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April Updates

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I think (hope?) that spring is finally starting to arrive. Of course, I pick a day where there was snow on the ground this morning to say that, but I’m convinced enough that I swapped the snow tires off my car, so hopefully spring is properly here now.

My US taxes are kind of a pain this year for a variety of reasons, so I’ve decided to have an accountant help me out, which has been super pleasant thusfar. Hopefully we’ll be back to normal easyness next year, but this past year I definitely wanted an extra hand. It wasn’t even figuring out what to file, it was just that some of the forms I need to file are super annoying. I do think I’ll be able to wrap things up by the June deadline, which is good, I didn’t really want to file an extension again this year.

Wesley has started to properly walk now. He’s been walking while holding on for ages, but he just wasn’t comfortable letting go and taking steps unaided until recently (and I don’t blame him, as someone who still ice skates right by the boards to this day). He’s getting more confident with it though, and it’s super fun to watch. He’s a blast. He likes to dance and he likes cars a lot right now, and computer mice, which he also likes to drive around like little cars. 😀

wesley_walks

Easter has come and gone, and it wasn’t quite as busy this year since we didn’t make the trip up to visit Trevor’s parents. It’s tough squeezing in family time around holy week services! And Advent and Christmas services, for that matter.

On the volunteering front, I have nearly got all my paperwork finished for Family and Childrens’ services- I should get my police record check back shortly. Then, next month, four evenings of training, and then I’m able to actually volunteer!

I got a new laptop recently, a Samsung ultrabook. I really love it. It has Windows 8, which I like more than I expected. It also has a touchscreen, which I am finding useful off and on as well. The best part is that it’s small, and weighs less than 4 pounds, so it’s super easy to carry around, while still being powerful enough for me to do work on it if I need to, or play video for a presentation or whatever. It tucks nicely into my laptop bag along with all my other junk. I’m a fan. I’ve been using it at work, since I have a desktop at work and the team loaner laptop is this huge heavy monstrosity that I don’t love carting around, and I don’t always have enough time to set up what I need on it.

Along with the technology vein, I also got a BlackBerry z10 a while back, and I’m a fan of that, too. I’m really coming around on the topic of touchscreens. The flick-up typing on it is super nice, and I love being able to peek into my email when I’m in another app. Overall, it’s pretty awesome.

Thursday

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Tuesday, during naptime, I put up the Christmas decorations. The tree is in the basement this year, which actually makes the basement more cozy, I think.

Yesterday was Wesley’s first day at daycare. We’re taking him part-time in order to get him comfortable before he goes full time in January, when I’m back at work. A friend of mine does childcare at home, and she’s awesome, so I’m more than comfortable with him there, but still, it is hard leeeeaaaaaving my baaaaaby. I got to stick around for a few minutes while he got accustomed to the surroundings (and the attentions of three charming little girls) but tried not to hang around for tooo long.

He seemed to have a good time though, so I’m glad. I was home in the morning, waiting for a furniture delivery that never came (oh, The Brick, you fickle pickles). I called them around lunch and found out they weren’t planning on coming until next week, so I was understandably a little cranky about that, but glad to know I didn’t need to stick around for them. So in the afternoon, I went out all by myself and finished all the Christmas shopping and wandered around. It was good to get out- in the morning I went into Wesley’s room to hang up some wall clings and was like “He’s not heeere :(”

Christmas shopping is done though, so hooray for that! I even wrapped the last few things. I am on fire this year.

I’m back to work in less than a month now. We’re going to be moving into a new area of the building, so I’m excited to see that space soon.

End of October updates

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We went to Fort Erie and Buffalo on Friday, so that Wesley could get his “interview” for his NEXUS card. Both Trevor and I have NEXUS cards, and they’re just plain awesome for crossing the border and getting through customs quickly. Traveling with Wesley though, he needed a card too.

As funny as it would have been, they didn’t ask him any questions. 🙂 They did ask us if we had any questions about the program, but since we’ve had cards for a while, we’re pretty well versed at this point. They asked me a few questions, including “Do you own a boat?” which was my favourite.

After we got the paperwork and so on sorted out, we had lunch and then crossed over to Buffalo for a little cross-border shopping. We managed to get most of our Christmas shopping for Trevor’s family done, which was nice and will hopefully make my December a little more relaxed.

Wesley continues to be a huge flirt. A number of different times he has totally derailed something someone has been doing (shopping, eating, etc) just by smiling at them and raising his eyebrows and laughing and generally flirting with them. At the grocery store, at restaurants, it happens all the time. The kid is cute, but distracting!

Hurricane Sandy is turning into a big storm, and we might get some remnants of it here. I’ve been glued to the weather because I find it all fascinating, and I’m also hoping everyone I know who lives on the coast is doing okay.

Babynaut

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So ever since I dubbed myself the Preggonaut when I was pregnant, we called the baby “Babynaut”, off and on. So his halloween costume was a foregone conclusion.

Ready for blastoff!

Pumpkin Patch!

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Trevor and Wesley and I went to the pumpkin patch on Saturday, and it was really fun! We wanted to go someplace new- we’ve been to Snyder’s Family Farm in the past, but it was a fairly long drive and it’s a really big patch, so you have to do a good bit of walking around to find a pumpkin you like.

So we tried a place in St. Clements called Naumans. Much closer to us. And it was awesome! I took Wesley in the carrier, and we didn’t have to do too much hiking to find pumpkins we liked. It didn’t cost to get in, and the pumpkins were nice and cheap (we paid like 8 dollars altogether for ours, I believe). The weather was chilly, but pretty decent pumpkin patching weather!

They’ll sit out on the porch to keep fresh, and we’ll probably carve them the day before Halloween. I’ll post pictures of our costumes soon! 😀

Baby… or rather, big boy!

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Wesley is 9 months old now. He went to the doctor last week, and he’s now 20 lbs and 13 oz, which is a nice size for a baby his age. He’s nearly 30 inches tall, so he’s above average in that regard for sure. Tall and lean like his dad maybe? We’ll have to see!

He’s definitely starting to look more like a little boy, and less like a baby. For example:

That’s not a baby, that’s totally a big kid! People mistake him as being a year old, because he’s so big.

He likes riding in the grocery cart now, and he loves loves loves to play with the springy doorstop in the office. He likes to make it broing and he’s also managed to twist it off the wall a bunch of times- I find him halfway across the floor carrying it. We like to say that he’s playing us the song of his people, ha.

He’s not walking or really standing up yet or anything, but I don’t really want to speed up his mobility too much either. 🙂 I’m sure I’ll be chasing after him soon enough! He likes to make noise and laugh and wave and give high fives, and while he says hi and mama and dada I don’t think he really knows what any of those mean yet. He has a super ticklish neck (like me!).

He’s branched out a lot in terms of foods he likes- he likes a lot more fruits than he used to, which is nice. He also likes yogurt quite a bit, and meat! He doesn’t eat a ton of meat, mostly fruit/veg/grains, but we do give him tastes of whatever we’re having.

He’s still a pretty easy baby- sleeps well, eats pretty well, plays with toys independently, not a huge crier (though I think he’s working on his next couple of teeth, because he’s crying a bit more the past couple of days). Definitely easygoing though, so I can’t complain. Changing his diaper has gotten to be a struggle though- he hates lying on his back long enough for me to change it. I have to basically distract him with a full-on-broadway-musical of song and dance to keep him there long enough to get a clean diaper on him. I hope that phase ends at some point.

Weather and other awesomeness.

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The weather has been absurdly beautiful the past week or so. Just clear and sunny and perfect. Spent some time out on the deck, walked down to the grocery store with Wesley, went to Trevor’s soccer game last night (though we walked around a lot during that too to keep Wesley quiet). A picture!

This time of year has such gorgeous weather and it just makes you pine for everlasting summer. Fall is gorgeous too though, thankfully, so I hope I won’t be too sad when I’m staring down the barrel of the middle of September. That’s when my birthday and wedding anniversary are as well, so that helps. 🙂

Swimfit today, which may or may not be the last class- my schedule says there’s one more after today, but the instructor said last week that this was the last class, so we’ll have to sort that out. I’ve definitely enjoyed it, thinking about signing up for a mommy and me water yoga class this fall.

Weekend awesomeness

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This past weekend was pretty nice! We didn’t have any specific plans for Friday or Saturday. We wound up having takeout wings for dinner on Friday, and on Saturday, we had a couple of nice outings and a long walk around the neighbourhood.

On Sunday, we went to the zoo! I’ve been to the Toronto Zoo a couple of times, but this was Wesley’s first trip. I love zoos, and have been to a ton of different ones in North America and Europe, and the Toronto Zoo is pretty good. Jackie, a friend of ours, was organizing an outing, so we decided to go!

It was a super hot day, so we made sure to stick to the shade where we could to keep cool. We saw mostly the African Savannah section of the zoo, since we were only there for a few hours.

Wesley is just getting to the age where he is able to enjoy a zoo trip. He was able to watch the animals (the ones that moved around, anyway- he wasn’t really interested in the crocodile that just sat still) and he liked being outside (though he got pretty hot before it started to rain).

And did it ever rain! We decided to stop for lunch because we were getting really hot, and the storm blew in while we were eating.

We waited until the rain died down a bit and then headed to do some of the indoor stuff, where we saw a pygmy hippo (so cute!) and some other cool animals. We hit up the kids’ zoo area before leaving (Wesley is gonna love that when he gets a little older!) and then came home.

All in all, a pretty awesome weekend.

Visiting the US Consulate!

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Since Wesley is the child of a US citizen (me!) he is a US citizen himself. In order to claim that though, we had to file some paperwork, since he doesn’t have a US birth certificate. The paperwork is fairly simple, especially in comparison to some of the government paperwork I’ve filed in the past (Canadian Permanent Residence, I’m looking at you). One question, however, requires that both parents of the child list every period of physical presence in the US. Living close to the border, that was a fairly long list for us (and I never even crossed said border until 2004!). Still, we got it all sorted out the night before- the application for the Consular Report of Birth Abroad, the application for the Social Security Number (which I’ll need to file my taxes) and the application for his US passport (which will be his proof of US citizenship).

In order to file this stuff, we had to make an appointment at the US Consulate in Toronto. We made an appointment for the latest time they had available (10:30 AM) since we’d have to drive there and the morning drive into TO is a bit rough.

We got out of the house at 7:30, and after the drive and then the subway ride downtown, we barely made it in time. It was Wesley’s first subway ride! We took him in the Boba carrier because we didn’t want to deal with taking the whole big stroller and everything on the subway, and we didn’t know if we’d have space for the stroller at the consulate either. It worked really well for the trip.

Once we got downtown, we quickly hit up a Canada Post outlet to get a prepaid Express Post envelope (which you have to submit with your paperwork so they can mail you the passport and report of birth abroad). After that, we headed up to the consulate, which is on a shady sidestreet that is closed to car traffic.

MAN, was that place crazy. The line for visas was way out the door and down the street, and then there was another line inside, then another line after that. The people getting visas there had a long wait in front of them. We had an appointment so we were able to head in and up to a different area, but we had to throw away the ice packs we were using to keep the baby’s milk fresh, at security. Oh well. At least we didn’t have to waste any of his food (it was still good when it came time to feed him, shortly after).

After getting through security, we headed upstairs to the designated office. There were a bunch of windows, and we had to sign in at one, and they checked our paperwork. We had to fix a few things, and then wait to be called. After that, a second person checked our paperwork again, and we were told to wait again, and then we were called again, for our final paperwork check and interview. All told it was about an hour, which was a bit faster than we were expecting. We were the last ones out. The waiting area had a lot of children (naturally), and the washroom had a nice changing table and we were able to feed the baby there, which was nice.

All in all it was an interesting outing! We hope to get Wesley’s paperwork and passport in a few weeks, and his SSN sometime after that (it takes much longer). I’m glad we got it done now and not later when he would be harder to handle in a government office sort of situation. 🙂

Wesley

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Wesley is 6 months old (as of last Thursday)! He’s pretty much enormous. At his doctor appointment, he weighed 18 lbs 13 oz, and was over 27 inches long! The joke is that he’ll be taller than me any minute now (since I’m only 5’1″, he doesn’t get his height from me!)

He’s started on solid foods. So far, we’ve tried sweet potatoes and green beans, and rice cereal, and the biggest winner so far has been sweet potatoes mixed with rice cereal. Introducing new foods is a bunch more fun than I thought it would be- I thought feeding him would be really time-consuming and messy enough to bother me. But really, Wesley has been a relatively tidy eater (in that he hasn’t sneezed it all on me yet) and he gets through his little bowl of food pretty quickly, in about 15 or 20 minutes.

He rolls all over the floor, and is working on crawling, but hasn’t quite figured out how to push with his feet yet. He loves standing up though, if you hold him up he is super pleased to be on his feet (no standing on his own yet, of course!)

We had a half-birthday party for him last weekend, and it was nice! Just a barbecue for our friends, and their kids, too. Our friends have some really charming kids, as well. There were 6 children here aside from Wesley, and they were all girls, so that might have something to do with it, but talk about well-behaved and quiet! I hope they had fun. It was fun to have so many littles around, but I don’t know if I could handle it every day!

He’s still a pretty good sleeper, but he almost always has to sleep in his crib in his room now- where he used to be able to just nap wherever he was, now he’s too distracted if anything cool is going on around him. So he naps in his crib most of the time.