by DaniGirl on February 8, 2010
in Lucas
My dear darling Lucas,
You are TWO today! Two years old! My goodness, was it not just last week that you arrived, late and large, to join our family? (And of course, on the other hand, have you not always been with us? How quiet our lives must have been before we had three boys contributing to the cacaphony!)
You, my son, are a delightful child. Smart, sweet and loving, you charm all who know you. You are also stubborn, strong-willed, jealous and territorial. Did I mention stubborn? Not to mention the fact that you’re a bit of a brute, regularly taking on your big brothers and coming out the victor. I’ve stopped protecting you from them and now expend my efforts protecting them from you!
You love to draw and to colour. You astonish me by actually colouring on, if not within the lines of, the images in your favourite Sesame Street colouring book. We no longer put stray papers in the recycling bin but keep them handy for your daily colouring exploits, and I’ve given up on putting the crayons away after each use and simply leave them near the table where you can help yourself. The other day, you turned over a blank page to find the original notice from the big boys’ school and my mouth dropped open in wonder as you started calling out various letters of the alphabet as you scribbled over the text. Not even two yet and you realize the difference between text and images!
Also at not-quite-two, you can count beyond 10, make a pretty good stab at the ABCs and mimic just about any song. I love to listen to you sing yourself to sleep with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Yet, brilliant as you obviously are, you stubbornly refuse to regularly differentiate between your two older brothers. They continue to be the two-headed brother creature with interchangeable names.
You’re a moderately good sleeper, waking occasionally in the night and asking to snuggle into bed with your Daddy, who is far more a sucker than me. You’ve just come through a patch of resisting going to sleep at bed time, but I suffer no delusion that you won’t soon be standing in your crib again, flipping the light switch on and off to get our attention. No bedtime would be complete without a cuddle from Mommy and your precious “blankey and soo”.
My dear Lucas, you are so very two. Terrible twos indeed! But your old mother is getting crafty in her dotage: I’ve learned to ask permission before taking the banana out of the peel before I hand it to you or (god forbid) snapping the cookie in half. I’ve learned that you’ll accept a swap for whatever treasure you’ve acquired (permanent markers and tiny bits of Lego come to mind) without a fight, but you’ll scream blue murder if I simply try to take them away from you. I’ve learned that you may in fact be just barely two, but you think you are the equal of your older brothers and fully entitled to participate in any and all mischief into which they might get.
You love Sesame Street, the Muppets, the Wonderpets, Bob the Builder, Thomas trains and Lego — especially the tiniest not-safe-for-toddlers pieces of Lego. You will play contentedly for long stretches of time, lining up action figures or trains on the edge of a table, and you love to sit on the floor with me passing a train or car or even a ball back and forth. You love books, and while you will occasionally entertain yourself with one, you much prefer to have them read to you. Tristan’s lap is just the right size to accommodate you, but even Simon will give a good stab at narrating the pictures in a book to “read” to you.
You are not particularly fond of strangers, and it amazes me that the third child in any family could be the most shy one. You have a most endearing way of nodding your head solemnly when I ask you something, and an equally adorable way of laughing out a shouted “Yes!!” when you are particularly excited.
Despite your shyness with strangers, you have an entertainer’s love of the spotlight. When you notice you have your family’s attention, you are quite the ham. Your favourite trick lately is to shake your arms with wide eyes to the boys’ laughing exhortation of “show us your muscles!” You are endlessly patient with your brothers’ requests to have you repeat just about anything they can think of: “Lucas, say ‘Mario Brothers.’ Say ‘Luigi’! Say ‘pumpernickel’!” You never seem to tire of this, nor do they.
Sweet Lucas, you are more delightful by the day. Challenging though your capricious moods and vexing needs may be, you more than make up for them with the joy you bring to every moment of our days. Happy birthday, my little one. You are loved.
by DaniGirl on February 6, 2010
in Tristan
Tristan and I are in the car, sitting in the Tim’s drivethrough on the way to skating lessons. We’re listening to one of my favourite radio program on CBC, Terry O’Reilly’s The Age of Persuasion. The episode is about tag lines and slogans.
As it runs through the opening, it plays a series of famous tag lines from past to present, including Obama’s infamous rallying cry of “Yes, we can!”
Tristan says, “Hey, I recognize that guy!”
“I’m sure you do,” I reply. We may be Canadian, but the average school kid can likely name Obama as the President before Harper as the Prime Minister.
“That was Bob the Builder!”
It took me a full minute before I could reconcile his response, and then I couldn’t help but laugh. Loudly.
Can we build it? Yes, we can!
I wonder if Hit Entertainment has filed the copyright violation suit yet?
Now that I’m officially done the 365 project, I don’t carry my camera quite so obsessively as I did before. And yet, I still feel the need to take a picture most days, so the subject matter this week is largely skewed to the close at home.
That’s why you get pictures like this one of Tristan, using the brand new tablet and animation program he got for Christmas. He took to it like a fish to water, and when I commented my amazement on the Flickr picture, a friend said, “Well, of course he’s not afraid of computers and technology. It’s everywhere in his world. You’re not afraid of the refrigerator, are you?” Fave analogy of the year!
Did I mention Lucas loves Sesame Street?
Of course, since it was his birthday, this week’s pictures focus on Simon in particular:
This is my favourite picture of the week, maybe of the month. I saw the light and how it was falling on them and had to move quickly, as I knew they wouldn’t be still for long. I just missed backing up far enough to catch the book at the bottom of the frame, but that’s okay, this one is still close enough to perfect for me.
This is why taking pictures makes me happy! (Coming up with titles for these posts? Not so much!)
When I saw the tear in the knee of Tristan’s gorgeous new Gap cargo pants, I was more than annoyed. I was disappointed, and frustrated. The boy is hard on his clothes. We hand down a lot of t-shirts in my house, but pants rarely survive to have a boy grow out of them. Even with reinforced knees, they get blown out regularly.
So you know what I did? I went to the notions section of Zellers (something about the notions section makes me think of my childhood Saturdays spent at Kmart with my mom and my granny) and I bought a $1.29 iron-on patch kit. Oh yes I did. Eight patches in four colours, I got. And I patched the knees of those gorgeously soft Gap cargo pants, and a pair of black pants that we got for back to school, and just today a pair of blue jeans, too.
I waffled a little bit at first, I admit it. You can see that some of the patch jobs are more, um, subtle, than the others. The brown one was pretty good at first, but now that it’s been washed a few times, it’s starting to fray around the edges. You really can only see the black one if you’re looking for it. There’s nothing discreet about that dark blue patch on the faded denim, though. But you know what? I reclaim patches on the knee in the name of frugality and saving $60 worth of trousers from the scrap heap. Humility be damned, I’ll admit it: I patch my kids’ pants and I’m proud of it.
My grandmother would be proud, too. She used to take all the stitching out of the collars of my grandfather’s shirts, turn it all inside out and sew it back together — on her peddle-powered sewing machine, no less — whenever the collars started to fray. Now *that’s* frugal.
I’m pretty happy with the newly recycled knees, and Tristan is still oblivious enough to be completely unphased by the patches. At around 15 cents a patch, I think that’s a pretty good investment, too. When did patches fall out of favour, anyway? I’m pretty sure I had plenty of them on my knees when I was a kid. Or that might be band-aids I’m thinking of. Now I’m on a mission. Maybe if I go beyond the notions section at Zellers, I can find some high-end patches. Maybe this is the beginning of a patching revolution. Hell, the next thing you know I’ll be darning socks, too!
Well, maybe not.
Wow, can you believe it? Five years ago today, I dipped my toe in the Internet Ocean and have been dog-paddling madly across the sea ever since!
Five years! Wowza. And to celebrate, I dust off an old favourite meme that I’ve done at least two or three times before: the Time Traveler meme. Because that’s what anniversaries for, right? Taking a moment to look back down the path you’ve trod and shaking your head in wonder that you ever made it through at all.
15 years ago today I would have been:
- about a month away from meeting the man of my dreams.
- living in a rented room in a house on Holland Avenue. (It was supposed to be a shared house, but I never really felt like any space except the bedroom was mine.)
- scrambling to find a way for the government to transfer me back to London so I could be near my family.
10 years ago today I would have been:
- starting the first in a series of medical appointments that would result, in about two months, with our official “infertility” diagnosis.
- making arrangements to buy our tiny garden home off Uplands from the landlord we’d been renting from for a year.
- about to start an assignment with Industry Canada, my first official communications position and the first fork in the road that led to my current job.
5 years ago today I would have been:
- starting back to work after a one-year maternity leave with Simon.
- getting organized for Tristan’s first out-of-house birthday party at Cosmic Adventures, at age three.
- sending my very first blog post guilelessly off into the Internet!
1 year ago today I would have been:
- starting back to work after a one-year maternity leave with Lucas.
- coming back to a new job in an area of communications I hadn’t worked in before, in a newly-reduced four-day work week.
- publicly revealing my two-week-old 365 project!
This year I am:
- absolutely delighted with my new job as Web manager for the Army. (Didn’t see that one coming last year!!)
- still searching for that elusive balance between work outside and inside the home, but making progress.
- very, very busy but very, very happy.
Today I:
- am feeling like I’ve got the world by the tail.
- am preparing for a meeting downtown tomorrow with Google. Yes, that Google!
- am wearing a spectacular new purple (!) bra that I acquired this weekend from Bra Chic.
Next year I hope:
- to be a permanent member of the Army team (just waiting for the paperwork to get resolved) and stop feeling like a deer in the headlights every time an issue comes up.
- to continue having fun with my social media, blogging and photography addictions.
- to be doing more or less exactly what I’m doing now — but better!
(You like the vagueness here? Goal-setting was never one of my strengths!)
In five years I hope:
- to be thinking about looking for a four-bedroom house.
- to be more comfortable in a management role.
- to have all three boys in school full-time and finally be free of the trials and tribulations of daycare once and for all!
It’s fun to have a record of these year after year, and see the amazing twists and turns in my own life over the last decade or so. Let me know if you play along!
by DaniGirl on February 1, 2010
in Simon
Happy Birthday, my dearest darling Simon. Today, you are six years old!
My dear Simon, where do I start to tell you how wonderful you are? You are a charmer and a character. If any member of our family goes on to win an Academy Award, or a Genie, or even to star in a local community theatre production, it will be you. You have a flair for the dramatic that shows itself in the way you use your hands and facial expressions to tell a story — and you have a gift for the gab that puts even your loquacious mother to shame. I admit, there are times in the car when I will tell you “Shhh, mommy needs to concentrate on driving and the other cars for a couple of minutes” just for a bit of respite from your endless commentary.
You are a delightful child and a good companion. You’d be quite happy to play a board game with the grown-ups every single day, if only we had the time. You also love the computer and video games, and are newly addicted to all things Mario Brothers. You love Lego and Star Wars and superheros, Webkinz and nintendo and Pokemon. You like to watch everything from Alvin and the Chipmunks to iCarly on TV, and you’ve become quite interested in the Food Network after watching it with the nanny some days!
In the last year, you’ve learned to read and write simple words. When the teacher sent home a note last term saying all the students in your senior kindergarten class would be learning to count to 30, you impressed all of us with your ability to count beyond 100. Which you would do repeatedly, out loud, whenever we let you!
Your sweet personality has endeared you to your chums at school. It still makes me laugh when I pick you up from school to hear the choruses of “Bye Simon!” as you leave the school yard. Your best friends this year are Sophie and Isabella and Diego and Max and Aleric and Tristan.
You do not particularly like vegetables, and you like to negotiate at each meal exactly how many more bites of each vegetable you will be forced to endure. You love caesar salad, though, and onions and guacamole and salsa. You are getting much better at eating some of everything on your plate even when you don’t like it, and I do appreciate that. Not surprisingly, your favourite meal is soft-shelled taco “roll ups”. You also love pepperoni pizza and, sigh, McDonalds.
You are a sweet-natured boy who loves to help out around the house. You are tolerant, to a point, with your baby brother Lucas and locked in an eternal best-friend/nemesis struggle with Tristan. It brings me no end of joy to see the lot of you playing together, which you do often. One of your favourite games around the house is hide and go seek with Granny!
You constantly amaze us with your gracious nature. You love to say “please” and “thank you” and when you are given a gift, you are adorable in your effusive thanks for the gift. Again, your flair for the dramatic is obvious!
Simon, I couldn’t have asked for a sweeter, kinder, funnier fellow for a son. It’s not always easy being stuck in the middle, but you do a great job of finding your own place in the world. I can’t wait to see what the next year holds for you.
Happy birthday, sweet Simon. I do love you so.
