A love letter to Lucas, Age 5

My sweet baby Lucas, you are FIVE years old today!

Snowman fun-5

Lucas, you are growing up waaaaaay too quickly. Not only are you five years old, but you are a clever and advanced for five, so much so that sometimes we forget you’re still wee. And I know for a fact you think you’re a peer to your older brothers, age-gap be damned.

Christmas torture

Lucas, you are a sweet, loving and independent fellow who knows his own mind. Your two favourite things are drawing and jigsaw puzzles, although you like crafts, playdough and video games a lot, too. You go through reams of paper each week, drawing Sonic and puffles and creepers and Willie the cat and whatever else catches your creative fancy. You’re just learning your letters, so what was an independent act is now a joint effort as we spell and you write your captions carefully (and often backwards).

Drawing

You are half way through your first year at school and you seem to love it. You especially love your teachers, and are disconcerted when there’s a substitute in the classroom. Your mates are Cole and Logan and Rachel and Owen, but your best friend seems to be Meg from daycare. You are impatiently counting the days until full-day kindergarten next year, when you get to go to school all day long like your big brothers, but I love our Wednesday afternoons together and I will deeply miss them when you’re at school all day. You’re a great companion on our afternoon errands, and I am so grateful for the time we have been able to spend together.

Off to school

This year, you will have your first big-boy birthday party at A Gym Tale – a little bit delayed, but you’ve showed your usual patience with even that. You are very excited about the super-hero theme, and have said that for your birthday dinner today you want your favourite meal: breakfast with bacon and eggs, toast and homefries, and a chocolate cake with chocolate icing and colourful letters on it.

Boy on a bike

You love music and listening to songs on the iPod. You also love games, online and off, and hold your own playing Uno and Yahtzee and Catan Junior with the family. You don’t have much patience for being babied anymore, even though you still have one foot firmly in preschooler land. Thankfully, you still love Max and Ruby, for example, and Bubble Guppies and Toopy and Binoo, and you still play happily in with your toys in an imaginative world of your own making.

Uno on the porch

You love the library and books of all sorts. This year, we’ve enjoyed discovering the world of Mr Putter and Tabby, and Henry and Mudge, and a slew of Robert Munsch books. And to my amazement, you’ve lately started reading to ME at night, carefully sounding out the words in the first books of the BOB series of books for beginning readers.

Lime Kiln Trail 2012

Of all the boys, I think you loved our cruise this past fall the best. Six months later, you still mention it randomly and out of the blue every now and then: “I miss the boat Mommy. When can we go on another cruise?” You also very much miss our “Manotick pool” this long winter, but after October or November you at least stopped asking about it weekly. You also started swimming lessons this year, and of course you loved them.

Apple picking 2012 (11 of 11)

You are a sweet and loveable boy, Lucas. You are generous with your hugs and kisses, and you seem to be slowly overcoming your deep shyness with strangers. You battle fiercely with your brothers on occasion, especially Simon, and you are a relentless snitch! You are also loquacious and imaginative, and have a wonderful appreciation for a good knock-knock joke.

"Mom, take a picture of us cuz we're cute!"

My sweet Lucas, you bring joy and sunshine into our lives every single day. I still can’t quite believe you’re not a toddler in diapers any more – wasn’t that just yesterday? You’re growing into a fine young boy and we are very proud of you.

DSC_0537

Happy birthday, my darling Lucas!! We love you!

Look up ^^^ there – new blog banners!

I‘ve been hankering for a bit of a bloggy makeover. I’d started playing with new banners three or four times in the last year or so but never managed to put together anything I like. When I started using the new watermark, I thought I’d pull that font into a new header, and eventually I’ll pull the same style into a new header for my photo site as well. (If you’re reading through a feed reader or on the mobile theme, please click through and take a peek! You might also have to clear your cache – my computer keeps calling up some of the old headers even though they’ve been deleted from the server.)

So – what do you think?

There are eight versions right now, and it should randomly rotate through them as you refresh or click on individual blog posts. I pulled together the typewriter and the camera on the left as a bit of a play on the idea of telling stories in words and pictures, and because a blog banner with my Nikon and MacBook didn’t seem quite so visually appealing. And the photograph at the right is just because I like the idea of a bit of variety in the headers, and I think these pictures offer a bit of a riff on my common bloggy themes of family and play and life in Ottawa.

Here are all of the current headers:

Blog banners

Already forgot what the banners used to look like? Here’s the ones I made up back in 2010:

New blog banners

Let me know what you think, I’d love to hear your comments!

Yep, she’s still blogging eight years later

A part of me says, “Wow, has it already been eight years since your first blog post?” And another part of me says, “Seriously, it’s only been eight years? Seems like much longer than that.” Well, in a way I suppose it has been. I created my first website dedicated to photos and stories about the kids back when I was pregnant with Tristan (heh, using my mad HTML skills, Front Page and a Geocities site!) so that’s going back about a dozen years. But it’s been eight years this week since I’ve been on the bloggy bandwagon.

Every couple of years I like to haul out the first meme I ever did (memes were good, eh? I miss memes) and use it as an excuse to wax blatantly nostalgic.

15 years ago today I would have been:

  • About to graduate magna cum laude from the University of Ottawa with a degree in Comms, after going part-time nights for six years to get my degree
  • Freshly appointed to a mid-level program management beancounter job and feeling like a young professional for the first time
  • Living in a tiny third-floor attic apartment in the Glebe with Beloved and starting to think about wedding plans for the next year

10 years ago today I would have been:

  • Getting ready to come back to work after my first year of maternity leave
  • Tempering my dismay at the end of mat leave with huge excitement about coming back to a new job: my first job in public affairs (where I still work today)
  • A couple of months away from finding and buying our townhouse in Barrhaven and then finding out I was pregnant with Simon

5 years ago today I would have been:

  • Hugely pregnant and overdue with Lucas, and liveblogging the lack of labour and then, finally, the labour and arrival of the “player to be named later” (the posts from my pregnancy with Lucas still seem like the glory days of the blog community. I miss those days!)
  • Did I mention hugely pregnant?
  • And overdue?

1 year ago today I would have been:

  • Happy to be back with public affairs, this time managing the social media team (I love my job!)
  • Enrolling “baby” Lucas in junior kindergarten
  • Finding my groove and kicking off a very successful year with the photography business

This year I am:

  • Thinking about blog and website makeovers (now taking suggestions!)
  • Contemplating changing the photography business name
  • Feeling busy and involved but (blissfully!) not overwhelmed… most of the time

Today I am:

  • In the midst of birthday season mayhem
  • Feeling much more confident about my parenting skills than I was 10 years ago
  • Happy

Next year I hope:

  • To have saved enough from the photography business for the full-frame camera I’ve been coveting
  • To do more travel with the family
  • To be done with daycare forever

In five years I hope:

  • To be wrangling with Tristan over getting his (gasp!) driver’s license!
  • To be considering a return to full-time employment (to top up my last years of income before retirement!)
  • To have renovated the kitchen and the basement family room

I was going to include a checklist of which prognostications and goals I got right and wrong in prior years but this is getting long, so I’ll save that for another day.

Funny that I’ve now got blog posts in the archives that cover so many of these highlights! I wonder if I’ll ever get to a version where I say, “15 years ago I launched this blog, using (snicker) a keyboard and a PC!” and we’ll all laugh about how quaintly antiquated it all was?

This week in pictures: winter family fun – and an award!!

How cool is this? I just found out that Postcards from the Mothership won third place in the “Art and Photography” category of the Canadian Weblog Awards!!

2012 Canadian Weblog Awards winners

I had been nominated in three (!) categories: Best Parenting Blog, Best Blog about Life and Best Art and Photography Blog. (And a HUGE thank you to whomever nominated me!) I love the fact that the Canadian Weblog Awards are juried (no grovelling for votes!) and I love love love that I won in the Art and Photography category. Thank you!!!

So, ahem, how about some photos?

On Saturday, we went out to enjoy Manotick’s Shiverfest with a little sledding. What we didn’t realize until after was that the city had closed all its hills because they were so icy. We’d hauled ourselves out in the cold, though, and we had the hill to ourselves for most of the time we were there, so with me playing traffic cop to make sure nobody took off too soon and wiped out a brother, we ended up having a lot of fun.

Shiverfest sledding fun

Shiverfest sledding fun

Listening to Lucas hoot and holler, somewhere between exhilaration and terror, was priceless, as was his bellow of assurance at the bottom of each run. “I’m okay mom!”

Shiverfest sledding fun

The next day Tristan and I braved the cold for a wander around the Lime Kiln Trail. The poor wee birds must have been starving with the recent deep freeze, because I swear we could have just sat in the car and held our hands out the window to feed them. We’ve fed the chickadees many times, and I’ve never seen them so aggressive.

Feeding the chickadees

Feeding the chickadees

The middle bit of the week was a little less photogenic. Tristan put together this “cracker napkin” and I thought it would make a good instagram shot.

Cracker napkin

And there’s always room for a cat-dog shot, right?

Cat's eye view

(I’d like that one a lot more if the light had been a little better and the shot a little less grainy. Oh well.)

And then suddenly, Simon was nine years old!

Happy birthday Simon!

Can I eat my cake now mom?

Doesn’t his expression say “okay mom, one more, but can I eat my cake now please?”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think there is a birthday party at some point today for which I should be getting ready… 😉