i'm the queen of the castle

This post could come from many different angles. On this particular day I’m leaning towards a downright nasty, negative angle (Tyler has the flu and I am without a washer/dryer)… however, like most bloggers, I have been formulating this post in my mind since late last night and the angle from yesterday is on the opposite end of the spectrum. Thus the title.

I wanted to write to tell you about our dorm room apartment that we’re living in for the summer. Basically it is just that. I think 500 square feet is a generous description, but I’m giving it mostly because we finally have our A/C working properly, and who can be less than thrilled when the A/C is functioning like a well-tuned car? I decided that if we were going to attempt a fairy-tale summer I would have to first convince the kids that our “summer home” was absolutely fabulous. It’s not, but I’ve done a good job convincing everyone – and at times even myself. Here are some pictures of where we’re living… however they are, of course complimentary… this is a concrete slab with walls in the state of absolute disgust - I have no worries that my children will trash this place! In my attempt at summer bliss, I told the kids we live in a castle. They believe me and have had more than enough adventures being a princess and princes. In fact I may have enough material from this summer to create my own Narnia series.

I’d forgotten how diverse Toronto is. So far we’re the only white family I’ve seen. We live right near what we believe to be a Sikh temple and are surrounded by men in turbans and woman in veils and long-flowing robes. Excuse my ignorance… but for my kids, our ignorance is even more magical; adding to our fairy-tale summer and royal surroundings.


We are at the very top of our castle, on the fifth floor. Yikes I say, but the kids are ecstatic. Their favorite place to be is on top of the desk under the big window watching all the airplanes and our royal subjects walking to and fro (we even saw a HUGE raccoon the other day and laughed as we watched people running to their cars in the pouring rain!) So there are some joys. Unfortunately the elevator is severely out of the way and also very old and scary. The kids would much rather climb the kajillion flights of stairs (concrete, so also little scary – both Julia and Ethan have goose eggs on their foreheads at present). We don’t have a key to our rooms, but a technically advanced card key. Very not handy because it keeps having to be reprogrammed and it is hard to keep track of since it can’t hang out with the rest of my keys on the easy to find keychain. Yesterday we went down for breakfast – yeah for free breakfasts – and climbed up all the kajillion stairs only to find our key card wasn’t working. Down we go to have the front desk to re-program it and the up again. I think we climbed the stairs up and down about 9 times yesterday… which resulted in ALL of us taking an afternoon nap! I worried I would lose track of the kids running through the halls here… but, like any castle there are cameras EVERYWHERE… so the princess and princes are scared out of their wits to be caught by security for running or behaving like anything other than pure royalty.

I could go on, and I should…but it’s been forever since I posted anything so I’ll post this. One last thing… check out the royal bathtub!!! (We only have a shower, but the boys were not impressed so I followed my friend Joy’s advice – thanks Joy – and got a big rubbermaid tub to fill and bathe them in).
Note: things are also royally expensive here, which is a royal pain in the royal --- ahem --- that tub was $10 – how much does it cost where you are?

Stay tuned for more adventures!