one. She loves to do crafts & make stuff and keep us well-fed by baking up a storm in the kitchen. She’s also vegetarian by her own choice.
Emma is the baby (12/17/2000). Smart as a whip, and cute to boot.

They are all growing up far too fast.

The homeschooling angle:
We’ve been homeschooling for ten years now, since March of 1994. Addison went to a private Christian school for kindergarten and part of grade one, and then we decided (for various reason) that we would use the same curriculum at home. We dumped those workbooks 4-5 years later and I got pretty burnt out. ddison went to public school for grades 6 & 7. He was bored silly, and they even had him in an advanced class. He wanted to come back home for school for grade 8 and onwards.
Sarah and Meaghan have never been in a school. Well, they have been there to visit, but not to attend. I taught them both how to read, and they both read at or above their grade level. We have a very relaxed, ecclectic approach, and I feel the more I read about homeschooling (and I read a lot in general) the less I know.
We plan on sticking with this until they all gradute. At this point, we are fairly in the unschooling pool.

Politics & Religion:
I’m not very political. I have no party affiliation and I secretly think they are all power-hungry money grubbing crooks. And that’s on a good day! I hardly talk about politics or current world affairs. Oddly enough, we really enjoy political satire.
I believe in God and Jesus, but outside of that I am very liberal. Small l. We currently don’t attend any church at all, mostly because we can’t stand internal church politics. I don’t mention religion much anyway. I’m very apologetic about it all.

Where I’m going:
We made a big life change and moved from the country to a small-ish city 3 hours away into a large Victorian house. I’m trying to clean out my pack-rat junk, renovate the house and homeschool better. I also went on a diet starting September 2003, and joined a gym. (UPDATE: I refuse to call it a diet, I eat what I like in moderation, and I exercise by walking because it makes my body feel really good.) And then after that, we moved back out to the country. I fell off the exercise wagon. I need to get back on.

Enough people said the stuff I wrote here was interesting and funny enough, that maybe I could try and go somewhere with it. If you enjoy parenting humour and an atypical, odd outlook on life where I try to see the funny side in everything, then stick around. My life is like a sitcom, and you are the audience.

Want more? Read the best of the blog.

People are saying:
“Andrea combines silliness with intelligence in a very appealing way.” - Lisa
“Hi. My name is Aimee. Andrea keeps me locked in her basement. But it’s okay here, she lets me use crayons and she cooks good. I like Andrea and her basement.” - Aimee
“Andrea is surprisingly amusing yet smackably cute.” - Sasha
“You are Nice.” - ev
“Whenever I think of Andrea I smile” - my Aunt Wanda
“She certainly makes life interesting.” - Ron

* Aboot is the supposed Canadian way to say about. But really, it doesn’t sound that way to me. Does it? Do I sound funny? You can tell me, honest! And then I had to update this because a real-live American proved to me that I actually say “aboat”. Darn.