Easter 2013

You can blame my mom for the long delay between updates. She visited us over the Easter weekend, and when she is here, she doesn't pay attention to the blog, and thus there is no one to nag me about not updating regularly. However, she left last Tuesday so we're quickly approaching the point where I will hear from her so I thought it was best I get a new update up. And speaking of Easter, that's the theme of this one!

I'm not exactly sure when it happened, but at some point, Easter became a poor man's Christmas, from a commercial perspective. Every year, Lucas gets a basket with chocolate, but he also gets a bunch of presents. Maybe the same thing happened when I was younger--I can't recall--but all I have memories of are chocolate bunnies and other assorted bits of sugar. Whatever the case, here are the highlights of Lucas and Easter 2013.

It might have been a little last minute, but the night before Easter, we finally got around to coloring eggs. It doesn't appear to be one of Lucas's favorite activities. He has more fun mixing the colors until they are a soothing shade of brown/black.

 

No Easter is complete without an Easter egg hunt. Lucas had a great time searching for them, and once again, I was able to stay one step ahead of him and actually come up with hiding places he couldn't find without help. I'm sure that won't last too much longer.

 

Showing off the loot. (Quite literally, this year, as my mom got him a pirate chest.)

Feasting away on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! LOVE the faces, especially in the first picture.

Lucas's thank you note for the Easter bunny. Note the "eaten" carrot on the left.

Weekly News

Couple news tidbits for the week. First off, Lucas had his last ever day with his daycare provider on Friday. Daycare was supposed to last until the end of the school year, but Andrea, his daycare provider, was offered her dream job at the Ronald McDonald House at the local children's hospital, and the opportunity was too good to pass up. It doesn't really affect us since we can easily handle dropping him off and picking him up from the bus, but it's kind of sad since it feels like the end of an era. Heck, Lucas has been with her since he was 1 so she's almost like family. Speaking of Lucas, it doesn't phase him. He's actually looking forward to riding the bus that stops on our street since he has a lot of friends and classmates on it.

In other news, Lucas received his green belt at Little Dragons karate. Granted, it's based on attendance versus any sort of merit system (that comes at age 6), but it's still good to see him stick with it for so long and have a good time. Here's a picture of Master John, the owner, putting Lucas's new belt on him.

One last dip into 2012

March break is over, Lucas and Marilu are safely back in Ottawa after their trip to Labrador, and I managed to survive the week despite drinking what seemed like my body weight in beer during their absence. Since I didn't get any new photos this week, I wanted to take a look back at some photos I took last year.

This is a cute one from August. Marilu and Lucas really decided to get into their roles as they read a Where's Waldo book.

We jump ahead to October for the next set of photos. For a while, Lucas went through a phase where he really liked parfaits. Here he shows off that night's dessert.

Marilu and Lucas decorate the outside of our house for Halloween.

When Marilu braided Lucas's hair into the result below, that's the point where I realized he was in dire need of a haircut.

This is what it looked like without the girly braids.

Finally, Lucas delights in drinking out of one of the "adult" glasses.

Believe it or not, I think we are finally caught up with 2012! Unless I missed a folder, everything from here on out should be recent (if you count 2 months old recent, which relative to some of the stuff I've posted, is just about like yesterday!).

March Break

We're in Montreal tonight, and I'm typing this from my iPhone so don't expect anything long as my smartphone typing skills are laughable. We're here because Marilu and Lucas are flying out of the airport early tomorrow morning, heading up to Labrador City for the week. I'll then drive back to Montreal next Saturday to pick them up. Here's a pic of the two of them on the bed from a few minutes ago, Marilu on the phone and Lucas, as per usual, playing on the iPad.

First time skating! (this winter)

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.

Bye bye, June!

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!

Birthday #5

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.)

Touch a Truck 2012

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.

New Haircut!

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.

Here's the finished product. Good looking kid!

Montreal - Summer 2012

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. :)