Some news to share!

Alan and I feel that it is probably time to share our big news with everyone - especially since it really is no longer possible to keep private without many questioning looks. We are excited to share that we are expecting our second baby as of February 2nd, 2012! I am now four months pregnant, back into the stretchy pants (which I despise) and I am happy to say that the 24 hour a day nausea is starting to subside - finally! Ewan is also very excited with the idea of a baby, kisses my belly each morning and also thinks that he has a baby in his belly too!

Now after the congratulations, I know that the first question on many of your minds is 'who will be teaching my child?' Well I do have a plan in place as well as a wonderful team of experienced staff that I am confident will continue to run A Gym Tale seamlessly and will win all of your children over as they have over the past three years. And as always I can always be contacted directly by email.

With regards to the Gym & Music classes, I do plan on working straight through my pregnancy until the very end of January. I will be running the first 6 weeks of the winter Gym & Music play classes - I make no guarantees that I will actually be able to get up from circle time, but I will be there! And then one of the girls will finish the session for me continuing on with all of my class plans. I will then be returning to teach all of the Spring session classes, most likely with the baby in a sling (yay, no need for a doll for the baby class!)

As for the Nursery School program, I will start to step back in January as Chrissy, a teacher who has been with us for the past three years, is returning from her maternity leave. Come the Spring I will be back part time in a 'supervisory' position.

We are very excited to share this news with everyone and I look forward to sharing stories of the pregnancy with all of you as well as hearing about all of your transitions from a one child family to two.

An enjoyable Sunday at home

After spending the morning at the dog park with both Ewan and Sidekick running around for a solid hour we made our way back home with the dog and the boy fast asleep. I was then free to take some time to go through the veggie garden which has been very good to us this summer with an abundance of carrots, yellow beans, broccoli, snow peas, spinach, onions, zucchini and now tomotoes galore. I spent the afternoon taking on the challenge of making homemade tomato sauce in order to freeze for the craziness of going back to work in the Fall - which as much as I have missed everyone, I have also really enjoyed my time off! Making the sauce was a surprisingly easy task - peeling the tomatoes were no problem, I decided to skip seeding them - next time I will try this. But then I just added all sorts of fresh veggies and herbs (carrots, onions, oregano, basil) that we had growing - making sure to puree it all so Alan will never find out vegetables were used! Dinner will be served in about an hour and the house smells amazing and I probably have enough sauce for 4-5 cans just from this batch.


I have really started getting inspired to cook and make more creative meals. The past week I have also started reading up on bento boxes and the hundreds of creative lunch ideas for kids and Ewan is loving them all. One mom from nursery school this year inspired me with all of her creative snack ideas. The idea is to make everything is small portion sizes and in creative designs and shapes. I have ordered my bento boxes so that I am ready for Fall lunch making (I have to find some way to make this task 'exciting'!). For lots of ideas just google bento.

Hiring Time!

The past week has been busy with interviews - meeting with 17 new potential members of A Gym Tale! We had some really great candidates and it was a difficult choice to narrow it down to 4 new party hostesses and a new nursery school and after school teacher - which is always a good thing to have lots of great people applying. Now this week I am undertaking the challenge of meeting with everyone for orientations and beginning training. Don't worry - the quality of parties and camps will not diminish at the least - no one will ever have a party host who is not trained to our standards. Quite the opposite actually, for the month of August and some of September, parties and campers will get to enjoy all their 'old' favourite hostesses as well as get to meet a new member of the team who will be mentoring with our senior staff.

It is an exciting time of year as we bring on new staff, but also a difficult one as we say goodbye to some very loyal and dedicated members of our team who are going on to school outside of Ottawa or their careers of choice post graduation. Alan and I are very proud to have the opportunity to work with so many wonderful members of the team for usually one full year and most often several years. It is also great to see how much pride and ownership our staff take in A Gym Tale and how serious they all take their 'mentoring' roles in training the new staff. It is a great relief as a business owner to know and see that your staff do actually care about your business and that they take their jobs as entertainers and teachers very 'seriously' and it is their own goal to create the very best birthday party or the greatest camp day ever!

So we welcome our new team members and we wish our current staff members leaving us the very best of luck and great success!


One last note - the only area that I am struggling to fill is our Princess character visits - so if you know of any potential princess's (especially a sleeping beauty), please send them my way!