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Category: General

  • Running in Circles

    With everything going on in the world right now, it’s pretty difficult to keep kids happy. In my case, both kids are home full-time until at least September. This is immensely draining for everyone, but remaining active is very important.

    I’m in a unique situation, as I’m also in the process of recovering from leg surgery. As a result, I’ve been ramping up the activity as lockdown continues. Although we had a bit of a cold snap for a few weeks, playing outside in the snow is one of the best things for kids.

    Yes, it’s cold and bundling up the kids takes entirely too much time. But the fresh air and exercise for are great ways to tire the kids out.

    As I’m also working on my own rehab, I love loading up the kids on the sled and dragging them around. 20 minutes clockwise, 20 minutes counterclockwise, and run them around. With the kids now over 70 lbs combined, it’s a heck of a workout.

    Beyond running circles, kids love going down a snow hill, so we’ve been piling our snow from the driveway into a single hill. Due to COVID-19, our siding hills in the area are all closed, so this is a good way to give the little ones a taste of that experience.

    It isn’t perfect, but the crisp, fresh air and exercise really help tire the kids out enough that they aren’t tearing up the house.

  • Leftovers & How to Store Them

    Here in Canada, Thanksgiving occurred this past Monday. It’s a day of preparing for feasting, feasting, and then studiously avoiding the cleanup from feasting. If your family is anything like mine, we prepare more food than we can safely consume in one evening. There’s never any fear of their being leftover deviled eggs, stuffing, or pumpkin pie. However, there’s always leftovers like potatoes, sweet potatoes, turkey, cranberries, dinner rolls, salad, and whatever else may have entered the mix.

    Before determining the type of container, there are a few questions that you need to ask:

    • Will we eat this tomorrow?
    • Will this go into school/work lunches this week?
    • Can this freeze for later?
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    Leftovers for Dinner Tomorrow

    The food you’re going to eat tomorrow, whether its in a hot turkey sandwich, turkey omelettes, turkey wraps, or turkey poutine, you have a lot of flexibility in how you’re going to store it. Since the fridge was just emptied to make Thanksgiving dinner, there’s a lot of room to pop it back in.

    For this sort of leftover, a larger snap-tight glass containers works well. You’ll likely want cranberries, turkey, and possibly even mashed potatoes (they’re good if you fry them up). Larger containers because you’re not really going to pre-sort your food. You’ll have turkey in one, potatoes in a second, etc.

    School & Work Lunches

    For school/work lunches, you’ll want to get this sorted as quickly as you can. If you leave it in a larger container, like the snap-tight one mentioned above, it will either disappear or go bad before it ever makes it into a lunch. I recommend using partitioned plastic containers. If your kids are anything like my son, they only want to open 1 container for their lunch.

    These plastic containers are perfect for keeping food from getting all mixed up, allowing you to add your cranberries to the turkey at lunch, instead of having soggy turkey that’s been soaking in them all day. It’s also great for putting dip in one section, and something healthy (like carrots sticks) in another.

    Freeze Leftovers For Future Meals

    Finally, when it comes to freezing food, there’s a number of issues with storage. A glass or plastic container, unless you push parchment right up against the food, tends to fall victim to freezer burn. Disposable plastic freezer bags, well, they’re pretty bad for the environment and tend to tear if you neglect to sort out a bone from the turkey.

    Thankfully, there is another option: reusable silicone bags. We use these a lot in our household, and they work fantastic. Push the excess air out before you seal the bags. The food freezes pretty good, and it’s easy to pull it out without worrying about it making a mess.

    To Sum Up

    With big meals like Thanksgiving, there’s bound to be leftovers. Glass containers are good for a big meal of leftovers the next day. Plastic containers with compartments are preferred for school & work lunches. And silicone bags are my recommendation for storing it in the freezer. Where possible, you’re going to want to keep any leftovers out of your compost bin. This is good food, and with kids (especially boys), there’s no point throwing it away.

  • Becoming Dad at Home

    I wasn’t always a stay-at-home Dad.

    Like many men my age, I had a full-time job that took me out of the house on a daily basis. I got up early, grabbed coffee, settled the kids with the sitter or loaded them into the car for day-care. Next, I dropped off the wife & kids, before my 9-5 work.

    I analyzed utilization trends for a company that had just been acquired by a larger umbrella corporation. I was on a good career path. My work was paying for some certification courses, and I was passing them with relative ease. There were, of course, some of the usual, cross-generational, differences about the office, but generally they were worked around and workflow was improving.

    So what happened?

    It was a double-whammy of trouble that rolled out.

    First, I had a tumour in my leg, and I needed surgery to have it removed. The diagnosis came in February, and I informed my employer like a good little worker. I received the usual platitudes, inquiries for surgery date (which I had yet to receive), and so on.

    COVID-19 hit by the end of the week, and we were all sent to work from home. Grandma handled childcare, as the daycare was now closed (even to those with parents in Healthcare), and we were expected to continue to work.

    Personally, that was awesome for me. It meant homemade espresso instead of Keurig. A daily commute became a thing of the past. And I would rarely be distracted by the telephone, office politics, overheard conversations, etc. My productivity ballooned.

    I quickly caught up on a backlog of work, prepared company newsletters both in advance and on the fly, and made some significant steps in other work projects that would make things smoother on whomever took over my position when I moved up.

    A month later my workplace eliminated my position due to “lack of work.”

    So I searched for new employment. Because of COVID, there wasn’t any.

    Becoming Dad at Home

    I no longer needed Grandma to take care of my kids, so I took over childcare full-time.

    My wife works in healthcare, and actually had her shifts increase from part-time to full-time plus OT. So her hours at home went from reasonable, to limited. Due to maternity leaves, retirement, and an unexpected death at her work, her hours have yet to return to a more normal level. We don’t anticipate it will happen anytime in the next two years.

    It’s spring, and my eldest wouldn’t go to school until fall. So, I focused on spending as much time with my kids as I could. After all, a surgery to remove my tumour could happen anytime.

    I took on most of the household duties. Not just cooking & dishes. I also handled most of the early learning, activity-running, event preparation, shopping, laundry, sweeping, mopping, and a myriad of other things that I didn’t realize was going to come with being at home. Add COVID-level safety precautions on top of it all, and it can become a mighty list.

    Economy & Schools Re-opening

    Months went by, and COVID restrictions began to lighten. I re-activated my teaching license, in the hopes of stepping back into a teaching role. I mean, they would surely decrease class sizes in order to keep COVID from becoming pandemic in the school population right?

    Wrong.

    Not only did classes sizes not decrease, but those that chose to no longer attend school in person, now get to watch their teacher’s blackboard from a webcam and hope they can keep up. They actually cut teaching positions, forcing some teachers to handle 2-3 online classes in addition to their class at school.

    Still, once things got underway, I figured something would come up.

    I didn’t really think it was going to be my surgery. Nor a three-week close-to-zero-movement recovery. Nor did I think it would be a continued search, without any realistic leads, for a position.

    Accepting the Future

    I had been a Dad at Home for a spring and summer. The school sent my kid home “sick” on the 2nd day of class. They also introduced the 14-day or 24 hrs after no symptoms & a negative COVID-test policy, so it quickly became apparent that both parents could not work the same way that we did pre-COVID.

    My wife makes good money. If we didn’t have debt, I’d say great money, but that’s how it falls. Since there’s no daycare bill, it’s actually cheaper for our family if I stay home. Soon-to-be-constant sick calls from cold & flu season in kindergarten already looms on the horizon.

    With all that in mind, it means I’m staying home for the foreseeable future. I’ll be taking care of the house daily. Tending my youngest all day. Watching my oldest when he’s home from school. And most importantly, making sure everything runs smoothly so my wife doesn’t have to worry about things while she works to keep the city healthy.

    I started to piece this together once I accepted I was going to be home on a more permanent basis. After all, there’s a lot more to being a dad at home than most people (myself included) realize.

    What to expect

    I’m going to piece this site together as I go. You can expect a lot of tips & tricks, links to sites with resources, some homemade materials of my own, and a heck of a lot more. I’m going to review some of the products we’ve experimented with as the kids have grown up, and I’ll compare them.

    This site is aimed at helping you make decisions about how to help your family, and how certain things affected my own.

    As with anything related to parenting, your mileage may vary. Not all kids & families react the same way, but if my experiences are useful to someone, that’s the goal.

    I’ll be releasing articles twice weekly. Other website updates may come in between, as I have something to add.

    Be sure to subscribe to my newsletter to receive updates and any sort of offers I may be able to pass along. You can also follow along on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest so you’ll know when I’ve some new material for your reading pleasure.

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