For Grammy!

This post is dedicated to my mom. She was visiting us last week and drove home this morning. I know she loves seeing Lucas while she is here, but she also makes our lives much easier. From a purely selfish standpoint, I love the fact that she is a morning person (I am not) so when Lucas wakes up at 7 in the morning, I can just hand him off to her and go back to bed for another hour or two. She also made it possible for Marilu and I to go out for a couple of evenings without having to worry about the rugrat. In fact, on Friday, we caught the Broadway musical Avenue Q at the National Arts Centre (phenomenal show!) and then stayed in a hotel, enabling us to actually sleep uninterrupted through the night. What a joy!

In honor of my mom, let me post this picture of her and Lucas from an earlier visit this year, back in March. Thanks for the visit, Mom!

Birthday Party Videos

As promised, a couple of videos from this past Saturday's party for Lucas's 3rd birthday. In the first one, Lucas blows out the candles on his birthday cake. Best part is at the beginning when he throws up the devil horns to show his age. Ronnie James Dio would be so proud of our little rocker. Also, his look of contentment at the end is pretty amusing as well.

The second video is of Lucas opening one of his birthday presents. I love the 13 second mark where he smiles on demand, putting to shame runway models worldwide.

3rd Birthday Party

Before I get to the party pictures, I wanted to mention that we brought Lucas to his first movie in a theater today. The movie was Toy Story 3, and he really seemed to enjoy it. He started getting a little antsy toward the end, but as my mom pointed out, if we came in late and skipped the 20 minutes or so of commercials, it would have been perfect. So that's what we're likely to do next time.

(Technically, Lucas has been at the movie theater before. However, it was when he was less than a year old and he would sleep through the movie while Marilu, as well as all the other moms with babies, could relax for a couple of hours.)

Onward to the party...

This year's theme was Spider-Man since Lucas loves Spider-Man. Absolutely loves him. There have actually been days where every single piece of clothing he was wearing was Spider-Man branded. So this was a pretty easy choice for Marilu when decorating for the party. For the record, his Year 1 theme was Elmo from Sesame Street, and last year was dinosaurs.

Here's a picture of the birthday boy wearing his birthday outfit, which includes a Spider-Man ribbon.


This next picture isn't Lucas (obviously); it's his friend, 5-year-old Francesca. I wanted to post it since I figured this would be the only way you'd ever see this cool costume we bought for Lucas during our trip to Syracuse last weekend. He doesn't have the patience to wear the whole thing all at once so you get the lovely Francesca modeling it instead.


This is the awesome-looking cake Marilu made for the party. Normally, she does a test cake a week or so in advance, but she didn't have time this year so this was her first attempt. Pretty impressive!


Lucas poses with his cake.


I missed getting the candle blowout in a picture, but I did video almost the entire thing. I'll include that in a follow-up entry since it will take too long to upload tonight.


Blue mustache = good cake.


Even Spidey needs to shop for groceries now and then.


This picture was taken just moments before Lucas started opening presents (an event that could best be described as Christmas in June). Can you tell he's excited?


This picture amuses me. Right in the middle of Lucas's gift opening, Logan decided to make an Iron Man cameo appearance. Comic book nerds will rightly acknowledge that with a name like that, he should have been wearing a Wolverine mask, but that is an argument for another time and place.


This was the only picture I got of Lucas opening a present that wasn't blurred or marred in some other fashion. It figures it happens to be of the one present that didn't work: a motorized water bubble gun. My mom returned it to Toys R Us earlier today and he replaced it with a, surprise surprise, Spider-Man action figure. I think he currently has in excess of 10 different Spidey figures.


An odd picture of Marilu with book club buddies, Tracey and Sherri.


Finally, an overhead shot of Lucas with most of his haul. Yes, that isn't all of it. I wasn't exaggerating with my Christmas in June comment earlier.


As I mentioned earlier, I'll be posting at least one video from the party (blowing out the candles) shortly. In addition, I'm uploading all the other pictures I took to my photo album website. Since I haven't done it yet, I'll include that link in the next post.

Hope you all enjoyed the glimpse at Lucas's latest milestone!

More from birthday #3

After putting up with 3 straight phone calls, 2 of which were (attempted) video calls via computer, Lucas was in no mood to take birthday pictures last night. However, we were able to get these quick shots of him as we brought him upstairs to get ready for bed. As I said in my last post, I'll try to get plenty more during his party on Saturday.

Lucas is 3!

For those of you not keeping track of such things, Lucas turns 3 today! I know people say this all the time, but it really does feel like only yesterday that he was born. Time has just flown by. Now feel free to insert your own "time passing" cliche. Best one wins a cup of assorted screws, nuts, and bolts.

Lucas's birthday party is on Saturday so it'll still be a few days until I take the good pictures, but I plan to get some tonight when he gets home from daycare. I'll try and have those posted by tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy the one below from this morning. I let him pick his breakfast so, of course, he went with 2 hotdogs, a chocolate-chip cookie, and a slice of cheddar cheese.

#500!

Here it is, post 500 of Lucas's little blog! I'm not surprised the blog is still going since, despite the fact that I don't update as often as I did in Year 1, I have every intention of continuing this until he is old enough to tell me to stop ("you're embarrassing me, dad!") or they shut down the Internet. That said, actually saying the number 500 makes me realize just how much time I've spent chronicling his development, and I'm glad I stuck with it.

I don't have anything super special planned for this entry, but as it so happens, the next pictures I was going to post ARE pretty amusing so let's just pretend that was a calculated decision. Maybe post 1000 will get something more elaborate.

Lucas is finally old enough that he has started making faces and associates labels to the faces he makes. For example, when we tell him to make his "happy face" or "sad face," we'll get a response from him. So what we did here is have him go through all the different faces he can make (or could make, since this is from back on March 1). Hope you enjoy!

Our little actor sits in his chair and prepares for the performance.


Somewhat surprised.


"Are ya kiddin' me?"


No idea what we call this face. Feel free to add your own label.


Sad panda face.


Our little stoner.


And finally, the "Hey, I'm only a day old" face.


Thanks to everyone who has been with us for the first 500 posts. Hope you stay along for the ride as we shoot for 1000!

Onward, we March (excuse the pun)

Going back to the beginning of March (the 1st, actually), here are some pictures of our trip to the Children's Museum at the Museum of Civilization across the river in Gatineau, Quebec. If I remember correctly, it was me, Lucas, and my mom.

As safe as we all know Indian buses are, with that kind of expression on the driver's face, I don't think I'd get on that one.


Riding the fake camel with a random French-Canadian kid thrown in for effect.


This was hilarious. There's a replica of a cargo ship in the museum and kids can use a control panel to raise and lower a hook to pick up "cargo" and then move it onto the ship. A whole bunch of kids were fighting over who was going to control the crane while Lucas ignored them and just started loading and unloading the cargo. We're so proud of our future manual laborer. He also had a yellow construction hat to go with his gloves and safety vest but that disappeared at some point.


As we were leaving, we stopped into the little theater and Lucas got dressed up backstage...


...for his starring performance. I get the impression he's not drawn to the theater. Oh well, there's always working the Newfie shipyards.


Believe it or not, the next post will be the 500th one for Lucas's blog. Not too bad as we approach his third birthday in just 8 days. Thank god I posted so often during year 1 since it makes my average posts per month look a lot better than my current anemic production. That said, you should get a kick out of post 500. I already know what pictures I am going to use so expect that sometime tomorrow.

Real Estate News

My apologies once again for the lack of posts. It's been a pretty busy week for me, business-wise. Not only does it look like I got a new listing (I'll know for sure on Monday), but my buyers just bought a new home earlier tonight. So now I have my first sell and my first buy under my belt. I'm going to revel in the moment for now, but I'll update with some new pictures tomorrow.

Night, all!

Quick One

I'm trying to get this post done before Lucas gets home so it's going to be a quick one. Mostly pictures, but if I have time for text, well then...hip hip hooray.

One thing to speak of before the pictures. Lucas got his first pet this past weekend. We bought him a blue betta fish along with a fish bowl and all the necessary items. We asked him what he wanted to name it and got the wonderfully creative "Fish," so I guess that is what we are going with for now. I'll try and get a picture of the two of them together if Fish doesn't die anytime soon.

This picture was taken the same day we went to Winterlude. Lucas got it in his head that he was going to school so he put a backpack on his back, my backpack on one arm, Marilu's purse on the other arm, and topped it all off with an Atlanta Falcons hat. Quite the look.


This was taken in our driveway on February 28. Can you tell we had a mild winter?


We learned that if you give a 2 year old some action figures, a roll of tape, and a pair of kids scissors, they will stay occupied for a LONG time. In this case, about an hour and a half. Who needs videogames?


This picture was from right before the US-Canada Olympic hockey game. I was trying to get Lucas to root for the US since it he was uncannily accurate in his predictions. Unfortunately, when we asked him who would win between US and Canada, he would only answer "Germany!"


Not sure what made him so happy during the hockey game, but it's cute nonetheless.

Winterlude 2010, Part 2

It's been two and a half weeks coming, but here are the rest of our pictures from our trip to Winterlude back in February.

In the first one, Lucas poses with Marilu on yet another ice throne.


Standing in front of the massive sheet of ice with the festival's logo.


Ice skating on the canal with Marilu. In his case, though, it was more ice standing or ice shuffling, but we all gotta start somewhere, right?


Eventually, he just lay face-down in the sled and let Marilu pull him. Not the most regal pose.


A final picture of our future Gretzky.

Musings and Regrets

I don't think I mentioned it, but my mom and Kevin came up to visit this past Wednesday and stayed with us until this morning. While it's always a little sad to see family leave, this morning it hit harder than normal. When Lucas was younger, he liked it when new people were around, but he didn't really make the distinction that they were visiting and that they would eventually be leaving. However, now that he is nearly three, he's beginning to understand it more clearly.

In the days leading up to their visit, Lucas would ask every morning whether Grammy and Grampy were here yet. When we brought my mom along to pick him up from daycare on Wednesday, he had an ear-to-ear smile plastered on his face as he ran over for a huge hug. And then this morning, when we told him they were leaving, he kept repeating that "the planes are all gone!" I guess that was his way of telling them to stay.

As I thought about it on the ride home from the airport, I realized just how much I hate living so far from any family, whether its mine or Marilu's. Lucas has such a great time whenever someone visits and when they are gone, it's just the three of us. Yeah, there are his daycare friends and kids around the neighborhood, but I can't help but feel he is missing out on experiences that children with local grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc, get on a regular basis.

Part of my feelings are selfish--who doesn't want easy access to a babysitter?--but it goes beyond that. I watched how overjoyed he was to play with his Grammy and Grampy the past 5 days, and I just feel bad that these interactions are so few and far between.

Knowing that there is no easy solution due to the international situation of our living status doesn't help. Even if everyone wanted to live in one place, it's almost impossible from a logistical standpoint. So basically, the situation just plain sucks.

Enough feeling sorry for myself. In positive news, I conditionally sold my first house this past Friday so I'm actually bringing money into the home again. Let's hope that is followed by a torrent of additional business.

I know I said I was going to post a follow-up to the Winterlude pictures--and I am--but for now, I wanted to post some pictures from this past week. Thanks for the visit, Grammy and Grampy!

For weeks, Lucas has been anticipating the Spider-Man scooter than my mom and Kevin were bringing up for him. So much, in fact, that we were able to bribe a lot of good behavior out of him. "If you don't do X, you won't get your scooter!" Wednesday was the big day, and we put it together not long after he got home from daycare. I believe he rode it up and down the driveway once and then moved on to something else. Go figure. However, they also brought the outfit you see in this photo--which is actually Spider-Man pajamas--and he would wear almost nothing else this weekend. Except for when we had to go outside on cold days, he wore the PJs nearly 24/7. So at least one Spider-Man themed present was a massive hit, just not the one we expected.


Here's a better shot of the PJs.


Amazingly, we finally got him to cooperate on this photo with my mom and Kevin.


Neither Lucas nor Kevin were looking at the camera in this one, but I really like the way their looking at each other turned out.


And finally, one with Lucas and the moms for Mother's Day. Thanks for coming up, Grammy and Grampy!

Winterlude 2010, Part 1

The real estate world has been pretty busy for me lately so hopefully the lack of pictures this past week will soon be offset by an influx of money. Keeping my fingers crossed...

Last post saw me go through most of February, but one notable event I skipped was our trip downtown to Ottawa's Winterlude. For those of you unfamiliar with Winterlude, I believe Ottawa has a few things associated with it, but the main focus is the frozen canal. Also of interest are the ice sculptures. On the day in question, we got to experience both.

For some reason, Lucas got it in his head that Cow needed to make the trip with us. So Cow sat in the back seat with him.


Lucas posed with several of the ice sculptures. Just about all of them were really amazing.



In this case, he sits on the ice sculpture, a huge throne of sorts.


I had Marilu take this picture of Lucas and me since it suits my arachnophobia. Why not pose in front of a massive ice tarantula?


Sigh...this was going to be an all-inclusive post, but Blogger is not letting me upload any more pictures at the moment. As a result, more ice pictures as well as some of Lucas skating will have to wait until tomorrow. Until then...