water-mmmmmmmelon

just a couple of cute photos of cole getting to know a piece of seedless watermelon. yummy! taken right before our vacation...

he's funny in that if you give him small cut-up pieces of something he may not eat them, but if you give him an entire ripe pear or 1/4 of a watermelon he goes to town...

he played knick knack on my thumb

jamie and i were debating about the actual words to "this old man" this morning and thankfully we had the good old interwebs to turn to for advice. yes, because i have nothing better to do than to look up the words to songs involving words like "paddy whack" - whatever that even means? (oh - gross!)

we found a great site - bussongs. in their words (because i do actually have lots of stuff to do, besides looking up song lyrics, let alone posting about them):

bussongs.com - the largest collection of children's music on the internet - with lyrics, videos and music for 2,066 kid's songs & nursery rhymes.

the site was created to help kids, parents, and teachers recall the words and lyrics to loved children's songs that bring back warm memories of family trips and summer camp. we also have a huge collection of lullabies and nursery rhymes to help keep alive the traditions of mums and dads singing their children to sleep.

so it put our debate to rest and i suspect we'll be visiting again. probably more for factual reference in solving debates, because i really enjoy making up random lyrics when i don't know the words.

we're baaaaaack!

so we had an amazing two weeks in england and are now back home. such a good time traipsing all over oxford and the south.

we landed yesterday and are getting ourselves settled back in. cole's catching up on his sleep (he must not subscribe to my theory that jet-lag doesn't exist) and i'm wading through many, many photos. here's just one to tide y'all over for a bit:

cole in the quad at the bodleian library. he missed the numerous playgrounds that we can find on every corner here in vancouver, but i tried to make up for the lack of slides and whatnot by letting him roam everywhere, from cathedrals to cloisters, from st. james park to a decrepit 13th century castle in wales...

more photos coming. 'soon' is my goal - 'eventually' may be more realistic! ;-)

cole + cherry blossoms

could it get any cuter? cole, auntie jas and i were walking to get some gelato yesterday, and we came across this stairway covered in cherry blossoms, just one street over from our building. it was raining blossoms - the wind was fairly mighty - and it was so beautiful...

seen around town

one of my favourite things about living in downtown vancouver is seeing - or stumbling across, rather - odd occurrences on a daily basis. unlike a larger city, you can still get away with gawking here. we vancouverites aren't so blasé that we'll walk past folks repelling down the exterior of the library without stopping to rubberneck.

we are, however, to generalize, too polite/standoffish to inquire about the purpose.

first beach trip of the year

we had a great time on sunday visiting jericho beach. i think that was the one - between kits beach and spanish banks, anyway.

the day was beautiful - blue skies, wispy clouds and the sand was warm and dry. cole had a blast at the beach - we took off his shoes and socks and he seemed astounded at the sand. i guess that's the word for someone who ended up eating a handful? he didn't seem to mind... he found rocks and shells and driftwood, spotted birds, took a foot-dip in the water, got buried up to his waist in sand and did his fair share of frolicking. most enjoyable.

more & larger photos on flickr. there may be even more soon, but i ran out of space...

playing in the morning sun

when we stayed at a hotel recently while our 1-year-old wood floors were replaced (some doofus a few floors up had a flood a few months ago), cole had a marvelous time playing, particularly in the wide windows looking down on the street 27 floors below. as i was getting ready to post new photos, i noticed these lovely ones of him in the morning sunshine, playing with the curtains and keeping a lookout for birds, one of his favourite activities. :-)

contents of the bag by the door

a little over a year ago now i cleaned out my desk at the office. i remember feeling excited and anxious - cole was due in about a month and i was definitely ready to go home, watch baby shows and wait... i was more tired than i thought i'd be at that point and it was all i could do to get through the day at work without a lunchtime nap, despite the fact that my job was one that required me to sit on my butt in my comfortable chair and make pretty things on my double-wide monitor all day. (side note: i really miss that monitor.)

i didn't want to leave my maternity leave replacement with the kind of gross, messy desk that i was used to, knowing that i wouldn't want to have to work around someone else's personal stuff for a whole year, and also knowing - hoping really - that i wouldn't be back in the same way anyway after the year was up.

so i did my best to tidy up. organized stuf, cleaned off the glass whiteboards, took home boxes of portfolio pieces and personal papers and old notebooks and copies of how magazine, unplugged my super-scary vintage clown lamp and eventually lugged all that stuff home. the last thing to be touched was that drawer. you know the one - the place where all the odds & ends live - things that you don't feel like dealing with yet aren't ready to let go. eventually, down to the wire and tired of tidying, i just shoved everything that wasn't ready to be tossed or recycled into a tote bag and called it a day.

for the better part of the year that tote bag lived in the storage room on parking level two of our building, collecting dust. then, about four months ago, i needed something from the box that held the bag and brought it upstairs. it hung on the door handle of our laundry closet ever since, because dealing with the contents meant i'd have to spend a few good minutes figuring out what needed to be done with all that junk - minutes that i'd rather use to do pretty much anything other than organizing more piles of junk into new piles of "this is totally not junk".so, today, tired of looking at the bag and feeling like it was another tedious task on the to-do list, apparently even below taxes, i opened it up and emptied it out. what was inside?

• a decaf mighty leaf teabag
• a japanese bunny paper clip
• a 1/3 roll of strawberry mentos
• two types of dental floss
• a piece of coral brought back from the keys
• some hot pink knee-high socks
  
• a book about maneki neko, asian lucky cats
• a business card case
• a mars eraser, scribbled with a 'm+j' on it in our early days, which is why i don't toss it
• a sheer but still too-red smashbox lip gloss
• four hair elastics - the kind that suck
• an undeveloped roll of actual film. i haven't had a film camera in years, so i'm really curious
• a paper-holder from the company i worked for about six years ago
• seventy cents worth of canadian tire money
• an emtpy travel toiletries pot
• a magenta sharpie and a green marker
• several pen refills
• miscellaneous reciepts from ikea and london drugs
• notes that jamie had doodled for me
• the air-plug for my yoga ball, which has gotten more action being inflated and deflated over the years than any actual excercise-related activity
• the usb cord to a digital photo frame
• a bottle of not-sold-in-canada aleve
• a green bird whistle
• an eames house of cards deck
• the 'n' new driver magnet from my days as an overaged new driver
• a glasses-wiping cloth
• a button, from what i don't know
• a crapload of pennies with a few odd nickles and dimes

so, yeah. in other words all just mostly junk. and an odd look at what i thought was essential over a year ago. :-)