Friday, December 18, 2009

Sleep is overrated, right?

Wrong. Sleep is a beautiful thing. I remember as a teenager I used to sleep until 1:00 pm sometimes. It was fabulous. Even in my 20s, after a night of partying, knowing I could sleep in was great. Now I'm a mom and sleeping in is not really an option at this point. Stevie is 2 so as you can imagine she's not up for sleeping in that late. Actually one thing we have learned about our little girl is she doesn't like sleeping at all. Well, that's not true. She sleeps. It's just always a struggle. Does she sleep through the night? Sometimes. Not as much as we would like though. It's brutal. I'm sure we have messed this up somewhere along the way. Probably by doing what we felt was working rather than what the books say to do. Now I can't help feel like we are caught in this trap and it's so hard to get out of it. "Let her cry" people say. Easier said than done though when the crying results in us all being awake until 3:00 am because she has worked herself up so much that now she won't go to sleep at all.

I guess some people are blessed with babies that love sleeping. I wish we were those people. Would I trade her in for a kid that goes to bed super easy and sleeps all night. Never. For now I will just need to seek solace in the fact that once she is a teenager I can get her back by waking her up at 7:30 on the mornings I know she wishes she can sleep until 1:00 pm.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Friday, November 20, 2009

Sexiest Man Living

Okay, I know it might seem like I can't stop talking about him but James Franco is really throwing me for a loop with this whole General Hospital thing. I mean WTF? It seems crazy to me that an actor with his current resumé would sign on to star in a soap. It weird but I also find something kind of cool about it. A true actor likes to challenge themselves, right? And that seems like it would mean trying all kinds of different work. I'm sure being on a soap opera is hard work, they certainly film enough episodes so I imagine the schedule is exhausting. Kudos to him for realising that acting is acting and if a part comes along that interests you, who cares if it's day time TV and you have to play opposite characters like Sonny Corinthos. It's all just another reason to love this guy.




Thanks Salon, I'm in total agreement with you!

Friday, November 13, 2009

Stevie - the early months

With Stevie's 2nd birthday this week it got me thinking about how quickly she is growing. It doesn't seem like it was that long ago that we were bringing her home from the hospital. Now she's running around and talking up a storm (or at least trying to!). I found these photos of her first couple of months the other day and just had to share.

















Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Hollywood Crush

Like so many other women, I too have a serious crush on James Franco. I think Milk was what solidified it for me. Not sure why it took him playing a gay man to do that but there you have it. Anyway, I work during the day so I am not much of a soap watcher but man, I wish I had a tivo/PVR to record this.


Tuesday, November 10, 2009

2 already

Two years ago I was at the General Hospital waiting for my little lady to come into the world. After spending 2 days in a hospital room waiting for my induction to take effect things finally started to happen. At this point two years ago I would have been two hours away from meeting Stevie face to face. Was I exhausted beyond belief? For sure. Was it totally worth it and the best day of my life? Most definitely. Not to sound all cheesy but it was truly life changing. And I don't just mean in the never having any time to myself kind of way. It's just changed the way I feel about everything. It's made me appreciate and care about things so much more. And even though being a mom is super hard, I feel like I'm good at being Stevie's Mom. Like this is just something I was meant to do.


Happy Birthday Little Bunny!!! I love you so much.


Sunday, November 1, 2009

Daphne Odjig

Today for our "Family Day" outing we went to the National Gallery to see the Daphne Odjig exhibit. Stevie loved running around and attempting to scare the guards by getting a little too close to some of the paintings. It was such a nice time though. I can't help but feel like we are fostering a love of art for her by taking to see these things so early on. I feel like it worked on me since my parent's did the same thing.



Anyway, back to Daphne. She was born and raise in the village of Wikwemikong, on Manitoulin Island. Her works are a very abstract take on the human form but you can see she is obviously heavily influenced by her native roots. The colours in her painting are so strong and bright. She is often referred to as "Picasso's grandmother". Stevie was pretty mesmerised by a number of them. So we're Darrell and I actually. That's what I love about the Gallery, you can go in not knowing anything about the artist and come out a fan. Daphne is still alive today, I believe she is around 90 years old. Still painting I hope.


Here is some of her work:




These photos don't do them justice though and there are so many great ones that I haven't shown here. Get to the National Gallery of Canada by January 3rd to check them out yourself.


Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Best Review Ever

A couple of years ago Cara and I had an idea for a movie review show called "Thumbs Down" where we would pretty much hate every movie that we reviewed. When I read the following review of Transformers 2 by Roger Ebert, it made me think we were on to something. Enjoy!

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"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots®, Decepticons® and Otherbots® is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.

The movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed "The Rock" in 1996. Now he has made "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." Faust made a better deal. This isn't a film so much as a toy tie-in. Children holding a Transformer toy in their hand can invest it with wonder and magic, imagining it doing brave deeds and remaining always their friend. I knew a little boy once who lost his blue toy truck at the movies, and cried as if his heart would break. Such a child might regard "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" with fear and dismay.

The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away from explosions, although--hello!--you can't outrun an explosion. They also make speeches like this one by John Turturro: "Oh, no! The machine is buried in the pyramid! If they turn it on, it will destroy the sun! Not on my watch!" The humans, including lots of U.S. troops, shoot at the Transformers a lot, although never in the history of science fiction has an alien been harmed by gunfire.

There are many great-looking babes in the film, who are made up to a flawless perfection and look just like real women, if you are a junior fanboy whose experience of the gender is limited to lad magazines. The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal. They take their son away to Princeton, apparently a party school, where Judy eats some pot and goes berserk. Later they swoop down out of the sky on Egypt, for reasons the movie doesn't make crystal clear, so they also can run in slo-mo from explosions.

The battle scenes are bewildering. A Bot makes no visual sense anyway, but two or three tangled up together create an incomprehensible confusion. I find it amusing that creatures that can unfold out of a Camaro and stand four stories high do most of their fighting with...fists. Like I say, dumber than a box of staples. They have tiny little heads, although Jetfire® must be made of older models, since he has an aluminum beard.

Aware that this movie opened in England seven hours before Chicago time and the morning papers would be on the streets, after writing the above I looked up the first reviews as a reality check. I was reassured: "Like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan!" (Bradshaw, Guardian); "Sums up everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood!" (Tookey, Daily Mail); "A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie!" (Edwards, Daily Mirror). The first American review, Todd Gilchrist of Cinematical, reported that Bay's "ambition runs a mile long and an inch deep," but, in a spirited defense, says "this must be the most movie I have ever experienced." He is bullish on the box office: it "feels destined to be the biggest movie of all time." It’s certainly the biggest something of all time.

Footnote 6/24: Does it strike you as a lapse of Pyramid security that no one notices a gigantic Deceptibot ripping off the top of the Great Pyramid? Not anyone watching on the live PyramidCam? Not even a traffic copter?

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He's still got it.

Monday, October 12, 2009

New name, same me

I've moved and changed my name. It's going to be pretty much the same blog that it was over at Deviated Septums but just a new name. Someone else out there has a blog called Deviated Septum and it made me feel totally unoriginal.

Where is SoRo you ask? Good question. SoRo is South Rockcliffe, better known as Vanier. But SoRo sounds way more posh, right? I love my neighbourhood and am enjoying the life we are building here. This blog will show you that life and a whole bunch of other fun stuff that I love.

These two are the main loves in my life:But there is no shortage of the other things I love or finding new thing to love as well. I look forward to sharing with you and vice versa.