Wise beyond his years

First off, much apologies for the long delay since my last post. My mom is visiting this week, and since she's usually the one that complains from afar that I haven't posted in a while, her lack of emails caused me to completely forget about updating. Well, that and the massive migraine I had a couple of days ago, work being busy as hell, and any number of other things. That said, I'm back, and oh boy, is it ever worth it.

The best thing about the following pictures, which culminate in what may very well be the funniest Lucas picture yet, is that none of it was staged. Not only did he grab the glasses himself, but apparently, he also sat down with the book without any prompting. I'd like to say I was there to see it live, but just like you readers, I'm viewing it after it's passed through the lens.




If that last picture doesn't make your day, well, I don't know what can.

Christmas Vacation in Florida - Part 3

Wow, I'm really surprised no one commented on that last entry with the sunglasses. Those were definitely some of my favorite pictures in a while. Oh well, to each their own, I guess.

Ok, let's wrap up our vacation down south. Before we left, I wanted to make sure I got a couple of pictures of Lucas and my dad playing around.



Then we got the "3 generations of Deal men" picture that we usually take at the end of each time we get together.


Afterward, we drove back up to the Atlanta area and stayed the night with my college friend, Clairanne, and her family. She has 3 boys, and the older two are a few years older than Lucas so it was quite an experience for him as most of his friends are right around the same age. As you can imagine, getting a picture of all 4 of them looking at the same time AND smiling proved impossible, so here's the best of the ones I took.


Later on, Lucas inexplicably decided to ride the youngest one.


The next day, we got on the plane, spent what felt like forever in airports, and finally returned home exhausted that night. For a reminder of what it was like for the little guy, check out the entry I posted the night we got back.

It Came From the 70s!

Just a quick interlude before part 3 of the Florida trip. Seriously, do baby photos get any better than these two? At least one will find its way up on my computer wallpaper for a while.



Oh, and there is a new entry right below this with lots of pictures from our vacation. Enjoy!

Christmas Vacation in Florida - Part 2

And now, more from the Christmas trip down South (where I'd really rather be right now instead of in -30 to -40 degree weather). Based on the number of photos left, I expect there to be one more entry in this series.

Our starting theme is "Fun with Statues". My dad has this little stone turtle (man, that makes me hungry and only a very few people will catch that reference) out in front of his house, and Lucas took a liking to it the first time he saw it. Seeing a recurring theme here with the inanimate animals? Anyway, after hugging it...


...and then petting it...


...I guess the next logical step was to sit on it.


Ok, sit on it twice.


Down the street from my dad, one of his neighbors has a couple of statues of a Dutch boy and girl about to kiss. While my dad and I talked to the neighbor, Lucas felt the need to get in on the action.


Later that day (Dec 27), we walked to a nearby pond where there are a town of ducks and geese, as well as some swans. They're pretty friendly since a lot of people feed them so we brought Lucas to do the same. He's kind of weird around animals. He absolutely loves them, but he's so overcome with excitement that he freaks out around them and can barely interact. In the 2 pictures below, he is having fun but somewhat reluctantly. This weekend, I'll try and remember to upload the video I took so you can get a better idea of what the experience was like.



I don't have a picture of the incident, but the funniest thing that happened during the bird feeding is that Lucas was looking one way but had his hand lifted in the other way. One of the geese came over, and thinking he had some food, nipped at his finger. It didn't hurt him at all, but it scared the hell out of him and he cried for oh, a good 10 seconds. Ok, so it wasn't the funniest thing to him, but we got a chuckle out of it.

That evening, we went to a nearby playground that was just fantastic. It had three different play structures, each being suited for a different age group. Most of the ones in our area here are geared toward one age group and then throw a bone to the other age groups by throwing in a swing or something so it was really cool to visit one that got it right. Man, I just realize I'll never be cool again since I got excited about a playground. Sigh...38, here I come.

This first playground picture is pretty poorly shot, but the way it came out amused me. He looks thrilled, what little of his face you can see.


Chilling on the slide.


For dinner, we went to a Mexican restaurant, something that is almost impossible to find in Ottawa (I'm not counting Tex Mex, I mean real Mexican). At the end we posed for a picture. Of course, Lucas was too cool to look at the camera with the rest of us.


And finally, a few pictures of Lucas and my brother hanging out (and 1 more with my dad). As I said above, expect another entry this weekend that will close out the trip, including our visit in Atlanta with one of my friends and her 3 boys.

Christmas Vacation in Florida - Part 1

As most of your probably know, we flew down south for Christmas to see my dad in Florida. Atlanta was the nearest major airport (about 5 hrs away) so we flew into there and drove down. Because we spent a lot of time traveling down to Atlanta, including a 4 hr layover in Toronto, we only drove halfway the night we got in, stopping in Montgomery, Alabama for the night. Here's a great picture I took of Marilu and Lucas cuddling, right before bedtime.


The next day, we got to my dad's and discovered just how kid-unfriendly his house is. I present Exhibit A, the glass liquor bottles on the open shelf near the floor. Lucas took a quick interest in that (I can't quite remember the story about the ribbons).


The next day was Christmas and that means presents! Here we see Lucas and my dad about to open one. My dad is sporting the spiffy Labrador hat we got him for father's day this past year.


Lucas isn't terribly impressed with the Xbox 360 my brother Jared got for Christmas. I'm sure that attitude will change in the years to come, if he's anything like every other boy on the planet.


For the time being though, there is obviously nothing better than getting a chance to play in a box filled with packing material. Oh, to return to those days.


Here he concentrates on opening another gift. It should come as no surprise that he was MUCH more interested in the opening part of the gifting process than the actual gift.


This is one of those "aww" photos. Lucas is hugging a bear he got for Christmas.


One of Lucas's more recent eccentricities is to open up the front of his sleepers. On Christmas morning, he also got his feet out, showing the world the following fashion statement. Man, I'm going to have so much ammo for when he gets married.


My dad has this little beagle figurine that Lucas absolutely adored. He would hold it and pet it, and sometimes, he even tried giving it water as you see below. As cute as it is, I don't think we're getting a dog anytime soon. One kid is more than enough work, thank you very much.


Later that day, Lucas discovered he could make faces on the side of his port-a-crib (not sure if there's a technical term for it) by pressing his face against it. I responded in kind and we had a good few minutes of laughter over that.


I know I've mentioned our child likes to climb a little too much for his own good so this climbing job was an amateur job, compared to some of the situations he's gotten himself into.


I should have the second half of the trip up sometime tomorrow or Tuesday. Hope you're enjoying!

Christmas morning...sort of

As I mentioned in a previous post, we celebrated Christmas early since it was easier than lugging all of our wrapped presents all the way down to Florida only to bring the unwrapped items back again. So Dec 22 found us in the living room, next to the tree, opening presents. Although it was Lucas's second Christmas, he wasn't really all that aware of what was going on last year since he was only about 6 months old. This year, he was very aware and he had a blast. It's amazing how much joy one can get from tearing open a present without even caring about the actual gift inside. Of course, we let him help open ours as well since he was having such a good time.

I've included several pictures from the morning below. Re-experience Christmas all over again!







The aftermath.


I had to include this last one since it amused me. Our tree started out normal looking, with ornaments evenly distributed over it. However, after a few days of Lucas attacking the lower ones with wild abandon--after a while, saying "no" apparently was just a suggestion--we had to rearrange their locations. So now we have a top heavy tree, which I suspect is not a rare occurrence in most houses with young ones.


For a little bit of nostalgia, here's a couple of links to last year's entries: photos and videos.

Another gift and SNOW!

Another of Lucas's early presents was from Marilu's parents. They got him a portable DVD player, which theoretically would make the flight down to Atlanta and the drive to Florida easier on him. As it turned out, Lucas is still not a big fan of TV and watching movies. I almost felt like a bad parent in the weeks leading up to the trip since we were TRYING to get him to watch TV, which is the complete opposite of what you normally do with kids, right? Anyway, the DVD was useful for me as I got to watch a couple of movies on the plane and in the hotel room so not all was lost. Plus, I'm sure he'll become more interested in videos pretty soon so it will come in handy for future trips. All of this talk leads to a picture of him watching an Elmo video at his new table.


And for those of you in sunnier climates, here's a couple of pictures from one of the crappier times we've had this winter, back on Dec 21. The first is a shot of our back deck and the latter is our front yard. Most of it melted while we were gone, but if the last few years have taught me anything (especially the 14 ft we got last year), Mother Nature is just biding her time.



Oh, what the heck, one more pudding smile for the road.

Gifts!

After going to a Christmas party at a friends house in mid-December, we discovered Lucas really liked some motorized dinosaur toys they had for their kids. As a result, I was out the next day to pick him up a dragon version of the toy. We ended up giving it--as well as several other gifts--early since we didn't see a point to waiting until Christmas. He still doesn't have any real idea as to what Christmas is, plus we were going to be flying to my dad's and didn't want to bring a bunch of gifts for him just to bring them all back. We did end up doing a mini-Christmas where we opened our gifts to each other (and the few remaining for Lucas) on the 22nd, I think. Those pictures will be in another post, probably the next one.

For now, here's Lucas with his new dragon.


Another of his early gifts was a new table. My mom was kind enough to get this for him. At first, we were going to get a fancy wooden one that admittedly cost way too much. However, the more we thought about it, the more we realized that this would be a table that would be used for eating, doing crafts, and lots of other stuff that weren't going to leave it in the best of conditions. As a result, a nice sturdy plastic table fit the bill.

Here, he checks out the table.


Not surprisingly, he found the screwdriver I used to put the table together much more interesting than the table itself. As you can see in the second picture, he picked up the idea of what it was used for pretty quick.



Of course, not long after I put the whole thing together, our little monkey found another way to use it, one that wasn't really intended.


These last pictures are from the same dinner as the popular "pizza in the pjs" video that I posted prior to our Florida vacation. We have one wacky little boy.