A Christmas party

Olan's school party was yesterday. It was held at a local hotel and there was a magician, cookie decorating, face painting and carol singing. Olan enjoyed himself though I don't think he cracked a smile the whole time we were there. He was too busy taking it all in. It was neat to have the whole school in one room and see how kids react to the same situation at different ages. The oldest kids raced around, assessed the spread and very quickly decided what was cool and what wasn't. The littlest kids were wide-eyed with wonder, amazed with it all.

Tonight Alyson, Gilles and Isabelle arrive. I can't wait until we're all together!

Decorating cookies with Gran's help


Watching the big kids


Taking in the magic show with Dad

DJ Vitamin O

This country seems to be one great big weatherbomb! We had a pile more snow here in, combined with high winds and wildly fluctuating temperatures. This meant, of course, that my father was in his element. Anticipating power outages, downed trees, etc. We headed out to their house in the blizzard. Olan was an angel on the bus, tucked into the sling on Adam's hip and when we hiked through the drifts up to the house he practiced saying "SNOW!" over and over again. Can't blame him, there was lots around :)

Friends of ours came over to share the meal, they're heading off home for the holidays today. We had a great night, lots of laughing, storytelling, drinking wine, eating incredible food and then to top it all off DJ Vitamin O put on a dance show for everyone before his bath. I don't think that I've ever laughed so hard in all my life.

We made it!


Vitamin O gets the party started

The silence

So it's been quiet around here lately. There's been lots going on, too much at times. I was waiting to post our good news but its all fallen apart. We had an offer accepted on a house we really liked but through the inspection process it went to shit. We were quite consumed with getting all our ducks in a row while it was going on, so I thought it better to wait to post. I wish I had better news to share! We will press onwards, believing that there is a better house out there for us :) And we'll have a much more relaxing Christmas, the closing was on January 11th!

Olan is rocking along, loving life and all the trappings of the Christmas season. He might not understand this whole baby jesus santa thing but he is loving the lights, the tree, the tunes, the jingle bells and the eggnog... oh he loves that eggnog!

A different kind of rock


The risotto massacre of '07


Boy in a bag


Off to find the perfect tree


Whoa! It's a big one Dad!

A very first toboggan ride

We have no worries of a green Christmas in Halifax this year. We've got snow, and plenty of it. Today we dusted off our sled and hit the slopes. It was an old beast and we didn't get in too many runs before it broke right in half but the going was good while it lasted!

Getting ready for a first run


Poised to go


Here they come!


Ready to hike back up to the top


Blissed out and passed out on the way home

Heeeeellllooooo Christmas!

Ahhhh, Dec.1st. There's a lot of excitement in this house today. We've been decorating, walking in the snow, listening to Christmas tunes and having a grand old time.

Raisin mom?


The bell ringer


Where's Olan?


Pretty lights


Lights in my room too?

This boy, he likes to rock.

Olan loves music. Our stereo is fairly low to the ground so he considers it part of his empire. He's gotten really quite good at operating it too. He can turn in on and off and adjust the volume. Somehow, we're not quite sure how, he always ends up on the same radio station, HalFM. It's a hard rock station, and while Adam is a fan, I'm not. But somehow, the station always finds its way back.

So this morning there was some crazy song on and it was driving me mental and it was morning and I hadn't had sufficient coffee yet so I marched over to the stereo and turned it to the next available station, which happened to be country. As soon as I did it, Olan dropped the toy he was playing with ran over to the stereo making distressed "Uh, UH!" noises and started jabbing away at the stereo. He was mad! Finally, his jabbing resulted in the return of his beloved hard rock. He walked back to his toy and continued playing.

I can't believe that he knew the difference, and that he enjoys one type of music over the other. Isn't he too young for this stuff? And why hard rock...

Poopy pink eye!

Olan was battling a cold all weekend but he seemingly okay this morning, off to daycare we went. However, I hadn't been at work 45 minutes when I got a call to come pick him up because he had pink eye. Whaaaaat? His eyes were fine this morning? Sure enough, when I arrived, his left eye was all goopy and swollen. Poor little mite! Maybe I was too busy booger checking and didn't ever look him in the eye? The daycare folks assured me that it came on fast at lightening, and that I couldn't have known, but still, I'm his MOM, aren't I supposed to sense these things?

So we went home. This wasn't Olan's first sick day, but it was my first sick day because of his sick day, if you know what I mean :) It was oddly nice! The thing about kids is that they have to be seriously sick for something to slow them down. So while he looked terrible- both eyes are now gummy and swollen and the runny nose is back- he was all about playing and hanging out. I felt bad that we couldn't go out but pink eye germs are SUPER-DUPER contagious so you just can't risk it. As it was, we went to have lattes at Starbucks while Ooze's prescription was getting filled and I was sure that some old biddy was going to march over and tell me a thing or two for having this squinty little guy out in the world. So we stayed at home and I got out some big plastic containers which we turned into a cat-trap, cars, boats... you name it. I'm sorry that he's not well, but it was nice to have a quiet low-key day with him.

Blissful weekend

We had ourselves a nice little weekend. Got lots of Christmas shopping done (with plenty of play breaks for Olan) and had fun just being with this amazing child of ours allllll day long :) One of the highlights was going for dim sum with Mer on Sunday.

Olan continues to work on his dance moves and I'll have to post a video soon, the moves are developing... into what we're not sure, but it certainly is entertaining.

He must be going through a growth spurt because on Friday night he ate half a striploin, half a baked potato (skin and all) and 5 brussel sprouts! He loves brussel sprouts, he ate them before he tackled anything else, clearly he didn't get the memo about hating them :)

He big new thing this weekend was learning to say "Uh-oh!". Now he's going around, dropping things on purpose so that he can say uh-oh. It kills me.

Working on his keyboard skills


Learning to spell


The end of a serious shopping trip


The dim sum crowd


I love this stuff!


Ta da!

Dreamy daycare

So I feel it necessary to give you readers a little daycare update. You shared the pain, so you should also get to feel the joy. And believe me, there is much joy.

Switching Olan to a new daycare was the right decision to make. He settled in no problem and we all love it to bits. The people, the facility... everything just feels right. The old place seems like a bad old dream that we won't think about any more.

When we drop Olan off, he doesn't cry. It should be noted that morning snacktime usually coincides with drop off. This kid of ours could care if we cartwheel out the door once he spots the morning snack trolley coming :) And he LIKES it. He loves playing with the other kids, he loves his teachers, he loves his music class... it's all good. Today when I picked him up I got to hear "Olan had an awesome day. We cut a big pumpkin up and let the kids explore. He was the only one who took a spoon and started flailing away." Adam and I are ridiculously proud of this by the way :) "He made some pumpkin art and really enjoyed himself and when we had afternoon snack (crackers with cream cheese and salsa) he ate 12! We kept thinking that he would get full but he was still hungry, it was amazing!"

It feels SO good to have him be so happy in such a happy place. It feels right. I knew that the other place didn't feel right and we were so right to go with our feelings. You gotta trust that intuition people.

Adam passes his bee secrets to Olan, future Collins beekeeper


At the park

Santa Claus came to town

Last night was the "Parade of Lights" a.k.a The Santa Claus Parade. It was quite chilly but we bundled up and headed out. Olan loved it... the drums, the music, the lights, the little baton twirlers. And when I say baton twirlers, they numbered in the thousands. Adam, Meredith and I had no idea that we were living in the baton twirling capital of Canada, or perhaps the world. It was insane. Without the shriners and the baton girls the parade would have been pretty thin. We've decided that while the Parade of Lights might be super-duper exciting for Olan this year, the year will come when we'll have to take him to a "real" parade in a bigger city.

Our little Rudolph

Meredith tries to keep warm

Olan checking it all out

What you would expect to see at any Santa Claus parade, a float by the correctional institution. I mean, it sure puts me in the seasonal mood.


We should have had our own float, we were THAT good.

When the mayor passed out the glow sticks, Olan was first in line.


Santa!!!

Play it again Sam

First Snow

There's something so magical about the first snow of the season. Olan and I were halfway to the grocery store when those first big flakes started drifting down. I'm so glad that it happened on the weekend, so that I could enjoy it with him. He loved it, pointing away, looking all around saying "Uh, uh, UH", look Mom, what is this stuff!?! When we got home he just stood in front of the sliding door pointing and watching... mesmerized. I remember that. Being so excited and overwhelmed and I loved watching him. It's still coming down right now, I hope that there's a bit on the ground in the morning so that he can explore. It's all about the simple pleasures people.

It's hard to see the snow in this picture... but believe me it was coming down.



Earlier in the day Olan had a major wipeout, the floor just reached up and bit him. His little bottom teeth went right into his top lip. It was a bloody, teary mess. Poor little bean. Now there's a piece of skin hanging off and I don't know what to do... do I pull it off? It seems like a mom thing to do, but I don't want to pull off more than I need too. Gross.

The big six oh

So off we went to Vermont on Friday to pay Adam's dad a little birthday surprise. Barb had organized a whole birthday weekend, complete with sons and grandson. The surprise actually worked out ( I love it when that happens!), and happened in two stages. The first, up at "camp" before we arrived. This when he was surprised with Brent and Matt. The second was the next morning when we three arrived for breakfast. We thought of surprising him when we arrived in Vermont at 2am but decided to get a little sleep and do it in the morning. Since we arrived at the lodge where everyone was staying so late, everyone was asleep. We wondered before we went down the next morning if we would find some strange family sitting around the kitchen table. It could have happened. :)

So followed a fun weekend. We hung out, there was lots of music, laughter, stories and beer. Olan was a treasure, charming all around him.

On Sunday we got to spend some quality time with the Houston boys and Lawrence's daughters... who are beyond lovely. Olan definitely had a serious crush on Madison and would have followed her to the ends of the earth.

The trip home was seamless, thanks to Lawrence, and we arrived tired, but blissed out late Sunday night.

We're back from Vermont

More to come :)

Hey Olan, say Boo

We had a great time last night. Olan was the cutest little red rooster you've ever seen! He actually seemed to sort of grasp the point of trick or treating too. We took him to three houses and then went back to Mom and Dad's. As soon as I set him down at the end of the driveway, off he headed to the house across the street that we hadn't visited. When people answered the door he held is pail out, ready to receice. It was hilarious.

If any of you have seen the setup my parents have at Halloween you'll know how awesome it is. We have a bonfire, a monster, mulled wine, scotch and very a very scary soundtrack of screams and other chilling noises. Well wasn't Olan just trying to groove out to the "music". There would be a series of screams from the CD and he would bop his head and do a little boogey move.

I was trying to teach him to say "cockadoodledoo" earlier in the day but all he could manage was "cock". I quickly changed tactics and it became all about saying boo. A one year old running around saying cock just isn't going to win him much candy :) And candy he got! Adam and I are more than happy to eat it all for him. Luckily there were some houses that were expecting babies, so he got to keep some raisins, dried fruit and playdoh.

The end of the driveway revelling got a bit out of hand as is the custom, Olan was safely in bed by that point. Maybe he'll be ready for that part next year. :)

Happy Birthday Uncle G!

Hope that you're having a great day and it's not too overshadowed by Isabelle's first conscious halloween ;)

I'm posting this now because in all the insanity of Olan's first conscious halloween I'm anticipating completely spacing calling you and singing my heart out.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Edit note: Holy spectacular errors! My mother pointed out that I spelled something wrong and I went it and "corrected" without thinking. That'll teach me. Glad to know that so many people are making sure that my grammar/spelling skills are up to par.

Today's Globe Essay

I love this.

fact&arguments

Didn't we almost have it all?
While we may not have everything we once thought was our destiny, we have found another kind of perfect

EMILY MARROCCO

October 30, 2007

As young women wasting away hours at the campus pub, watching boys and cocktails come and go with alarming frequency, we talked of our plans to grow up and have it all.

In our dreams of glamorous jobs and power suits, we somehow seemed to be taller and skinnier, with better haircuts and perfect makeup, even though we were pretty sure we had stopped growing by age 25 and already started going grey.

We imagined strutting to the gym every day after work in tiny tank tops to tune up our movie-role-ready bodies, even though we could never seem to get there with only 12 hours of classes a week and already looked a little squishy in boxers and baggie T-shirts.

In our dreams of marriage, we had wed men fit for the 50-most-beautiful-people list, with high-powered jobs, friends in high places, biting wit and big brains - men who also met us at home at 5 p.m., cooked gourmet suppers and never yearned for golf getaways. We didn't notice that our then-boyfriends seemed pained to fit time with us in between the classes they were barely passing and yet another guys' night out.

But our dreams of children were perhaps the most sensational, as we all imagined the dozens of babies we could conceive and give birth to without effort or consequence: scores of beautiful, smiling accessories perched on our hips as we continued with our lives.

Fast forward 10 years as we all meet for play dates, comparing stretch marks, swapping viruses and trying not to spill the third coffee of the morning on someone else's kid (even though there's one we're all gunning for). Fast forward to talks about who's back from mat leave, how many days she's working, who's got the kids and, of course, how it's all working out.

And somewhere in the fragments that must count as conversation, as we peel toddlers off each other and extol the virtues of sharing the dump truck, we reconsider what it means to truly have it all.

Our returns to work were met with skepticism from all angles: from the old boys at the office who still aren't convinced they should have ever started hiring girls; from the stay-at-home moms who clearly don't believe that 10 hours a day of daycare is an important introduction to anything; and, of course, from our toddlers, who look at us like we have got to be kidding when we walk out after breakfast happily announcing that we'll be home in time for dinner.

Our returns to work have thrilled only the newly hired childless superkids, who bomb around the office sending e-mails at 11 p.m. just because they can. We were not met with any red carpets when we finally came back after being away for 365 days. There was no talk of promotion, only whispers wondering when we might be plotting to do this again. There were no congratulations for showing up having managed to take a shower, or for finding the way to the correct desk on five broken hours of sleep for the fifth night in a row.

There were no points awarded for managing to serve a dinner that did not start in a frozen state, for putting on an animated story time or for squeezing in an evening trip to the park that included a marathon round of hide-and-seek.

The criteria on our performance reviews were not reworked to include "fairly coherent" as an acceptable standard of anything.

We cannot believe that we forgot to include "ability and willingness to change nighttime diapers" as a must-have quality in a husband, one that should have ranked well ahead of "ability to move hips while dancing."

And while going to the gym is mostly a fantasy, we hope to get fit by some kind of osmosis if we just buy a lot of Lululemon wear in which to collapse on the couch.

But somewhere in the midst of clearly not having anything close to the everything we once thought was our destiny, we agree that we have found a different kind of perfect - in the belly laughs, munchkin voices, toothless grins and big, drooling kisses that just seem to keep on coming, even on the days we know that we are so not pulling this off.

And as we wipe the Zincofax cream off the BlackBerrys and load the minivans we swore we'd never buy, on some level we all agree: For now, at least, perhaps having all that matters is the same as being all that matters to a little tiny someone else.

Emily Marrocco lives in Toronto.

Our gentle giant

You know why I didn't post anything on the weekend? Because Adam was away at a work retreat and he took the camera. And there went my blogging! We had a great weekend though, trip to the market, shopping (for consumables and wearables) and on Sunday we took a trip to the valley to visit Kayla. We had a great lunch in Wolfville and after dropping Kayla back we went back to mom and dad's for another great meal. When Adam arrived Dad and I were out on the front deck with Olan. When he heard his dad calling him from the bottom of the driveway he started RUNNING (holding my hand) down to meet him. His other hand was pointing at Adam and he called "Da! Da! Da!". He was so excited and so, so sweet.

So today, Olan had his 12 month appointment. After charming everyone in the doctor's office, he was weighed and measured, poked and prodded and used as a pincushion. His stats are 98% for height and 53% for weight. A little string bean indeed :) According to our doctor he's "tall, veeeeery tall". He was unfazed by it all and enjoyed the stickers and new trucks they had in the waiting room.

New babies & apple eating

So first and foremost we would like to send out a great big congratulations to Jen & Jason on the birth of little Fenner. We're so psyched for you two and can't wait to see that sweet little girl!

I would also like to extend birthday blog wishes to Alyson. She had a birthday on the 23rd and though I talked to her, and sang to her, I never announced it to my public :)

I should also give some kind of daycare update since the whole beginning part was so depressing for EVERYONE. Olan has settled right in. Not a single tear has been shed this week. He doesn't even cry when Adam drops him off in the morning anymore. Just walks over to the toy shelves and starts pulling things down. We're switching him to another centre because we're not thrilled with this place so hopefully we won't totally traumatize him (and us) again. At least now we know that he will settle in and be happy and not hate us forever :)

Yesterday when we got home, he walked over to the bag of big juicy honeycrisp apples we have in the kitchen, picked one out and started walking around the house munching away. They're big apples, so he needed two hands to hold on to it but as he was walking around he would see something he wanted to play with or touch so he'd drop the apple, play for a bit and then pick it back up and take another bite. His apple got a bit linty before he was through with it. It was so funny.



His Gran and Grandpa gave him a drum set (it's the type with all kinds of instruments that fit inside the drum) for his birthday and he looooooooves it. So much so that as soon as I set him down inside the door today he hurried right over and started playing with all his instruments and was so impatient with his mom for wanting to stop him to take his hat and coat off.



He also loooooooves all his party decorations. I'm loathe to take them down because he enjoys them so much. I think that it'll be Christmas and we'll have these little shrivelled balloons hanging everywhere. He's trying really hard to say balloon but it comes out as oon. He insisted on taking a balloon into the tub tonight, because really, what more could you want then a balloon in the tub?