Yeah, it really is about the kids.

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