Mumma, Chanel got bit by a shark!

Um…really?

Yes! She showed me.

Honey, if Chanel got bit by a shark, she’d of lost limbs.

But, no-ah! It’s what she said!

Lucy, a shark has hundreds of very sharp teeth, and a strong jaw. If Chanel got BIT by a SHARK, she’d be missing an arm.

Oh.

*silence*

I think Chanel was just jokin’ with me.

Yes, I think so.

When my eldest daughter is nervous, she puts her fingers in her mouth.

Although Lucy is only 4.5-years-old, you can trace these moments back in the thousands of digital photos that fill our computer’s hard drive: when people are singing to her on her second birthday. Her first day of preschool camp at Elgin Park last summer. When meeting her baby sister for the first time in late 2008.

So it came as no surprise that when when Lucy’s daycare teacher emailed photos of a little graduation her class had — of kids moving up from the preschool room to the junior kindergarten room — Lucy had two fingers held up near the corner of her mouth in the group shot, along with a beaming smile.

That may as well be me, too. Tremendous excitement mired with trepidation and a bit of sadness as September approaches.

I’m not nervous about Lucy starting JK in September. She will transition from a daycare centre to the classroom, and is well prepared for the routine of school. She can write almost all her letters, and spell some words. Lucy loves books, and must create something every day — be it a drawing of our family or a fairy castle with sticks and jewels. She is outgoing, friendly, and makes friends easily.

Lucy’s daycare teachers call her a kind soul. She is caring and empathetic beyond her years. Recently, a new girl started at daycare, and refused to talk to any of the teachers, but would whisper her needs to my daughter. At night, Lucy lines all her dolls up in a row beside her in bed, covering them with a blanket and kissing them goodnight.

She is intuitive and perceptive to people’s feelings. Last week we watched the Disney movie The Fox and the Hound for the first time. When Big Mama left Tod in the forest, Lucy suddenly burst into tears, overcome with emotion.

It’s with this in mind that my mama bear worry comes to the surface. I’ve friends with kids in kindergarten, and am horrified by the stories of bullying at such a young age. One kid — not even 5 — asked my friends’ son where he lived so he could come over after school and beat him up. How does a child that little even form a thought like that?

We talk a lot about right and wrong, about nice and mean, about hurting people’s feelings and what makes us feel good and proud. I hope this gives her the tools to fend off any not-so-nice characters she encounters at any stage in her life.

More than anything, all of us are excited for what the fall will bring. We purposely kept both girls out of organized activities this summer so we can enjoy these last weeks of carefree living. We slurp popsicles in the backyard, take lazy walks to the park and stay in our pajamas until noon when we can.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far as a parent, it’s that life with kids is never constant. And so we grasp on to these fleeting moments of summer before school changes life again.

Too written out from  Uxbridge Town Talk (our August issue is in production). Gur? Mrwebplp69t?

Photos!

Meet DeeDee. He's a rat from Ikea. He's adorable, but the hardest little bugger to keep track of.

Auntie Jenni (Eric's brother's wife) and Lucy shelling fresh peas. That's my nephew in there!

Me n' our babysitter, Shelby, at her family's neighbourhood Canada Day barbeque.

Some of my best girls, from our cottage trip a few weekends past. Seems like a lifetime ago. It'll definitely be a yearly adventure.

Nana and her Star

Lucy got the coolest bike EVER. More on this soon.

My loves

Downstairs in the basement we have a whiteboard. It’s in our laundry room beside the dryer, and is filled with check boxes beside various to-do items: paint the bathroom, fix the burn-out lights in the hallway, make and birth a baby (Alice!) etc. We started it a few weeks after we moved in to our house in the Boonies in 2007, and it’s almost all complete (we need to take a pic and start a new one, three years later).

One of the items is launch daycare site. And that we did in the late summer of 2008. Durham Region Daycare went live in September 2008. I started it after struggling to find daycare for Lucy. Word of mouth just wasn’t working, and other sites out there were poorly designed, hard to navigate and very out of date.

One of my mantras in life — and for most mothers, I think! — is that if someone isn’t doing it (or doing a good job), I’ll do it myself.

We paid my uber-talented sister, Michele, built the database from scratch, eventually using it for her thriving Quilt Shop Locator site.

Despite some bumps along the way — including an angry phone call from one competitor, absolutely incensed that we had the audacity to start something remotely similar to their own site — Durham Region Daycare thrived.

But after Alice, after Uxbridge Town Talk, after Sweet World Media, the site became a huge stress point. Unfortunately the hours in the day are finite, and it kept getting pushed to the bottom of the list.

I knew the time had come to say goodbye.

So now my second baby — after this site — is in the hands of a wonderful home daycare provider from Oshawa named Tamara. She was my number one supporter from the start and as the site grew, and I’m so thrilled Durham Region Daycare is with someone who works daycare, who adores kids, who genuinely wants to see it succeed as it should.

Tamara will be posting about crafts, adding new providers, sending email newsletters (here’s a great one today about men in daycare) and more. If you’re looking for childcare in Durham, I hope you’ll continue to use this free resource site for parents.

After eating candy and anything princess, Lucy loves to make crafts. Stickering, painting, gluing, sparkling, colouring. We have so much fun creating together. While we sometimes get Alice involved in our projects (we made hand-print tulips in the spring), crafting is usually a Mumma-Lucy activity when Alice is napping, which makes the process extra special. It’s our Thing.

Here are some of our favourite fall and Halloween crafts we’ve done at home and daycare. They’re fun and easy for all ages — the cat is actually decorated by Alice!

(We have a wire strung across a wall in Lucy’s bedroom, and hang a lot of her artwork here with clothespins. The rest goes on the fridge, front door and in keepsake binders.)