Halloween 2009

This year was the first year Lucas could really participate in Halloween. I think he helped out a little giving out candy last year--I assume, since I was in London at the time--but he got to do it all this year: help carve a pumpkin, wear a costume, go trick or treating...the whole shebang.

A couple of days before Halloween, I bought a couple of pumpkins, and then Lucas and I cut one open, emptied its guts, and carved a face on it. He really seemed to enjoy the whole process though he was a little weirded out by the gooey inside at first as you can see on his face here.

Marilu took the following video in the middle of de-gutting the pumpkin. Lucas wasn't sure whether he wanted to do the official job, eat the pumpkin, or get into a food fight of sorts.

Lucas poses with the finished creation. What a proud kid.

On Halloween night, we went out with a few of the neighbors and their kids so we had quite the little gang going. That only lasted about halfway down the street since the older kid (age 4) moved a lot quicker from house to house while Lucas and some of the other took their time or got distracted as you'll see in some of the photos below.

One of the houses was decorated really well with, among other things, this skeleton laying against a tree. Instead of being scared or tentative, Lucas went over and plopped down in its lap for a few minutes. He must have thought it looked too skinny as he also offered it some of his chips.


A few houses later, he and his friend Reid decided that lying in the middle of the grass and taking a rest would be a good idea. I pretty much carried him home from there since he grew tired of carrying his bag around at that point.


When we got home, he sat out on the porch and watched people come to our place for trick or treating. Turns out he loves lollipops.


We didn't get too crazy for Halloween this year since I was pretty busy with my real estate exam (which I took on Halloween morning, for the record) and didn't have the time to decorate much. That said, we still tried to go for the Halloween look, which you can see here.


Finally, I took a picture of Lucas and Marilu, who is dressed up in my old Army uniform. There's no way in heck I'll fit in it anymore so might as well make some use of it.

Trying out the Tigger costume

This is easily the best video we've taken of Lucas in a while. It starts out cute, but keep watching since the latter half is arguably the funniest stuff he's ever done on video.

Movie Night, Part 1

For your viewing pleasure, the next two posts will contain an assortment of movies from the last couple of months.

This is the first of three from our trip to Massachusetts earlier this summer. In this one, Lucas tries his hand at vacuuming. Now all I have to do is teach him snow shoveling and taking out the trash, and it's easy living for me here on out.



In Massachusetts video #2, Lucas tries his own unique method of feeding bread to the fish. No animals were harmed in the making of this video. A little uncomfortable maybe, but eh, they're fish. We put 'em back in the water.



To close out the Massachusetts trilogy, we return to the boat on the lake previously seen here.

Coming soon

I'm currently uploading a bunch of videos, which is a fairly time-consuming process. If they finish tonight, I'll post at least some of them. Otherwise, be on the lookout for them tomorrow.

Massachusetts: Almost Done!

Let's see, we didn't end up going away for the weekend, AND I didn't get around to updating until just now. Um, Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving, everyone! (hopefully that will make you forget my negligence)

While in Massachusetts, Lucas was playing around with some clothespins, and it gave me an idea. The end result follows...

This isn't Lucas related, but Marilu and I got a chance to leave Lucas with his grandparents, and then we spent a night at the MGM Grand Hotel at Foxwoods Casino. We took the following picture right after we ate dinner at this FANTASTIC Chinese restaurant. I ate way too much, but by now, my stomach is used to being distended.

Here's a view from our room the following morning. The ones I took at night weren't that impressive even though the "live" view was really something.

Going back to the lake theme from the last Massachusetts entry, one evening we took a ride around the lake on one of those patio boats (or pontoon boats or whatever the heck they are called). The weather was perfect that evening, and we all had a really good time just cruising around dusk.




With my mom by his side, Lucas attempts the grizzled sailor look.


The wind had its way with Marilu's hair.


We're doomed.


I love how this next picture came out.


Finally, a rare nature shot since it really was a beautiful view from the boat.


That's just about it for the Massachusetts trip. Tomorrow, I'll have a couple more pics from our dinner at Eighty Ates, and if I have the time (since I'm spending a LOT of time studying for the real estate course), I'll try and get a couple of the Massachusetts videos uploaded to YouTube.

Mid-week update

Not many updates recently for 2 reasons. First, we went to Syracuse last weekend to shop and see my school (USF) beat Syracuse handily at football. Second, my mom has been here since last Wednesday, and she is usually the one who reminds me when I haven't updated in a few days. Since she gets to see Lucas on a daily basis, I've avoided her nagging temporarily. :)

For the long weekend coming up, we are headed to Hamilton (near Toronto, for you non-Ontarians) to visit with our friends Wes and Kelly and their 2 kids. As such, I'll try and get the rest of the Massachusetts pics up before Saturday, as well as some new pics we took today at the Children's Museum in the Canadian Museum of Civilization. If you live in the area and you haven't been there, you gotta get over there. I think we could have left Lucas there all day and he would have been happy. Great place.

Now I'm off to watch TV since I need to make room on the PVR. Technology has a death grip on my life, obviously.

Massachusetts: Part Deux (Lake Edition)

In the last entry, I covered our trip to the zoo while in Massachusetts. In this one (and probably the next), the theme is the lake. There are 50-60 pictures from when we were playing on or around the lake so I'm just going to go through and pick out some of the highlights. For those of you who are curious, my mom lives on what non-natives call Webster Lake in Massachusetts. However, the official name is Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaug. Yes, I can spell that from memory. If you think I'm making that name up, check out its entry on Wikipedia.

This first one is just a high-level view of the dock as you are coming down the stairs from the house...just to give you an idea of where we were.


Can you tell by that wide grin that Lucas is having fun?


One of the problems with the lake is that you get a lot of fish that we call kivers (spelling?) near shore and they tend to nip at your legs, particularly if you have much hair on them. They were really freaking Lucas out so one day, while he was napping, I went up to K-Mart and picked up a Spider-Man fishing pole and a fishing net. Lucas is still too young to understand the fishing pole but we had a blast catching the fish in the net. There were a couple of times I was able to pull up nearly 10 of them. Whichever ones weren't able to squeeze through the netting ended up on the dock so Lucas could look at them. After a minute or two, we would put them back in the water and replace them with new ones. I think Lucas had a really good time.



It did take a little bit of time to get used to the idea though. :)


Close-up of the guests of honor. You may notice bits of bread around them. Since we fed bread to the ducks, Lucas just assumed the fish would want it as well.



I think he's trying to make sure we know where the fish are.


My mom got really lucky with this shot. Great one of the three of us.


The rest of the lake pictures are from when we were on a boat so I'll save those for a separate entry. There are also several videos from this set so I'll try and remember to upload them to YouTube. It may take a while though since it's not the quickest process. Once they are up, I'll link to them here.

Finally, Massachusetts (Part 1 of ?)

Procrastination, begone! I'm finally tackling our Massachusetts trip from late July/early August. I've been putting it off for what feels like forever now since we took a massive amount of photos on that trip--eyeballing the albums looks like about 150 pics. Obviously, a lot of them are probably either very similar to one another or crap, but the end result will probably still be 3 or more posts from the trip.

So without any further adieu, let's begin. The first one focuses on our trip to the Southwick Zoo. It's a relatively small zoo less than an hour from my mom's place in Webster, but despite its size, I was extremely impressed at the number of animals they had. In addition, you were able to get a lot closer to the animals than you can at one of the bigger zoos. We all had a blast, and the only negative is that it started to rain so we had to leave early. My dad and I brought Lucas back later in the week, but unfortunately, we didn't bring the camera for that trip.

In our first picture, Lucas and I take a look at the tortoises. In case you are shuddering at my profile, I'm going to the gym again!


You can't see it in this picture, but at another monkey cage very similar to this one, there was a monkey in it that kept leaping at the fence and baring its fangs at us and then started whacking itself in the head. Lucas was entertained by that for nearly 5 minutes. It was probably the highlight of the zoo trip for him.


Actually, this was the monkey. I just don't have any pictures of him leaping at us.


Lucas's face is a little blurry in this shot, but I love the look of sheer excitement.


Hanging out with the monkeys...


See what I mean about how close you could get to the animals? Great view of the white tiger. I can't recommend the zoo enough if you happen to be in Mendon in south-central Massachusetts.


Later that evening, he had some bonding time with Kevin.



And then he relaxed with the local paper.


Many more pictures on the way!

Worst. Phase. Ever.

We all know it's common for a child to go through different phases in their lives, with some characteristic seemingly coming from nowhere one day and then disappearing as quickly as it came days, weeks, or months later. If what I went through this morning with Lucas is a phase, let's hope it falls into the single day category of length.

Let's review how my day started this morning...

1. At approximately 6:40, I get out of bed since Lucas is whining repeatedly over the monitor.
2. While walking to his room, I realize he is saying "pee" so I go in expecting the worst.
3. Sure enough, Lucas has peed through his diaper and PJ bottoms and there is a medium-sized wet spot on the bed. No biggie as this is fairly common for him recently.
4. Pick him up, get him a new diaper, take the sheet off his bed. Put him back into bed and give him some off his stuff to play with since I want to go back to bed until 7. So far, the same as a lot of mornings.
5. As I lie in bed, I can hear him playing and moving around but nothing out of the ordinary.
6. At about 5 til 7 (roughly 10 minutes later), he starts repeating something else over and over, enough that I can't get stay asleep so I walk back to his room.
7. Just before I get there, I realize he's probably saying "big poo." We are kind of potty training him lately, and he typically says this when he wants to use the toilet so I figure I'll be carrying him in there to use the bathroom.
8. I walk in the room, and the first thing I notice is that he removed his diaper. Damn, guess he really needs to use the bathroom.
9. I hurriedly move to pick him up and get him to the bathroom before he starts going, and that's when I notice he pooped right in the middle of his bed.

I don't really need to go on, do I? The only silver lining in this story is that the poop was solid and it was on the crib mattress itself which wipes quite easily. If it had been diarrhea and on his sheets? That would have been much nastier.

I guess the other silver lining is that the day can only go up from here. And as I said at the very beginning of this post, let's hope that this is not a sign of things to come.

Are You Ready for Some Football?!

Yesterday was the first Monday Night Football of the season, and we decided to dress Lucas up accordingly since the New England Patriots were playing.

He unwittingly posed for the first two as we were getting ready for daycare in the morning.



As you can see from the TV, this one was taken during the game.


Finally, there is always time for the rough-and-tumble football player to let his mom know he loves her.

Summertime Relaxation

Back in July, in between trips to Labrador, Niagara Falls, and Massachusetts, Lucas and I found time to kick back and relax in the pool out back.






And a little video to cap things off:

Trip to Niagara

Shortly after our trip to Lab City back in July, Marilu brought Lucas to Niagara Falls with her brother Jonathan and his new wife, Chantal. I didn't go since I was going to spend the days apart studying (as well as sitting around doing nothing) so I don't have much commentary for the following photos. All I know is that they stayed at a Hilton with a really nifty pool, and they went to Marineland. Oh, they also met up with our friends Kelly and Wes (along with their kids) who don't live that far away.

On the night they got there, Lucas apparently had a blast playing around on the bed with its pillows.



Stroller parking alongside Brody and Carson at Marineland.


Lucas with his mom and Aunt Chantal.


Amongst the herd.


I think he is trying to cuddle with the deer here.


Hangin' with Wes and Brody.


Getting a ride from Uncle Bub.


One thing of note is that Lucas went on amusement park rides for the first time at Marineland. According to Marilu, he LOVED them. Good to know since I like a good rollercoaster myself.


Chowing down at dinner that night with his aunt and uncle.


Playing in the jacuzzi tub was a close second to the rides for Lucas.

Two quick updates

1) Rogers was down throughout our entire area of Ottawa today so no phone, no Internet, and no cable. It just came back up a little while ago hence the lack of any updates today.

2) I passed my second real estate course with a 95. Not as good as my first result (100), but it's hard to match perfection. I'll start the final course this coming week and should wrap it all up by the last week of November. Then I get to pretend to be a grown-up again. Woohoo!