From there to here, from here to there, Funny things are everywhere
He’s as tall as me, all lanky legs and limbs, and his hair might be a little longer than I’d keep it if I were in charge of the scissors, but he’s still willing to humour me and my relentless camera.
I love that you can see vestiges of the toddler he was and hints of the man yet to come.
Wait, what? I have a TEENAGER in the house? How could my sweet baby Tristan possibly be 13 today?
Tristan, it has been a great year for you. So many big changes, so many big moments, and so delightful to watch you grow from a little boy to a man-child.
And when I say you’re growing up, I really mean UP. I’m still a meagre inch or so taller than you but not for long, and your feet are already well bigger than mine and almost bigger than your dad’s. You like being as big as the high school kids, though you don’t seem to use your size for nefarious purposes. Yet.
Your spring was filled with adventure as you discovered first that you love to ski and then that you had a talent for running and competed on the school track team for the first time. Who would have ever pegged a child of mine for an athlete? “He runs like the wind!” your proud vice-principal confided to me, an undertone of amazement in his voice.
And then you left grade school behind and graduated from Grade Six! We couldn’t have been more proud to see you earn the Creative Arts award, and even if we didn’t quite understand your teachers’ inside joke about you and not wearing your shoes, your class certainly found it funny.
This year you moved to middle school – a big transition for all of us, but one you seem to have taken in stride. You’re doing well in all subjects, but you seem to be enjoying math and English in particular. Mr Peters assures me with enthusiasm, “Tristan is a math guy!” and Mr Ireland mentioned how much he enjoys your quick wit and that he’s never seen such a dry sense of humour in a Grade 7 before. That’s my boy!
You absolutely have a quirky sense of humour and you take great pride in not following the crowd. You covet weird things like boots up to your hips and a sword and shield and an ocarina, which you got for Christmas. You seem to like the Legend of Zelda and Minecraft in equal measure, but you are also always up for family game night. I loved introducing you to Dungeons and Dragons this year! And you love to express yourself in art, either with a pencil or a set of fabric markers on a t-shirt or with PicCollage.
You are becoming very particular in your preferences. You prefer wooded trails over city sidewalks, cheese pizza over pepperoni, individualism over conformity and comedy over drama. You don’t understand why there are “rules” like boys don’t wear skirts to school. You like to question authority but are not particularly compelled to rebel against it, and you have a strong sense of justice and what is ‘right.’ You’re an irrepressible daydreamer and a bit of a scatterbrain, but you’re also easy going, kind and thoughtful. You are developing a delightful appreciation of beautiful sunrises and picturesque scenes.
You have a lovely gentle touch with animals, and they seem drawn to you. Willie, with whom you share a birthday (happy birthday Willie!) sleeps on your bed most nights, and Bella likes to sleep on you when we watch TV. You loved having Sir Charles the Hedgehog and his Ratty friends visiting us during the March Break last year as much as I did, and you often ask about adding another cat to our menagerie.
Your friends seem to be the same gang as always: Sophie, Theo, Carter, Owen, Ethan and Oreo, and you’ve added a few new ones this year at your new school. The gang will be here today to help you celebrate your birthday, with Monty Python and board games and Super Smash Bros and pizza. Or, as you called it, “just an ordinary day in Tristan’s life.”
In a year filled with awesome moments and milestones, I think my favourite time with you would still be our evening walks with Bella. Your legs are almost longer than mine and I have to work hard to keep up with you, but we have an easy peace between us on those walks that I enjoy more than I could explain. I love chatting with you about your day, telling you stories from my own school days, and exchanging opinions and insights. You’re a clever, quirky and sublimely funny guy, and I’m glad you’re my friend as well as my son.
Happy birthday to my sweet, silly, smart and funny Tristan! I hope this year, your first as a teenager, is full of adventure and discovery and laughter. We love you!
Lucas, my baby boy, today you are seven years old. Not so much a baby anymore, I guess!
Lucas, you are warm and affectionate and curious and stubborn and an incredibly talented artist. You love nothing more in life than a blank page and the time to fill it, and I continue to be blown away by your natural artistic ability. Not only do you draw well from your own imagination, but you can mimic just about any style you see and you can easily reproduce posters, book covers and video game boxes. When I recently took up learning to draw myself and found the process rather tedious, you assured me “it’s a great start Mom! It was hard for me when I started, too – just keep practicing.”
Aside from drawing, you love to play games. Uno, Apples to Apples, Settlers of Catan, Dungeons and Dragons, mancala – you are always the one most willing to play a game with me. You also love Lego and hexbugs and Sonic the Hedgehog and superheroes, and of course you love video games like Minecraft and Super Mario Bros, just like your big brothers. You’ve discovered watching videos on the tablet, and you’d do that for hours sometimes if we let you.
You love to play outside, and you are always willing to go for a walk with Bella in the evenings, even when it’s wintry and cold outside. You also love to go on walks in the woods or to feed the chickadees. In the summer, your favourite place in the world is in the swimming pool – diving off the diving board and swimming in the deep end.
I have been sad to see you in a different class this year from your friends Owen and Cole, but I think you are finally starting to get comfortable with some new friends. This year you have invited Owen and Cole, along with Matthew, Hudson, Adam, David and Chris, to your birthday party. You insisted on a party at your house, so we turned it into an art and cupcakes party. You, of course, can hardly wait!
This year, you started grade one. In just a year, you have gone from reading your first complete book (“If you give a pig a pancake”) to reading dozens and dozens of books. You are reading way above your grade level, but you seem to like math and French in school as well. You have a quick and curious mind, and you absorb new information like a little sponge. You have a bit more of a tendency toward mischief than I’ve seen in your brothers, but I think that may be partly from boredom. I still wonder if I didn’t do you a disservice by not pushing harder to get you skipped ahead a year in Kindergarten.
Your favourite foods are peanut butter, just about any fruit, goldfish, pizza (but with the cheese peeled off), edamame, and tacos. You’re still a bit of a picky eater, but I have confidence that you’ll come around soon. You also love to help, whether it be setting the table, putting away the silverware or acting as my sous chef.
Lucas, you are a delightful little boy who loves to laugh and who brings joy to us every single day. I enjoy our “coffee and newspapers” mornings and silly games like “pee race” more than you can guess. I hope this is your happiest birthday and best year ever.
Happy 7th birthday, my sweet boy. We love you!
For his birthday party this year, Lucas was insistent on an at-home party. Really, I asked. Are you SURE? I am always willing to throw money at an on-location party, partly so someone else will have to deal with the mess and the noise and the chaos, and party because I am just not the most organized person in the world sometimes and planning a party is a lot of work.
But Lucas was sure, and that’s how we ended up with seven very excited six and seven year olds in the house this afternoon for an art-themed birthday party. If you know Lucas, the art theme isn’t much of a surprise. You know what? It was noisy, and it was messy, but it was also a lot of fun. What sweet, funny kids they were.
I was a little worried that we wouldn’t have enough to keep them occupied, and my clever friend Sarah had suggested all sorts of fun party games to keep the kids busy and engaged. In the end, things went so quickly and so well that we didn’t even have time to play them.
So here’s how to host your own at-home party for seven year old boys without losing your sanity.
Step one: a board game. A Lego board game, to be specific. We picked up a copy of the Lego Creator game after Tristan’s awesome Lego birthday party a few years ago, and the boys played in teams of two.
They loved it, but we ran late and had to hurry a bit toward the end.
Step two: make-yer-own t-shirts. Tristan got a set of fabric markers and a couple of blank t-shirts for his last birthday, and since then the boys have had fun making their own t-shirt designs. I picked up a handful of small plain white tees and bought a new set of fabric markers. I was afraid that boys so young wouldn’t take to it or take more than a couple of minutes before they were bored, but they really got into it.
Of course, I probably should have seen this coming. (Sorry moms!)
Ah, boys.
Step three: decorate your own cupcake. I picked up colourful sprinkles, silver dragees, gummy worms, smarties, skittles and gummy frogs at the Bulk Barn and Beloved baked up the most delicious cupcakes ever and frosted them in rainbow hues.
I was going to put out little bowls to share all the decorations, but then I thought about seven sets of dirty fingers and virus season, and decided to make each kid his own plate with a wee bit of each of the decorations. I am getting smarter with each party, I tell you!
And all that sugar had pretty much exactly the effect you’d expect.
Step four: sing happy birthday, and have fun trying to blow out a sparkler.
Step five: while the kids are opening the presents, stash each boy’s t-shirt in his loot bag with a Kinder egg, a box of mini-pencil crayons and a treat-sized playdough for the easiest! loot! bags! ever!
Step six: hand off sugar-crazed children to their parents and enjoy the relative peace and quiet.
How did we ever think our house was noisy with just three boys in it? 😉
In the end, the cost was almost negligible – the most expensive item was the fabric markers, and I got 40% off those with a coupon (and bonus, Lucas can keep using them on future t-shirts.) The t-shirts came to about $15, maybe $20 for cupcake decorations, chips, fruit punch, and about $3 per kid on the loot bags. There were no tears, no breakage, and no cupcakes smeared in to the sofa. And I’m pretty sure my ears will stop ringing any time now.
In celebration of 2015’s anniversary-palooza and 10 years of blogging, I’m revisiting some of my favourite blog posts ever. This is from the spring of 2005.
We had some friends over on the weekend for dinner. No no, we didn’t have them à la Hannibal Lecter, we had the grilled chicken fajitas you told me I couldn’t have on Friday when I had to have takeout. Did I thank you for that yet?
So we had these terrific friends of ours over, and they brought their baby daughter. Okay, I can see it’s going to take me forever to tell this story, because I already have to correct myself again. What really happened is, we really really wanted to see, hold, cuddle, play with and otherwise fawn over their beautiful two-month-old baby daughter, and since she isn’t getting out much without a chaperone these days, we had to invite them along for the ride.
So anyway, they all three come over for cuddles and fawning and some dinner on the side. They are there exactly long enough for me to serve them each a drink when J (aka the guest who might not want to be named on the Internet) caught Simon with his hand submersed up to his wrist in J’s drink. This is the first of many times I will think throughout the evening that I am incredibly glad these are very good and patient friends of ours who genuinely love our boys and who are on the cusp of some major parenting foibles themselves. So J is pretty good about the whole thing, gets a towel and wipes off Simon’s hand and the drink spilled all over the end table and doesn’t even mention the fact that I totally didn’t offer to get him a new drink. Can you believe I only just NOW thought of that?
Now, you’d think that with the ratio of parents to children rising from 2:2 to 4:3, the odds would be improving in our favour over your average level of household mischief. Not so much. Beloved is so completely enthralled with beautiful baby girl that he forgets he even has boys, let alone that said boys are running rampant through the house. Not even 10 minutes after the Simon-as-stir-stick event, somehow Simon gets into the bathroom, closes the door behind him, and makes his way – in the pitch black, mind you – to the toilet, lifts the lid, and begins washing his pop-soaked hands in the toilet water. Beloved intercedes and washes Simon’s hands, I go back to making dinner, and within five – I’m guessing it wasn’t even three – minutes, Simon was back with his hand up to his wrist in J’s drink. God bless J, who only asked Beloved, “Are you sure you did a good job washing his hands?” And you know what? I honestly can’t remember if I got him a fresh drink even then.
So we have dinner, and it’s the usual chaos of dinner with Tristan not wanting to eat (a blog for another day) and it’s too late for Simon who passed through hungry the previous hour and had arrived at too-famished-to-do-anything-but-holler-and-throw-food, and JJ (as opposed to J) has to leave the table mid-meal to be a meal to her baby girl, and I remember the days we used to have dinner when it was just the four of us and we’d linger over dinner and dessert and conversation for hours. Or was that somebody else’s life?
You’d think having his very own baby in the house for the past 14 1/2 months would have left Tristan jaded on the concept of babies in general, but just the opposite is true. He really had no use for Simon as a baby, but he is fascinated by the new babies in our life, particularly his almost six-month old cousin Noah and beautiful baby girl. Beautiful baby girl is particularly special, however, because she is the only baby girl in any of our lives. My brother has a son, my closest friends have sons, my cousin has a son – even the day care provider has nothing but sons. So you can see why beautiful baby girl is a princess in all of our lives. On the way home in the car from our first visit to introduce beautiful baby girl to the boys, Tristan pronouced (with no prompting from us) that beautiful baby girl is his girlfriend. (pauses to let you “awwwwww” properly)
So anyway, JJ finishes feeding beautiful baby girl while we clean up the kitchen, and of course the next thing on the agenda is a diaper change. Tristan, who hasn’t really moved more than a foot away from beautiful baby girl all afternoon, is ‘helping’ and JJ is extremely patient with him. As she removes beautiful baby girl’s diaper, Tristan begins to howl with laughter, and I am mortified when he exclaims “Look at how small her penis is!”
Needless to say, we won’t be hosting too many more dinner parties this decade. We might even have to hold off until the engagement party of Tristan and beautiful baby girl…
Our darling old dog Katie arrived in our lives long before any babies did, and I think that’s why she always acted in a very maternal way toward them.
Bella, on the other hand, arrived into a pack of noisy, playful boys, and it’s clear she thinks the boys are her littermates; never moreso than when given the choice, she will choose to lie on top of one of them rather than just about anywhere else.
Like this:
I can’t figure out what I like more, the fact that Tristan is tolerating this or the expression on Bella’s face as she looks directly into the camera that says, “What?!”
Wow! 2014 was an amazingly photogenic year. I could easily post 50 favourite photos just from our trip to Prince Edward Island alone (yes, I know, I’m on about PEI again – I never really stop thinking about it!) or 50 favourite photos of fun family adventures with the boys. I probably even have 50 photos of Bella and Willie, and 2014 was my most successful year with Mothership Photography, so I’m sure I have 50 favourite portrait session photos I could post.
I’ll restrain myself, though. Some of these are dear to me because of the moment they captured, or the memory they evoke, or even the fact that I look at them and think to myself, “wow, I made that?” Every single one of them, though, makes me smile. They’re in no particular order.
Happy sigh. Thank you to everyone who was a part of this year, whether that was letting me get you in my viewfinder or letting me interrupt whatever it was we were supposed to be doing so I could take a photograph or letting me share my treasures with you. It’s been a beautiful year, and I cannot wait to see what 2015 has in store!
Happy new year!
This might be one of my favourite Christmas photos of the boys ever. My friend Henry on Flickr gave this one an alternate title that I also really like: we’re going to need a bigger wagon!
Fun, right? The expression on the reindeer slays me. That’s a Donder face if there ever was one.
This one almost went sideways on me right from the start. The idea was to have Bella pulling the wagon, and I was going to put some reindeer antlers on her in the style of Max the dog from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Except as I was getting the boys settled on the wagon, she managed to find a pile of poop in the front yard and roll in it. We don’t actually allow her to poop in the front yard, so I have some other neighbourhood dog to thank for that gift. And we were quickly losing the light, so we had to improvise.
This was the original shot:
I loved the expressions on their faces. The dog was a bit blurred though, and even with a few other poses to choose from, it just wasn’t working out to be what I imaged. The boys had been good sports and adorable, though, so I wanted to make it work.
I started by cloning Bella and Beloved out of the image and editing it for exposure and white balance. I found the perfect reindeer, but he was too big for the canvas, so I extended the edges of it upwards and to the right. I positioned the reindeer and tweaked him a bit so it looked like he was standing in the grass. He was already wearing the red harness, so I took Bella’s leather leash from one of the other poses I hadn’t used and painted it to match the harness, then stretched it to fit into Lucas’s hand. And I painted a bit of a shadow for the reindeer. I had to play a bit with the colour and contrast of the reindeer to look like he was actually standing in the same light as the boys, and then I tweaked it a bit more overall for the bright and contrasty look.
What do you think? It makes me chuckle when I look at it, which makes it a win in my books!
I‘ve seen a lot of photographers using an edit that darkens the background and makes for warm, rich tones. I had my handsome model pose for a portrait so I could have a play. Here’s the final edit:
Here’s the image straight out of the camera:
I think his face might still be a little too warm/yellow, now that I see it here. It’s a clean edit in raw in Lightroom, although my white balance might be a little too warm, and then a lot of layers in Photoshop – a bit of radial blur, masked off of him, and a couple of levels layers. One layer darkens the midtones in the background, one gives it that reddish golden tint, and I popped the contrast around his eyes a little bit. I need to figure out how to make his freckles pop more!
What do you think? Do you like the clean edit or the more creative edit? I always struggle to find a balance between the two. I love the creative edits, but wonder if people don’t find them too heavy handed. It’s still fun to play!
(Also? Pre-teen – SMILING FOR THE CAMERA!!! #win)