what a way to make a living

two random photos that i found of cole from friday - we were getting ready to go to the aquarium.  he picked up his barn full of barnyard fun and put on the specially resized old watch that grandpa dave gave him and loitered around the door telling me he was going to work.  i think i was slowing him down, what with the snack and lunch preparation and all.  it's "time to go" o'clock, according to the upside-down watch.  ;-)

hey four eyes

i scored these swell old man/nerd toy glasses at granville island toys on main street yesterday, and they've been a real hit around here. cole loves them - particularly on me, because apparently he prefers to wear my actual glasses and laugh at me wearing these ones...

and of course we couldn't resist trying them on jamie when he got home. yep, equally flattering and massively hilarious on everyone!

a bicycle built for two

cole was determined to take the new year's baby for a bike ride around the house the other day. i'm serious - i could hardly stop laughing, it was so cute. we should probably make some pants for her.

i know i keep bringing up the new year's baby. it's creepy, it's silly, it has a strange family history. but seriously - cole loves it! there's no way i can get him to part with it long enough to send it back into the family christmas gag gift exchange now! (hear that uncle ian - you may be safe this year after all!)

putting out fires in the tub

cole's fondness for his hats doesn't stop at bathtime. yeah, i braved the camera-in-tub for these two shots...

he likes to go around the house pretending to spray a hose on things. it's a game jamie started playing with him a long time ago, and he absolutely loves it.

our new pet - bee!

yesterday i was straightening up cole's room - not an easy task, considering he likes to rip the books off the shelves while i shelve them and putting away his toys renews his interest in them - and we found this dead bee on the carpet. i was really excited to have a bee that we could look at up close, since cole loves bees - in books or at picnics or over in the bugs/snakes/beaver dam/quiet room at science world. i scooped him in a tissue and cole was immediately enthralled. "bee?" was a massive source of entertainment. after we put her down (on a high shelf) cole lingered around, pointing to her and wanting to touch and pat the bee. throughout the day, i milked that bee for all it was worth - a fussy moment here and there? how about we see the bee?! etcetera... i figured we should take a photo for posterity (it's kind of fuzzy and oddly focused, but it worked in the moment) and then we dug out a travel toiletry jar to give the bee a little lasting power in cole's fascinated little hands.

looking at her so up-close, i realize that she seems to be missing a leg - perhaps that contributed to her demise? and today at science world we heard that the hive's queen has gone missing and they don't know what happened to her, so i sure hope she didn't wander into our place and perish!

the fruits of our labours

cole and i baked today for the first time. i mean, there have been plenty of times where i've cooked and he's played in the kitchen (like, three times a day plus snacks), and we regularly do the 'pretend cooking/bashing pot lids' thing, but this is the first time that i got him up on a chair and we made something together! i even put my grandma's apron on him - so cute.

it was a lot of fun, and surprisingly a lot less messy than i anticipated. we made pumpkin bread, since i happened to pick up a can of organic pureed pumpkin while grocery shopping solo on saturday. i love the leisurely kind of shop that a) costs too much and b) allows you to think ahead about things you'd like to make. cole used to eat pumpkin straight up but nowadays i figured that we'd better come up with a good disguise for it. and hey - it's the first day of fall, so pumpkin spice bread is perfectly festive!

he loved cracking eggs! i cracked them and then gave him the shells to re-crack (and then picked out the shells in the bowl). i dipped his finger in brown sugar and got a bonkers reaction from him when he tasted it - a muymmmmyyyy kind of sound and bug eyes. yeah, kiddo - sugar is tasty. he did lots of scooping and stirring and sploshing of things, and eventually settled on stirring his own bowl that contained a spoonful of flour and a dash of nutmeg. and he ate it by the scoopful - delicious?

he loves watching things in the oven, and it was so cute watching him watch the bread we'd made together. and eating it? forget about it - SO good.

i used a modified version of this recipe. we added some dried fruit, swapped some white flour for whole wheat and it called for a hell of a lot of sugar and oil, so i changed that a bit - it could probably go down a bit more without sacrificing the sweetness or moistness. oh, and it made a LOT - an enormous loaf and we still had left over batter for 8 muffins.

pumpkin bread

mix together, in a very large bowl:
- 1 (15oz) can of pumpkin puree
- 4 eggs
- 3/4 cup vegetable oil
- 1/2 cup thick plain yogurt (i use olympic 3.5% organic plain)
- 2/3 cup water
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1 cup white sugar

separately, combine:
- 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
- 1 cup whole wheat flour
- 2 tsp baking soda
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 tsp nutmeg
- 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
(the recipe called for cloves & ginger too, but i didn't have any)

mix dry ingredients into wet ingredients. stir only enough to moisten. add in: - 1/2 cup golden raisins
- 1/2 cup dried cranberries

stir a little. pour into 2 bread loaf pans or a few dozen muffin cups... i baked one loaf for 65 minutes, a tray of muffins for 22 minutes...

he was making smiles

we draw and colour a lot around here. mostly i draw little characters with smiley faces. cole likes to colour on top of the smiles and scribble on big pieces of plain paper or over the suggestive doodles on pages torn from our taro gomi colouring books. i'm not opposed to mess or even drawing on ourselves - just this morning i made a snail out of my hand using a sharpie to entertain cole during breakfast (hilarious, apparently but it's effect on eating - negligible). so i was not particularly surprised when this eventuality happened:

cole wandered off with his bucket of markers and crayons while i cleaned up after breakfast. it was a little too quiet, in retrospect, and i was raking the debris in his room aside so i could sit on the floor when i noticed it. it will wash off, so no big deal. and it's really in a spot that could use a little jazzing up, but i don't want to encourage it, so i asked him "did you draw on the wall cole?". he looked at me and said "smiya?" (smile). oh i couldn't do anything but.

random wellness

we spent the last week lying low. cole had some cooties, so we had to cancel plans with all our baby friends to keep from sharing... the doctor told us that he may have caught coxsackie virus, a scary-sounding but common childhood illness that's "going around". cole had some odd red spots on his inner lip, spots that we couldn't figure out and drove us to consult the doctor. thankfully no coughing or sniffling, no fever and he seemed generally in high spirits during the day, but not hungry at all and at night he cried a lot and woke up more than ever (!)...

his lip looks fine now and he did seem to get up to more than his share of fun this week while on the mend. the moments i have photos for:

we've been playing a lot of dress-up lately. cole's dress-up suitcase is not very full yet, but it does contain all the pride parade beads that i had laying around, a kukui nut necklace, a crown, a cape, one leather glove and a few other odds and ends. he loves the necklaces - putting them on and taking them off - so cute.

we took the boat over to granville island, just for fun. cole loves the ride, waving at the boaters and the birds... i got a chance to try out our new umbrella stroller, scored on craigslist last weekend in preparation for future travel - brand new, in the box, crazy deal... i have seen the light of the small baby carriage. i folded it in seriously five seconds and just slung it over my shoulder - ahhhhhhh! (that was angels singing, not me having a spaz.) we were polite to and then irrated by the crushing, gawking tourists and i'm so thankful that it will be september in a few days and many will go home. so i can enjoy buying fruit (and beer and tiramisu) in relative peace...

we revisited for the 1000th time the many playgrounds of our area, always bringing chalk. i am in love with sidewalk chalk, you might have noticed. it's so vibrant! cole loves colouring with it - and he's not eating it as much, so that's good.

and we made fun stuff out of our recyclables. my favourite , the beer-carton hat that jamie fashioned for cole:

and, because of the poor nighttime sleeping, we spent a lot of time overnight on the couch, like so (thanks jamie - it's not as bad as i pictured when you woke me up by taking it):

cole and the babies

yes, another post involving the somewhat-creepy vintage doll dubbed the "new year's baby". actually, i'm not sure that we've had that many posts that reference this doll, but it comes up in conversation oddly often in our family.

for those who don't know: jamie and i liberated it four years ago now on christmas eve eve from a musty corner at the cloverdale "antique" mall - source of good finds and a lot of junk. it was one of our two contributions to the annual family post-christmas-dinner gag gift exchange. won by aunt christine, who was totally creeped out by it and vowed that it would not be allowed in the house. surprisingly, it showed up again the following christmas, only to end up with yours truly. i was very excited to see it back. turns out uncle ian had kept it hidden in a spider-infested shed and saved it for the exchange. i have been wanting to put it back in for the last few years, but it's proved too good a model for various things (stock photography, for one) and instead we've put in substitutes two years running - one year a framed photo of the baby, hilariously which ended up with uncle ian who, when unwrapping his gift, prematurely declared "at least it's not the creepy doll". and last christmas we had a deck of cards custom-printed with the baby photo on the back, encased in a box containing four pounds of peanuts in the shell, which made little sense but had us laughing until we cried while we wrapped it up. fifty-two new years baby photos - plus jokers! check out the baby's annual family christmas appearance in this flickr set...

anyway, the baby still lives here at our place. cole used to be alternately mildy curious, spooked by it and then intrigued. now he calls it 'baby' and laughs at it and likes to dress it up with various hats. and to possibly make it less creepy (but not really) we've dressed him in one of cole's old newborn t-shirt with monkeys on the front. a while ago i was getting rid of some things on craigslist and a woman came by to pick them up. she was browsing through our old baby clothes and found the pants that matched the shirt and asked where the top was. i think she was creeped out when i pointed to the doll... right now it's sitting on cole's radio flyer scooter over in the corner. yesterday it was lying, spread eagled with no pants on, in the hallway when jamie walked in and declared that it was too gross a sight to see on first getting home.

we added another doll baby to the house a little while ago, when i thought ny baby might be too creepy for cole. we got an inexpensive doll from toys 'r us that had a hard head and appendages but a soft, squishy body and a rather vacant expression, which we've dubbed 'scuttles' since that's kind of what he does when you make him pretend chase cole. cole calls scuttles 'baby' too and likes especially to drag him through the big blue tunnel that always seems to come out when it's time to fold laundry, for some reason.

anyway, that whole long, rambling story was just to justify the photos of cole being adorable with his dolls.

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.