Family Dinners

I grew up in the 80's/ 90's (thankfully, I was just a kid in the 80's so I don't have any pictures of 80's bangs - well, none that I'm responsible for... but that's a whole other story...)

Anyway, I grew up with smurfs, snap bracelets, hyper colour shirts, and I thought Zach Morris was dreamy (if you don't know who that is, look up Saved by the Bell - it's totally rad)





I TOTALLY had this poster on my wall!!!



I watched Saturday morning cartoons and played outside with my friends until my mom yelled
"Paaaaatti Lyyyyyynnnnnn" from the back porch. Then I ran home as fast as I could and I ate dinner.... with my family.
Shocking, I know.

My family ate dinner together every single night. My dad owned a business in town so he worked shift work, but he always came home for dinner then went back to work (not everyone is able to do that, I know, but he made a point to be there at meal time - and I'm just now realizing how cool that is)

Mom or dad cooked dinner every night, we were very much a "meat & potatoes" kind of family, spaghetti was "something different for a change" as my mom used to say.
We were so "meat & potatoes" in fact, that when I decided in my late teens that I didn't want to eat meat anymore, my mom (horrified) said "What will you eat??? Carrots and potatoes??"
We still laugh about that, and mom has since experimented with all kind of plant based dishes. Because she's supportive- and wonderful.

Don't get me wrong, these meals weren't always peaceful - we were far from a perfect family, my sister and I fought, I sometimes refused to eat, mom and dad would sometimes use these meals to lecture us about one thing or another BUT we ate together every day.

Sometimes family dinners looked like this...

And sometimes they looked more like this....

I didn't realize that eating together every day wasn't the norm until I got much older and people told me they they ate their meals in front of the TV or they would go to a fast food restaurant most nights.

We went to fast food restaurants... but not often, and if our parents let us choose what restaurant to go to we never chose a fast food place. We would want Chinese food or Swiss Chalet or something like that - so at least it was closer to real food than a burger and fries.

But I'm wondering if it's odd that we shared meals? Is it totally a "1950's", outdated practice? Or do families still sit down together at the end of the day and 'break bread'?

My partner, who I've affectionately referred to as "husband" since the day we got married... I was excited that I could finally call him my husband - so I started calling him that, all the time. So much so that it's a year and a half later and I still rarely call him by his name. If any of my colleagues take a message for me when he calls they always say "Patti, husband called" LOL

What was I saying...

Right, my partner and I sometimes eat in front of the TV and watch Big Bang Theory (because it's hilarious)

This is what we do when we eat in front of the TV too!

but we often sit at the table while we eat and we chat, and ask how each other's day was - and listen. It's nice.
I guess what I'm wondering is, are we old fashioned? When we have children are they going to eat with us? Or text us from their bedroom that they're ready for dessert? (That would involve me getting a cell phone.. which is a WHOLE other post.... maybe I am old fashioned... )

There is a ton of research out there about the effect that eating meals as a family has on children, but I'm not going to get into any of that. All I know is what I lived - although sometimes it was a pain, and I really wanted to get back to fort building or barbie make overs I had to sit with my family and finish my peas before dessert.

I'm curious about other peoples up-bringing, is it similar or the exact opposite to mine? And would they/ are they raising their children the same way or completely opposite to how they were raised?

The Danger of a Single Story

I attended a work shop at ISIS  (Immigrant Settlement & Integration Services) a few days ago; it was excellent. We heard about Canadian immigrants and refugees and some of their needs and challenges in a new community, I learned a lot of interesting statistics and met some cool people.

But the thing that really got my attention was a short video that we watched of a speech called The Danger of a Single Story. Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian author gave this talk at a TED conference. She is so eloquent and her message is so important that I've watched it a few times since the workshop.

All too often many of us are guilty of buying into stereotypes and projecting a single story onto others, and sometimes we are the "recipient" of the single story, this is a kind reminder to open our eyes and look at people, places, things from a different perspective.

Growing up I always saw people who looked like me on television and in books and magazines and until I listened to this speech I definitely took that for granted, I never really "got" why it made a difference or why it was important.

I think everyone should watch this talk, and watch it often.
The Danger of a Single Story: Chimamanda Adichie

Inclusion, diversity, and new perspectives make me happy.

Wanna- be DIY'er

I love DIY projects... I'll never have my own tv show about it or make any money doing it, but it makes me happy AND it saves me money (sometimes... lol)

Here's the first DIY project I completed after husband and I moved into our apartment, he brought a dresser into the relationship that I HATED (I had been using milk crates to put my clothes in... so really.. who am I to complain? I mean, it didn't stop me from complaining, but at least I acknowledged that I had no right... lol)

My mom loved this dresser as it was, and was very worried about what I would do to it (I went through a phase in my teens where everything needed to be as bright as possible, check out my room from jr. high

I chose the colours for the walls and mum tried to "bring it all together" by making some throw pillows, curtains and buying that bed spread. There's a great picture (somewhere) of my dad painting the first wall yellow wearing sunglasses...haha

But, I digress...

Back to the dresser.
So my mom was very worried about what I would do to it (now you understand why) so she really wanted me to leave it as it was, we have very different tastes. Leaving it like that would have been *almost* as bad as hanging on to the milk crates. lol

Just to drive home my point, here's a close up of the gold flower part.

I don't have any pictures of the steps (cause who knew I'd be blogging about it!!)

Step 1. I put down some garbage bags - *tip* splurge on a tarp, trust me.

Step 2. I sanded the crap out it. Not with a fancy sanding machine... but with actual sand paper...that's right, I'm hardcore!

Step 3. After waiting for the dust to settle and wiping it down with a damp cloth, I stained it black (classic black satin to be precise). I was super impressed with the stain, it only took one coat and I still have over half of the can left!! (946 mL can!!)  Maybe it's because I don't know much about painting that I'm so impressed about that. LOL
It cost about $15.00 for the can of stain.

Step 4. I replaced the hardware, we bought 2 packs because I plan on buying another dresser on kijiji and matching it to this one.
It was about $40.00 for both packs.

Here's the finished product.

The flower is still there, just not as gold... lol

It was super easy to do, so much cheaper than buying a new dresser and prettier than milk crates.

The one downfall was that I spilled paint on the carpet... whoops... so let's add $20.00 on to the final cost for the mat we had to buy to cover the black spot on the carpet. (but yay for a new mat... haha)

It took me the whole day to do it (you'll notice how much darker it is in the second set of pictures).
I love doing projects like that, because at the end of the day you can say "hey, look what I did!" and that makes me happy.

Welcome to my blog!

Hello folks,
Thanks for checking out my blog.
I've been throwing the idea around of starting a blog for a while now, and when a friend of mine told me that she had started one I thought "why can't I do that?"
The answer was, there's no reason why I can't, I was the only thing stopping me!
So here it is, my attempt at blogging.

I was trying to choose a "theme" for my blog, but there were so many things I wanted to be able to touch on like delicious food, DIY projects, beauty in nature and things I just think are neat, then I realized that these are all things that make me happy. Voilà! There's my theme.

It's kind of awesome actually, what a great opportunity this is to try to spread some joy; maybe someone out there in internetland will see this and decide to try out an awesome plant based recipe or choose to find the silver lining in a crummy situation, or maybe I'll be able to raise awareness about things that matter deeply to me, OR maybe no one will ever read this and at the very least it'll give me an opportunity to take a few moments for myself and try to focus on the goodness in life.
Either way, I think I'll get some joy out of this little project.

To close my first post (exciting!!) here are some things that make me smile.

Gabby Cat enjoying some of my smoothie

My kittens (yep, I'm totally one of those people who call full grown animals kittens and puppies) always bring me joy - even when they're being monsters (because when they're being bad they're still hilarious)

Living in Nova Scotia, makes me ultra happy. The weather has been a little crummy lately, but compared to other parts of Canada and the world, I really can't complain (although I might at some point...).

This is one of my favorite videos of all time.
Try not to laugh while watching this. I dare you.
If I'm feeling bummed out I throw this on and it never fails to make me laugh.

Partly because it reminds me a a camp game I used to play, the "HA HA game" (aptly named). We would lie on the ground with our head on the next persons stomach and the first person would say "HA", the next person would say "HA, HA", the next person would say "HA, HA, HA" and so on. The idea was to say it in a very serious tone and not laugh. If someone laughed, you had to start allover again. You couldn't even cheat with a silent laugh because someones head was on your stomach so they would feel it moving and they would start to laugh. Good times.

Well, that's if for me.
Night all.