A visit from Grandma

After Mothers Day, we were delighted to have Max's and Leo's Grandma visit from Winnipeg for a week. Upon arriving at the house, Grandma was promptly whisked away by Max to help with some building he had to do in his bedroom.


The rest of the evening was spent exploring Max's other favourite toys and books while Holly was off at a bachelorette party. Whoopee!

The next day, we all set out to catch the remainder of the tulips - remember, this is now a week after Mothers Day (see previous photos of toques and empty flower beds), so we figured the tulip gardens were going to be on their last legs. Surprisingly, there were still a few left standing. In fact, some of the beds were still gorgeous and the weather had done an absolute about face so we were joined by the rest of Ottawa. Definitely a good call to hit them ASAP. Here are some photos:


See? Some tulips WERE still alive on the 16th!

This picture kills me. It looks so pretty at first glance. What is it Max is looking at? A bug? A pretty flower? I can't tell...all I can see is that dead dandelion in the foreground. And is that a hot dog in his hand? Yup. (Max had the best hot dog lunch that day: 1 dog, 1 bun, 25 olives, 9 pickles. Sweet.)

I remember when I took this picture how stunned I was to catch a Leo smile on celluloidigital. Not to give away future post spoilers, but Leo is a different kid now.

We tried so many times to get everyone looking at the camera...no dice. It devolved into Max trying to sit on Leo and I think that's when we called it a day on family portraits.
I had to work most of the week so I missed out on some of the adventures, but on Monday there was an awesome visit to the Experimental Farm with the Bee Exhibit and awesome display of tractors.



On Tuesday, Max's wildest dream came true. Check it.


Your eyes do not deceive you - Max is in the cab of the backhoe. A pipe under our neighbours' lawn blew up and so there was construction equipment all over the place for a couple of days. Some sketchy-looking but actually very cool construction dude (see below for a close-up of his belly) decided that it would be OK if Max were to operate the backhoe loader and do some digging. On our neighbours' lawn. They don't know yet. Holly jokes that Max's life is going to be pretty sad now that his lifelong dream has been realized at age 2.7.


The next couple of days featured a playgroup rendez-vous at our place and an epic visit to Toys-R-Us (to that point, Max believed that the local consignment store was the toy store...SURPRISE!!), where Grandma immortalized herself by buying Max a big ride-on excavator with sounds and lights. Max loves his digger and even Leo is using it for climbing practice now. Here's Leo's friend Grace modeling the digger:


On Grandma's last full day in town, we went out for a belated Mothers Day sushi lunch. Leo picked at a few things, Max gorged on udon noodles (as per usual) and the rest of us also pigged out (possibly because I overshot on the ordering).


We retired to a nearby park to digest and Leo provided us with a high and a low:


HIGH: he posed for this great picture, taken by Grandma.


LOW: Leo ate sand. Quite a bit in fact. Even after a handful like this left a bad taste in his mouth, he continues to go back for more...

We had a wonderful visit, front to back. Thanks a bunch for making the trip, Mom!

Here are a couple of other cute pictures, just for you readers.



One day, Leo actually fell asleep in his Jumperoo. Isn't that supposed to be the opposite of what happens in the Jumperoo??


Another day, we had a yummy family lunch at the Works and Max conked himself on a table. Our favourite server promptly whipped together this stylish ice pack for him.

My boys in BC

I know we are crazy behind in chronicling the past few months of Stardom family adventures (be patient - we're working on it!) but I thought I would take a minute to post a quick photo. I think it is my favourite photo that I have taken of my three boys:


The photo was taken at Cascade Lookout in Manning Park on our drive between Grand Forks and Vancouver in early June. I've just finished sending it to work (I started back today - ugh.) so I can put it up in my cubicle to make me smile. Perhaps it will do the same for you.

A year has come and gone

To my beautiful one-year old boy,


Happy birthday! We made it. You are one year old. Seriously, where did the time go?

It has been an absolute joy to see you develop your own little personality these last few months. We have always loved you to bits but I think everyone can agree that you had some rough moments, particularly in the evenings, when no one could seem to figure you out. I think your dad took the worst of it in the evenings and at bedtime. Now, you let your Nana babysit you and put you to bed with nary a whimper. You are such a happy boy these days.

Unlike your brother, you love, love, LOVE sand and water. I’ve never seen you happier than sitting in the sand at the beach and playing in the water. You even like to eat sand. Big handfuls of sand in your mouth and wet sand smeared all over your face. Oh well. A few extra germs will bolster your immune system for everything else you are going to throw at it later in life. Bath time is also happy time for you. You don’t even care if you are in the bath; you are happy as a clam standing on the side of the tub while your brother is bathing. Heck, you even like standing, looking into an empty tub!

One of your favourite games right now is to shake your head vigorously side to side like you are saying “No!” in response to your dad or I shaking our heads up and down to say “Yes! Yes! Yes!” You think this is completely hilarious. You also like to wave “Good-bye” and “Hello” whenever you hear someone say it. You clap when someone else claps or says “Yay!” or "Good job!".

You also love to talk on the phone. Actual phones, toy phones, small plastic magnet toy pieces, stuffed animals, your shoe – you’ll use anything you can get your hands on to have a conversation.

You seem to be a pretty tough little cookie. Our playgroup mum friends are all amazed at some of the tumbles you have taken without a peep. Most of the time, you just right yourself and keep on playing. I think it might be a good thing that you have such thick skin considering some of the roughhousing your brother has been subjecting you to of late. Don’t worry – I think you are going to be a strong little dude and capable of defending yourself sooner than we think.

At the risk of disturbing the sleep gods, you have put in some great nights lately. Evidently, you love the outdoors because you didn't wake up at all the first night you ever spent in a tent. Then you slept through the night again the second night. I see some camping in our future!

It looks like you love to eat and have an adventurous palate. Avocado sushi rolls, artichoke hummous, and Creamsicles are your latest new tastes. You love cherries.

You aren’t walking yet but you are standing by yourself for extended periods of time and climbing on everything. We’ve found you kneeling on your brother’s play table a foot off the ground and standing on his potty in the bathroom. You also love ride-on toys and can get on and off of various wheeled objects with relative ease. When visiting your bro's favourite playgroup, you can always be found standing on the kids' picnic table. You also love toys with any sort of cause and effect – the dinosaur with the clear plastic balls, your brother’s mix and match farm animals magnet, the Elmo phone, etc.

You are spending your weekdays with your dad now but it is nice to know that you still think your mum is a pretty cool chick. Your smile and frantic crawl over to me when I got back from my first day of work was pretty awesome. You seem to be transitioning just fine.

I love you, little one. Thank you for a wonderful year. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for you.

Mothers Day

I've always been confused about whether there's an apostrophe in Mothers Day or not. This calendar in my hands says no. Whatever. (Note from Holly: Um, I've never seen it without an apostrophe so now I'm confused too.)

This past Mothers Day, I was sick as a dog and had to duck out of a special brunch invitation from the boys' Auntie Laramie at the restaurant where she works. It sounds like it was a heckuva good time and that the food was really good (endless shrimp! dessert buffet! omelette station!). Dang. Here are a couple of pictures from the brunch.



After the morning of rest, I rallied a bit so that Holly could hang out with some friends at a local art festival (super cool) and then, after nap time, it was time for our annual Moms Day ritual - heading on down to Dow's Lake to take some pictures with the tulips. Well, this year was something else. After that 30 degree Easter weekend, there were more hot temps in early May and all this coaxed the tulips out of the ground quite a bit early. Mothers Day Weekend is usually the time for tulips to shine. Instead, we had this:



Yes, those are toques and mitts we are wearing. There were snow flurries! All was not lost though; there were plenty of other tulip beds that were still in full bloom and we had the run of the place. No waiting for everyone else to take their pictures - we just snapped away. The gray day also made for good light.





Another bonus of the chilly weather was that we pretty much had the displays all to ourselves so we could talk to the staff and have a little fun with the Dutch and WWII artifacts:




On the way home from the tulips, we grabbed some pizza and had a nice quiet evening. All in all, it was a really nice day despite the frigid weather. We are pretty lucky to have the Tulip Festival in town and it is a nice way to spend part of Mother's Day. It is also a really cool opportunity to take some photos of Holly and the boys as Holly spends more time behind the camera than in front of it.

Random May stuff . . .

Quite a few things happened in May that we haven't really touched on yet. I'm only going to cover a couple of things in this post...it's time to get some pictures out there! Given that it was the first month that Max was out of daycare since late 2008, it was a great opportunity for him to do a bunch of neat activities with Leo and Holly. One of those special adventures that I have yet to take part in is Cosmic Adventures, a giant kid-oriented play center featuring play structures, ball pits and the like for kids to clamber on, in and around. There's also a baby area for the youngsters, so Leo and Max have been able to share in the fun. Here are some visuals:



In fact, Holly and the boys have had so much fun that we've roped some other friends of Leo's (um, and their parents) into going



The other really cool event for Max last month that I want to cover in this post was his friend's birthday party. One of the boys with whom he spent all of his time in daycare turned 4 and invited Max. We weren't entirely sure how it would go - Max has always been kind of possessive about presents and opening everybody else's at all events...but he was a real gentleman in letting his little buddy have his moment. And a little bit of cake is always a big plus. Leo got to attend too and both boys had a blast with their loot bags. A big thanks for the invitations!

We're alive

I promise, a lengthy post or series of posts is pending.

I just logged on and saw the title of our previous post, that Leo was now crawling. Man, that feels like an eternity ago. May was a crazy month, filled with visits from afar and the end of work for John. On the last day of the month, we left on a two-week tour of British Columbia to visit family and friends. We got back earlier this week, but have been primarily concerned with realigning the sleep situations of our little ones, who were locked into Pacific time for a bit there. The ship seems to have been righted at this point, so perhaps tonight or tomorrow night, I'll sit down and finally put some thoughts and pictures down in the blog.

Just to give you a taste of what's new for Leo, though, he has two new teeth, can climb up stairs (but certainly not down), is eating pretty much everything but citrus, shellfish and nuts, has suffered through two ear infections, has learned to point, is infinitely happier/smilier and has probably spoken his first two words (mama=mom and nana=banana). Wow, that's a lot.

Anyway, I promise there's more to come soon.

Crawling update

See, I was going to post a little something on Tuesday to let everybody know that Leo had officially slept through the night for the first time since that first day post-swaddle. But, with 2.75 years of experience behind me, I'm pretty aware of what happens when one tempts fate with blogging. So I let it go and, sure enough, Leo slept poorly Tuesday night and then caught a cold on Wednesday. So we're back to square one for a while, but we know that given good health, Leo is capable of pulling an all-nighter. We're both looking forward to a couple of those in a row:)

The main purpose of this post is to give all of you an update on Leo's crawling escapades. I was editing my May 1 post today and it struck me as funny that just 7 days ago, he was crawling for the first time. Four days ago, he was a total pro. Two days ago, he started to help himself up to his feet and yesterday he started sidling on tables and things (cruising). Seven days. Unbelievable. He's so into moving around that it's getting difficult to keep him in his Exersaucer or highchair for any length of time. So, for a little while at least, we're going to miss out on being able to turn our back on Leo for any real amount of time. I'm curious as to whether he'll be walking before his birthday. Max was an almost-13-monther so that's kind of what I'm anticipating. It will be interesting if things develop much differently for Leo.