strawberry pickin'

we went strawberry picking, cole and i, yesterday. we do love us some fruit around here and there's really nothing like a fresh local strawberry. i hadn't any expectation of trying to pick - we were just going out to buy them but we brought a little bucket just in case.

our favourite place is kraus brothers way out on 248th street past langley. i always get lost when i try to get there by myself, if i come from the highway as we did rather than from my in-laws place in langley... we ended up at the nexus of the universe - 56th ave. and 56th ave. how does one street cross itself?

we've been going to krause for fruit since i first moved here and it's come a long way in the last nine years or so. it used to be more of a farm stand but they started making improvements and it's quite the operation now. it has a little snack place, a good selection of produce & jams, wagons, a tiny petting farm, horses and a donkey to boot. very fun indeed. i love the new set-up, and it certainly makes it more fun for the kids but i do detest the mega long line. i suggest going on a weekday. u-pick raspberries start tuesday, fyi.

cole loved it! we got a wagon and wandered out to the field just to see. we went into a lane and found a couple berries - cole spotted one first and proceeded to eat it straight away, stem and all. we picked a few more - the crop is mostly done and the picking was hard - and cole promptly ate them out of the bucket faster than i could add more! we only managed to pick (and eat) a handful before we gave up and went to buy some, but it was great fun. and he didn't run off, which is what i had expected would happen! he was content to sit and eat and play with rocks and eat and eat some more. we moved along once he started trying to eat rotten ones when the good berries ran out.

we ventured into pet the animals before getting our fruit. he was so curious about the animals but a little timid too... i loved the way his face lit up when an adorable baby goat licked his hand, kind of like "oh my god, he's licking my hand, check it out do you see this?!?!". he seemed fascinated by the big goat making his "maa maa" sound - much better than the one we do reading animal sounds. ;-) no good photos of the inside parts - i was too busy making sure he didn't pull the rabbit ears (again) or get cornered by the pregnant goat.

the lengthy line-up for getting our milkshake was nearly more than i could do - it was late by then and cole was tired and thrashy, but all was well again once he had that sweet, sweet strawberry shake in his little ice-cream loving hands.

coco and his kitty phone

again, still just going through our stash of recent photos that i had forgotten about. much cuteness - many photos! at least you have to choose to come here to see them, rather than the olden days method of foisting your kid's baby photos on strangers: "hey, check out these million baby photos i just happen to have in my wallet!".

jamie brought cole back this hilarious hello kitty phone from his recent business trip to japan, and we all just love it. all the conversation is in japanese, so various buttons will blare out adorable phrases like "moshi moshi" and whatnot. i'm not sure if cole realizes it's supposed to be a phone, despite knowing a real phone and thinking every type of remote control is also a phone, but he likes it anyway.

yeah, so popsicles are popular

we buy the yummy all-fruit kind usually, or sometimes the all-fruit & yogurt type. cole is not particular - he likes 'em all.

homemade playdough recipe!

homemade playdough. i remember it fondly from when my mom made it many years ago and i just spotted this recipe & how-to over at the craftzine blog. i'm not sure if i should try this one yet with cole, but i'm going to have to and get some cream of tartar and give it a shot next week. (side note: what on earth else is that stuff for?) if the worst thing he can do is eat it then that's probably not too bad.

and better than the craft we tried the other day - stringing eco felt and cut-up straws onto a piece of wool. it was more of a random rainy day activity we could do together than a craft for him to do - i knew i'd be doing the stringing and a lot of hovering to ensure small bits remained uneaten, but cole ran off with all the supplies before we got too far. and i punched the holes too big so the felt pieces just came off and we were left with a string snake of straw bits. but it was still a lot of fun - he had a blast whipping felt around and chasing our pitiful snake, and it was our first craft together!

will report back on the success of playdough as soon as we try it out...

friends with wheels

a few weeks ago we made the trek to langley to visit with gramma & grampa and a friend that lives next door. her little guy james and cole had a blast out in the yards - it certainly made me wish for a space of green to call our own! i think cole got his first taste of battling for the driver's seat.

and a few days later we went to a fun birthday party in surrey's bear creek park for a friend's baby girl's first birthday party. i'd never been to that park and the playground there was fantastic! a water park, bathrooms (thank heavens), shady areas on the playground and everything. and there was a wagon! cole and the birthday girl, maryn, loved riding in the cart and grampa dave was happy to oblige with unlimited towing.

just sittin' on a doorstep

cole loves sitting on the ledge between the living room and the balcony. we've thought about whether to add some kind of gate or something for safety but so far he's been minding our requests to stay inside and of course we don't leave the door open unattended... but he does love to linger on the crest until we go out with him...

cole and his green thumbs

for some reason i kept forgetting to download our recent photos. we've got a good few weeks of pictures that need showing for the various grandmas and other curious folk... starting with: cole's love of balcony gardening! stuff is really growing on around here - oh man, that's horrible but i can't make myself untype it:

three weeks ago, before everything was planted:
about two and a half weeks ago:yesterday:

he loves to touch the leaves and to help water them (which is good because i usually kill all my plants by forgetting to water them). he really enjoys swatting at the smallest japanese maple - it's a bitty little thing and i'm not sure how much of cole's love it can stand! ;-)

i didn't go too crazy for the gardening this year - although i of course bought more than i had planned on when overwhelmed by choices at the store. everything was so green! and fragrant! and full of potential! and of course i'd love to grow a tomato (i didn't get one) and i probably have room for an enormous blackcurrant bush (i didn't get that either because i don't)... i stuck to a passionflower, the tiny maple (named victoria) and a nice taller but still smallish maple (named winston). i always name my maples after british leaders - i'm not sure why, but started and we've managed to either leave planted elsewhere or dehydrate our way through charles, charles II, oliver cromwell and prince harry. also filled a few large pots with herbs - they're all smooshed together and smelling lovely. cole likes to rummage around the pots and he always comes out smelling like mint - got a few kinds of that too (english and kentucky) so i can make some mojitos with freshly plucked mint this summer.

cole and his silly playsuit...

last fall i made cole a rather silly playsuit in a size so large he only recently grew into it. so what better to do than to dress him in an embarrassing homemade outfit, take him to the public park and photograph it for posterity?

lucky for me, this was the day he felt like sticking his tongue out from morning 'till night a few weeks back. ;-)

the new do

so i got a haircut on sunday. my usual haircut factory type place on west georgia. i went in because i was out looking for pants (why good-fitting clothes are so hard to find) and i couldn't find any that were any better than the pants i had at home. i was getting frustrated. and my hair was in need of a trim anyway, so why not? called for an impromptu appointment and they could fit me in with some person i'd not seen before, so in i went.

out i came with a reverse mullet! i don't know what i had agreed to, but i went in with slightly mangy overgrown hair that was otherwise reasonably acceptable and came out with a CENTRE-PARTED FULL-FRINGED REVERSE MULLET! i'm not up on my hairdo terminology to know a better word for something that leaves me with a much shorter back and two seemingly unrelated non-graduated dangly wads of hair on either side of my head. from the front it actually looked ok, but from the side i looked strange and from the back i looked like i must have cut my hair myself! i didn't really come to appreciate those angles until i was at home.

so back to the haircut factory i went. of course, i'm nice, so i didn't want to offend the very nice haircutting person who had given me the reverse mullet and i made some randomly babbled excuse about liking each part separately but not altogether at once on my head... she trimmed about a centimetre off the dangly bits and then prepared to finish - i had to tell her to keep going about three more times until it was evened(ish) out...

now i have a sort of blunt bob (verging on mom hair) but that is much better than something that looked like the gateway to kate gosselin's dead possum hairdo.

best.photo.ever

we went to a fantastic birthday party on the weekend for a friend's little guy who just turned three. it was a great kids party - good food & company, no rain and even a (hilariously indestructible) pinata! cole seemed to enjoy himself immensely indoors and out:

this photo cracks me up to no end. taken by the very talented tara. thanks for capturing this! ;-)

cole's new shorts...

check 'em out! details over here at my other blog hudsonny, you know, cause i have so much spare time that i had to have two blogs.

home repairs and then some...

we've been doing some decorating this week. i don't know if it was the hot weather that we recently had or just the fact that cole's toys suddenly seemed to take over every square inch of the place, but we've really felt an urgent need to declutter, streamline and put all the toys into some kind of (even temporary) order. we spent last week putting old baby stuff up for sale on craigslist, counting our newfound cash, reorganizing the storage locker and this week so far building things from ikea. i would like to be a little less fight club narrator-esque, browsing the ikea catalog late at night in a futile search for orderly satisfaction, but i have limited furniture-buying funds and i just happen to have a store-copy-only catalog...

we moved a large (very comfortable!) la-z-boy from cole's room and replaced it with a new chair. thank you gramma b for the new chair (and the old one) - cole loves it! it's given us back a good chunk of floor space and more view of the window.

which reminds me - curtains... the curtains we have up are some nonsense that i made before cole arrived and they're horrible. they're thick - i started out with some kind of canvas material from ikea which proved not thick enough to cancel out the light from the georgia viaduct. i added blackout fabric, but while that works for the light it also makes the drapes about as thick as that lead apron you wear at the dentist. and they're stained from water since our new-building-windows have some kind of winter condensation issue. am sewing more as we speak. they have birds on them!

we also put together a new desk today. it's been about a year and a half that i managed without one but i gave up the ghost and crammed one into the living/dining room after rearranging things. it's a super cheap deal from ikea and i don't have a photo of it yet. it's not that exciting anyway. and since i can't figure out how to attach the table top to the drawers or how to attach the drawer sliders to the drawers themselves, it only appears to be a finished desk. but i did have a lot of help putting it together from my little helper.

he loves to hammer! truth be told, we used that little mallet from one of this pounding toys to put the thing together, since i didn't want to go down to the storage locker to get the actual hammer. he added the robin hood hat himself...

just like mama

cole seems to have a thing for shoes. in this case flip flops, which he gathers up and slips his arms through before wandering around the house. he also enjoys slipping his whole arm inside jamie's size 12 shoes and then cackling like a crazy person. very adorable.

things to bring to the beach

cole and i enjoyed a lovely day today, heading out to lunch at capers (or whole foods, i guess, on robson) and then over to first beach and ceperley playground at stanley park.

we laid out our blanket - not an easy task with a, shall we say enthusiastic, toddler - and then scrambled on down to the water.

cole loves going in - he wades in until about knee level and collects rocks and seaweed and sticks and shells. everything got a lot messier after we ditched cole's shorts in favour of the practical (yet trashy looking and i swore i never do it but oh well) diaper and t-shirt combo. we made this same round trip between our blanket on the sand and the water 20 feet away many times, each time with cole becoming more and more caked in sand... when we were leaving the beach he tripped and got sand in his mouth and up his nose (although he didn't seem to care).

i am a big fan of kids getting dirty. they can always get clean anyway, and as long as he's safe i like him to just explore and have fun. life is too rigid nowadays, and i certainly don't think i should chase him around with hand sanitizer all the time... but, for future reference, i'd like to remind myself to bring a few things for our next beach trip:

• swim diaper + trunks
• a towel. yes, an amateur move - i forgot to bring a towel to the beach
• extra clothes for cole - nothing like shaking sand out of a wet t-shirt
• extra clothes for me - um, if he's filthy and i carry him to the change room, guess what i am too?

i did remember a camera, a pail, shovel, bubbles and other various toys. and the blanket, which made a very mediocre towel stand-in... i shoveled a lot of sand. we spilled the bubbles all over the clean(ish) shorts. but the camera did come in handy (i'd stopped taking photos once we started getting really dirty and didn't break it out again until we were getting cleaned up):

it was a wonderful day. :-) there is a great outdoor shower near the pool, so cole had a little nudie shower right there in the park and we got cleaned up... we spent the rest of the afternoon at the playground - they have some wacky slides over there by the fire engine - and cole became fast friends with this cute little girl from the uk who showed him around. so cute.

idle parenting

lovely how things work out sometimes... i was reading some random article on nytimes today while wasting time that could have been spent doing one of the many things that need doing. actually, to be factual, it the times' motherlode blog and was about the end of over-parenting.

anyway, it mentioned a book which sounded good - the idle parent: why less means more when raising kids by tom hodgkinson. as i say, sounded good, but as my limited wahm (work-at-home-mom) salary doesn't really match my list of noods (new objects of desire) i figured i'd let it go until a copy graced the library...

anyway part two - i was randomly reading more news over at slate and stumbled across four excerpted chapters from that very book! the best of the two i've read so far was definitely the one entitled "drink as much beer as you can and then lie in bed". most enjoyable... here's the beginning and then the link to the rest (in case you missed the one above):

"for the idle parent, going to bed early seems a little, well, square. when the small ones have finally got to sleep, following an elaborate ritual consisting of bath, massage, story time, lullabies, small plates of sliced fruit, and beakers of water, surely it's time for mom and dad to indulge in a little pleasure? this is the time when i generally drink as much beer as I can. and with each subsequent beer, the desire to go to bed recedes. why would I want to go to bed now, when i've finally started enjoying myself? but victoria and i have found over the years that unless we were in bed by half past 10, particularly if there was a child under 2 in the house, we'd find the daytime almost intolerable." [and on to the rest...]

obligatory baby-in-sunglasses photo