OK, one more for February

Here are a couple of videos from the past month:


Here's a video of Max bowling with his farm friends bowling set.


So we were shopping and Max grabbed a baby doll off the shelf. As it turns out, the baby moved. Max was enthralled, but we took a pass on the doll. Creepy.

Yikes - February got busy

Hey. I'm nipping in to get one more post in before the end of the month. These past two weeks have been hectic with visits from good friends from out west, taking in a Sens game, hosting local friends over at our place a couple of times and, of course, the Oscars. It was very strange - this was probably the first year since senior high that I wasn't able to even name the Best Picture nominees. I'm pretty sure I've seen less than 10 movies this past year (rentals included) and sometimes, I just wasn't into seeing something subtitled so whereas in past years, I was usually able to knock off all multi-Oscar nominees before the show, I think I had seen one or two this year. Sad. Good thing I was watching something much more interesting instead (Max).

Speaking of the little squirt, he is getting very close to getting some words together. I think Holly and I have agreed that Max has said both "mom" and "no" and probably meant what he was saying...but he still doesn't say either instinctively or with any regularity. Last night, he said something pretty close to "light". He's also trying hard to put "duck", "dog" and "cat" together. You can tell that he definitely wants to say certain things, it's just a matter of piecing it all together.

Max is still book-obsessed and in particular, likes to focus on pointing out every animal in the books he has. This fascination with animals has stretched to other media too, as he'll point to the little cow on the packaging of his yogurt at breakfast time. He's even pointing to dogs out on the street.

I'm really enjoying picking Max up from daycare these days. He's usually on the couch when I come by, and the couch is backed up against the front window of the house, so he sees me when I approach. Once Max sees me, he usually goes berserk, bouncing on the couch and waving. The first time that happened about a week ago, I just about lost it. I don't think a reaction like that will ever fail to make me smile.

Teeth #9 and #10 have shown up, both molars. I've seen #9 on the bottom and our care provider says that #10 is over on the other side. Soon he's going to be able to lay the beatdown on a serious steak.

The only other news is that Max loves playing with the parachute at gymnastics. Last weekend, all the kids stood on the parachute while the parent stood around the outside, making ripples by shaking the parachute. Max was thoroughly unimpressed and the other parents laughed when I told him to pretend that he was enjoying himself. Then all the kids got under the parachute and we lifted it high over the heads. Max's head just about flew off his shoulders! Lots of squealing and "jumping" around (when Max jumps, he lifts one foot, but not the other, so he kind of just bounces around in a circle). So hopefully we bust the parachute out again this weekend.

Here are some February pictures:


Clearly, Max loves clowns. Apparently, one day in January at his Saturday playgroup, some clowns were invited and kids were crying all over the place. Creepy.

"Alright, that's cool. What time can I drop by and pick you up? Sweet, I'll be there."

Max is OK with sitting up at the front of a shopping cart. But put him in the main body standing up and look out!

Safe? Maybe not. Funny? Most def.

A few Sundays ago, I made some pancakes for Holly and plopped them on the coffee table. Max was so stoked to see them that he tried to skirt the table, but ran into the arm of our chair, bounced off of it and smashed his face on the corner of his toy chest. This is what was left of the bruise after 4 days.

Max got his first chance to eat with an old-fashioned silver baby's spoon and he loved it. It made everybody wonder why they've done away with spoons engineered like that, that are so easy for babies to use, in favour of these plastic things that are impossible for babies to manipulate.

Earlier this month, we went out for Auntie L's birthday and Max discovered he liked virgin pina coladas. I guess it runs in the family.

Home Alone 2

So this past weekend, I was Mr. Mom again - Max and I got to chill sans Mom, who was away in Boston maxing out the credit card. Fortunately, our friend J from Toronto was up to hang out with the men (until Family Day, which Holly took off to be with J & Max while I worked). The three of us had a blast! From chatting to playing to going for a run outdoors to gym class to a nice sushi dinner, everything was awesome. J makes the trip up to Ottawa 3-4 times a year and I have to underscore how lucky we are to have friends like her in our lives. It doesn't matter how long it's been since we last touched base, we just pick right up where we left off. Beautiful.

Anyway, everybody is back where they're supposed to be now and nobody's going anywhere for a while. Which means I have some time to post pictures from 2009. I'll start with a few selections from January and in a future post, I'll tackle some of the February pics.


Max, getting ready to go outside.


Check out those teething cheeks.


Hammering out some Joplin.


Max, happy that Mom is about to read him a good book.


Story time.


All dressed up and feelin' fine.


Help. I'm stuck in a snowbank.

A quick note

It's been a while since we've posted pictures. I'll try to get some up this weekend. I just wanted to post a quick blurb about two awesome new Max facts.

1) Remember when Max was teething, but then finished without having any new teeth? Well, it's possible we weren't looking in the right place. At least four of Max's teeth have been cut in line by his frontmost top two molars. So now he's up to 8 teeth and he can't stop chewing on his fingers, fascinated by these new hard things further back along his gum line.

2) I was reading Eric Carle's first book of animal sounds earlier tonight and Max seemed particularly interested in the rooster and the dog. But then, he turned to the lion page and growled. I am not kidding. No prompting, nothing. Rrrorrorrwww. Awesome.

A great weekend

I kept wanting to put something up this past weekend about what a wonderful time we were having, but the good times just kept coming and I was having too much fun with my family to bother.

What made the weekend so good? Let's see. Saturday started with a bit of an early wake-up, but Max was in a good mood. We were in no rush to go anywhere, so we chilled in bed with our rambunctious toddler for a little while. Then, we spontaneously decided to do something about our spare bedroom. You see, if you haven't been upstairs at our place in a while, we have two normal-sized bedrooms and Max's nursery. We generally stay on top of our room because we use it, but over the last few months, the spare bedroom has gotten out of control. Clothes Max has grown out of, combined with those he's about to grow into were heaped in about 6 storage bins, and then many many weeks' worth of random Max-related junk got piled on top of that. Eventually, a volume about 75% that of the bed in the room was this pile of stuff.

I whisked Max away to the main floor, where we did dishes, we ate pancakes, we played with toys, we listened to NPR podcasts...generally, we had a relaxing Saturday morning while Holly sorted through things upstairs. Max really went the distance with his happiness and desire to entertain himself that we managed to get quite a bit done. When he finally crashed, I decided to go for my first run in 5 months - it was above freezing outside so the 6.5 km didn't go too badly. I'm anxious to get out with Max in the spring for some stroller jogs so this was a good start. Holly put her feet up to recuperate from all of the tidying - well deserved.

When Max woke up, we did lunch and then I piled him into a borrowed car and the two of us did some grocery shopping while Holly caught some Z's. The boys got home and whipped up a nice salmon and pasta dinner that Max scarfed. Yum!

Then, for the first time ever, we left Max in the care of a babysitter who was neither a family member, nor a close friend, but one of our neighbours. Mom and Dad headed out into the night to have a dinner out and see some bands play at a local bar for a friend's 30th birthday party. Yeah, we were yawning by 9:30 and ended up packing it in about 2 hours before everyone else, but we still had a great time. Not only did Max stay asleep for the sitter, I opened my eyes in the morning to light. Light! That's the first time I haven't been roused to the sounds of Max prior to sunrise in at least 2 or 3 months. Sure, Max was already awake - I could hear him telling his stuffed animals some stories - but he kept to himself and let us get some extra sleep. AWESOME!

Sunday was almost as good as Saturday - we started with a family dinner out at Cora's. Max had a great time nibbling on all of our fruit and colouring with crayons. Then, we went straight to Max's gymnastics class, where he seemed to be having fun...until a couple of times late in the class when he finished what he was doing and then sprinted off to the exit door. What made this impressive is that it's around the corner from where most of the class takes place. Eventually, Max completed his workout and got stamped up with hearts and such in honour of Valentine's Day. Then he went home and had a long snooze with Mom while I hip-hoppped off to my dance class.

The evening also went well, and Max decided to show off a new skill to us. Max had recently started pointing at pictures in books and that night, he started to point to a duck in a Caillou book. The duck was on Caillou's clothes so Max kept pointing to it on multiple pages. I closed the book and asked Max to find a duck and he picked up the book, flipped through a few pages until he came to one where the duck was visible and stabbed his finger right at it. Crazy. He repeated the feat with a cat in a second book and this one was trickier - while the cat was on almost all of the pages, we gave him a page where it was pretty tough to see the cat, but he nailed it. Seeing that sent both Holly and I for a loop. Our little guy is something else.

Update on Max

Hi all! This is a brief interlude from Holly telling you about her first trip away from Max to fill you in on some of the new things Max is doing these days. First off, though, a story about Mom and Dad losing an awful lot of good parent points.

On Friday night, we put Max to sleep and went down to the basement to enjoy our first rented movie in months and months. We had the monitor on and, at some point, Max started coughing. About four times in total. This was weird because Max didn't have and wasn't getting a cold. But he settled down in the end so we never went and tended to him. He woke up just after 4 in the morning (which seems to be his new pattern) and Holly went in to get him. As soon as she stepped in the nursery, she said "Something's not right." Yeah, it turns out that coughing at 10 p.m. was likely the sound of Max vomiting. So for the 6 hours after the incident, Max's tossing and turning ended up turning his body into a big paint roller and spread the puddle all over his mattress. Yuck. The poor guy was freezing and drenched too. In the early days, we would have been to groggy to act quickly, but after over a year of SEAL-like insta-wake up training, we roared into action, stripped Max's bed and got him changed and into bed with Holly in no time. He eventually fell asleep again and stayed down until 8, which was nice. We're not sure what brought that on (you may recall that this had happened once before), but some gastro bug had been circulating amongst the other boys at daycare as well as their parents. In fact, I may have caught it myself last night. Boo. Hopefully it goes away and doesn't come back.

On to the more fun stuff.

Max loves to bounce on springy surfaces. Maybe this is something he picked up at gymnastics, but he loves standing on our bed, looking at himself in the full-length mirror and trying to jump. I don't think he's managed to leave the ground yet (well, without wiping out), but that day is coming. When we're not upstairs, he likes to do the same stuff on the couch, with the added bonus of getting to chuck cushions around.

As a follow-up to the past item, JUMP is one of the many words that Max understands. As in we say JUMP and he starts bouncing around. I tried to compile a list of all words that he understands and this is what I came up with: JUMP, GO, STOMP, TURN AROUND, SCRUB, FLUSH, DANCE, SIT, ARMS UP, UP, STEP OUT, EAT, BOOK, FOOD, BOOTS, SOCKS, MILK, MOMMY, CAT, OUTSIDE, DOWNSTAIRS, LIP BALM, PHONE, BATH and NO. That's a pretty good list, considering he doesn't really know how to say any of these words:)

Max has successfully gotten himself into one of his boots by himself. It's still very hit-and-miss, but he likes to line up his boot beside our ottoman and attempt to hoist his foot/leg into the boot. He hasn't quite mastered orienting the boot the right way or ensuring that he's got the proper foot, but yesterday, after donning one boot, I watched him step into the other one by himself. It was a bit of a moment.

We had a friend come over to the house last night and he started to juggle some of Max's toys. It seems, from Max's reaction, that he loves juggling. Max picked up two of the three objects being juggled and tried it himself. That is, he shook the two toys vigourously and then threw them at the ground. He was pretty proud of himself. Not I-got-my-own-boot-on proud, but pretty proud. Max and our friend also engaged in a good game of rolling a ball to one another across our coffee table. It looks like Max is really grasping the art of the bounce pass.

Monday, Max got to go to his playgroup for the first time in eons (mostly weather-related). One of the songs they sing there goes "tick. tock. tick. tock. I'm a little cuckoo clock..." It seems that Max really got into the song, rocking back and forth like a grandfather clock and, get this, saying something that sounds an awful lot like "cuckoo clock". I think this is the first time I've seen him mimic the movements to a song and, more importantly, the first time I've ever heard him properly reproduce a specific consonant sound.

Max has always been quite fond of Lily and she, in turn, has typically been patient with him. These days though, Max is pushing the boundaries of their relationship. You see, he has been trying to mount her like a bike. Perhaps it has something to do with his rocking toys, that he just thinks he can hop on our cat. Lily meows, but has yet to really lash out at Max. It's pretty impressive actually.

So that's our boy. Always coming up with new ways to entertain us and himself.