Posts Tagged ‘Family’

Wills.

"La la la...I can't hear you...la la la"

"I don't have much, so there's nothing to fight over"

"I'll only need a will when I'm older"

No more excuses.  You need a legal will now.

You might not like to talk about death, tragic scenarios and heart-breaking possibilities but in order to protect yourself and your family, please make sure your wishes are fulfilled, with no error for misinterpretation and future challenges.

Step 1: Meet with a trusted legal advisor  who will make the process easier. Save time and come prepared with questions, documentations and options.

Do your homework

Image via Wikipedia

On your list, should be (if applicable):

• Naming a guardian for your children. First choice?  Backup?
• Choosing an executor. Will it be your spouse? Appoint someone else as co-executor?
• Organ donation and funeral service.  Any specific type of memorial or service you wish for yourself? Location? Trust me, this makes it easier for your children to know that they are doing as you wish.
• Keep a list of the names and contact information of your professional advisors and bank information such as; physician, lawyer, accountant, financial account numbers and institutions.
• Think about how would you want to divide your estate, with different possible scenerios. If only your spouse survives, if only your children survive or if no immediate family survives.

There is so much to think about. If you need some help to get started, use the Will Planning Guide offered by RBC . It's a good step. I'm filling my forms in now.

Take good care.

O.

Do you already have a will?

This week's blog is a guest post from Wendy Graves, our senior Life editor.  – Teresa

Who has time to sit down for a family dinner anymore?

Between two busy working parents and kids running off to hockey practice one night then piano lessons the next, how often is the entire family even home at the same time?

So eating a meal together? At the same table? Even a couple times a week? That’s crazy talk.

Family dinners aren't as common as they use to be (image by Nordiska museet via Flickr).

Researchers at the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University in New York City have studied the importance of family mealtime extensively. Here are just 2 of their rather sobering findings:
• Teens who have fewer than 3 family dinners per week are nearly twice as likely to report receiving mostly C’s or lower grades compared to those who have 5 to 7 meals a week.
• Teens who have fewer than 3 family dinners are twice as likely to have used tobacco, nearly twice as likely to have used alcohol, and one and a half times likelier to have used marijuana.

And at least two other studies have shown the nutritional benefits of eating together:
• Families eat more healthfully, regularly getting higher intakes of calcium, fibre, iron and vitamins B6, B12, C and E (Archives of Family Medicine).
• Children eat more fruits and veggies and less unhealthy snack foods (Journal of American Dietetic Association).

One study has shown that kids who have dinner regularly with their family eat more fruit (image by Rick McCharles via Flickr).

And even without scientific studies we know that family mealtime will:
• Give kids the chance to talk with their parents and siblings, which will not only expand their vocab beyond what they’re learning in school but also teach them about the give-and-take of conversation.
• Give parents the chance to keep up to date on their kids’ activities, who they’re hanging out with and whether their moods or behaviours are swinging like a pendulum.

Here are 5 ways you can make family mealtime easier for you and yours:
1. Turn Sunday into Family Cooking Day. Double a favourite recipe or two and set yourself up for quick, hot meals later in the week. Get the kids involved as well – they’re more likely to eat something they had a hand in preparing (pizza, anyone?). Here are a few of our favourite family meals.

2. No time to spend the whole day in the kitchen? Why not take advantage of Supperworks, a meal-preparation service that allows you to put a healthy and delicious meal on your family’s plate. In two hours you can prepare up to a dozen freezable entrées, all with fresh and nutritious ingredients. The Bring Your Child Sessions allow you to make it a family affair. Best of all? Somebody else does the dishes. While Supperworks locations are currently only in Ontario, they can deliver anywhere in Canada.

3. On nights when your son or daughter has hockey practice, pack up the meal (it can be as simple as sandwiches, veggie sticks and fruit or yogurt) and have a picnic at the arena.

4. Teach your teens a handful of easy recipes – something simple that doesn’t even require the stove – that they can make when they get home from school so everyone can sit down together once you're home from work. Or have the kids assemble the ingredients of an easy one-pot dish (our online food editor, Colleen Tully, suggests this delicious Roasted Vegetable Pasta Bake) that you can pop in the oven when you step in the door. (It's never too early to encourage your kids to be active in the kitchen.)

5. Pick up a serving or two of the prepared but nutritious food, such as a roast chicken, at the grocery store. Serve some mixed veggies as a healthy side.

Do you have a secret to making mealtimes easier for your family?

Here's a great guest post by Lisa Fielding, the copy chief at Canadian Living and a new mom to nine-month-old Archie. After filling out Archie's baby book, Lisa wanted to find out more about her family roots. Here's a little of what she learned. – Wendy

When I started to research my family history, I was skeptical that it would be very interesting – all I thought I’d find was a bunch of names, dates and places. It became clear, though, once I started digging, that it wasn’t just about compiling a list of basic facts: it was about uncovering the day-to-day details of our ancestors’ lives, piecing them back together to make a wonderful story.

I connected with a distant cousin, Gail, through Facebook, and she sent me a few old photos of my great grandpa. Long before I was born, he had lost his hands working on hydro lines in Ontario – and one of the photos Gail sent showed him before the accident. If I had never asked my family to dig into their photo albums, I might never have seen it. It was wonderful to think of him as a young man, working to build the province into what it is today.

There are lots of little details I discovered once I started to really read some of the documents I found online. WWI draft papers showed that many of my ancestors were farmers by trade (which I knew), and that many were Methodist (which I didn’t).

Census records not only noted who lived in each house and their ages, but who their neighbours were as well. When someone got married, the certificate had the witnesses’ signatures, sometimes another couple they were friends with; birth records showed the father’s occupation (machinist, telegrapher), though not the mother’s. So I got a sense of not only the major life events, but also what my relatives did for fun, who they hung out with, what their daily lives were like. It made them more real.

Researching your family history can be a massive undertaking if you really want it to be – or it can just be fun to poke around on the Internet and see what’s out there. I’d like to keep working on it and one day compile a huge scrapbook for my son and future generations, so that they might know not only our names, dates and places, but what we did for fun on a Friday night as well.

Here are some links to get you started on your search.
• Ancestry.ca – their resources include the Canadian census (as well as English, Welsh and Scottish ones), passenger lists, and birth, marriage and death records
• Globalgenealogy.com – they sell various genealogy resources, including books and e-books, as well as family tree charts and magnifiers
• Library and Archives Canada – their resources include immigration and land records, as well as birth, marriage and death records

Have you checked out your family’s roots online? Did you discover something new about your family?

Today marks the start of one of my favourite weeks of the year: the Rogers Cup tennis tournament. For the first time, the men’s event (this year in Montreal) and the women’s event (in Toronto) will be played simultaneously.

I am a huge tennis fan (well, a huge sports freak fan in general). My family didn’t get a lot of TV stations when I was younger; we were at the mercy of the reception from the large TV aerial outside my bedroom window. But every summer I could always count on watching Canada’s pre-eminent tennis tournament.

Aleksandra Wozniak, from Blainville, Que., will be playing in Toronto this week. (Image via Wikipedia)

I can’t say for sure if I started playing tennis because I liked watching it, or I started watching tennis because I was playing it. Either way I still have fond memories of hitting the ball against the fence next to the house and against the wall at one of the local public schools while my brother played his weeknight soccer game.

Learning to play against a fence and wall served me well once I started playing tennis competitively in high school. My playing “partners” never missed, which helped turn me into a human backboard of sorts. Being barely five feet tall, I certainly wasn’t going to overpower you, but I would run down and return anything you sent my way!

I have even fonder memories of my dad and I grabbing our racquets, driving to the local community college and playing a set or two a few times a week.  We were a little erratic when we first started playing, just as likely to hit the ball over the net as we were to hit it over the fence behind the court. (Being an active baseball player as well, I would give those shots my best home run call.)

Tennis, anyone? (Image via Wikipedia)

As my dad and I spent more time playing together, we not only got better (my dad lobbing the ball over my head as I stood at the net now being intentional, not an oops) but also more competitive (I loved getting him running from side to side, although I’d usually start laughing and end up losing the point).

A lot of our father-daughter bonding moments revolved around sports: playing catch outside the house; Dad coaching my softball team; and him and another dad leading a chant of “We Will Rock You” at one of my volleyball games.

Was there something that always brought you and a parent together? Do you have a favourite summer memory of time spent with your mom or dad, or  with your own kids today?

Three summers ago, after yet another weekend of “what do you want to do today?” “I don’t know. What do you want to do?” my boyfriend and I drew up a to-do list. We named it “Our Summer ’o Fun.” We wrote down more than a dozen activities and hung the list on my fridge. By the first week of September, everything had been crossed off.

The tradition lives on. Here are just five things on this year’s version of "Our Summer 'o Fun."

• Pillage a pick-your-own. I crossed this one off the list this past weekend by picking about five pounds of strawberries. I think a return trip is in order, but this time for some fresh veggies. The potatoes just became available and I’ve been meaning to try my hand at making potato soup.

Delicious summer strawberries (Image via Wikipedia)

• Picnic in the park. I have a portable griller that is begging to be used. We’ll marinate some chicken souvlaki, cut up some fresh veggies and throw a couple of ice-cold bottles of water into our cooler and head off to the Toronto Islands. Now all we need is a shady space to lay our blanket.

• Hit the tennis courts. I used to play quite regularly; now, it’s more of an annual event. This is an early morning activity for sure. Any later in the day and the heat will likely cause me to curl up in a ball beside the net and settle in for a nap.

• Enjoy a ball game. No, I don’t mean the Blue Jays (although that’s fun, too). I mean the Toronto Maple Leafs, our local entry in the Intercounty Baseball League. As a child, I loved to bike down to the local diamond and take in a game. Now, I can ride the subway a few stops and check out these semi-professionals from across Ontario.

• Take a day trip. A yearly favourite is Niagara-on-the-Lake. A stop at Kurtz Orchards, where you can sample pretty much any of their jams, jellies, sauces and butters, is a must. This year I plan on visiting St. Jacobs for the first time. The village is known for its beautiful hand-crafted furniture and I’ve been looking for a end table, so who knows?

My list is far from complete so help me out. What should I add to it? What are your favourite ways to have fun in the sun?

You know what.

I'm tired of hearing everyone say how busy they are (myself included).

Everyone is so insanely busy that friendships are taking a backseat. It shouldn’t be this way. Our lives should never be so full that we can’t make time for family and friends.

Busy shmizy.

I want to bring the fun into busy and the active into friendships and I think I may very well have figured out a way to do it.

Ready for it...

SOFTBALL. (or soccer or volleybal or dodgeball or bowling etc. etc. etc.)

No joke.

We put a softball team together.

We called up a few family members, old friends, new friends

And voila...

Team ADRENALINE was born.

Over the past few weeks, we've been getting together to practice our mad skills (or lack thereof), which easily leads to laughs and good times. Our kids come along and play at the adjoining playground or (if they prefer) become our little "ball boys and girls" and our fans.

Go ahead. Give it a shot. I'm sure once you start, you'll be wondering what took you so long.

We're making time for family and friends and we're having fun.

Take that...BUSY.

My oldest son's birthday is today.  By oldest, I mean 6.

I've always felt that I should get the presents on my son's birthday!

Am I wrong?

After all, I'm the one who suffered for 12 long hours with no assisted medication. My fault - I did arrive at the hospital too late.

Actually, NO!...my husband's fault for stopping for gas.

Oh YES. Yes, he did.

Instead, cleaning, baking, decorating, hosting, and cleaning again is on my agenda.

Planning a children's birthday party is getting more and more complex.

I remember mine was a home baked cake and the special treat was a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Now families rent inflatable jumping houses, obstacles courses, carnival games and superhero look-a-likes to come. It will certainly be memorable, but quite expensive.

We still have a home baked cake, but baked in my son's favourite themed pan. I usually rent a cake pan at Bulk Barn for the occasion - since next year the theme will be different.

Our home becomes the obstacle course - filled with balloons and streamers.

Our carnival games are simple treasure hunts, pin the tail on the donkey (avoid the pin, use velcro tape), Musical chair with no chairs (kids "freeze" in the most funniest positions).

As for the "superhero", well, if all goes well, that's me. (At least in my son's eyes.)

Usually there's a brief moment during the chaos where  just...for a second...the noise stops and my eyes focus frozen on my son.

And that's when I truly realize that he is my gift.

He makes me a better person, he adds play, fun, laughter to my life. He's love that I've never felt.  He is my heart.

I love the gift of watching him grow up.

I am so blessed.

It's been a couple of weeks since I last blogged.  Sometimes Life is challenging. Priorities shift and time passes quickly, other times, time passes very slowly.

My husband, who by the way, will probably kill me for writing this, got laid off.

Now what?

He has been working since the age of 14, and doesn't know what else to do. Work was a major, major part of his life. Something he felt he was good at. Something he took pride in.

But on one bitter cold January afternoon, it was gone.

Poof...

It left him numb at first, then all sorts of emotions started to surface.

No.

Erupt.

Anger.

Hurt.

Resentful.

Vendictive.

Stupid.

Doubtful.

Insecure.

Embassed.

Levels of emotions that I've never witnessed in all our years together. Nor would want to.

It's hard.

It's hard to go through. It's hard to watch.

It's hard.

But, it is what it is. We can't go back trying to analysis everything and every word, every action, every decision.  We'll go nuts.

We need to realize that a job doesn't define you.

We need to value how blessed we truly are.

We need to step back, breathe and start fresh.

I try to reassure him that "things happen for a reason" - "you'll find something better that gives you a better balance in life" - "it's going to be okay".

In time, I'm sure it will.  Right now, we're adjusting and learning how to cope with job loss.

Every year I say the same thing...."I'm never ever going to do that again!  Never! NEVER!"

But I do.

"Tis the night before Christmas...join us for Christmas Eve Dinner" invitations are sent to our immediately family of 20 in total.  Yup, 20.

I even found a site Evite Invitations, which makes it easier to send out invitations, monitor responses, add columns to allow guests to sign up to bring items and add comments.

I do know it's my fault.

I just want everyone together at one table and give thanks for all our blessings, remember those whom are not able to be with us, and appreciate the time we do have with those there.  It's important to me for my children to have funny stories, fond memories and photos of their family, especially their grandparents.

And that's why I do it.

This is my third year, and it is getting easier.  And that's because I've learnt a few things along the way.

1.  It's never going to be perfect.  Give it up.

You had to see me the first year, wanting everything looking beautiful. Table set, napkins placed perfectly, candles burning, Christmas carols in the background, place cards with a Lotto 649 ticket wrapped around it...so very cute.  I had a complete menu planned and itinerary for the day.

Didn't happen.

I tried.  Really hard, but couldn't keep up.

2.    Ask for help.

Something I have problems with.  I think, why should I have to ask? Don't people see I'm struggling? I would help them in a heartbeat.

Everyone is different and sometimes, they just don't realize you need help.  So ask.

3. Remember why the holidays are special.

I was so busy focusing on the visual, I forgot about why I do it.  And I missed most of the funny stories and picture taking, because I was still in the kitchen trying to keep up with the dirty dishes!

Forget about the kitchen, go outside for a quick snowball fight, crawl under the tree with your kids and search for presents, hug everyone, treasure this time!

Have a wonderful magical Christmas.

First term of school is done and report cards have been received.  Okay, now what?

My oldest son started French Immersion in Senior Kindergarten this year. We wanted him to be challenged and have fun learning.  And that's a hard combination.  It took a few weeks to adjust,but next thing I know, he's counting in French at home, listing all the colours, addressing me with "Bonjour ma mere",  "Au revoir",  and singing Christmas songs!

Me, on the other hand, know very little French. A few words to get by, and a few not so nice sentences. So, I'm learning too.

We decided to take steps to welcome French into our home.  Sounds weird, yes? It actually looks even weirder, but it helps.

• We put post-it notes on household items with French translations. Yes, on chairs, computer, fridge, table, stairs.
• We change the Walt Disney DVDs to French and watch the movie together.
• We talk about going on a trip to Quebec and practicing our French, in real situations.
• I take advantage of the tools on the web.  I found that abcteach website is a great resource for worksheets, flash cards, puzzles and more!

It's actually kind of fun. Afterall, who doesn't love French Fries, French Toast?   Try it.  Any language will do.

Revoir mes amis.