Photography and brush painting are my individual hobbies. H is a jazz musician so music is his. I'm also into cooking. We use to play disc golf together.

With two toddlers together hobbies are hard. We do get a monthly date night.

Our house is a work in progress. H was a carpetner for a while and I have been with Habitat for 10 years. So we can do a lot of it ourselves.

I read anything and everything. I have a macabre interest in genocide. Trying to understand it, I guess. I just wrote a term paper about whether or not the British and later Canadian governments commited genocide with respect to Aboriginal people. I got an A.

I also sew. I make baby slings. I am a huge advocate for attachment parenting.

I don't know if fitness regimes counts as a hobby, but I was getting into Crossfit. I'd love to paste a link here for you, but donknow how to do that. If you aren't familiar with it, search "what is crossfit" on you tube. I haven't been able to get there much lately b/c of work and kids. There is no childcare.

I am not artistic or crafty at all.

I also love gardening, but am in a rental row house so I now concentrate on house plants. I usually end up with too many, so I get them full and beautiful then give them away.

We did what our Pediatrician called modified AP. Basically we did AP when home with kids and chose a nuturing focused in home daycare over a center.

I used to play classical violin and take art lessons. I really loved the ceramics class I took for an art requirement in college, would love to get back into that. I enjoy photography, although I'm not a pro by any stretch, and especially love to play with pictures in photoshop. I love to play in my garden and go for light hikes/walks with my friends, and play with tools (i.e., building things around the yard and house with my H). Shopping with my mom at thrift stores is another fun thing, and I love getting good deals. My H and I used to be gamers together, now we just don't have the time. But we are very much sci-fi/fantasy, comedy, action movie bums, and love going to baseball games and watching football (go Cowboys!). I used to run cross country in high school and I'm trying to work out regularly again, only I have a bad knee that is getting in the way of that.

I build stuff, timber Canoes and kayaks mainly. The last year or so, have been renovating my home, built and installed a new kitchen, working on fret work in the living rooms area at the moment.

As for real hobbies, Paddling, flat, white water and in the ocean. One is as good as the other for me. Landscape and macro photography is a big interest. Oh yeah, and camping in the bush or in the mountains. We are blessed to have an abundence of both in this area so the options are allmost endless.

My partner, Evie has similar interests and we do them all together.

If I told you, I'd have to kill you (and I need the friends)!

Ha! No! Please... come kill me. Let me just look up my address for you and give you a name. Er. I mean. MY name. Suuure. ;)

@hairymick : I love that you have similar interests as Evie. Paddling definitely seems like it'd be enjoyable with good company. The huz and I are big time campers and before I had a herniated disc and surgery to correct it, we were big into backpacking. I still haven't been cleared for packing, yet, even though surgery was 9 months ago. Everyone's trying to keep me healthy, but I sure do miss getting out in the wild.

@Enca : Thrift store shopping for the win! We used to hit all the thrift stores once or twice a month when we lived in Sacramento. There aren't any decent thrift stores around where we live, now, unfortunately. When you say "gamers" do you mean RPGs? If so, which ones? H and I played everything from Shadowrun to Rifts to D&D to homebrew games our friends made. (I even got credited as being a tester for one of my friends RPG's in the book he had published. So neat!) Time isn't so much of an issue as finding other people (who aren't teenage kids, ha) to play with.

@mim : I go through phases of reading where I gobble up anything/everything around me. Someone recently asked me how many books I read in a year, and the answer isn't that impressive since I have so many months of "down" time where I'm not obsessively reading, but I'd still say I plow through a dozen or so books a year. Most of my friends are/were AP families, and several home school. I was somewhere between full AP and mainstream, which meant I was comfy hanging with just about any type of families without being uncomfy. I've heard good things about Crossfit (definitely familiar with it because of H's job) but I just don't have that level of commitment. I'm such a weenie when it comes to exercise.

@Lotus : Your huz is a musician!?! OK I have some serious envy going on. How awesome is that!? I envy you two toddlers, too, but only because I have SUCH "toddler fever" right now. (Notice I didn't say BABY fever... I'm not a fan of babies, but if they started at 18 months, I'd have had a dozen of them.) I do remember how exhausting it is and how there's constant clutter/mess and I don't miss those parts.

Thanks for responding, all. It's neat to get a peek into the inside of other people's lives.

Allora - we played mmorpgs, when we were dating and first married we played Dark Age of Camelot, we were totally addicted. lol We played WoW for a little bit but it just didn't do a lot for us. We did a D&D type campaign with our friends in college, and the one who was GM ended up working on Halo 3. My husband plays FPS like Modern Warfare and Battlefield 3, and we've played most of the Halo games (<3).

We only have a couple of decent thrift stores near us, but my mom's area has a ton that she hits every time there is a senior discount day (she doesn't care that she's over 50 or over 60 as long as she gets a deal haha). The secret also is to go to thrift stores like Goodwill in big cities because a lot of times wealthy people get rid of really good stuff and take it there. One of my friends/neighbors is an extreme couponer, it's crazy the deals she gets.

I'm also big on attachment parenting, but not an extremist. All of our kids were co-sleepers at some point or another, and I am a stay-at-home mom so they get me full time. I'd say I'm pretty middle of the road, too, although it did make me a little uncomfortable that one of my neighbor friends didn't stop breastfeeding her younger daughter until she was like 3 1/2.... lol

Oh man... I remember days of my WoW addiction. Before that it was Guild Wars. Before that Neverwinter Nights... good times, good times. :)

H's grandmother is big into coupons, which is awesome - except - and I mean this in the nicest way - she totally fills her basement with *crap* that no one wants/needs. Who cares if you get 4 bottles of ranch dressing for 37 cents if no one will eat the stuff!? Now you have not just one bottle to throw away but FOUR. Yeesh. On the flip side, I've seen people get some hecka awesome deals and lower their food budget by 2/3 just by coupons/bargain shopping/bulk shopping. I love watching other people do it, but I don't have the organization and planning necessary to make it work.

BF til 3 1/2? Oh. HONEY. One of my friends bf her kid to almost six *and would have kept going* but she was trying to get pregnant. Whatever. Her kid is no better and no worse than mine, so clearly it didn't make much difference one way or the other. I'd still co-sleep if the kids would. They're SO not having it. My youngest used to sleep with me when H would work long stretches of graveyard shifts, but no more. I always had very supportive pediatricians when it came to co-sleeping, with the exception of one who said, "Well, do what you want, but I don't see the point except to use as birth control." Hahah. He didn't get all psycho "OMG U WIL KIL UR KID!" on us the way some folks have.

And um, yeah, no, we didn't kill any of our kids thankyouverymuch.

(Heck, we didn't even want to til they started reaching the tween stage... well, except for the one time with the Hershey Syrup River... or the time they tried to climb the Christmas tree... or maybe the time they tipped the dresser over to make a fort... )

Annnyway...

Allora- i bet you a trip to my house and being submersed into the chaos that is a 3 year old boy and 20 month old girl will get you over that toddler envy real quick. LOL

My two are at the "fight over everything then be cute as all hell then fight some more stage."

If it wasn't for doctors and books telling me this is normal I would be really concerned about the bipolar nature of a toddler.

Ohhh. No. I would PAY to be immersed in that. As long as after I put in eight or ten hours I could go home and sleep after. Heh. The "on call" all night thing you can keep, as well as toddler's innate sense of crack of dawn. I'll pass on those. But hey - from 8am to 8pm I'm all yours. Soo love that age. Even the bapping each other upside the head with toys and total melt downs. :)

I absolutely love to read about anything and everything and since I got a kindle I read even more. I love fiction and science related books. (Origin of the species is one of my favorites) I also love books about sports (football mostly) I read The Blindside way before it was a movie....I actually was confused about how they made it into one because the book is mainly about the evolution of the left tackle position ( the Guy that protects a quarterback's blindside- unless he's left handed ) especially after Lawrence Taylor came on the scene and started really hurting QBs. That would make a pretty boring movie I suppose so they focused on the story of Michael Oher.

My husband and I are both avid football fans so we go to games and watch together on Sundays
We are also both certified scuba divers but we only get to do that on vacations to warmer places.

Well I'll tell you what I'm into too. I like running but my yoga teacher says it doesn't help you to stay calm because it releases stress hormones as part of the fight-or-flight response so maybe I'm gonna take to walking instead. I like yoga. I love reading coz I like the silence but I just left my book group because the vibe has changed and I get a bit bored of the conversation now. I like throwing dinner parties for groups of friends. I'm going to go to some meditation sessions on anger in the new year at the local buddhist centre. I've done a little before but would like to learn it in more depth.

Oh, I miss Yoga. I haven't gotten back into it at all since having my stupid disc removed. I never enjoyed running - I guess it's pretty common that FMS sufferers don't get "runners high" - that definitely fits me. Even when I was running a mile+ every day, I never got any joy/thrill/good feeling from it. Yoga, though... yessss I loves me mah Yoga. Very calming. Very centering. And yay for flexibility and strength, as well.

It makes sense why your yoga teacher would recommend calming stuff for you, but if you enjoy running, I think the overall health benefits probably outweigh the "stress" reaction. Stress (in moderate amounts) is good for us. I s'pose it depends on whether or not you feel like it's making you feel worse?

I only got "runner's high" toward the end of intense workouts and races, never during regular runs. It is a little hard on my knees right now (mostly my retarded left knee) so I use the elliptical machine these days which I *love*. I've had anxiety disorders diagnosed since I was 17 and running was something that really helped with the fight or flight response for me... doing cross country and track was as much social as it was physical, and it was a great way to run off the extra adrenaline and energy that built up quickly for me in addition to being surrounded by wonderful people (runners are the nicest athletes, seriously).

cheaterssuck - what teams do you follow? We are Cowboys fans first and foremost, then Seahawks and Broncos. Diehard haters of the Eagles, Giants, and Steelers. :)