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.