Blogging for Mississauga Kids…

According to Wikipedia:

In most of Canada, Family Day is a statutory holiday  occurring on the third Monday in February. This corresponds with Presidents Day in the United States. In the provinces of Manitoba and Prince Edward Island, the statutory holiday on this date is instead termed Louis Riel Day and Islander Day, respectively.

And…

After Dalton McGuinty’s appointment as premier was supported by the election, McGuinty advised the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario   David Onley  to establish Family Day on 11 October 2007, with the first being observed on 18 February 2008. Its creation raised Ontario’s number of public holidays to nine per year, Unionized workers whose collective agreements do not yet include this holiday will continue to work on Family Day.

My Husband, ever the cynic, loves to joke about this holiday.  “They should call it:  Please Oh Please Vote For Me and I’ll Give You a Day Off in February Just Like the American’s Have Day.” Which refers of course to the above paragraph.

My 16 year old son does not care how it came about.  He does not care why it came about.  He does not care what it is suppose to celebrate.  He is however delighted that he can sleep in and does not have to go to school.

I however find this newly generated holiday quite interesting. It is interesting to me that the holiday also arrives close to Valentine’s Day.  When I was young and in love Valentine’s Day was all about doing romantic stuff with your boyfriend and dinner out and roses and candy.  I’m older now, and still in love, but once you have kids past the age of 2 it becomes more about them.  You find yourself hanging heart shaped cling-ons on the big glass patio door.   You make heart shaped pancakes for breakfast.  You help them fill out the little Valentine’s Day Cards for their class.  Rolling Family Day and Valentine’s Day up into one long weekend Family Love Fest is certainly an appropriate way to go.

The first year it was held it seemed no one knew quite what to do with themselves.  That is slowly changing as families and businesses start to  form new traditions.  The City of Mississauga has really stepped up to fill a void.  Many of the usual fun places to go will be closed that day, but it is the perfect day to set aside to get out and get active with your kids.  If you check our website you will find an article with some great ideas on Family Day Activities in Mississauga.

As we explore this new holiday families will begin developing traditions of their own.  Our family went up to the cottage  for the last 2 Family Days.  It is more like luxury camping in the winter.  There is no running water.  We bucket water up from a hole my husband drills in the lake so we can flush the toilet.  We do have electric heat, the refrigerator, stove and the tiny TV that is not hooked up to cable all work.  We read books, play board games, and force our son to watch old black and white movies.  (Because of this he knows that:  “Badges?  We don’t need no stinking badges!” is not an original Cheech and Chong line, but actually comes from the 1948 movie “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” with Humphry Bogart.)

This year however we will be staying in Mississauga.  My son is taking his WSI (Water Safety Instructors) course with the city and needs to be in town Sunday afternoon.  And that’s okay!  The Olympics are going to be starting that week and we are going to love watching those on our high def TV in the city.  So I think I’ll cook up something yummy for dinner (TBD) and I’ll take some time to make a home made chocolate cake with white icing in my heart shaped cake tins.  It’s going to be a cozy relaxed Olympic Family Valentine at our house!

What does Family Day mean to you?  What will you be doing?  If you leave us a comment about Family Day below AND fill out our contest form you’ll be entered to win a Playdium family prize pack of 4 X 160 credit Playcards valid anytime!  For rules and additional details check our Mississauga Kids Contest Page!

I just got a call from the Giuseppe Agrippa the Landscaper working on my Mississauga project. He was having trouble sourcing a particular plant. It seems that Jodi Liptrott who designed the layout and chose the plants for my landscaping project chose a plant called Japanese Spurge to place under my new ivory silk lilac tree. She told me it would look great and spread nicely. I never bothered to look it up , trusting her to know what was best.

I’ve looked it up.

Never did I imagine that Japanese Spurge was what I grew up calling Pachysandra.

Never did I imagine the flood of memories about my family, especially the women, that would come flooding back to me with this discovery.

Through out my life I have been surrounded by this plant! Now we are using it in my Mississauga Landscaping project!

I grew up in an old farm house in the Town of Montgomery, New York. It was a big run down house that my parents bought as their second home moving us out of the City of Newburgh and into the country where we would have space to run and play without getting into too much trouble. We had about 2 acres to run wild in. There was a farm house in front, a large garage with an attic that we would use as a club house, and a dangerous dilapidated barn that would later be torn down and rebuilt as a barn like structure for my maternal grandparents to live in.

Run wild we did and we got into trouble too, but not too much! I remember my brother and I pulling my sister up after her leg fell through the floor of the second floor of the barn once. We were forbidden to be up there of course. My brother actually fell out of the second story loft and onto a cement slab once when he was exploring on his own. He did not even tell me, his big sister, about that till months later. He said he was peering over the edge and fell, woke up we guess moments, minutes, or more later, and did not tell anyone because he did not want to get into trouble. That of course explains a lot about my brother! ;-p

But I digress… I started talking about the Japanese Spurge that is to be planted in my new front yard landscaping project. Why all these memories are coming back is that every house I ever lived in had Pachysandra on site. The house in Montgomery had it all round the base of the house on most sides, around many of the trees, along the path from the house to the barn that was later my grandparent’s home. There were jars of it rooting on the kitchen window sill from my earliest memories. Where ever nothing else would grow in went this plant.

When I married ,(21 years ago this week!) my reception was held in the back yard of the old farm house. My mother, father, sister, grandmother and I began working on sprucing up the landscaping that Spring. My brother dodged the chore, he way away serving in the U.S. Navy on a nuclear submarine. He always managed to avoid the fun family landscaping projects! We began the process if pulling out the pachysandra from the areas it had overtaken and using those to root in old milk jugs to fill in areas we thought needed filling in. There were jam jars of pachysandra on the kitchen window, jugs of pachysandra on the screen porch. There was pachysandra growing in a vase in my grandmother’s house in her bathroom! It was taking over! I remember asking my mom and grandmother “Why don’t we just buy a few flats and move on!” They scolded me, “Are you kidding me! Do you know how much that would cost!”

Later as newly weds the home we owned had a very small shady back yard. Guess what we did? We broke out the old milk jugs and went over to my parents house and took clippings from here and there and lived with milk jugs full of rooting Pachysandra all winter long till we could plant it in the Spring. After our son was born when my husband changed jobs and we moved to Vermont there was pachysandra already planted there under the evergreens by the woods.

And so this week I find myself buying pachysandra. I know I’ll never walk by that greenery without thinking of my Mom and my Grandma and of all the houses and memories. I’m laughing through the tears imaging what Mom and Grandma would say about me buying Pachysandra. (Or should I say Japanese Spurge.)

Jodi M. Liptrot of JML Landscape Design helped us with the design. http://www.jml-landscapedesigner.ca/

Giuseppe Agrippa from Vaughan Landscaping is our contractor. http://www.vaughanlandscaping.ca/

UPDATE:  We were NOT happy with the quality of the work performed by Vaughan Landscaping.  Check our comment below for details.