westward, ho!

i've been looking for a little red wagon for cole for a long time. "looking" being the term i'm using for "once in a blue moon i remember that i'm looking for a wagon and then i spend five minutes poking around on craigslist."

on thursday night i got a bee in my bonnet again about getting a wagon and, becoming slightly and irrationally despondent about the lack of good wagons on craigslist, was about to order one from a great place in the states that has free shipping. but i waited, and in the light of morning yesterday - lo and behold - a new wagon listing on craigslist! i was all over it like butter and jam on toast and called the person up at ten to nine, because apparently when you have children you forget that there's such a thing as "too early" and that, for other people, that might include the wee hours before 9 am. i rationalized that, when calling someone who is selling a wagon one can safely assume that the person on the other end is well-acquainted with the early morning habits of the small folk.

anyway, long story short, cole and i drove on over to a lovely home on 26th and fraser to pick up our slightly used wagon. apparently the folks who were selling it are moving to europe and thankfully the kids didn't seem too broken up watching us roll the wagon away. you might not know it now, kids, but you're on your way to europe - rejoice! and i think they have wagons there too.

we made the most of our trip downtown, stopping at granville island toys on main for some good times, since cole often references "going to the toy store" reverently in his imaginative play, like some kind of holy city of awesomeness. then we squeaked in a few stops on granville street - i had to pick up a wedding gift at pottery barn and then a wine stop at the liquor store. we rolled the length of granville's shopping area and made both stops in the wagon, so it should be noted that i can enter and exit not one but two stores full of breakable goods while pulling an unrestrained toddler in a vehicle with a wide turning radius.

coco loves the wagon and i love watching him love it. he likes to ride and he likes to pull. we took it out after naptime for a little walk in our neighbourhood and had a grand time filling it with goodies before pulling it to our destination, a sunny hill. we sat on that hill, rolled, ate cookies and rolled some more, discovered "canada" apparently underneath a droopy tree, lost and then found my new sunglasses in the long grass, hassled all the dogs that walked by and waited for jamie to come walking up the path homeward bound.

if my brother is any indication of how long a wagon should last a little boy, i would say this one has about eight years of use ahead of it, but then again coco doesn't have a big sister who may taunt him for riding around in a wagon. ;-)

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.

Hip hop...

Bunnies are coming. Is it Easter already? Nope... Just finished a schwack of soft stuffed scrappy bunnies and am in the process of changing my mind about the Etsy shop. The holidays derailed a bunch of plans to create things for v-day and such and of course I changed my mind about the look, the possible contents, whatnot. I wish I was not so wishy-washy. Or do I?

Anyway, photos of the bunnies coming soon. A preview first. I love these squishy little guys and gals.

I have to march off to buy a fun paper backdrop for their photos today. Well, "have to" is perhaps a stretch, but "am going to" is the truth.

The long week

This week that just finished was loooooong around here.

Jamie was out of town (in Baltimore of all God-forsaken places) and of course when he's not here we certainly miss him. No more tag-teaming at sunrise and sundown or the exchange of "just go see if he's looking for a soother" hopes in the middle of the night when Cole can't possibly be hungry an hour after his last midnight feeding. I missed out on sharing tales of our days - tales from the outside world, stories of misadventures and new discoveries and all that good stuff... But on the other hand, on Thursday night I could loll around until the highly irresponsible hour of 10pm to watch both back-to-back episodes of CSI's goodbye to Grissom, sitting on the floor and cutting out fabric. I'm so glad he's back now (Jamie, not Grissom) - he shared a can of Guinness with me, ordered us a pizza and read Cole Grumpy Bird. He listened to my (somewhat) crazy ranting, and to stories of how I was fabulously rude to perfect strangers for various reasons this week because I'm tired and therefore entitled to be somewhat unpleasant. And had some quality Daddy-Baby time with Cole today while I visited the hairdresser.

Despite my crazy level of exhaustion, our days this week out and about, in and around were great. Daylight hours are good - it's the nighttime that's killer... Cole's been having fun with a bunch of lovely new toys too, thanks to terrific trio of my brother Bryan, s-i-l Michelle and niece Robyn who sent us a gift card to the toy store for Christmas. We strolled on up to Toys r Us and had a field day.

He's been highly entertained by one of his new favourites - his rotary phone. I love this thing - the ringing, the creepy woggly eyes, the 5 centimetre cord... Cole is nuts about it. I was thinking - do kids today (wow, old person phrase alert!) even get the concept of a rotary phone? I mean, for him this is just a fun toy that rolls and makes ringing noises - it's not like it relates to something he sees us using around the house. We don't even have a home phone, just a couple of mobiles...

And, just this week has just started to wiggle along to music. Almost clapping too, when we're playing in the kitchen and he's enjoying his other new toy, a magnetic animal-matching game complete with various cute down-home songs. And his first standing up solo dance was to Spoon's The Underdog. We danced around together as we do often and when I put him down he kept right on wiggling his legs while holding on to the sofa - so adorable! I'm a hard sell on most kids music, personally. I find it makes me want to, oh, gouge out my eyeballs, pour hot oil in my ears, you know... Like the collection of songs I saw advertised on tv a while ago featuring kiddie favourites "sung" by screaming children. When the woman on the commercial puts the cd in for a car trip so that her kids can scream along on top of the recording well, I just can't imagine how she keeps the car on the road! We have a huge (mostly bootleg) collection of music and are big fans of a lot of Internet radio too, with a good sprinkling of CBC Radio 2 and whatever that French station is that plays good stuff... I rotate through a loop of various musical moods. Sometimes it's Miles Davis or Coltrane (the inspiration for Cole's name) for months and then not again for a year, but I always come back to my favourite genres... And lately it's been back to some indie stuff. Here's a bit of what we've currently got in our playlist, in honour of Cole's first dance:

Hip, hop, hippity hop

Finally - have found time to make something new! It's been a long time, what with the Christmas holidays and whatnot... I thought I'd get lots done while Jamie was home for two weeks on vacation between Christmas and New Year's, but of course I just spent whatever leisure time we carved out watching really terrible old mystery shows and making hot chocolate...

Found a great book - Aranzi Cute Stuff - by two crafty Japanese sisters. The book itself is fantastic - really quirky and full of translated glory. And it has a ton of terrific projects. Good basics, too, even if you don't want to applique everything with characters. I have at least half the pages dog-eared with projects for Cole (and myself too)... They have a Baby Stuff book coming out next month that I'm preordering now - can't wait!

First up though: this cute bunny for Cole.

It's from the "long doll bag" pattern, and is supposed to be a little purse with a zipper in the back that you can carry on your wrist, but I modified it a little and just stuffed the torso. I'm going to try making it a friend in a different fabric. Cole was instantly a big fan - grabbed it off the doorknob where it was hanging before I even had a chance to photograph it.

He chose the vintage fabric from my scrap stash himself! The eyes and mouth were supposed to be appliqued felt, but I figured he would just chew them off so instead I used non-toxic fabric paint.

He is a big fan of bunnies in general lately. He loves turning the pages of I am a Bunny and pointing out Nicholas, the little bunny who lives in a hollow tree. He also gets a big kick out of Mrs. Bunny, a weirdo hand puppet that we found at Yoko Yaya at Christmas time. He smiles from ear to ear when she pops out to give him a little talk. She seems to have a good opinion on most matters (as voiced by yours truly). Her bunnies always eat their veggies and take their naps.

A day in the life

Just a few photos from our day yesterday. We had scads of fun at home, playing and getting out and about (well, that was fun for me).

Cole is crazy about the wool monkey from Auntie Kathy, Uncle Al & the boys - we call him Orangelo (for Orange Jello).

He's also great at helping me with my projects - he holds the lens cap for me and pokes the lens, and even helps keep my ball of wool from rolling under the couch. :-) He's been a little anxious lately when I move too far away, so I'm trying to find good ways to not only play together, but also to play independently while staying close by. I'm not sure how well the knitting & sitting on the floor with him plan is going to go, but it was adorable to watch him pounce on the wool like a kitty. I'm knitting a little scarf for him, so if he wants to suck on the wool it's fine by me. It will end up being munched on anyway in the long run!

By the way... After I posted about his naptime irregularities and stuck photos of him cavorting around in the nude on the Internets for the "world" to see, Cole was an angel and had a long nap in the morning and napped again for over an hour and a half in the stroller in the early afternoon - long enough to walk to the west end, go to Capers and walk all the way back. No comments on this happening again - just reporting on yesterday. :-) In fact, only an excessively loud man in our elevator woke him up. What is with otherwise very nice people shouting things like "OH - HE'S SLEEPING!" into a stroller at a sleeping baby? Or continuing to spew loudness at his mother, who is bristling visibly and talking as politely as possible in a very low tone? I actually shushed a still-hammered youngish man on the street on New Year's Day around noon. Thank you for bellowing "HAPPY NEW YEAR BABY" to Cole while he slept - he thanks you for your well wishes, I'm sure.

Oh - and check out Cole's top teeth!!!

I've been meaning to take a picture of them, which is easier said than done at this stage. You can see them best when he's upside-down or from another angle when he's howling with laughter - neither are easy photos to get single-handedly. His three top teeth are out, with the fourth about to come through. Aren't they awesome? Love that gap - it makes me giggle. To get this photo I tickled him and snapped away - ticklish and an adorable gap in his front teeth? Seriously, he gets more squishable and kissable every single day.

Just playing...

Too lazy/tired/busy to write much of interest, but I couldn't resist the chance to post a few photos of Cole from the past couple of days, playing around some of his new toys...

He loves his Uncle Goose wooden blocks. They're really fun to play with - for us too - stacking, building towers, loading them back into the wagon they live in. Cole loves to smash the towers down, and apparently the way they taste doesn't lessen the appeal... Mmm, piney!

Cole received an adorable Melissa & Doug wooden barn puzzle from Grandma B & Grandpa D. He is enjoying the large wooden knobs on the animals, which true to form end up as stand-in soothers, and of course the bizarre animal noises we make to encourge his *learning*. ;-) He picks the animal we call out quite often, actually.

He seems to be having a lot of fun on the new piano that we got him for Christmas. He enjoys pounding on the keys and using the piano itself as a good balancing tool for his standing adventures, and we are enjoying having a new toy to play on too. Hey, I've even expanded my own musical repertoire, past my ability to play Mary had a Little Lamb on anything and sea shanties on the harmonica. I am proud to say I can now also play I'm a Little Teapot. We're hoping to decode the secrets of the Murder She Wrote theme song soon... ;-)

And Cole really enjoys playing with his chewy teething keys. These aren't new - we were given them for our baby shower and he's begun to really enjoy chomping on them... We love how he looks like he's emerging from a snug little cocoon here - we caved and spent too much on the Bugaboo footmuff to keep him warm, ordered in true Vancouver fashion a few weeks ago when it was uncharacteristically cold out. Jamie figures that's the time that all Vancouverites buy things like coats and snow tires and shovels... The big snow storm before the Christmas eve one was my excuse to finally buy a new pair of wellies, so I figure that last minute thinking works well! Anyway, the footmuff (despite it's ridiculous name) is great, and much better than the alternative - my plan to spend probably many hours making a cozy zip-up for the same purpose.

Danger alert!

We have a set of these very cool looking matching animals from Plan Toys and they've been quite popular around here lately. Although they're marked 2+ on the box and website, I didn't see any reason why Cole couldn't play with them with supervision. I checked them all over and all the pieces seemed secure, and I trusted that company who are known for their safe wooden toys. We kept the chicken under wraps because the beak looked too pointy for my liking (you could take an eye out with that thing!), but the others seemed ok. The yellow worm was especially well-chewed by Cole over the past few weeks.

Was, being the operative word. I caught a real safety problem with these, thankfully before it became dangerous to Cole. One of the felt circles on the worm nearly came clean off! Hello, chokeables! (Our word for swallowable items that we keep away from Cole.) When I was inspecting the toy, I tugged at the horns ever so gently to see if they were secure, one of them came right off in my hand! It was like a delicious little morsel. Defintely unsafe. Very scary too. I checked all these before I gave them to Cole and that didn't happen. I guess a few weeks of being knocked on the floor did the trick? And perhaps the felt didn't stand up to baby drool?

I wrote to Plan Toys to let them know and I'll let you know what happens. I've taken our set entirely away from Cole and I hope that they do something on a recall level because there's no way this has just happened to us. I saw a review on the site above in which another family had a set where the velcro kept falling off the chicken (which is why they gave only a four-star rating. Hello? What??). I thought toys for kids under 3 were supposed to be carefully produced to reduce the risk of choking...

Fun finger puppets

We found a set of these awesome Great Revolutionaries finger puppets last weekend in Victoria. Ghandi, Trotsky, Mandela and Che Guevara. I'm sure they will be lots of fun. At least as much fun as they all were (or are, in the case of Mandela) in real life, I suppose? :-)

Cole loves his ball!

We dug out an old beach ball the other day after getting inspired by another one of the brilliant-yet-simple ideas from our book of 1001 games for babies. They suggested tossing up and catching the ball just before it lands on the baby, but this seems a little startling. I tried it anyway, and Cole seemed to enjoy it, but not as much as he enjoyed playing with the ball himself! He has been loving the ball - rolling with it, grabbing it, trying to eat it... It's adorable!

It's as much fun as a balloon, but more safe, since it won't explode and send delicious-yet-deadly rubber shards everywhere!

And, I figured out how to upload videos to YouTube! I was thinking about doing this last night at 2:30 am when, in a cruel twist of fate, I was again unable to sleep. It's really easy (uploading videos, not sleeping). Yay for me! :-) I think 90% of YouTube is split 50-50 between adorable baby videos and movies of teenagers hurting themselves... By the way, the video is smoother if you pause it at the beginning and wait for it to buffer.

Jumperoo - is that even a word?

Jamie and I try to hold out against the kind of plastic, multi-coloured craziness that they sell at Babies r Us. We like cloth and wood and European toys, as well as a more minimalist style - we have a small space and it can really quickly look very cluttered. Plus, we just aren't big fans of the in-your-face distractions that are part of most mainstream baby toys.

However... We did just go out and buy Cole his very own Rainforest Jumperoo. You can kind of tell from the name that it's going to be pretty wacky, but this thing actually has about 12 kinds of brightly coloured craziness! And music! And lights! Oh dear... :-)

It's really just a take on the classic Jolly Jumper - basically a seat on springs. I decided against the Jolly Jumper because the original version is hung from a door frame, and to me anyway, that didn't seem very safe. We have very narrow molding around our door frames, and really none that we don't need to walk through many times each day! And the modified version of the Jolly Jumper that comes on a swingset-style a-frame would take up too much space in our living room...

The Jumperoo, on a circular base, uses a 1x1 metre area in the living room (we relegated a chair to the bedroom to fit it!). Around the seat are several activity centres with toys that make little noises, rotate and spin. The seat itself can be rotated 360 degrees to give baby a new view. It also takes batteries - movement activates lights & rainforest noises, which are not actually as annoying as that sounds, although we've often left this turned off just so Cole can hear real music playing in the background.

Despite the craziness and name - the Jumperoo is great! Cole really loves it. We've been putting him in it once or twice a day, for about 5 - 10 minutes each time. Sometimes he goes wild for bouncing in it, and other times he's more intent on exploring the brightly-coloured toys surrounding him. He's starting to use his hands more purposefully and also to really focus on objects he's interested in; it's so exciting to see him learning.

I'll soothe my feelings of plastic-related guilt with the thought that I can pass it along or sell it when Cole is finished enjoying all of the crazy.

Cole's little man shirt

Cole went for his six-weeks appointment on Monday at the Doctor's office, and I'm happy to report that he's growing really well! He now tips the scales at 5.2 kilos / 11.4 pounds, and has grown to 58.5 cm / just over 23 inches.

Dressing Cole is just so much fun. We bought a lot of little clothes when we went shopping around 6 months pregnant, and we didn't have any clue what to buy I realize! We bought him this cute little collared polo onesie from the Baby Gap and I was wondering how practical it would be, but it actually turned out to be surprisingly easy to get on him and monstrously cute to boot!

Cole is now able to clutch onto some of the little toys from his play gym if we place the object in his open palm. He eventually lets go and I'm not sure if he knows that he's holding things, but he does seem to enjoy all the interactive play!

Cole continues to love his play gym - more each day, I think! I usually place it on the bed or on the couch so that it's not such a back-breaker for me to play with him on it. It's an awesome toy that helps me, because he likes to lie on it while I take a few minutes to get dressed to go out for our walks or make lunch (actually had one today - I usually eat crackers!).

Mainly though, he really enjoys being played with while on it. He seems interested enough on his own and he stares at and studies the toys and colours and shapes, but when we play with him on it he just lights up and has a ball. One of the good things about this activity gym (and maybe all of them - I don't know!) is that the toys are all detachable and you could add your own toys if you wanted to.

Hand made stuffed giraffe

I love the line of stuffed toys (and pretty much everything) by Dwell, but due to a combination of sometimes-thriftyness and the fact that I like to sew, I am always pondering whether to buy their stuff or just try to copy it...

Jamie helped me to draw out a similar giraffe and I used more of the blue dots fabric (four metres went a long way!) and another coordinating fabric that I happened to have on hand. And lots of fibre-fill stuffing. The Dwell version is a little boxier - I bet they use foam inside rather than stuffing. The back leg has a bit of a wonk, but I think it turned out pretty well!

Sophie the giraffe

Imagine my surprise when I found something on my "cool items list" at Babies r Us the other day! I kid, I kid - it's a great store, but seriously, they never seem to have the weird stuff I'm looking for. Except in this case...

Sophie the Giraffe, aside from being immensely cute, was up there on my list under "chompy toy for PJs".

This French toy was first created in 1961 and is all kinds of great. She's soft and light, chewable, free from PVC and phthalates, and is perfectly sized for a baby's little hands. And she squeaks! She's made from soft, natural rubber and painted with food-grade paints, perfect so baby can chomp on her head and legs to relieve teething. She's designed to stimulate all of a baby's senses. Also cool, she's made in the French Alps! It's hard to find anything made anywhere interesting lately.

So, long story short, I scooped her up and am trying hard right now not to play with this toy myself. :-) I'm about 1/8th French, which Jamie teases me about whenever I am too fancy or making my own crepes, and since PJs will be about 1/16th French (what's that, about a tablespoon?), I am sure he'll love Sophie.