Yeah, it really is about the kids.

I'm pretty sure these two have nothing to worry about, Santa surely will make a stop by the farm for them.

Started writing this yesterday on my phone using the blogger app from the Google Play store.  It actually let me compose the post, apparently save it, and even attach a photo.  All looked good.  So I tapped "publish" whereupon it went into a crash-loop that was, as far as I was willing to debug it, irrevocable.  So here we go again, on a real computer this time.  I guess I'm not ready for living in the modern world with all its "app stores" and Gs ranging from 2 to, I hear, 5 and beyond now. Anyway, not very much to say, just that we made it back to the farm, the drive was as good as we could ever expect and the boys were, as always, the best little travelers imaginable.  And now that we're here, we start the tradition of watching hours of movies, running circuits in Mamoo's house, playing with cousins when they're around and playing with wooden trains in the sun-room when they're not.  It's pretty great here at the farm.  It's good to

Been a very, very long time since I posted anything here, so I have kind of a backlog, but I also thought I should not rush back into it. So a couple of absolutely adorable James stories from the last few days. Yesterday morning after the boys had finished breakfast Daniel was playing in the front room with the dinky cars and James was running from the front of the house to the back and forward again.  Somewhere in his travels he found a whistle (the kind with an internal fan that makes a whizzing noise rather than the ear-splitting sort you often find) and started blowing it while he ran.  His first few laps into the front room didn't do anything.  Then Daniel started laughing whenever James came whizzing into the room near him.  After two or three more laps James stopped and announced:  "Stop Daniel!  It's not that funny!" Which, of course, made it hilariously funny for us. Next was this morning.  Our Shelf Elf, Choir , had moved to the curtain rod over the

Ages ago now I taught James that certain phrases have power.  In particular, stop the car  would almost invariably result in the car stopping almost immediately (within reason, of course). The purpose of this was as a secondary step to the far more important, my seat belt , phrase.  He learned them both at the same time, because they were intimately connected.  He should always announce if his seat-belt wasn't on or wasn't tight.  This because I had caught myself a couple of times almost forgetting to tighten his seat-belt.  The way this happens is he had started insisting that he wanted to climb into his seat himself, so I would let him.  But this was in the winter and it was either cold or, toward the end, rainy and awful, so I would close the door behind him while he climbed in and I was getting Daniel in his seat.  A procedure only slightly less challenging than getting a cat in a wet-suit (originally written: the Battletoads Turbo Tunnel level, if you're of the vari

These guys make me laugh all the time.  I don't think there's a single day that goes by where at least one of them doesn't do something that makes me laugh out loud.  Today they both managed it. Daniel wasn't interested in supper -- at least not by his standards -- but when it came time to take him to bed and read his stories he spied the container of watermelon in the fridge and made it abundantly  clear that he wanted some. So I took the smaller one out of the fridge and we sat down to eat some.  I knew he was going to make a hellacious mess, so I sat him in his booster seat and belted him in before starting to put pieces in front of him.  The first few barely had time to touch down before he snatched them up in a wide, roundhouse swipe, and jammed them in his mouth.  After he'd consumed a few ounces of watermelon he cooled down a bit and started taking his time with them.  At one point he started smelling each piece before he ate it.  I can understand that, I l

Been a while (again) since I wrote anything.  I've got to be better about keeping this up, it's not for lack of stuff to write about.  Mostly, though, between a new job and finishing up Dad's business, I've been feeling kind of enervated. Last winter, though, I saw a prize on Freecycle that I knew I had to claim.  A water table.  Basically just a plastic platform with a couple of basins in it so kids can play with water without actually getting in a pool.  And someone was giving it away.  I am so  glad I made the trip to Hintonberg one afternoon while Daniel napped in the car.  This wasn't the first time the boys got to play with it, that happened while I was out of town last weekend, but it's the first video I caught.  Right after supper, while I was doing dishes and watching the boys play through the kitchen window. Update:   I thought of something when I was telling Christine about playing with the water table that I forgot to write down here.  Probab

I love my new phone, it's brought a lot more good than bad with it, but wow  has it been a pain to get stuff off it and onto my computer where I can do sensible stuff with it.  Today, though, I managed to get rsync-based backups working and now we're all good.  So there'll be a few new video posts from the past couple of months coming soon. This one is from last Friday, I think.  Daniel and James each got a bottle of bubbles from Lynne and while I was re-(re-(re-?))heating a coffee I realized that watching Christine, Daniel and James playing with them was too good to miss.  So here we are. @1:33 that's all I've got to say.

This is from Wednesday ... Christine took the boys out to pick up some sneakers.  Since the weather is finally taking a turn toward warm, it seems like a good idea.  They got back just after I'd finished cleaning up from supper and I assumed Daniel would be wiped out and ready to go right to bed.  Turns out not.  He was pretty hyper and James was James.  So they started running around.  Daniel made right for "Daniel's Toy" (that appears to be the proper name for it) and started running around with it.  Once James saw that he made right for the wagon and they just sort of fell into playing together, racing from the great room in the front to the kitchen. This lasted for about half an hour when Daniel finally started showing signs of being tired.  I picked him up intending to take him upstairs and put him to bed but James ran right up to me and said "Daddy!  Put Daniel down!"  Clearly he wasn't done playing yet. So I did, then I thought I'd best

Daniel took his first real steps today. He's been cruising for ages now.  He's been finger-walking for more than a month, he was doing not too bad at it before I went back to work and he went to daycare.  He'd been there maybe a week before I saw him doing the whole finger-walking-with-only-one-finger thing. But today, right after supper, the four of us were hanging out in the living room.  Christine was on the futon, I was on the floor, James was doing something and Daniel was at the play table when he turned around and decided he was just going to walk  over to Christine.  Three really solid, deliberate, confident steps completely hands-free. We were suitably impressed.  So much so that even James started saying "Daniel walked", but I don't think he really got the import of the event. Three steps was nowhere near enough for him, though, once he'd figured out how to make it work.  Before he went to bed he had one little walk that took him from the

Today James spent the day in the house.  We had an incident (several, actually) that precipated his arrest yesterday, but ultimately it was a big deal.  It did mean, though, that by mid-afternoon he was starting to get a bit stir-crazy and was casting about for something to amuse himself.  He gave up on playing with the stuff I was trying to show him to instead grab  that guy  and start waving him around over various surfaces.  I wish I had gotten video of this.  He would walk up to something, place the fan an inch or so away from the surface then turn on the button and occasionally wave it a bit.  After a few of these he let us in on what he was doing. "Mama!  I am cleaning the table!"  "I am cleaning the bathroom!  I am cleaning the potty!"  "Daddy!  Your hair is clean!"  "Mama!  I am cleaning the car!"  "Daddy!  I am cleaning Brazen-cat's fur!" Brazen, for her part, took the cleaning in what I am now coming to think

We took this video last week one evening during the bedtime routine.  I can't believe I forgot to share it until now.  I really don't think I can add anything to it, this is basically what passes for peek-a-boo in our house.

James used to make all kinds of hilarious sounds when he was an infant.  My favourite was what I called duck-talk .  A kind of hacky kwaa-kwaa  sound I used to do myself as a kid when trying to emulate the voice of Donald Duck from the Disney cartoons. Daniel, though, started entirely on his own doing something we call purring .  He does it much less often now than he used to, but today I managed to capture some of it on video.

Daniel loves headbutting things.  More than even James did (and James was the one who split my lip and I thought gave me a nose-bleed when we were playing on the floor one evening).  Usually, though, he likes to limit himself to soft stuff.  The bear decals on his wall look soft to me, too, so we'll give that one a pass. Today I finally caught some video of him attending one of his favourite blankets.

When I was home with James he had a regular routine in the morning.  I would put him down on the floor and he would make the rounds from the cat food to the stove to the laundry room (usually focusing on the washing machine, but that's likely because at the time the drier we had wasn't very interesting but the washing machine had a very interesting clear front.  He'd do that loop two or three times until he was satisfied that everything was as expected, then do his own thing. Daniel has a routine too, but it's less structured.  He'll almost always make right for the car-seat bucket and grab hold of a fox (whom I've dubbed Foxy Loxy ) that he got for Christmas.  That's the start and a frequent stop any time he passes by.  Without fail, though, if the fridge doors open, bam  he's there like a shot.  And if the doors should close before he gets to them it is an absolute tragedy.  This morning, for example, he was in the family room playing with his wal

Another (finally completed) post from the archives, back in September. We weren't completely sure we were going to the Richmond Fair this year.  The weather had turned a bit chilly and we were getting scattered rain showers passing through the area all day long.  I'm glad we did go, though, because even though it was cold, James was pretty stoked about it.  For one, we got to see Trevor the Traction Engine again.  Okay, not the actual one, but a traction engine painted nearly the same, and that's good enough for James. The best part of the day, though, was when we made it over to the midway.  Unlike the Specerville Fair, this time we bought some ride tickets.  James was feeling a bit more brave and wanted to try riding some of the rides.  We started out with the merry-go-round and a miniature train, but by far  the winner of the day was the super-slide.  I remember loving it as a kid, but by the time I remember it, I was old enough that it was in the context of it bei

This one comes from way back in September.  I'd meant to post it then, but never quite got around to filling out the story. We've been reading to both of the boys quite a lot (not as much to Daniel as I'd like, but I'm getting better at that).  I may have written down before about how James tends to come to new things through books first, more than anything else.  He may see a new toy or something and be interested in it, but until he hears about it from a book, he's not really invested in it.  If he's going to throw a tantrum in a store, it's almost always because he isn't getting to read the new book he just saw quickly enough. When I first started writing this post, his favourite book was a Toy Story 3 book called A Spooky Adventure .  It was the one that, guaranteed, we would read every night, and he would want to read more than once if he could wrangle it somehow.  He was also pushing his bed-time back and back, but he's been very good about

Two weeks ago brought a new bit of excitement into our household.  Over the holidays there were a few bright moments in what was otherwise a pretty dark period for me.  One was an evening at Steve and Brenda's place where Steve and I watched Pacific Rim (my favourite movie since 1995 ... there's been a few demarcation points there, to be honest.  There is Alien, prior to the 1980s, Blade Runner prior to the 1990s, Heat and now a new contender.  I just hope the rumoured sequels don't ruin the franchise the way others have .) Earlier that same evening, I think, we were watching A Muppet Family Christmas while the boys simultaneously failed to fall asleep and keep the other from falling asleep.  Stressful, but the way our lives are now and not unexpected.  The movie reminded me about Fraggle Rock , though, and now that I've loaded it onto the media centre I offered it up to James one evening as a treat when he didn't already have his heart set on Scooby Doo or somet

I've been on parental leave since the start of January and on the whole it's been going really well.  Yesterday was awful, but that's because I finally caught the stomach bug that Daniel had last week.  It laid him up for almost three days.  It only did me in for a day but it was easily the worst bug I've had in years.  Probably the worst I've had in more than a decade.  Bad. But before that I spent the better part of the weekend hanging out with James.  I've seen so little of him lately that Christine thought it'd be nice if we could have some time alone together.  So Saturday morning we went to the Science and Tech museum.  We couldn't really fit everything in that we would've liked, but we visited the major areas.  The trains.  The big clock.  The Automoblox table.  One pass thorugh the Crazy Kitchen.  Then home for lunch and back out again to do some errands.  On the way home we were listening to one of the music CDs that happened to have instr

It's been a while. November and December really got away on me both due to the normal holiday chaos, preparation for my time off work in January and February, and due to the hospitalization and death of my father.  There was a lot going on. Now I'm starting into my third full week off on parental leave with Daniel and I cannot possibly give this form of therapy a higher recommendation.  It is exhausting, sure, but it is also incredibly restorative to be at home with him all day long.  The transition periods are difficult (going down for a nap, getting up from a nap, getting out to pick up James at daycare, getting supper ready) but the middle bits, just playing on the floor together or attempting to read together or having a meal together, those are bafflingly awesome. Then, stuff also just happens sometimes and all I can do is marvel at it.  Earlier this week Daniel discovered "The Tunnel".  He was a little unsure about it at first, but once he understood it, h