I’ve been keeping score at baseball games since I could lift a pencil. When I was really young, I used to help my grandpa track at-bats on the single game score-cards or programs they’d sell at Yankee games. When I was a little older, I took a break from the paper and ran the electronic […]
We promised something for you yesterday, didn’t we? Sorry it’s late. We were having technical difficulties. No. We were ditching school! The main problem with starting off our Summer of Funner a little early this year has been that the kids aren’t really out of school yet. How to deal with that? A ditch day, naturlich. […]
Following up on last summer’s fantastic viewing of the Canadian Stage performance of Macbeth in Toronto’s High Park, we knew that returning for more Shakespeare in the Park would be a high priority on this summer’s Love-to-do-List! So, on Wednesday night, we took in a performance of Titus Andronicus. We had such a great time, and […]
The kids’ first Toronto Tuesdays outing with Papa took them uptown to Yonge & Eglinton. They headed up Yonge past the Yonge-Eglinton Centre to the Postal Station K at the corner of Broadway, a beautiful old building with carved lions and unicorns on the facade. A sign said that they’d find a Canada Post Kids […]
Blaise is going to spend most Tuesdays in the summer introducing the kids to Toronto’s neighbourhoods, or finding and exploring all of the city’s “hidden gems.” Before these travels begin, however, they spent a day “mapping” both the city of Toronto and our Upper Beaches neighbourhood, newly dubbed “Beach Hill.” To get started, they looked […]
Today, we took our reading and illustration project to the great outdoors. On a misty, “drippy” morning, we sat on a bench beneath a cluster of trees in Toronto’s High Park. There, I read the kids our second instalment of Beowulf: Just when things were settling down at Heorot, Grendel’s mother comes and attacks the […]
Tuesday’s installment for our Summer of Funner Film Festival happened to be another Wes Anderson movie, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. The kids were particularly interested in the amount of underground digging performed both by the animal protagonists in flight and by the big three farmers in pursuit of them. They were also dumbfounded by the […]
This is a summer to be inspired by the Olympic Spirit. As we learn more about our Olympic competitors by reading newspapers and magazines and by watching sports interviews, one of the aspects of Olympic training that the kids and I have admired is the self-sufficiency of even the youngest of our athletes. Time and […]
July 2, 2012 On a sunny, hot Canada Day (Observed), we headed out with our special guests, grandpa Silvio and Jessie, for a tour of Toronto’s Kensington Market. We were on a mission to source the ingredients for our very First Paella, which we were planning to make on the gas grill later that afternoon. We […]
September 5, 2011 Over the past few days, I have been supposing that this last entry for our Summer of Funner 2011 would be something like one of those top-ten lists the media produces over the lazy days of the new year. I thought that I would write an overall assesment of our highs and […]
August 24, 2011 On Monday, we lost Jack Layton. The leader of Canada’s official opposition party, and a former Toronto city councillor, Mr. Layton passed away after a heroic fight against cancer. Even in his last days, he stopped to consider all of us, writing a Letter To Canadians that has struck a chord with […]
August 10, 2011 Did he ever return? No he never returned From the library that day He may circulate forever ‘Round those queer old stacks & bookshelves He’s the mayor who never returned Today we made t-shirts to show our love and support of our local public library. Then, in further support of books and […]
August 4, 2011 Thanks to @MargaretAtwood for retweeting my “Save the Riverdale Farm” Sketches! A record number of visitors checked out the site yesterday! I hope you come back and visit us again! Please help Toronto save its farms, zoos, libraries and bike lanes! Write to your councillors! Get on the phone and call them, too! This Friday, […]
July 27, 2011 Today was supposed to be a day in which we played simple tourists, tooling around the city on a double-decker bus and taking photographs of Toronto landmarks and attractions with our purple and orange kid-safe cameras. But, this just didn’t seem right. We’re not tourists. We’re Toronto residents. And, our city is […]
July 20, 2011 I hadn’t meant to spend two weeks in a row with the kids sketching at a museum in the city. We were supposed to photograph landmarks this week! During our trip to the AGO, however, the kids caught the sketching bug. In order to get him to take a lunch break from […]
July 13, 2011 Today was our first “culture” day. I’m not sure why I came up with such a stupid name for the days of the week in which we go do something creative downtown, but there you have it. We transferred at Broadview and took the Dundas streetcar all the way west to the Art […]
July 6-11, 2011 My new strategy for entertaining out-of-towners: try something in the city that you’ve never tried before! This week marked the first of several visits from family and friends. First up were California grandpa and step-grandma. We had a busy few days playing t-ball, starting swimming lessons, learning to play video games, and trying out new […]
