Although I've been sick with a fever and a cold and a sore throat for the last couple of days, I'm making sure to get this post up before midnight since I sort of promised it in the last update, and I don't want my mom giving me grief.
This entry is devoted to skating. Marilu and Lucas hadn't skated at all this winter, but she decided to rectify that situation a couple of weeks ago. There's a couple of community "rinks" in our neighborhood so we went to the closest one, which doubles as a parking lot during the warmer months.
Of course, an update like this would be nothing without videos so here you go.
I think they only went skating once or twice last year so we were pretty impressed at how quickly Lucas got acclimated to skating (even if the ice was rough enough that it was more like ice walking). We haven't gone since then, but we hope to get him out more before winter is over. Unlike most Canadians, I didn't grow up near ice so skating isn't second nature to me. Therefore, it doesn't always occur to me to get Lucas into it. On the other hand, Marilu is a true Great White Northerner so you can blame her for Lucas's delay in the tundra sports.
Why yes, yes I did forget to post last week. Thanks for noticing! Here are the last of the highlights for June of last year.
Lucas's school had an end of the year thingamajig with food, crafts, and other assorted activities. I volunteered as an attendant for one of the inflatable slides. Lucas and his friends had a ball with this, going on it no less than 20 times during my shift.
Lucas went through a big science phase last summer where he wanted to do "experiments." During my mom's trip up, she bought him a couple of science kits. In the picture below, he's doing an experiment which is supposed to create sugar crystals. It didn't work that well, but that might have been user error on my behalf.
Here's the card and gift Lucas gave me for Father's Day.
We had much more success with our volcano experiment than the crystal one. Here's a photo and video of our efforts.
Finally, you can thank Marilu for snapping this photo of me asleep in the living room. Classy.
Hopefully, the next entry will be newer photos. Lucas and Marilu went skating for the first time this year last week, and I got a couple of decent shots of them. Look for it by Wednesday!
Probably the biggest event you missed last summer during my hiatus from the blog was Lucas's birthday. I might have posted a picture of him blowing out the candles on his cake, but I didn't upload anything for his party. I know it's strange posting about this now, seeing as he is closer to 6 than 5, but I wanted to include it for posterity.
Because there are a LOT of pictures from his birthday, thanks to pictures from both my camera, my mom's, and our friend Tracey's (just over 200, I believe), I've decided to upload all the photos to the online albums instead of trying to find 10-15 highlights out of all of those. I think there's a link on the right to the photo albums, but you can click here to go directly to the birthday one. (I just found out Google has changed the way the photo albums work. You definitely need to use this link, not the one on the right. If anyone has problem accessing the albums, let me know.)
When you look at the pictures, you may notice that some are at home, and some are not. What happened is that Lucas's party was initially scheduled for the day of his actual birthday at a place called Monkey Around. Unfortunately, he got sick the night before, and by morning, it looked like he would be in no condition to attend a party. On top of that, Marilu came down with a case of strep throat. As such, we rescheduled the party for the following Saturday. For what it's worth, Lucas ended up recovering pretty quickly, but because of Marilu's condition, it was best that we did cancel the party, or she would have had a miserable time.
So the pictures you see at home are from June 16, Lucas' birthday, and the ones at Monkey Around are from the following weekend. I'm sure that's more information than anyone needs or cares about, but hey, I'm all about full transparency here at Deal With It. :)
(I wasn't going to upload anything in this entry, but I'm feeling generous so here's a video of Lucas getting his birthday cake at Monkey Around.)
Another thing that happened back in June was Touch a Truck. It's an annual event that takes place not too far from us where they fill a mall parking lot with all kinds of different vehicles. From Army trucks to ambulances to double-decker buses to construction equipment, there's a little bit of everything. The best part is that the kids are encouraged to get in the vehicles and explore. They also had some reptiles there, which I think was the highlight for Lucas. There's not really much else to say so here's a look at our visit to Touch a Truck 2012.
Lucas's hair was getting a little unwieldy so we scheduled a hair appointment for this morning. For the last couple of years, we've been bringing him to Goobers, which is a hair salon specifically for kids, but their results have been mixed. As such, we decided to bring him to the place I've been going for the last 4-5 years. It also happens to be the place Lucas got his very first haircut (see here for a trip down memory lane). For his first trip back, I had my guy, Arben, cut Lucas's hair. Next time, we'll probably go together and get our hair cut side by side.
Lucas behaved extremely well, and as you can tell by this picture, he had a pretty good time.
While looking through my photos that haven't been uploaded yet, I realized that almost none of our photos from June made it on to the blog. The reason for this is quite simple. That was in the aftermath of the Rory situation, and I didn't post anything for a month or two. Now that we're a little removed from the summer, it's time to take a look at some of the stuff we did and places we went.
After everything that did happen with Rory, Marilu and I decided the best thing for us was to get away as a family so we took Lucas to Montreal for a weekend. Considering the circumstances, we had a pretty good time. The highlights were the hotel pool and our trip to the science museum, which had a very cool Star Wars exhibit at the time. See below for plenty of pictures of each of those as well as a couple of other random things.
Stopping at McDonald's on the way to Montreal.
Playing in the pool at the Delta Hotel.
And finally, a ton of pictures of the Star Wars Identities exhibit. If this comes to a museum near you and you are even a remote Star Wars fan, I highly recommend it. I was extremely impressed.
There's an interactive component to the exhibit that lets you create a Star Wars character based on your personality choices. You then get to name your characters. Here's a shot of our three. One guess as to which one was Lucas's. :)
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