Tales From the Minivan

Andrew has been off for the past few days, and we thought we’d take a little day trip to Maine.  This isn’t a new thing for us, we go down about once every six weeks or so.  I refuse to pay over $6 a box for the cereal like, and milk and butter are half the price, so I always pick up a gallon of milk and enough butter to get me to my next visit.  Before crossing back over into Canada will fill up our gas tank and save 35 cents a litre. I once overheard a man telling his grown son to “Fill ‘er ’til she spills!”  There’s also a conspiracy that this US gas lasts longer.  One man that lives on the Canadian side of the border actually did some stats on it over a year and consistently he got almost an extra 75km more to a tank on the US side.  I don’t know just how true it is, as this gas is the same stuff that gets refined right here in our city and trucked down to Maine.  I do find though after a trip down to Maine my tank stays full longer, I think it may be more that I do less driving after a trip down, I tend to stick closer to home.

So while in Calais we did our regular stops.  First we tracked down a parcel a friend had shipped, that was an adventure but not overly hard as the town only has 3 main streets!  Next we went to Marden’s- this place is great!  It’s a salvage and surplus store.  You never know what you’re going to find there, hence their jingle” You shudda bought it, when ya saw it…at Marrrr-dens!”   We have found so many really great deals there over the years.  Just last month before we went to Florida, they had a huge shipment of brandname swimsuits.  I got a Nike one that had a MRSP of $80 for $14.99 and two seperate JAG pieces for $5.99 each that were regularly priced at $48 and $50!  We’ve been hoping to do some camping this summer, and headed to the sporting goods section and spotted an Eddie Bauer 8 man 2 room tent for $130, needless to say we picked it up along with two of the all-in-one inflatable sleeping bags for $12 each.

Next on our stops was Walmart. Here Andrew was quickly drawn to his favourite spot in the store…”The Chip Aisle”. Andrew loves his chips.  He has them every evening, his normal snack is nachos and salsa, but has a soft spot for Doritos and the different flavours they carry stateside.  As he was drooling browsing down the aisle, he spotted this immediately:

Doritos!  These Doritos came with a little gimmick though, something to lure you into to buying them…”The Quest: Guessing the Flavor is Just the Beginning…”.  These were mystery Doritos!  Even I was a little excited I will admit.  So this evening we decided to pull out some of my childhood photo albums, and have a fun time laughing at “70’s home decor”, as Mackenzie put it then decided to crack open the bag of “QUEST- Doritos”.  The photo albums were quickly shuffled aside, and everyone started tasting the chips trying to figure out what the flavour was.  My first taste sensed a definite lime, yet salty flavor and perhaps cheesy?  After we all had a try we decided to check out the website listed on the bag:  www.snackstrongproductions.com to see what this was all about and figure out what the actual flavour was.  Well as soon as we found out, we started laughing and realized that the familiar taste was something we all had tried before at least once.  If you don’t want to know I’ll write the answer in pig latin below

The Mystery Doritos Flavour was: OUNTAIN-MAY EW-DAY !!

Too funny, eh?  You have to give praise to Doritos and PepsiCo their parent company. They are always coming up with innovative ways to advertise.  They were one of the first to embed advertising into a reality TV show (remember Survivor and the Doritos and Mountain Dew reward), which has started a trend.  Maybe we’ll see less and less commercials this way if it’s subtly put into shows.  I don’t mind.  Well I just want to say Kudos to Doritos for keeping us entertained this evening, and this mystery flavor?…Well the jury is still out!

Once again, life has gotten in the way of me updating my blog. Here’s a few paragraphs (well maybe more than a few) to keep everyone up to date of what’s been going on since we got back from our trip. (I know I still haven’t added Part 2 of our trip yet!)

So as some of you are aware, we were having some issues with Mackenzie and school. She was having a hard time, and this was one of the reasons we decided to take the trip. When we got home, these issues did not get any better, if anything things were escalating and hit the boiling point of her getting suspended from school. I’m not going to get into the details of the suspension, but when I actually got the call from the Principal last week a sense of relief came over me. We met with the school district later in the week and I’m happy that our concerns were listened to and they will hopefully be resolved so no other child will have to suffer like she did this year. I just wish I had listened to my own instincts and took her out of school after we returned from Florida, but as they say..”hind sight is 20-20″.

The second issue that’s been looming over our family has been EarlyFrench Immersion, you may have read a previous post called A Sad Day in NB for Education. If not, to sum it up- Early French Immersion was eliminated as an option in NB. IN our province it starts at the grade 1 level, and Liam was registered to start this coming fall. On Feb 29, a report was released regarding French Second Language (FSL) (the Friday before March Break) and parents were told to send comments and concerns regarding the report to the GNB website. There was no mention of when the Minister would make his final decision. Two weeks later on March 14th, Education Minister Kelly Lamrock made the announcement that Early French Immersion would no longer be an option for FSL. Instead all French instruction would be eliminated from Grades 1-4 and in Grade 5, ALL children would then take an Intensive French course, where half the year would be taught in French, and the entire Grade 5 curriculum would be crammed into the other half the year.

After the decision was made, many FSL experts came out against this decision even the designers of the Intensive French Course said it was never meant to be used this way, it was never meant to replace Early French Immersion. You can hear a CBC Radio Documentary on this here: http://www.cbc.ca/nb/features/ scroll down to Sunday Edition: Scrapping the Cadillac. I soon joined a group of concerned parents upset that the choice was no longer an option for our children, and we decided to sue the Province, and we felt that the whole process leading up to this decision was flawed. A 2 week period one of which being the March Break, was unacceptable, after the Minister stated this past summer, that there would be “a full debate on this issue”. Is 2 weeks and an online submission form, really a full debate?

On June 11th, Justice Hugh McLellan of the Court of Queen’s Bench, deemed that “the decision of the
Minister was unfair and unreasonable” and that “the Minister’s decision to phase-out Early French Immersion is removed into the Court and quashed.” This meant that Early French Immersion was back on! I took the four kids with me to the Court room to hear the verdict, and managed to get myself on TV again, I guess I was a good photo-op.

Later that day, our hopes that this would be over and our children who were enrolled in EFI for the fall of 2008 would be allowed to resume, were dashed when Minister Lamrock stated, that he would now follow the Judges ruling and allow for a full debate and have a 6 week consultation. Comments and ideas could be submitted once again to the GNB website up to July 25, and the Minister would make his final decision on August 5th, 4 weeks before the start of the school year.

Could this cause anymore turmoil for families, teachers and school administrators, who now have to come up with staffing plans for 3 possible scenarios? Once again the Minister of Education is showing his “unfairness and unreasonableness”, it’s time to admit you’ve made a mistake rushing this through and put a one year hold on this plan. Furthermore I believe that Minister Lamrock as a parent of a child enrolled in Kindergarten this year (and an older one in EFI) needs to take a step back from this decision, it is clear that this has gotten too personal for him. Designate an independent panel that can weigh the pros and cons of this. Not have someone that has a predetermined outcome already conceived.

Many parents have been deceived into believing that EFI is the root of all of the problems in NB ) Education System, and if you’ve only heard Lamrock’s side of things or read their Glossy inserts in our newspapers http://www.gnb.ca/0000/publications/ProgressReportEnglish.pdf he makes a great argument, but there is another side to this, last month this article was published in the Telegraph Journal with outlines a lot of the misconceptions and myths the Government had been feeding the public, The Other Side on Education.

So if I’ve been a little preoccupied it’s because I have a lot on my mind. I want all of my children to have the opportunity to become fluently bilingual, and under this new plan, that is questionable, unless they opt for the Late French Immersion program in 6th grade. We won’t know how successful that will be either, as anyone currently who is in LFI, has had previous French instruction prior to entry and there are plans to offer less courses in French in the future. It’s a big gamble that the Government is taking on, I don’t want my children to become lab rats in the “educational experiment” that has not been proven.

I hope my children will get the opportunity to wear this symbol in the future. If the government’s plan goes through, it will truly be a rarity to see it in the future.

I have to say, I had a pretty amazing childhood when I think back to growing up.  There’s a lot of reasons but number 1&2 have to be my parents.  Were we spoiled, maybe just a little, but I know that I was always appreciative of everything my parents did for me and my brother.  They instilled many values that I hope to pass down to my kids.

Geographically the place where I grew up Bradley Lake, was the absolute best.  My parents built our home on a small private road on the lake’s waterfront back in 1978.  My maternal grandparents summer vacationed here every year and with it’s close proximity to the city it was the perfect place to get away from the FOG in Saint John.  On our little road (of 8 houses) that my father unofficially named Cedar Brook Cresent there was 20 kids no more than 6 years apart. There was always games of baseball, soccer and water fights, canoe & kayak races and plenty of swimming!  We were often in the water from just before lunch to just before bed.  I can’t remember ever being bored and always felt very safe.  We always had strict rules about water safety and all of the parents were united on this front, which was why I think there was never any close calls around the water.

Today we spent time out at Dad’s for Father’s Day. My brother Curtis and his girlfriend Sam joined us as well as my little brothers Nathan and Jonathan (almost 11 & 13).  We had a nice BBQ and were going to take a swim in the pool but the overcast skies made it a bit cool for it.  Instead we took out the Kayaks.  It was really cool, and once again brought back many memories of kayaking in the wooden kayaks that my nextdoor neighbour made back in the 80’s.  I took ythe boys out for their first official Kayak ride and Mackenzie took off like a pro by herself in the other.

I hope to get out to the lake a lot this summer, and hopefully my love of the water will rub off on the kids.  I feel at peace when I around a body of water.  I loved waking up on a summer morning with calmness in the air and the lake as smooth as glass without a ripple to be seen.  Occasionally you’d hear loons calling each other, or the Andrew’s brothers calling the loons.  It really was a childhood I would never trade.

On Dad’s deck with the lake in the background:

Future Kayakers?