Kasie Savage: (almost) Mother of the Year

Christmas is less than 2 weeks away - yikes.  If you're doing a mental tally of your gift giving and it has as much "wow" factor as fish-faced selfie, you need to consider stepping it up (big-time) in the stocking-stuffing department.  After all, for many, it's the opening of the stockings that brings the most excitement anyway! You know I love supporting Canadian businesses and you know that I love great, unique finds that are not mass-market items.  Here I have curated a group of great stocking stuffer ideas that will wow and surprise even the most grizzled of family grinches.  In fact, I think most of these items would make great stand-alone gifts too!!! BEST STOCKING STUFFERS  (TO MAKE UP FOR LACK-LUSTRE GIFTS UNDER THE TREE) Click here to watch my segment on CTV's Canada AM! Canadian Companies Hillberg & Berk : From Regina, this handmade semi-precious jewellery company is owned and operated by women.  Fast becoming one of Canada's best-kno

Just as soon as our clocks fall back, I like to spring forward and soak up every single merry second of the holiday season.  It's just so much easier than starring bleakly at a cold, damp, darkened, leafless streetscape at 5pm dreaming of April. In our family, once the Halloween candy is still freshly wedged into tiny molars, the kids are already addressing envelopes to the North Pole and dotting the "i"s on their wish-list of Apple products.  As parents, we know that December means answering the thrice daily question, "how many more days until Christmas????"  A Christmas calendar makes the countdown (or count-up) fun and making your own reusable calendar can be a really nice way to kick off a new tradition as well as usher in the festive season.  With budgets in mind (you won't need a credit card for these purchases!), I've come up with two easy (I promise), fast (I promise) Christmas calendars using supplies that cost less than $30 total- one is f

315 long, cold, endless, bum-numbing hours.   From September to March, each year, it's the same routine, every day of the week and most weekends: load up the gear, get in the car, drive, drive some more, keep driving, arrive at arena early, sit, wait, watch, freeze, cheer, freeze some more, load up gear, get in car, drive, drive and drive some more.  Then repeat. Yes, this is life in Canada as a rep hockey parent, and I am not alone.  If you add up the parents of kids in house league hockey, rep hockey, figure skating, speed skating, skating lessons, curling and other ice sports, hundreds of thousands of Canadian parents are doing much of the same - essentially freezing their baguettes off for what can amount to (in my case) 315 hours, 13 entire days of one's life spent in an arena (not including playoffs and tryouts and summer camps).  And it is awesome!!! If you're spending approximately 11.25 passive hours per week in a vast, steel, fluorescent-lit meat-locker des

            As far as my three boys are concerned, there are only 2 days in a calendar year that matter: Christmas and Halloween.   And they’re not alone - according to consumer stats, Halloween ranks second in retail spending.   That’s HUGE!!!   From Halloween recipes, to drinks, to décor, to costumes, wedding-themes (huh?), licensed merchandise, how-to-videos, pyrotechnics, outdoor lighting, inflatables and more, Halloween is no longer a one-night trick-and-treat. Used to be, when I was a kid, Mom took an old worse-for-wear bed-sheet (likely one that you permanently soiled during that nasty stomach flu), cut out jagged eye holes and a mouth, tossed it over your head casually and announced, “you’re a ghost – that’s your costume”.   One pumpkin on the porch was standard décor and kids excitedly tossed their pillows loose from their cartoon-themed pillowcases with the intention of filling them until the seams burst with good ol’ fashioned stick-to-your-silver-fillings candy.     

We Canadians spend so much time indoors hiding from the miserable cold, that once the sun shows itself, we hit the patios, terraces, backyard decks and cottage docks with a vengeance. A bevie in hand and munchies in reach, there's nothing quite like an alfresco dining experience to rejuvenate the soul and boost any mood.  So why then do so few of us picnic?  If your definition of a picnic is eating a 12"cold-cut combo on a park bench, let me redefine the meaning for you: A picnic is a pre-planned, eating and/or drinking experience, typically between two or more people, in a casual outdoor setting surrounded by an inspiring natural environment (think trees, not traffic), whereby food and drink are toted to said location in a packed carry-all supplying linens, edibles, beverage, possibly tunes (via portable speaker or you and your acoustic guitar) with the intent to relax and soak in conversation and scenery. Now if the idea of picnicking sounds like it's going to me

Why is it that it's SO easy to shop for Moms, but when it comes to Dads you always find yourself scanning a 96 piece ratchet set (just like the one you bought last year) or combing the shirt-n-tie aisle with a glazed-over look in your eye.  B-O-R-I-N-G.  I mean come on, this guy helped to create you!  Get him something with a little oomph!  I recently took to the park, streets, sidewalk and backyard and asked a bunch of cool-looking local Dads what they desire more than anything in the world for Father's Day.  Their responses were all identical.  It was almost as if they had formed a secret society of listless, down-in-the-daddy-dumps Dads, some night, in some garage, where they pledged to only ask for one simple thing - the whole strength in numbers routine.  100% of respondents replied: "All I want on Father's Day is for an entire day to myself where nobody barks orders at me, or has me working on a project or running an errand.  I want just a single day to do what

Along with a lifetime of stress, worry, stretch-marks and that abdominal pooch that won't go away, becoming a Mom entitles you to everlasting appreciation by each and every one of your offspring, to be celebrated in uber-thoughtful ways on Mother's Day!  Or at least that's the fantastic ideal.  In reality, most mothers of underage kids spend Mother's Day doing everything that they did the day before Mother's Day...but often in larger doses:  more cleaning because the whole fam-damily is coming over, more shopping because now we need to feed a crowd, more cleaning because there are more people we need to prove we aren't slobs to....ugh.  I'm not proclaiming to be a Mom's Day clairvoyant here, but even though there are millions of different Canadian Moms across this vast land, I can tell you with unfaltering, 100% certainty what NO MOM WANTS for Mother's Day: More cooking, cleaning and food shopping A package of frozen meat submarine sandwiches

Your neighbours are doing it.  Your friends are doing it.  Your spouse has probably done it, online, more than once, without you even knowing...  Canadians coast-to-coast are saving and earning big-time bucks via our thriving second-hand economy.  To celebrate 10-years in the business, Kijiji, an online marketplace for buyers and sellers of second-hand goods, recently put out some very impressive facts about what Canadian second-hand shopping practices look like.  Check out these stats: Every minute , Canadians spend approximately $57,000 on second-hand products. The second-hand economy is worth $30 billion annually (15% of the value of new goods purchased). 2 ads are placed on Kijiji.ca every second ! The average Canadian grants a second life to 76 products annually via buying, selling, trading or donating (the highest numbers being in the Prairies and Alberta - nice going, guys!!) The average family of four saves $1150/year buying second-hand. So what the heck is your

I come from a very long line of pranksters, hams, wise-guys (and gals), jokers and all around good-time-Charlies.  No, none of us has ever made a buck off of it, but a far better payday is knowing that you got someone good - real good!!!  Example: When I'd have a group of friends over as a teen, I'd pre-hatch a plan with my Mom whereby she'd storm into the room we were loitering in and just yell and scream and berate me whilst wielding a potato masher...ahhh...the look on their faces...priceless!  Although that brand of humour might be somewhat, unconventional, isn't laughter the absolute best?  A good laugh can break the tension, ease the pain, mend a wound, halt the tears, fill an awkward silence and just feels so darn-tootin' good.  In fact, my desire to laugh is so great that if I look back over my entire lifetime and add up the number of non-funny friends that I have, it equals zero .  I  don't trust people without laugh-lines.  If you're over 30

In October, five friends and I packed our bags and jet off to sunny Palm Springs for a long-overdue girls' getaway.  I went in search of laughs, relaxation, shopping and adventure, but what I really discovered was far more thrilling and rare - it was Fun Kasie!! A lost relic of my past, Fun Kasie was benched years ago as Wife Kasie and Mom Kasie filled the top spots in my household roster.  Sitting idle for so long, Fun Kasie was all but forgotten until the right mix of girly stupidity, lack of responsibility, freedom to do what one pleases and a hint of vodka came into play.  The group of girls I was with had never met Fun Kasie before; having only had met them in the Wife Kasie era, they were instantly impressed and proudly renamed this vacation version of me, "VaKasie".  VaKasie did all sorts of crazy stuff - went without makeup, let her hair air-dry, wore a bathing suit in public, laughed until she had to race to the washroom, used expletives liberally, was the TMI

My husband Brad has always firmly maintained a strict "no Hallmark holidays" stance.  Especially when it comes to Valentine's Day.  When we were hot and heavy in the early days (literally hot and heavy - post-University chub and excessively sweaty - not pretty), he would declare proudly, "why does anyone need to remind me to love and treat you special on one day of the year when I love and treat you special everyday?" "Wow, what a hopeless romantic!", you're likely thinking.  Or, to play devil's advocate here,  "what a hopeless cheapskate trying to avoid buying a V-day gift for yours truly". Thought I'd offer both perspectives for you.  Anyway, to get back on track, he did sort of have a point.  I say sort of, because when two people are in a fresh-out-of-the-oven romance, every day does feel extra sweet and special.  Flowers "just because they made me think of you", back rubs "just because you work soooo hard se

I don't know what's worse, shopping for bathing suits, or shopping for jeans.  Both experiences are right up there with pap-smears and cleaning up vomit on my list of ugh -worthy activities.  Shopping for bathing suits and jeans both leave you frustrated and deflated, shimmying into too-tight or slithering into too-loose fabrics, discovering new areas of your body that have either drooped downwards or disappeared completely off the face of the earth (i.e. my waist and confidence). Ultimately, both have you fleeing the dressing room empty-handed and heading straight for the nearest fro-yo shop for a double-scoop of frozen therapy.  Let's face it, after kids, our bodies just aren't the same as they were pre-kids.  As each of my three boys descended down the birth canal, other body parts followed suit: boobs, bum, waist...they all bought a one-way ticket south from Taut-ville to Mom-ville.  But just because your body is different, doesn't mean that you can't loo