Happy belated Canada Day! In celebration, I conquered my fears and flubs, and made a quick (not so great) video blog.

Canada Day 2010 from fleuris dotca on Vimeo.

Back in June, we babysat my nephew for 5 hours so my sister could do normal human things… The kinds of things you don’t do when you have two boys under the age of 5, I imagine. Things like sleeping, and staring at the wall for a few uninterrupted minutes.

Dear audience, a 4.8 year old is hard work. We made a few science experiments for him, and this video is the result of the volcano we engineered. This video was made from part 1 of the volcano explosion, and part two when I cut in closer to get the detail of the bubbles.

Each time we did this, X-man was all “I wanna do it again!” Towards the end, I said “Welcome to year four…. of life.” Because the whole day was like that. Case in point: After the seventeenth time alternatively hiding/seeking, I could have been passed out from exhaustion on the living room floor and he’d be all like “I wanna do it aaaagain!”

I have no idea how my sister does this.

But wow, isn’t he adorable? It’s totally worth it.

At the beginning of the summer, with fairly high hopes, R. and I decided to become urban gardeners. Both of us had previous experience planting vegetables in, you know, actual gardens. Neither of us had ever tried to grow anything large in a planter –but really, how hard could it be?

I remember being in Canadian Tire, picking out some of our seeds. I told R. it would be unwise to buy them, but we somehow still walked out of there with Heirloom tomatoes… not fully realizing that the plant would later take on super-powers and grow over 6 feet. You know how turtles grow proportionally to their environment? I think it’s safe to say this isn’t the case for the botanical world.

Interestingly enough, this one particular plant was completely disinterested in growing more than 2 tomatoes. It was almost hell-bent on becoming a tree.

The carrots, however, were the garden’s mystery. There was no way of really knowing how big they would get. So when R. told me he was going to grab a couple of carrots, the documentary filmmaker within me surged, and I grabbed our camera. I should explain a few things about this video:

Please note…
1) That before this clip, I asked R. to explain what he was doing.
2) In an attempt to keep an element of decorum, I had to BEEP out the name of the individual (his friend) he references in describing the carrot-size.

Also of particular note: While watching this video now, I recognize that I am so accustomed to his humor that I completely disregard how sarcastic he gets. At the same time, he completely disregards how incredibly whiny and high pitched I get (I am not usually like this).

Impressive! We have learned to live with each other’s annoying characteristics. Now THAT’S love.