Anatomy of a Craft

At Lucas's daycare, they make a staggering number of crafts. For someone who considers coloring, painting, and Play-Doh about the limit of my crafting knowledge, I am constantly amazed at some of the things he comes home with. Case in point? A pirate ship made from a box, a cardboard tube, and a few other materials. I was actually quite impressed.

As with most crafts Lucas brings home, this one didn't last a considerable amount of time. For whatever reason, he delights in the destruction of his creations as much, if not more, than the actual building process. A benevolent god, he is not.

Unfortunately, he wasn't in the mood for a picture the day he brought the ship home so this is the best shot I have of him and the craft.


Skip to a mere three days later...the pirate ship is long gone, and the box has been repurposed to Lucas's needs.

Our little thug

Back in April, Lucas received a long-sleeve Spider-Man shirt from the 6 year-old son of his daycare provider's neighbor. Lucas happens to really like her son, and as a result, this shirt rocketed to the top of his favorite shirt list. If he sees it, he HAS to wear it. There's been times where he has worn it all day, kept it on for bed, and then fought with me when I tried to take it off of him the following morning. Being long-sleeve, we pretty much had to hide it once the warm weather arrived since he would likely prefer heat stroke to removing it.

One of the things I haven't mentioned about it yet is that is has a hood, which Lucas refuses to put down while he is wearing the shirt. The result is that we have a 3-year-old kid running around the house looking like a hoodlum on "long-sleeve Spider-Man shirt" days. See the pictures below to get an idea of what I am talking about.

Of course, nothing says "thug" like eating pancakes.



"But mom, I'm trying to look tough!"


I think Marilu is mocking him here.


I stand corrected, nothing says "thug" like eating pancakes while your mommy reads a Caillou book to you.



I wrap this post up with an extremely rare shot of Hoodlumus Toddlerus with his hood down. I guess he felt the backwards hat would keep his street cred intact.

The Dynamic Duo

One afternoon, I showed Lucas how you could tie a blanket around your neck and make a cape. Of course, that led to us dressing up as the least threatening superhero duo of all time. Though he DOES have a pretty fierce face right there so I wouldn't mess with Lil Critter.


Incidentally, I like this picture so much, it's been my Facebook profile pic since the day I took it back in April.

Yet more faces

Looking back on the pictures from late March/early April, it appears that Lucas was learning how to make faces. To clarify, he'd been making faces of one sort or another for awhile, but it was about that time that he could make several, particularly when we told him to. At least that is my theory, based on how many pictures we have of him from that time making one crazy face or another.

This post continues that theme as Lucas makes several more faces for the camera...while eating, as you'll see in the last photo. Enjoy!

Random Photos

As the title of this post indicates, here are some random pictures of our little hooligan.

Showing off his new bike/scooter helmet.


"Can't you see that I'm TRYING to read."


Just a cute picture of Lucas on the couch.


Truly stylin'.

Two Sides to Every Story

For the title of this post, I was going to use "Before and After," but I've apparently used that before. Not that I couldn't use it again, but I do try to be original. That's why you get the "Two Sides" entry name, which really doesn't have that much to do with the subject of today's post, beyond the first two words.

Sometime back in March, Lucas's friend Carter was over, and they decided to watch TV. Marilu had the presence of mind to take the following two pictures. I think it came out quite cute.



For what it's worth, I wasn't there so I have no idea what Carter is so peeved about in the first picture. And upon second glance at the next picture, it appears the TV is off, so to be honest, I'm not sure what the two of them were doing. Watching paint dry?

Dessert

Following the facial expression cavalcade that Lucas presented in the last post, I'd like to keep with that theme in this one. Big difference is this one is a video!

This clip came from after dinner sometime in mid-March while Lucas was eating ice cream. He'd already made the "cold face" on several occasions before so in this case, he's just hamming it up for the camera here. Still, I'm not sure what is more amusing: the face or the fact that he is acting.

The Many Faces of Play-Doh

You wouldn't think Play-Doh would elicit that many reactions, would you? Lucas would respectfully disagree.




Continuing with the "making faces" theme, a couple more from a few days later.

Weird Kid

Back in March, Lucas decided one night to crawl up inside the front of my shirt. He stayed there for a while before popping back out the bottom. See the video below for the weirdness.



Fyi, the video ends just as he is requesting to do the same to Marilu's shirt.

Digging in the snow

Here's the follow-up video that I mentioned in my last post.

More winter hijinks

Last winter, we bought a storage unit for the back deck so we had some place to put the hoses, Lucas's outside toys, and other various items. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that by the end of winter, Lucas got himself stuck in said storage unit.


I'm not really sure words can sufficiently describe this picture.


As if the above pictures weren't enough, here is a video that documents the first episode in much more detail.



Lest you worry about his capture by the storage unit, I rescued him moments after I turned off the camera. Also, I'll have another video up later in the day that shows off his digging efforts.

Snowshoes!

As some of you may know, I'm on my own for the next 3 weeks while Marilu and Lucas are off cavorting around Newfoundland. Since I'll have a little more time to myself (and the ability to sleep in past 7 AM EVERY SINGLE DAY), I have made a vow to post every single day.

Well, that's not totally true. What I plan to do is create several posts during one sitting and then time delay them so that they appear to upload every morning, probably at 6 AM. Smoke, mirrors, and trickery aside, what this means is that you'll be seeing a lot of Lucas pictures over the next 20 days. You can thank me later.

For now, let's start off with a post highlighting the hijinks of Lucas and I in the backyard back in March when we both tried on snowshoes for the first time. Suffice to say, neither of us were terribly proficient.

Lucas tests out his footing.


Here we both try to stay upright. Luckily, there are no pictures from a few minutes later when I fell on my ass.


If you DO fall down, you may as well eat some snow while you are down there.


Posing together.


Finally, a video of the little guy trudging along the frozen tundra of our backyard.

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.