Just Mommying Around...

More photos from Chinese New Year

2012-01-25T14:28:00.000-08:00

Year of the Dragon cake

2012-01-24T10:18:00.000-08:00

Graphic design credit: yienkeat stock image
Cake recipe: cotton soft Japanese cheesecake
Icing recipe: whipped cream cheese

Tristan's second haircut

2012-01-23T11:37:00.000-08:00

A year ago, I gave Tristan his first haircut. It was right before Chinese New Year because we wanted him to have a new look. We timed it just the same this year. Here are the before shots for this session:

Last time I gave Tristan a haircut, he was constantly moving and standing up. I trimmed his hair so it would be shorter and more or less even all around. The result? He looked like a little monk :( This year, I went for a more challenging haircut since he is 3 years old now and I just assumed it would be easier to cut his hair the second time around. The result? A cute retro layered haircut :)

It was easier to cut his hair this time. Just so you know, I am not a hairdresser at all. I have been cutting Jean-Louis' hair for maybe 9 or 10 years now but I use one of those electric shavers and it gets buzzed off easy enough each time. He likes his hair style and wants to keep the same cut forever. Boring. I don't use scissors on Jean-Louis. For Tristan, I used nothing but scissors.

I found some cute shaggy retro haircut pictures that inspired me. Then I watched a couple of youtube videos. I loaded the hair pictures onto the iPad for Jean-Louis to show me but I actually ended up just winging it and didn't even refer to those pictures. That's what happens when you are in a hurry! I don't know how hairdressers hold their scissors and comb at the same time. I tried but couldn't so I had to put one down each time. I must be holding it all wrong because my arm was tensing up and hurting. Luckily, Tristan was pretty patient throughout the haircut. He sat the whole time but he kept moving his head. Near the end though, Tristan and Jean-Louis were just nagging me to finish up and not be so perfect. I was only going for evenness, not perfection! Anyways, I think the end result was good. Is the haircut short enough for him to pass by as a "true" boy now?

Gong Hei Fat Choi!

2012-01-23T10:55:00.000-08:00

Happy year of the Dragon! Gong Hei Fat Choi! (Translation: Best wishes & Congratulations. Have a prosperous & good year!)

Today, Tristan was in Chinese clothes for the special holiday. He's still young enough to not care so much about what I put on him :) There were many other kids dressed in Chinese clothes at daycare today. They were all so cute! And yes. Tristan had a haircut! Like it? I will be posting something about that soon :)

Last night on the eve, we had a Chinese feast. Tonight, we continue that feast with even more new dishes :) Oink, oink.

Crib access is open

2012-01-18T10:12:00.000-08:00

It's been four days since we removed the middle part of Tristan's crib. Now he can get in and out as he pleases. We're transitioning him into a larger bed.

Tristan turned three back in November but he still sleeps in his crib because we have had no problems with it. He doesn't jump out of his crib and he always calls for us to come to him in his room. We could probably keep him there as long as he is small enough and right now he is. But he's growing and we want to give him room to grow.

Removing the middle part of Tristan's crib is a first step in transitioning him into a bigger bed. Being able to get in and out on his own will make him feel more grown up. However, this hasn't happened yet. So far he seems to just stay in his bed and wait for us to come to him. Nothing has changed really. I expected him to run into our rooms in the morning and wake us up but it hasn't happened yet. He is so used to being in his crib waiting for us that he hasn't been brave enough to leave it on his own. At least that is what it appears.

On the first night, Tristan fell out of his crib once. He hasn't since then. In the morning, he calls for Daddy or Mommy and when we go in his room, he dangles his legs through the bars of his crib, just like he has always done.

It's funny because we started window shopping for bigger boy beds a few weeks ago and we thought we were going to buy a toddler bed. We figured it was the logical next step from having a crib. When I asked one of the sales ladies at the store, she told me that a lot of parents will move their toddler from toddler beds to twin beds when they are around 3 years old. Oops. Here Tristan is 3 and still in a crib. Technically, he's beyond toddler stage too so really it should be time for a twin bed. It also turns out that toddler beds are the same length as cribs but are assembled to appear like smaller beds. Jean-Louis thinks Tristan would be scared in a twin bed because it would be too big for him. This is only because he has been sleeping in a crib for ever! He doesn't sleep with us ever and has been sleeping in his crib every day since he was days old.

Everything is relative and every child is different. My friend's boy is two weeks older than Tristan and sleeps in a double bed. That's huge! I'm not sure when they moved him in there but that is a huge transition from being in a crib. My friend tells me that she and her boy can lie down together sometimes this way and it works well for them. The few times we have laid down with Tristan was when he was sick and we would lay on the couch. We don't have the same sort of problems. My friend also has toys in their boys room and we do not. We never play in Tristan's room. The room is strictly for sleeping. One of the reasons my friends has toys in the room is so the kids can play in the morning if they wake up too early. Again, we don't have this problem because Tristan sleeps until 7AM or later. By that time, Jean-Louis can take him and I can sleep in a bit more. Lucky for me, Jean-Louis only needs around 6 hours of sleep. It all works out for us.

Positive things we have going when it comes to eating

2012-01-13T20:35:00.000-08:00

Lately, I have been talking too negatively about getting our 3 year old to eat. In fact, I feel like most of my eating posts are related to frustration. I don't mean to mislead readers in thinking this is normal for us. I often get the urge to post when I need to vent. It's somewhat therapeutic for me. Other bloggers could probably relate.

I want to let everyone know and also remind myself when I look back at this time one day that we are in fact very lucky to have a 3 year old who eats well. That's right. You heard me right! Tristan eats well normally :)

I breastfed Tristan for a year and he drank breast milk exclusively for the first six months. His first solid food was broccoli. He even tried bittermelon as a first solid food. Every new food presented to him was in pure form with no seasonings until he was around 12 months old. He only drank milk and water. Even now, he drinks more water than anything else. If you offer him juice, he would probably ask for water. He can be picky sure but we don't dine on junk foods like potato chips and we rarely eat processed foods. We may open a can of soup or cook from a pack of instant noodles once or twice a year. Processed foods usually gross me out. We eat a lot of brown rice, multigrain breads, vegetables, fruits, healthy grains, and we always have a variety. We have pretty much introduced Tristan to every kind of food out there since I love to cook Chinese, Vietnamese, French, Greek, Italian, Indian, Hawaiian, and so many other things. We are even doing tons of vegan food these days! Jean-Louis and I pretty much love eating everything and are somewhat adventurous eaters. Tristan will probably grow up being the same.

Feasting on durian

Tristan loved food until he was about two years old. He didn't care what it was as long as he could put it in his mouth, he would eat it. When he was around two, he started to resist certain foods, including some of his favorites. Jean-Louis called him a moody eater. Some times he would love it and other days he would hate it. He would pick at his food a bit for a few days or weeks and then he would go back to eating everything we give him again. We would go through these cycles where we would have to nag on and off to get him to eat most or all of his food. When he would be sick, it would be way worst. Nowadays, he will still eat anything but just not as much as we would like him to. Many people who have dined with us are usually impressed that he eats what we give him. They are also impressed he does this on his own.

Right now, Tristan is finishing all his meals. The nagging is almost non-existent. I guess he is hungry now from having so little to eat last week when he was sick. The type of nagging and coaching we do now is more along the lines of "you only have three more spoons to go. You can do it!"

Here is what he ate today:

Breakfast: 1 slice of multigrain bread, 1 fried egg, 4 slices of pear, bit of water
Lunch: chicken pesto salad panini sandwich (2-3 cups), 3 slices of apple, bit of water
Dinner: mushroom, tofu, shrimp stir-fry rice macaroni (3-4 cups), 2 slices of orange, 1 hedgehog, 1 small vegan almond cookie, bit of coconut water, lots of water

Tristan finished everything above, except for a small piece of chicken from his panini sandwich. Today was a satisfactory day! The thing is Tristan knows that we are not happy when he doesn't eat. He also knows our rules at the table. Eat your main dish first, especially your vegetables and then you can have fruit and possibly a treat if you are really good. Sometimes we would present a dish of food to him and also give him a piece of bread or cracker to go with his meal. He would check with us first to see if he could start by eating his bread or cracker. That's because he knows that things like bread, crackers, and fruits are more like rewards for eating well. Some times we just tell him to eat everything together but he'll set aside the bread or fruit until he is done with his main dish anyway. Fine with us, as long as he eats everything.

The three of us eat together all the time. Well, I eat breakfast with Tristan every day and Jean-Louis joins us on the weekends. I sometimes eat or at least sit with Tristan while he is having lunch and at dinner, the three of us all sit and eat together. I think Jean-Louis has only ever missed a couple of dinner sit downs because of his iPhone meetups. I think eating together as a family is important and we are fortunate to have schedules that support that. Sadly, I have heard of many families where this can't happen very often. We also all eat the same things and that is also important for Tristan to see.

Speaking of eating the same things, because I started baking more in the past year, people may have the impression that Tristan eats too many sweets now and has become a pickier eater because of it. Yes, I have baked a lot but I'm actually the one that eats most of it. Jean-Louis is always watching his weight and I'm the Mommy in the family so I eat all the leftovers, sweets included. We also send quite a bit of sweets to Jean-Louis' work so we can get rid of them quicker. As for Tristan, if he is well behaved and eats well, we may offer him a small treat. If he does get a treat, it will be 1/4 to 1/2 the size of the treat we would get. Many times when a treat was offered though, he never got it because he didn't quite finish his meal. If he doesn't finish or at least eat most of his meal, he doesn't even get fruit! Yeah, we use fruit a lot as a bribe. It's funny because he would come so close to finishing his food some times and then refuse to take the last bite and just declare defeat. He would tell us he doesn't want the cookie anymore just so he doesn't have to finish the last bite of his food. That's okay with us and we just take his food away. Remember that Santa hat cake I made? Tristan didn't even have a bite of that! He probably has a treat like a cookie or chocolate two times a week. That doesn't sound like a lot to us, is it? As for how often I eat treats, you don't want to know! I will be hitting the gym next month though and will be paying dearly for all my sweet sins. Oh boy :S

3 year old had nightmares about eating

2012-01-10T12:26:00.000-08:00

It's true. I witnessed him having a nightmare in his crib. He was obviously disturbed and he was turning and turning and he seemed scared. Then I stayed to watch to see if I could find out what he was scared about. When he spoke, he said "No. I don't want to eat." My heart sank.

It saddens me to know that he is having nightmares about eating. He will grow up troubled because we constantly nag at him at the dining table :( On the up side it does work in getting him to eat a balanced healthy meal. When I told Jean-Louis about the incident, he first laughed and then he said it's only human to be psychologically damaged. If it's not this, it will be something else later on. I guess when it comes down to it, we have more or less two options:

Have him grow up physically healthy knowing he has good nutrition but is a bit troubled or
Have him grow up unhealthy, a bit malnutrition on vitamins, and not troubled with eating issues.

Obviously we picked to go with option 1.

The past week was a terrible week in that Tristan was sick and he didn't want to eat. We were lucky if he had a few bites of his dinner. He ate very little and we didn't push him too hard. We also got in the habit of feeding him his leftover dinner, at least a spoon or two of it, before giving him his normal breakfast of bread or pancake. By morning he was usually hungry so it wasn't so hard. However, one morning was particularly bad in that I lost my mind and force fed him two spoons of fried rice. I knew it was wrong to do and but I had to do it to prove a point. When my threats didn't work, I just lost it. I didn't hurt him since I was still pretty gentle but the fact that I did that upset him a lot. Of course this made him cry and I felt really bad. I had a miserable night of sleep and I was feeling under the weather. That was why I lost my mind. I'll just have to step away next time for a breather. This mad incident and the increased nagging last week probably gave him bad dreams. Poor Tristan:( Already troubled at 3 years old.

Speaking of eating well and finding balanced meals, this Healthy Eating Plate was released September 14, 2011 from a research study based on scientific evidence. It looks like a good blueprint to follow.

Mommy, I don't want to eat!

2012-01-03T22:16:00.000-08:00

Tristan is going through a phase where he isn't interested in food anymore. He some times won't even want to eat his favorites foods. I mean he still eats what we give him but it will take a bit more nagging from us to get him to start eating. Then more nagging and maybe a bride for him to finish his meal. It can be exhausting! Some times nothing works so then we keep what he doesn't eat and give it back to him again for the next dining period. A few times, he had to eat his leftover dinner for breakfast. I hate having to do that and thankfully, this has only happened a few times ever. One of the solutions for mealtime during these "I hate food" phases, is to feed him ourselves. That seems to work but Jean-Louis absolutely hates doing that :( Sure, I would prefer Tristan to eat on his own all the time too but sometimes I worry he isn't eating enough. Since we can't really feed him because it angers Jean-Louis too much, we resort to nagging and bribing (e.g. with fruit & movie watching). It's all bad really. Sigh.

"Mommy, I don't want to eat."

30 minutes later: small nibbles

60-90 minutes later: "Look Mommy. I did it!"

My big goals for 2012

2012-01-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

I love this time of year. Christmas break was lovely. The boxing week sales were lovely. Then we had another long weekend with New Years, which also happened to be my birthday. It almost seemed like too much was going on. It was definitely nice to have Jean-Louis home so many days with us. Tristan is so attached to his dad! I call him the "daddy magnet." Just the way the stat holidays worked out this year, Tristan actually didn't get to go to daycare much this December. The past couple of weeks felt like a staycation :) Jean-Louis and Tristan would spend hours every day playing Lego. And I fear this is only the beginning. Now that the break is over, there won't be another long weekend until April. April! They really should spread out the holidays more.

It's January and everyone is talking about goals and resolutions. I actually didn't make any for this year. I think this is the first year that I haven't. What we did in the past was actually pretty silly. Before midnight every December 31st, Jean-Louis and I would write each others resolution and then discuss them before adjusting and adding our own goals to them. Then we would file it away and never look at them again until December 31st the following year. So silly.

I have a few definite goals in mind for the year but I'm just going to keep them in mind :) I will try to consistently remind myself of them and this way I will more or less do them. Here are a few of my 2012 goals that I don't mind sharing:

Eat more whole foods (i.e. organic, local)
Eat more legumes, beans, vegetables
Eat less red meat (e.g. pork, beef, lamb)
Resume iPhone app work & get on board development
Launch at least one more iPhone app
Run my 2nd marathon (1st one after childbirth)
Speak more French with Tristan
Meet another virtual friend in person

My marathon goal alone makes this year a very ambitious one for me! I'm kind of scared of this one actually. Two of the things on my bucket list are to run a marathon and then run it again after childbirth. It's time to stop procrastinating and coming up with excuses so I want this year to be the year I can cross that item off! Because it will be over 9 years since I ran my first marathon, my goal is just to complete the race. Besides, I'm old now:)

Happy New Year!

Santa Hat Cake

2011-12-29T22:10:00.000-08:00

If you showed me a picture of a Santa hat cake a few months ago, I would have died and told you that's crazy! A few months ago, I made my first fondant and since then the cake decorating world started to open up to me. The Santa hat cake I'm about to talk about is my second fondant cake. My first one only had a few pieces of fondant here and there. I also made fondant flowers when I first made fondant as a topper for my mom's cake. This Santa hat cake was full on fondant!

When I first saw a Santa hat cake floating around Pinterest, I thought it was such a clever and simple idea. I was totally stoked to create it for Christmas. The more I thought about it though, the more I started to notice all the challenges that came with it. I actually gave up on the idea for awhile out of fear I would mess it up. I even found a few backup design ideas to go with. That's the thing with cakes like these, you sort of only get one chance. Everything involved, like the fondant, takes awhile to prepare and if you mess up, you basically have to buy a cake :( In my case, I was also running out of everything like sugar, eggs, and we were low on butter too! I couldn't believe it. When you run out of simple things like sugar and eggs, you know you have been baking way too much :) Luckily if I had messed up on the main cake, we still had nutella cupcakes and a ton of other stuff for dessert to fall back on.

The inside matched the outside (of course :)

I didn't mess up! I mean the cake had plenty of imperfections but considering things, I was quite happy with the way it turned out. I went with a buttery eggnog cake recipe for the inside. I divided the batter up and added red food coloring to one batch. The used one round pan and one glass bowl to bake the cake and then assembled it the best I could in a cone, trimming away the excess cake. I grabbed some of the cake trimmings and mixed it together with a bit of frosting to make a cake ball for the pom pom part of the hat. I didn't want to risk anything falling off so I made sure the pom pom part of the hat just sat on the ground off to the side. This also meant I had to make the hat tall enough to fold over.

I thought about taking pictures along the way but I didn't have any available hands and I was pressed for time. Sorry:( Placing the hat on was definitely tricky. I actually used a piece of paper to see how it would fold the night before. The best fold came when I cut off half triangles from the long sides of a loose-leaf sheet of paper. I also planned for a small slit about halfway so that there wouldn't be too much tension in the fold. It proved to be a good plan :)

Rolling the fondant big enough was a challenge because it kept sticking to the table. I had to clean and dry the table many times before I could get it right. The more I worked with the fondant, the drier it got and the more stubborn it got. Really! I used two pieces of string: one to measure the circumference and the other to measure twice the height of the hat. Like I said earlier, I only had one chance at this so I had to be prepared. When I finally got the best big piece of fondant I could get, I got Jean-Louis to help me carry it over the cake. Yes, it was that big! He supported the top part while I wrapped the lower part around the cake. The whole thing could have ripped and fell apart right there. I knew this cake would be trouble! Luckily, I moved fast and it was quickly applied and folded. I trimmed extra fondant off and then I worked on rolling a white strip of fondant for the bottom. I also wrapped white fondant around the cake ball. Everything was applied and tucked in. It was starting to look cool! I was pretty confident it would all work out then :) The final touch would be more buttercream for the fuzzy part of the hat. I made sure I applied it where it needed to be to hide imperfections and all *ahem* :) Mission accomplished!

When Jean-Louis first brought the cake to the table there were a lot of ooohs and aahhhs and then someone said that "the cake was the bomb!" Something like that. I'll take that as a compliment :) But the best part was when my mom came back from the washroom and asked why there was a piece of cloth on the table. Someone answered, "that's not a piece of cloth! That's a Santa hat cake!" Pure awesomeness :) The cake took a couple of hours to do but it was totally worth it! By the way, it tasted pretty good too, for a white cake that is. The eggnog was a bit weak and of course the fondant part was a bit sweet. Compared to your traditional cake, it really wasn't that sweet overall but my family is used to Chinese sponge cakes. They liked my Santa hat cake though but I think the presentation helped. You know how things just taste better when it looks pretty? Yeah, that helped.

Big family Christmas at our place

2011-12-28T23:07:00.000-08:00

Tristan making cards for the family

For the first time this year, my parents accepted our invitation to come over to Vancouver and spend Christmas with us. Typically, we just spend Christmas here alone. We've been over to Victoria a few times for Christmas but the ferry traffic and me having to bring a lot of kitchen things over kind of stresses us out. This year my parents and older brother came over. My sister and her family and my younger brother, who all lives in the Vancouver area, also joined in on the Christmas gathering. I volunteered to cook the turkey at my place this year. That made it the largest Christmas gathering at our place in the past 8 years!

That Christmas morning, we took our sweet time with breakfast, took pictures by the tree and presents, and then we unwrapped the gifts. Tristan was probably the last kid on earth to open his presents! Like any special occasion, we took pictures and video and documented the whole thing :) Tristan was visibly more excited and happy this year compared to last year when he just turned 2 years old. He received plenty of Legos, Playmobil, Playdough, books, clothes, and money. I honestly don't think anything was left out. Spoiled you think? :) After unwrapping gifts, we skyped Tristan's grandparents in France since we were not able to the day before. Luckily it was still Christmas for them. Then it was play time with the new toys! I took advantage of the time to prepare and send my Christmas emails since I totally forgot to send cards in advance this year :(

Food preparation started around 12:30PM. I honestly think cooking would take much less time if we had a large kitchen instead of the tiny one we currently have. Every time we cook, we have to clean along the way to free up counter and sink space. Luckily my sister agreed to bring a few dishes over so I didn't overwork myself that day :) My sister and brother-in-law brought a roast pork loin, roasted root vegetable dish, and mashed potatoes. Jean-Louis made a vegan lentil salad. I made hot spinach and artichoke dip and served it with red and green tortilla chips and sourdough bread. I roasted two 8lb turkeys, which fitted perfectly in my roasting pan. Hooray! I bought a nice bag of organic carrots and cooked them with marsala wine. We had wine, champagne, juice, and soy milk. The food was colorful, delicious, plentiful and we were all quite full before dessert even arrived.

For dessert, I made an eggnog cake with eggnog flavored swiss meringue buttercream and nutella cupcakes. I am beginning to think nutella cupcakes are my favorite cupcakes :) I got Tristan to help me top each cupcake with a ferrero rocher chocolate ball. He was a good help too! There were also pistachio and apricot sables cookies, chocolate almond caramel, and Christmas rice krispies. It was a Christmas dessert buffet people! Pumpkin pie was the only thing that was bought so really most of the desserts were somewhat healthy because they were homemade ;) You aren't falling for the healthy part, are you? Oh, but was Christmas. You know what they say: eat December, diet January! Lol.

Dessert buffet. Pumpkin pie was brought out shortly after.

The meal was a success. We ran a bit late but it was a good thing we told everyone it was at 4:30PM. I was actually surprised everyone showed up on time. We ended up eating shortly after 5PM I think. I had compliments for my turkey, which was cooked just right and came out flavorful and moist. It was brined and I also stuffed it with celery. I wanted to use my batch of celery up since it was taking up too much space in the fridge and why not, right? We had no bread stuffing this year. It was a bit weird but we made up for it by having plenty of other great dishes. The turkey was served with gravy, cranberry sauce my sister made, dijon mustard, or nothing. Jean-Louis had compliments on his lentil salad as well :) The fact that he made it was enough to get people to try it. Most of it was gone by the end of the night! Kudos to him! The party was over by around 8PM. Everyone was in a food coma by 8:05PM :) And we were still on routine for the night so I call that a double success!

3 year old singing Christmas carols

2011-12-26T21:16:00.000-08:00

Jingle Bells

Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer

Santa Claus is Coming to Town

Why we celebrate Christmas

2011-12-22T21:54:00.000-08:00

Jean-Louis is atheist. I'm agnostic. However he was raised Catholic and I was raised Buddhist. I love Christmas. Him? Not so much but we're celebrating it anyway.

Christmas to me is like another holiday to celebrate with family and friends, much like Thanksgiving. The feasting is one of my favorite parts. Big surprise :) I mean we could cook turkey and feast almost any time of the year but knowing that this is part of tradition and that almost everyone else is doing it at the same time makes me feel like I'm included and part of something greater. I have a lot of fun decorating for Christmas and having the house look nice makes the holidays feel more festive. We also go shopping and give out gifts because it's also part of tradition and pretty much everyone participates. Even if you don't give out anything, you will likely receive something and feel bad for not giving back.

I had fond memories of Christmas growing up. My parents always decorated the house and we had gifts under the Christmas tree. Back in the 1980s, my family was very Buddhist but they were also learning how to be Canadian. We didn't have turkey and any of the traditional feast until I was around 13 or 14 since my parents didn't know how to cook or eat that stuff. When I was old enough, I took over cooking the turkey and food for the family.

Of course Christmas is celebrated 10x more now that we have a child. Before Tristan arrived, we had just a few decorations up and when we lived in Paris, we didn't have a thing. I have to confess I was pretty sad around Christmas time :( Somehow Jean-Louis is a Grinch. He sort of hates Christmas. I guess because he sees it too much like a religious celebration. He also thinks the whole Santa thing is ridiculous. He doesn't get why all these stories have to be made up for Christmas. When I asked him why, he actually doesn't remember much. I told him that it had to do with his past. Something must have happened to have made him a Grinch. He thinks it's possible that maybe he was super pissed when he found out that Santa was not real. He knows that his parents still talks about Santa today. Oh boy! Imagine that.

We had our first Christmas tree last year when Tristan was two. We filled the tree with gifts, mostly for him and we did the traditional meal. Now that I'm a part time stay-at-home mom, I also do the Christmas baking. This is somewhat still new to me. It's just my second year doing it but it is so much fun! We do Christmas activities like the Christmas train and we visit gingerbread displays. When it snows, we build a snowman, play in the snow, and go tobogganing. I am now living my Christmas through Tristan's eye and I love it :) I'm excited and happy just to see his excitement! Jean-Louis agrees with me there. He will do anything for Tristan so he has no problem celebrating Christmas :)

When I think of Christmas, I don't think of Jesus. I think of Christmas tree and decorations, Christmas music, turkey feast, presents, giving to family and friends, charity, shopping, extra time off to relax from work, spending time with family and loved ones, chocolates, eggnog lattes, warm cozy sweaters, colors, and snow. It's a time to celebrate with everyone and wish everyone a season's greeting and merry Christmas! I can never be a Grinch. Christmas is too fun and I love it! :)

For your amusement, you can read what other atheists, agnostics and non-believers say about celebrating Christmas too. That was what prompted me to write this post.

Snowman-balism (via cookie)

2011-12-21T14:23:00.000-08:00

Melted snowman sugar cookies

2011-12-19T12:11:00.000-08:00

Ever since I first saw them online last year, I knew I wanted to create melted snowmen cookies one day. I was just getting the hang of decorating sugar cookies last year so I didn't want to ruin the cookie. A year later, the cookie didn't look intimidating anymore so I went for it!

It took a bit longer than I expected since I had to cut everything out manually. I tried creating as many different looks as possible with the shapes, colors, and accessories I made with fondant. My fondant was actually quite soft and moist so I didn't need to heat it up from the fridge. It worked better this way because I think if it dried up too much, it would have been hard to bite into. Starting off with a softer and moister fondant is the way to go, especially for the head. This was the first time I used fondant on a sugar cookie. I loved the effect it had on the cookie. There is just something about 3-dimensional cookies that shout out "super cool!"

I loved that the cookies didn't have to be perfect and still looked great. One of the snowman's face was accidentally tilted too much and part of its face was in the white icing. You could only see half of its sad face but then again it looked pretty cool. Poor little snowman:( Part of his face got buried in the snow when his body melted. Some of the gloves were not facing correctly but then again, it could have melted and fell off like that, right? There were little mistakes here and there but each cookie had a different story to tell. I loved the scenes that were being created! I loved it so much I thought it would make a great "show and share" at daycare so I sent Tristan to daycare with one today :)

I am happy with how the cookies turned out. I really am. I had to improvise while I was decorating but it all turned out anyway :) For instance, I was trying to make toques for their heads but it just didn't look right so I ended up with ear muffs. Those were WAY easier to do. I'm not sure I would make melted snowman cookies again in the next year or so but if I were, there would be a few things I would do a bit differently. I had a feeling a pure fondant head would be too much fondant and too sweet. I had ideas of making it better using rice cereal or something in the middle but since I ran out of time, I just went with all fondant. I also figured it was a sugar cookie after all so maybe it wouldn't be too sweet in comparison to everything else. Jean-Louis now tells me that it was in fact too sweet :( I ran into a bit of problem with the icing as well. I got lazy in diluting my icing and ended up applying very thick icing, which then dried up a bit too fast. Then I also ran out of icing before I finished off all the cookies. Doh! When I added the fondant to it, the icing cracked a bit and I had to use additional royal icing here and there to attach the pieces. Oops. Then again, the cracked icing gave a nice effect to the melted snowman scene. When you think about it, there really is no going wrong with this design :) It's one big disaster scene!

I had a lot of fun making these melted snowman cookies. Can you tell? :) When I was assembling the cookies, I actually laughed out loud because they were so hilarious. For those who want to try to make these, here were the recipes I used:

Almond sugar cookies
Royal icing
Marshmallow fondant

Happy baking!

Christmas baking in full swing

2011-12-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

It all started last Thursday. The following are stuff I have baked or made so far. Yikes! With the exception of the sugar cookies, they were all new recipes too. The sugar cookies had a new design though :) Cupcakes are also coming up near the end of the week for Jean-Louis' work potluck and then more cupcakes and cake for Christmas day. If you don't get a cavity from reading all this, you may from looking at what I have made so far! Just so you know, a lot of these are giveaways :) We had a good sampling of them though. *oink, oink*

Lemony olive oil banana bread

Chocolate almond caramel (soft toffee)

Almond lavender parfait

Toasted almond cranberry sables cookies

Vegan almond lavender sables cookies

Almond sugar cookies with fondant

What's awesome about your life?

2011-12-12T12:09:00.000-08:00

Recently I read an article about one of the worst questions you can ask at a party: Why Ask "So What Do You Do?" It's funny because it's also one of the first questions you get asked by someone that doesn't know you. It has happened to most of us and I have asked others the same question myself. In fact, I witnessed this exact thing this past weekend at a party. It was pretty much the exact question stranger A asked stranger B when they first sat down.Whether you like it or not, it has become one of those lines you use at a party or gathering. I always kind of thought that it would be a good start to get to know someone. What you do for work says a lot about you. However, your work does not define you and apparently, some people like the author of the above article, Lissa Rankin really doesn't like being asked "what do you do?" I am so glad someone else said it first. Although I have accepted the question of "what do you do," I personally hate being asked that myself. It is this question that has made me shy away from a lot of gatherings, especially in the past when I was merely a bored stay-at-home wife.

"What do you do?" is one of the worst questions you can ask someone at a social gathering. There are places where it would be suitable to ask that question but for a social gathering where you are suppose to mingle and have a good time, it would be better not to ask a stranger "what do you do?" At least not at the first meeting and out of the blue. Like Lissa states, once you answer this question, you get placed inside a box. A stay-at-home mom? Well you get placed in the same box as all the other stay-at-home moms and you are stereotypically viewed as being home at lot, playing with your kids, taking naps, not doing much all day and whatever else stay-at-home moms are generalized as. As a part time stay-at-home mom myself, I know that we do a heck of a lot. In fact, there's not a single thing we don't do! Are you a work-outside-of-home mom? If so you get placed in the box where people assume you don't spend any time with your kids and that you are not raising them yourself and you care more about work than your kids etc. There may be good assumptions about you too but the bad ones may just be nasty! Obviously, being placed inside any box would be a bad thing.

Now that we are aware of the worst question to ask at a party, what would be a good question to ask? Lissa likes to ask "what is awesome about your life?" I personally love that question myself. This question would spark all sorts of positive answers and who wouldn't want to share their life's awesomeness with others? The truth is people love to talk about themselves and brag so here is their chance! Just as a comparison, here are my answers to "what do you do?" and "what is awesome about your life?"

What do you do?
I am a part time work-at-home mom and part time stay-at-home mom. For work, I design software and websites for user experience and manage projects. As a mom, I take care of my 3 year old son and make sure everything like chores, bills, and appointments are taken care of.

What is awesome about your life?
So much is awesome about my life! My husband, son and I are whole and in perfect health. We spend a lot of time together every day, even when my son is in daycare that day. Lucky for us, we can drop him off late and he doesn't sleep until 9PM so it gives us plenty of quality time. We go on vacations at least once a year and normally to hot tropical places. We all get plenty of sleep! We eat great food because I like to cook. My son loves to talk and laugh with us. He is a big reason why life is awesome these days. He's a great little kid:) I love event planning and having a child allows me to throw cute and fun birthday parties. It's totally awesome. I think I have finally reached a balance in life where I could be happy with for awhile. I get to stay at home and spend lots of time with my son, Tristan, as well as work part time and continue to contribute to projects I have been working on for years.

I love it! Next time I am ever in the position to break the ice with a stranger at a gathering, I'm going to ask them what is awesome about their life :)

Adult party with the kids

2011-12-12T11:58:00.000-08:00

This past Saturday we hosted a Christmas potluck at our place. The party started at 4PM, which all the adults thought was bizarrely early. We figured an early start would mean an early end. Tristan was there and so were his two young cousins. We wanted an adult-like party with nice adult conversations but we wanted to include the kids as well. It turned out well since the kids played well together and pretty much entertained themselves most of the evening:) They were all surprising well behaved. Tristan didn't nap all day and ended up being awake from 7:30AM until nearly 11PM. Wow.

It was great to mingle with adults again. We even forgot about Tristan here and there throughout the evening. Every so often I would return to mommy-mode and offer him water or wipe his hands down. When I was worried he didn't eat much either than tortilla chips, bread and spinach dip, I prepared him a bit of the rice and curry around 9PM. His dinner was totally all over the place but that was okay. It was a party so we let it go. Jean-Louis pitched in here and there too when he brought Tristan to go potty. I was drinking wine and mingling, which is something I don't remember doing in a long time. I got to chat with pretty much everyone and I even got to eat lots. That never happens when I play host! Thanks to the potluck, we didn't have to provide all the food so we really did get to relax and have a good time :) In fact, we went shopping in the morning and didn't get back until later in the afternoon. We had only 3 hours to make four dishes of food for the party and clean up! I think we deserve a medal :)

Considering we're both somewhat anti-social, Jean-Louis and I had a great time. Besides wanting to purge the house of food, I think we both needed a social like that. It was a bit of a nerdy party since we played Pictionary near the end but we thought it kind of suited the crowd we invited :) Even my 7 year old niece participated. We used Tristan's brand new easel to draw for the game. It worked brilliantly and no mess! :) Someone would draw on the whiteboard and when they were done, he would come and erase the board for them. It got so noisy at one point I was afraid the neighbors would complain. I guess that is what happens when you combine wine with Pictionary :) I swear my Pictionary game is like 15 years old. It just proves that you can have a blast with it at any age :)

Grateful for Jean-Louis and daycare

2011-11-29T21:12:00.001-08:00

Tonight I read an article featured on CNN on Why we get mad at our husbands. It starts off as though it was me writing the article. Jean-Louis and I just celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary this past August too! Then I read on and in between the laughter here and there, I came to realize how Jean-Louis could be viewed as a super-dad to the average person. To me, he is just a good dad. We have always shared chores and responsibilities so I did not expect anything less when we had a child. After reading the article I feel even luckier to have him.

There was a followup article titled Mad At Dad Part Two: How to Get Past the Anger and it mentioned that "there is a message that fathers who pitch in are somehow special." The article talks about how to get fathers to pitch in more at home and encourages a fifty-fifty partnership. At home, I do more but Jean-Louis does way more on the day-job front. It all sort of balances out. We are happy about how things are working out. We both work, contribute to chores, and we both get to spend a lot of time with Tristan too. When we can, we both try to pick Tristan up from daycare together. I know it doesn't take both of us to go but we want to. He is only going to be this young once. Jean-Louis and I pretty much do everything together. It has always been like that.

I don't get angry much thanks to Jean-Louis and daycare. I am extremely grateful for these resources. I have a lot of me time and it's great. Many of the women out there who are angry have too much on their plate and they don't have the resources to help them. It's understandable. I would probably be on anxiety pills if I were them. I have Jean-Louis who pitches in at home a lot. Jean-Louis cleans the bathrooms, vacuums, plays with Tristan a lot, gives Tristan a bath five times a week, does the dishes every night, puts Tristan to sleep every night, and let's me sleep in on the weekends. We all go to the mall together to grocery shop and he usually watches Tristan in the store while I walk around and shop. When it's a party day, I do all the cooking but Jean-Louis will tiny up the living room and sweep the floors without being asked. Honestly, I think this is all normal and every husband and father should be contributing where they can. All the fathers I know are hands-on, maybe not as hands-on as Jean-Louis but they do a lot too. The fact that society views this as "special" is sort of sad.

I also have a great daycare nearby. It allows me plenty of time to get work done, run chores and do whatever I want for me time. If anything, I feel like I need to do more. I'm working more these days so that feels great. When Tristan was in daycare and I wasn't working much, I felt a lot of guilt since we were "losing" income and I was available to take care of him. Thank goodness we're no longer in that situation. I love this flexible schedule! I know one day I will return to working full time so right now I'm enjoying being a part time stay-at-home mom and part time work-at-home mom. Yes, I still get angry from time to time but nothing like the examples in those articles above that I read. Reading something like that really makes you appreciate what you have. Thanks to Jean-Louis and daycare, I feel pretty lucky! :)

Monkey cake and cupcakes for a monkey themed party

2011-11-26T16:56:00.000-08:00

I did it. I made my first party cake for my toddler's 3rd birthday. Now that I have started, I won't be buying anymore cakes for future birthdays :) Hooray for being able to DIY (do it yourself)!

The party was all about monkeys. Monkey anything for little boys is adorable. The younger they are, the cuter. Our boy Tristan has tons of clothes with monkeys on it in some form or another. He was dressed as a monkey for two Halloweens straight! Throwing a monkey-themed party was something I just had to do :)

I searched and I searched and found my monkey designs for the cake and cupcakes through the Martha Stewart site and Pinterest. I love Pinterest! If you are a foodie or craft person, you should get on Pinterest stat. No seriously, sign up now! :)

I had leftover marshmallow fondant I made not too long ago that I wanted to use so instead of following exactly what was described, I just used fondant wherever possible. This is the second time I have played with fondant and my first cupcake using it. The only thing I have ever created using fondant were ruffle flowers for the cake I made for my mom's birthday. This time, I really got to play with it. I had both brown and ivory color paste but I discovered that brown and yellow makes sort of a tan or dark ivory color. Neat! The fondant was a bit tricky to work with when it dried up and it kept sticking to the table. I had to clean the table a few times from the build up of fondant. I used a mix of mostly icing sugar and a bit of cornstarch to prevent from sticking too much and I had to work fast before the fondant got dry and hard.

I didn't want to make the cake that was used on the Martha Stewart site since I wanted something just chocolatey. The thing with monkey-themed parties is that people want to incorporate so much banana into everything. Bananas are good but chocolate is way better, don't you agree? :) The only banana thing we had were real bananas. Well, I made banana looking sugar cookies too but they were lemon-vanilla flavored. So the cake I did was chocolate but the design I used was pretty much an exact copy from the Martha Stewart site. I made my favorite icing but this time I made it chocolate. It's actually the swiss meringue buttercream recipe off of Martha Stewart as well. What can I say, Martha has good stuff on her site :)

The cupcakes I chose to do were nutella. I made them once before but I kind of messed up so I wanted to try them again. This time they turned out great. Some were slightly overcooked. I guess I didn't rotate them in time. The fondant design I used was from The Frosted Cake 'n Cookie site. They have a great tutorial with lots of pictures on that site. It really was easy. I used the chocolate buttercream on the cake and cupcakes. The nutella cupcakes were for the more daring guests. In case any of the kids had an allergy to nuts, I wanted a chocolate cake alternative. Both cake and cupcakes turned out delicious. They weren't too sweet since I cut down on the sugar and the buttercream went super well with the marshmallow fondant. I was a bit afraid the fondant would be stiff and hard but the buttercream icing totally softened it up. It was a perfect marriage!

The monkey cake had more success at the party. I think because it looked totally cool. Jean-Louis preferred the taste of the chocolate cake more since he said the nutella cupcakes were not as moist. I thought they were moist enough. The consistency was more like a moist brownie than cake though. If you like nutty fudge stuff, you'll love nutella cupcakes! I personally loved them but I also loved the cake too.

Finally what is a monkey party without monkey and banana sugar cookies? I made these lemon-vanilla flavored ones for party favors. Jean-Louis thought they should have been banana flavored but the idea of that didn't appeal to me. So there you have it! There are tons of monkey designs out there for desserts and they are so much fun to do :) Now, go throw yourself a monkey party! Oo-oo-ee-ee!

Tristan & I decorated together! This is his creation :)

It's his birthday so he can have both cake & cupcake!

2011-11-23T12:28:00.001-08:00

3 years developmental update

2011-11-21T23:17:00.000-08:00

Wow, I still can't believe Tristan is 3 years old now! Bye bye under 3 freebies. We all knew the time would come. But really, time goes by quickly and kids grow so fast! I'm so happy to be able to spend so much time with him while he is still young. I feel like we have celebrated every milestone and everything we do together will leave behind great memories for the future. With another birthday behind us, here is the latest in growth and development for Tristan.

GROWTH

He really is getting so big! Physically he is a bit bigger than he was a year ago. He isn't growing at the rate he used to when he was a baby so we're able to let him wear his clothes for longer periods. He still wears some of his 24 month clothes even. Most of them are pants though. Last year's 3 year old winter clothes will get worn again, which I'm thankful for. Tristan has nice clothes and some of them are really expensive French clothes so if he can wear them for more than one season, then I'm happy! Some of the pants we let him wear last year no longer need to be folded at the bottom. He wore the same Halloween costume as last year! It was slightly big last year and this year it may have been a bit snug. Jean-Louis weighed Tristan a week or so ago and he's 32 pounds. When compared to the other kids at daycare, Tristan appears to be a bit on the small side.

FOOD & EATING

Tristan may be a bit small for his age (or maybe he's average) but I know he eats well and I'm not worried at all. Jean-Louis and I are both petite so I don't expect Tristan to be very big or tall one day. For the past week, Tristan has been eating well. He some times nibbles at lunch but then when dinner comes along, he eats all the food we give him. He'll have a bowl of vegetable and chicken soup, then yogurt, then fruit and maybe a cookie. Overall though, we still don't enjoy mealtimes very much. Whether or not Tristan eats all his food or not, we still have to nag at him or coach him along quite a bit. Sometimes we even have to soup feed him a bit to hurry him along. Jean-Louis really really hates doing that! Lately, it has been pretty good though and Tristan has been eating by myself.

Things are pretty much back to normal now. When we came back from vacation, Tristan became a bit more difficult at the dining table. Thank goodness we are back to our routine. We're allowing Tristan to eat more things now, including junk food like processed candies. He had his first lollipop just a few days ago. At first he really liked it but then after about 10 licks, he didn't want anymore. He has also tried pop, black licorice, M&M candies, and chips. When he does eat junk food, it's more like a sampling. The idea is just for him to try it and let him know that he can't have too much because it's not healthy. I think it's important for him to try all sorts of foods so that he at least knows what they are and will be able to follow when people talk about them. We also don't want to deprive him to the point where he would engorge in tons of junk when he's at a party because he can't have any at home. I heard that is a problem with some kids. Of course we are very strict with him as well or else he would be a very picky eater and not listen at the dining table.

POTTY TRAINING

Tristan is going strong with his potty training. He is fully trained when he is awake and 50% of the time when he is asleep. It could be more because he has been increasingly waking up with dry pull-ups now. I can't remember the last time we had a potty accident. When we were in Hawaii, Tristan didn't have any accidents, even when we were on the tour bus all day. We were very lucky because it turned out that we had totally forgotten to bring along a change of underwear and clothes for him if he had an accident. So lucky! I don't bother asking Tristan if he has to pee anymore. He tells us and some times he will even hold it a long time, while I finish something up in the kitchen. We used to run up the stairs every time he told us but now we just calmly walk up. It's so nice to be potty trained :)

SLEEP

Tristan sleeps a bit less now since he has pretty much given up his naps. He stopped napping at home for a few weeks now. Sometimes when we are out, he may fall asleep and then we just let him. If he can sleep, I'm all for the naps :) We just don't bother putting him down anymore. He seems totally energetic and happy about it too. His bedtime hasn't changed. He sleeps around 9PM and wakes up around 7:30AM.

Tristan still sleeps in his crib. He slept in a twin and double bed when we were on vacation and only fell off it once. We thought we would have to transfer him over to a bigger bed or extend his crib when we got back. It turned out he liked sleeping in his crib. It's not a big deal to us since we would prefer to keep him in the crib as long as possible. He doesn't jump out and this way he is contained. I used to hear my friend talk about how her kids would run to her room at 6AM and wake her up. I'm trying to delay this from happening to me as long as possible. I know I'm lucky Tristan listens a lot. He wakes up in the morning and he calls out from his crib "Mommy? Are you awake? I'm not tired anymore." I would look at the clock and respond "Not yet Tristan. Go back to sleep. Mommy needs 20 more minutes." That usually does it :)

SPEECH

Tristan is piecing together new sentences like you wouldn't believe it. He'll hear something once and then try to use it in a new sentence. I'm not sure how and when this all happened but we're noticing it right now. He is also speaking with better tense. He'll say things in the present and past and is figuring out which one to use and when. He asks "why" to everything. I think the "why" stage started when we went to Whistler back in May. He's funny to have conversations with because he has answers for most things even though they don't make sense. Let's say he has a reply to most things :)

Jean-Louis says that Tristan has no theory of mind. What he means is that he doesn't know that there are some things he will know that we won't know. For instance when we pick him up at daycare and ask him what he did at daycare, he says I don't know. Then he turns to me and asks me "do you know mommy?" The same thing happens when I ask him about the kids at daycare. This makes it extra hard to learn about who he plays with and who his friends are. It wasn't easy knowing who to invite to his birthday party.

Tristan speaks English but has a full understanding of French. He says a few things in French and only French. He can say a few things and understand even more things in Chinese. One thing I'm proud of is that Tristan doesn't swear or say things like "damnit." I don't swear and Jean-Louis is controlling himself from saying things like "damnit" and "Jesus Christ." So far it's working because whenever Tristan is in shock, he says "oh my goodness." However, he does know dirty words and he'll say it to be naughty. For instance he says "caca" here and there to be funny. "Caca" is poo in French. Luckily, not many people know what he is saying and probably thinks he is just making funny noises.

BEHAVIOR

Some times we lose our patience at Tristan and then we yell and become aggressive. Tristan is learning from us and some times he protests and misbehaves for attention. A couple of times, he tried to hit or kick us when he was really mad. Every time, we pulled him aside, lectured him and got him to apologize. He's pretty good at saying sorry and he understands why we are sad when he is behaving badly. He is also polite and says thank-you and excuse me.

Tristan is rough when he plays so we're teaching him to be more gentle when pretending to play things like "kung-fu." We pretend fight him but he fights us for real and some times we really get hurt! I am definitely going to enroll him in some kind of martial arts class. He's going to kick butt!

He's goofy. He likes to make funny and weird faces all the time. I think he gets that from me. At his birthday party this past weekend, he had a hard time standing still with a straight face when everyone was singing happy birthday to him. He keep making faces and sticking his tongue out. I notice but Jean-Louis didn't. Some times he just does that.

Tantrums? What tantrums? Yeah, he still tantrums from time to time. They don't bother us much anymore since they hardly happen and when they do, they last maybe a few minutes at most. We're so glad the terrible-twos are behind us. From what I hear, threes are awesome :) It's already pretty awesome I think. Tristan really is a great little kid.

Happy 3rd Birthday Tristan!

2011-11-20T20:53:00.001-08:00

Today was the big day. We had a party for him with family and a few of his daycare friends. It was a monkey-themed party and it was a success :) Success because the food all turned out and nobody cried at the party.

We gave out invitations a week and a half ago but I think next year I will give them out sooner. It's nicer to know in advance and to book people before they have plans :) Two weeks in advance would probably be better. For this year's party, we got a little more formal. I hand wrote invitations out of construction paper cut out as bananas for some of his friends who I didn't have emails for at daycare. Here was the message I used on the invitations:

Monkey see, monkey do,  Tristan is turning 3!!!
 Monkeys love to jump and run,
Come join us for some monkey fun!

We’ll go bananas if you can come!

We decided to play games this year! The idea seemed alright and the games we picked were easy. At least we thought they were. For Tristan and a couple of others though, it just didn't work out. On a good day, Tristan would have been fine but today, he didn't want to obey. We played one game, then ate, then played the other two games.

Draw the best monkey: All the kids had to draw a monkey. The best monkey drawing won a prize. All the kids were between 3 and 4. Apparently, the drawing ability between 3 and 4 is huge. My 7 year old niece was the judge. One of the kids was not in the mood to draw a monkey so he drew a roller coaster. Somehow that got into Tristan's head and he started drawing a roller coaster too. Therefore two kids didn't even draw a monkey:(
Best monkey imitation: Each child had to show us their best monkey impersonation to compete for a prize. I initially pictured kids making monkey noises and jumping around with their arms like monkeys. In reality, most of the kids were shy or wasn't interested in playing. Then there was Tristan who decided to impersonate a tiger instead. When we told him "no, not a tiger, a monkey," he almost cried. Yeah, I would call that game a fail too. Don't know what it is but lately for the past month or so, Tristan has been pretending to be a tiger for fun. A better party for him would have been a tiger. Or an astronaut. At least for the next little while until he is interested in something else.
Throwing safari animals: I initially got this idea from a similar one where kids throw banana bean bags through a monkey hoop painted out of cardboard. We couldn't put that off so we settled for a jungle drawing with a hole on the ground and bought a bag of safari animals. Each person throws all the animals in the hole. The person with the most animals inside the hole wins a prize. It ended up being harder than I thought but this game worked out a bit better.

Nutella cupcakes & chocolate cake

Now, what is a party without talking about the food? In previous years, I have always made at least most of my food and then I would buy a nice cake. This year, I decided to make everything from scratch, including the cake. People that know me know me for my cooking. Only in the past year have a started to bake more and feel more comfortable with my decorating skills. At my mom's birthday a month ago, I made her a cake and felt pretty good about it. Now that Tristan's cake is done, I'm glad I decided to do it this year :) It really was a lot of fun. I'll try to write a post on it later for those who may be interested.

Like the banana food labels we made? :)

PARTY FOOD MENU

Appetizers:

Foie gras & fig jam on mini dry toast
Cheese & meat plate, crackers
Chips

Main dish:

Pesto chicken vegetable pasta
Three cheese tomato tart
Tuna sandwiches (cut out with monkey cookie cutter)
Banana, oranges, persimmons

Pop, pineapple juice boxes

Dessert:

Monkey cake
Monkey cupcakes
Lemon vanilla sugar cookies

I tried to incorporate monkey-themed food here and there but I mostly just had good food. We had real bananas cut up and around for decorations. We had a pineapple for decoration and served pineapple juice boxes. I made tuna sandwiches, which I cut out using my monkey cookie cutter. We served lots of oranges too because I heard that monkey love both oranges and bananas. The dessert was all monkey-themed, as you can see :)

Some times when I am in such a rush to cook, I just don't taste test. Today I made the mistake of not taste testing the pesto pasta and it turned out it was missing salt. No wonder there was so much left! People were probably too polite to ask for salt. Lol. I was also running a bit late so I skipped a few things. I wanted to present the cut up fresh fruit in rows with the pineapple top on one end but I ended up just cutting fruit on plates. No one noticed and probably wouldn't have cared but me anyway.
The party was from 11-2PM. Jean-Louis and I were so busy getting ready still that we were at least 30 minutes late setting up all the food. That was a bit embarrassing. Next time, we need to do more preparation the night before. However, once all the food was laid out, I got to sit down and relax a bit:) See? I told you I would try to relax during the party!

Monkey-themed parties are totally cute! I knew that if I ever wanted to do one, it would have to be now while Tristan was still young. I think it's just cuter when they are young :) The other reason is that when they get older, they tend to want to choose their own party themes. That's what I hear anyway.

Tristan can draw faces now :)

2011-11-16T09:15:00.000-08:00

Isn't it awesome?!? Reminds me of Charlie Brown :)

This is suppose to be Jean-Louis (aka daddy).

One of my favorite activities is to plan parties

2011-11-15T21:40:00.001-08:00

This is Tristan's last week being a 2-year old boy. Our baby is about to turn 3. OMG :( But that also means I get to plan and host a birthday party. Hooray! Kid birthday parties are the most fun to work with :)

I am an event planner. An amateur event planner. I always have been. I love it and it's one more activity that allows me to use my creativity. I also love to cook. And for a year now, I also love to bake. Before Tristan came along, there weren't many events or parties to plan. Our birthdays and anniversaries were private and we didn't know enough people to throw parties. Whenever there was an opportunity to throw a party or plan an event though, I happily worked away. I did a few events back in Paris for fundraising. I had a blast each time.

One of my favorite things about being a mom is planning and throwing birthday parties for Tristan. Since becoming a blogger here and hanging out on Twitter and Pinterest, I have come across a gazillion party posts, dessert tables, and totally cool cakes and cookies. I have so much inspiration and ideas to work with! Since most of this is new to me, I am overwhelmed with all the great resources. There are only so many birthdays and parties one can have. We only have Tristan too so that means one birthday party a year:( I even considered throwing a half-birthday party just to get another birthday party in there! If I did that, I'm sure I would be looked upon as a party freak, which I'm not really :) Actually since last year, I've been making a slightly bigger deal out of Jean-Louis' birthday and my birthday. We didn't have decorations but we had people over for "high tea" (sort of) and served fancy tea, dessert, and bite sized food. It was nice.

Party planning for Tristan's upcoming birthday this weekend is in full gear! I'm WAY more excited than he is. On the day of, he will probably be more excited :) I even have some of the decorations up already! We were bored this past weekend so we decided to put the birthday banner up. It's going to be a small party with family and friends and I'm hoping to do a bit more this year since he's turning 3. Jean-Louis wants to do a drawing game but I'm still not sure 3-year-olds are capable of much when it comes to drawing. Based on what I have seen Tristan draw lately, I'd say he has no chance! Sorry kiddo:( I just want everything to be perfect but this year, I'm going to try to not spend all my time hosting and tiring myself out. I hear it's not much fun for anyone when that happens. People probably feel sorry for me. I don't know. I haven't figured out how I am going to relax during the party but I'm aware of it and will try! Maybe some Beaujolais wine may help :)

Halloween comparison: 2010 & 2011

2011-11-09T09:17:00.000-08:00

Left side is 2010, right side is 2011 (but you can tell, right? ;) Also, same monkey costume was worn!

Tristan's drawing capability

2011-11-07T23:15:00.000-08:00

Tristan is no artist. Yet :)

A couple of years ago, I was over at a friend's house around Thanksgiving and she showed me a picture of a stick man that was drawn by her then 3 year old son. It had a face on it and a stick body but the neck was disconnected from the head. She beamed with pride while holding it up for me to see. When I just smiled, she explained that he was only 3 and that a lot of kids can't draw that yet. Oh.

Now that Tristan is almost 3, I can't help but think back to that incident and laugh. I was clueless in what a 3 year old was capable of and I obviously wasn't impressed by the funny looking stick figure that was drawn. Now that I have Tristan to compare with, I am totally impressed! Tristan can draw a circle and something in it. Maybe a nose or one eye or two crooked eyes but that's about it. He can almost draw a face. ALMOST! I got him to try a few times and he came fairly close one time. It looked more like a panda head than a human head though :) Are you more impressed? The problem is I didn't ask for a panda head. I'm not even sure he knows what a panda is. Sigh. Either my friend's boy was artistically gifted beyond his years or Tristan sucks at drawing. Or maybe both.

Besides coming close to being able to draw a face, Tristan can also write the letter T very well. He recognizes it as the first letter of his name. He actually sees the initial as his name. Whenever he sees the first letter T in any word, he points and says it's his name. Then we say "oh yeah, that word starts with a T just like your name!" I'm trying to show him that there are more letters to "Tristan" than just the "T" but he's not quite ready for it. The only other letter he can copy in his name is the "i." No rush. We'll try again when he is interested.

Tristan's accidental ladybug

Tristan accidentally drew a ladybug one time. I think he was randomly drawing and then when it started to look like something he recognized, he pointed at it and said "look, ladybug!" We were quite impressed, even though we knew it was a complete accident :) So yeah. Tristan can draw circles, short lines, dots, and sometimes he can connect these things together. All the pieces are there really. It's just a matter of time before he draws a simple stick man :)

Tristan is getting better at coloring too. He understands that he should color and stay inside a defined area. He doesn't have the coordination or patience to do it yet but he gets the idea. He used to color in scribbles over a drawing. He is much better at identifying colors now too. I know I'm his mom and I'm biased but overall I do feel like he has potential. Remember the nice canvas art he did for me for Mother's Day? It was nice, no? :) Also, I remembered a daycare staff lady describing how Tristan was working to put together an art piece. There were all these pieces of tin and sparkles on the table and the kids were assembling them on sticky paper. Apparently, Tristan took his time and carefully placed each little piece of tin onto the paper. He didn't miss any. Hearing that made me proud :)

Spider? Fly? Suppose to be something.

I know Tristan is still young but a part of me really wants him to be artistic. I would love to do things like draw, paint, carve pumpkins, and a whole lot of other crafts with him. I'm dreaming of the day he will be able to help me decorate sugar cookies :) Ha. Too much to ask for? I probably have high hopes and expectations but if he is anything like me, he probably will enjoy some of that stuff. It would be so cool to sit by a lake together and paint a canvas or something. Jean-Louis can tweet and take pictures while we do this :) Lol. Jean-Louis isn't into creating art or crafts. If you were to ask him, he would just tell you that he sucks at it. We both tried to draw portraits and carve pumpkins together in the past but he would just get discouraged and quit. That's totally fine. When I carve pumpkins now, he just helps by scooping out the seeds and flesh for me :) I hope Tristan is artistic but if it turns out that he is not, we'll know which side he took his genes from. No offense Jean-Louis :)

Saving big bucks on a Hawaiian vacation

2011-11-03T11:22:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm frugal. Since not working full time and having Tristan in daycare, I have become even more frugal. Hard to imagine some times. I am a bit of a coupon junkie now and I have the talent of smelling a good deal :)

We went to Hawaii for eight days: five in Oahu and three in Kauai. We did a lot of things and we had a blast! The accommodations were a bit disappointing but we didn't have a budget to stay at the Sheraton! Overall, we are pleased with how things went and would totally do it all over again.

The following are some of the ways we saved BIG bucks on our Hawaiian vacation.

Cheap flight:
We decided to go to Hawaii when I spotted a great deal on WestJet. Yes, I monitor a few sites every now and then for deals :P $139 one way directly from Vancouver to Honolulu for October dates. Even though this was Tristan's first paid flight, we only paid around $1000 for all three of us to fly there and back :)

Island hop savings:
If you book a flight from Vancouver to Kauai, you will most likely go through Honolulu and you would pay big bucks for it. There are few direct flights and they only operate seasonal. You may also have to change planes on the way there. $1000 round trip per person would not be unrealistic. We flew to Oahu and then booked a separate flight directly through Hawaiian Airlines to go to Kauai. If you book through Expedia or another third party, it will also cost you more. I booked our tickets 3-4 months in advance, which was also cheaper. It turned out that the airline raised their check-in luggage fee in August 2011 from $10 for the first piece to $17. Since we purchased our tickets before August, we were able to pay just the $10 fee. Lucky! I booked the flight and car together as a package on Hawaiian Airlines and that was cheaper than purchasing them separately. I also made it so that we had the car rental for exactly three days and that we would be at the airport in time for our flight out of Honolulu back to Vancouver so we wouldn't have to go back into town. Just like WestJet, we had all these costs taken care of before our vacation so we didn't have to worry about paying for everything at once :)

Groupon Honolulu:
Knowing that were were heading to Hawaii, I monitored the Groupon site for deals every now and then and were able to snatch four Groupons. One of them was for our hotel stay. Even though the hotel was a bit disappointing, it wasn't such a big deal since we already saved around 49% on our stay. We paid $399 for 5 nights in Waikiki, which included breakfast, Internet, and parking. You have to be a bit careful with Groupon. When I looked on our hotel website, they were also offering a deal so you really only save maybe 25%. Two other Groupons we had saved us $40 on food. The last Groupon we couldn't redeem since the business closed down but Groupon refunded us for that :)

Entertainment coupon book:
Entertainment coupon books are good until November 1st. We traveled in the middle of October. In July, all entertainment books for all cities were just $5, plus $1 for shipping. You can buy Entertainment books for places you are going to visit! We bought the one for Hawaii. 80% of the book were coupons for Oahu. We used the coupon for all our activities on Oahu, which were basically buy 1 get 1 free. We also used a ice cream coupon at the Dole Plantation and one for Senor Frog. We saved at least $247!!! Even if we bought the Hawaii Entertainment book at its regular price of $35, we would have still saved big.

Coupons from free tourist pamphlets and guides:
We checked these out for maps and activities to do. We managed to use a few of them and saved a few bucks. Every little bit counts, right?

Choosing the right activities for under 3 year old:
Besides the flight and car seat rental, we did not pay anything extra for Tristan to come along with us. We bought more food but he didn't eat much anyway. We only considered activities that were free for under 3 year old :)

Knowing where to shop and eat:
We are not new to Hawaii so we sort of knew where to shop. I also did a bit of research and I had a better idea of what was out there. For souvenirs and food, nothing beats Walmart. For instance, at the General Whalers Store, water is $1.49 for 2 liters. The same water is $0.79 at Walmart. A&B Stores are okay, if there is no Walmart near you. Costco may be better but we have no Costco card. Chinatown has the best prices for produce but it was kind of far to walk to.

We love Quicksilver and Roxy but they are sort of expensive. We shopped at Macy's and looked at the clearance sections for these brands and were able to snatch a few things that we liked :) We also shopped at Ross.

For eating out, I did research beforehand and found a bunch of local places that were good and cheap to eat at. One of those places was Rainbow Drive In. Jean-Louis found a place on Flickr called Wailana Coffee House. We bought a kid's lunch with drink included for Tristan for just $2.25. OMG. They were all great finds!

Book from home and buy your activities online:
I called and booked many of our activities from home before we flew. As a result, we didn't have to use the hotel phone at all and we saved a few bucks. For the luau on Kauai, I booked online to save $20. Again, every bit helps!

If you have saving tips for traveling to Hawaii, feel free to enter them in the comments section ;)

Toddler partying hard on the dance floor

2011-11-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

Highlights from our trip to Kauai

2011-11-01T11:44:00.000-07:00

Kauai is one of my favorite islands. The first time we visited it 13 years ago, it was magical. I couldn't believe how such a small island could be so beautiful and have so many attractions. We love Kauai but it actually wasn't our first choice. We wanted to go to the Big Island. We decided to go to Kauai instead because of Tristan. There would be too much driving required on the Big Island and Tristan would not enjoy it as much.

We spent three days in Kauai. I was able to rent us a private cottage in Kapa'a by the coconut coast. Coming from Waikiki in Oahu, this was a big change. It turns out that Kauai is a bit too country for me. Lol. The cottage we stayed at had occasional ants, cockroaches, and we had wild chickens and geese living under and just outside our cottage. The vegetation around us was like living in a rainforest. There were tons of banana trees, orange trees, papaya and avocados trees, passion fruit trees, aloe vera, and other tropical plants I couldn't identify. I finally saw a green gecko when I opened our front gate. Geckos are very common in Hawaii but in Oahu we never saw any. We arrived at sunset and then it got dark fast. It got super dark! The only thing you could see in the dark were the stars. That part I liked, except when I had to go pee in the middle of the night.

Here are the highlights from our trip in Kauai:

You have not truly stargazed into the night until you do it on a pitch dark island.
Places are hard to find due to lack of streets signs. We kept missing the turn to our cottage and it took us three attempts before we got it right. Jean-Louis remembered it was the post with the reflective stickers. I was looking for the short banana trees. We also got lost on a hike (read below) and we couldn't find a restaurant.
13 years ago, we stood an inch away from the Spouting Horn. Now, we have to view it from a fenced in ledge 10 meters away and 10 feet above.
You know the chicken population is out of control when they are blocking traffic in the Walmart parking lot. Also, did you know that chickens can jump and climb trees?!?!
Big Save and Walmart were our most visited stores. For the best deals, go to those!
The Smith's Garden Luau was everything I had hoped for. The Garden was beautiful, the food was delicious, and the show was educational and entertaining. We were told to eat until we were tired and not stop when we were full :) That's what I did!
Tristan really enjoyed the train ride at the Kilohana Plantation. It doesn't matter where we are as long as there is a train:) I saw rambutan trees for the first time and we got to feed the boars.
There are so many scenic drives in Kauai. Waimea canyon was amazing to see again. When Tristan gets older, we would love to hike inside of it. I hear some of the hikes are difficult.
We tried one hike with Tristan but we made a wrong turn and then ran out of time on our hike so we had to turn back. We were looking for the Berry Flat Trail in Kokee State Park but it was not connected to the road.
Polihale Beach Park was one of my favorite beaches but we had to turn back since we didn't have a 4-wheel drive and it was also pouring rain:( We drove less than three minutes away and we were back in sunshine and dry ground. Yup. Then we saw a double rainbow. Welcome to Hawaii!
The only beach we went to was Poipu. Last time we were there, there was a sea lion on the beach. This time, there was a sea turtle. It had a playground and is a good place for swimmers, snorkelers, and scuba divers. We made it in time to catch the sunset.
There was one more beach I wanted to check out that was recommended for small children. Lydgate Beach Park was only a three minute drive from our cottage but since Tristan did not finish his breakfast, we could not go:( Sometimes it sucks to be the parent.
We had a blast biking along the coconut coast in Kapa'a. I can now join all the other parents with small children by highly recommending this as an activity to do in Kauai. The path is as flat as a pancake along the coast and it's just beautiful! Rent your bikes from Coconut Coasters.
A new Shrimp Station opened up in Kapa'a so we tried the garlic shrimp and coconut shrimp. It was yum! Not sure I would call them shrimp since they were more like huge prawns! I was a bit bummed that we didn't get to try the shrimp from the shrimp trucks near the shrimp farms on the North shore of Oahu but this experience made up for it :)

Spiderman pumpkin: this year's carving for Halloween

2011-10-31T11:36:00.000-07:00

Tristan's favorite superhero is Spiderman. We have never watched any superhero flick with him yet but he seems to have a lot of interest in Spiderman. Maybe because Spiderman looks cool?! His recent fascination with Spiderman made this year's pumpkin design choice super easy :)

Happy Halloween!!! May you get all the treats (or tricks) you deserve :)

This took 1.5 hours to carve! Phew.

Highlights from our trip to Oahu

2011-10-31T11:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, we went to Hawaii!!! We were in Oahu for five days and then Kauai for three days. It was everything you would expect from a tropical family vacation.

It has been over 10 years since Jean-Louis and I have been in Oahu. We lived on the Big Island of Hawaii for awhile and visited Oahu a few times. Our impression of Oahu at the time was that it was dirty and was way too busy and we had no idea why it was so popular. Waikiki was lame compared to the beautiful beaches we have been to on the Big Island and Kauai. There were beggars, prostitutes and it didn't feel safe to wander around in the city at night.

Now in our 30s with a toddler, our impression of Oahu is that it's actually a great place for a vacation. It has cleaned up quite nicely and there are so many new buildings and roads. The Waikiki area is lovely now. There's great shopping, entertainment, and I hardly saw litter on the streets. A lot has changed. We have also changed.

We stayed in Oahu for five nights, which we thought was plenty. Since I was so organized, we got to do a lot of stuff and when we left, we didn't feel like we missed out on much.

Here are the highlights from our trip:

We visited with a friend, who we haven't seen since our wedding.
Coffee & Tea has better bubble tea than in Vancouver. It's true!
Diamond Head State park is a long walk from Waikiki. Tristan walked all the way up and down on his own and the other hikers were impressed. That made us proud :)
We all enjoyed the Grand Circle Island tour. It gave us a look at the real Oahu, not just Waikiki. However, I got four nasty mosquito bites from that trip and Jean-Louis got stung my a bee on his foot.
Island Vintage Coffee on Waikiki rocked.
The Magic of Polynesia show was excellent. The dinner portion was just okay.
The Waikiki Aquarium was okay. The Vancouver Aquarium is way better.
The Ali`i Kai Catamaran dinner cruise was nice. Tristan partied really hard. It was kind of embarrassing since we normally don't dance and he had to drag us out for every song. He kind of threw a fit when we didn't let him dance out there.
Hit places we ate at: Padovani's Grill, Rainbow Drive In, Leonard's Bakery, Waiola's Shave Ice and Bakery
One of the Groupons we bought for ice cream, Hula Swirl, went out of business:( Luckily, Groupon refunds you in an event like this.
Surprise find: reliable wireless Internet was hard to come by. Many coffee shops didn't have WIFI or a bathroom. What the heck!
Everywhere I went, people thought I was a local resident since I was Asian and tanned
The weather was great! We only encountered a brief shower once.
No rain, no rainbow. Even though we weren't rained upon, we got to see two rainbows in Oahu.

HI: We're back :)

2011-10-28T20:59:00.000-07:00

Guess where we vacationed this time?

Hint 1: Re-read the post title.

Hint 2: State fish: humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa

Vancouver Zoo in pictures

2011-10-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

Apple picking at Ma and Gong's house

2011-10-12T17:06:00.000-07:00

Lots of apples = apple pie ...of course:)

Victoria half marathon was a success!

2011-10-11T11:41:00.000-07:00

We did it! We were blessed with great weather and had a terrific run. In fact, Jean-Louis finished with a personal best time! We both achieved our target goal of under 2 hours. Not too shabby for our first race in over 3 years :)

Here are our results:

	Time	Final Place	Place in Sex	Place in Age Division
Jean-Louis	1:39:10	533/5147	401/1916	65/245
Susan	1:47:29	1009/5147	326/3231	59/439

Jean-Louis and I ran together for the first kilometer or so and then we lost each other in the crowd. In the end he just smoked me, as my brother-in-law puts it! I had a feeling he would do well since he was in much better shape than I was and trained twice as much as I did. We used to be great pace buddies. A long time ago, that is. It's hard to think that I used to beat him in some of the longer races in the past. Not that I'm bummed by my own results. I more than reached my goal so I'm proud :)

After the race, we ate oranges, bananas, chocolate energy drinks, bagels, and cookies. There were also puddings, energy bars, and muffins. My favorite were the oranges. I couldn't get enough of those sweet oranges! Thank-you Thrifty Foods for breakfast :)

The Victoria marathon event, which also includes the half marathon, 8km road race, wheelchair competitions, and kids run has been voted the best marathon in Western Canada. It is always well organized and we pretty much get everything we want out of a race. We have competed in maybe twenty races since 2002 and this race is one of our most highly rated ones! I get the feeling that the competitors in this race are overall faster compared to other races. Or maybe I'm just getting old :) Hey, next year I will be in a new age division! Wow.

I ran too slow, then too fast, then super slow, then held steady to the end. I actually sprinted the last 500 meters. It was bad strategy on my part so if I were to race again soon, I know I could do better. It has been so long that I must have forgotten what it was like to race again. Overall, Jean-Louis and I both feel good about the half-marathon. It really wasn't so bad. After the race, Jean-Louis mentioned that the race was actually quite short. Brag, brag, brag. Not for me! The guy even tweeted while he ran! Obviously it was too easy for Jean-Louis :) Now that the half marathon is behind us, the full marathon seems a lot more reachable. The main problem is finding the time to train with Tristan and also finding someone to watch Tristan.

My parents babysat Tristan for the first time ever this weekend so we could both race. We were a bit stressed about it, especially since we left him early in the morning while he was still sleeping. In the end, he was perfectly fine. It was a couple of hours without us and it was just fine for everyone. I think it helped that I had told him about it for awhile now. He knew that we were running and that he would have to stay with his gong and ma. We planned for them to watch us along the route but unfortunately we totally missed each other :( Thankfully none of us got lost this year and we were able to meet up after wards. We even made Tristan a sign to hold while cheering us on! My parents said he was saying hi to everyone that ran by and they said hi back to him :) Oh well. Maybe we can use the sign again next year :)

Durian coconut cream cake

2011-10-10T21:58:00.000-07:00

My mom had a birthday this weekend so I ended up making her a birthday cake. I thought about what I could give her for awhile but in the end, I just couldn't get anything on time. I was hunting for bubble tea supplies in Vancouver for the longest time but when that failed, I had to come up with a plan B. On the upside I did find a good bubble tea supply store that only ships to the US so I'll think about using them next time for a Point Roberts order.

This is the first time I made a birthday cake for anyone either than myself or Jean-Louis. Normally, for my parents, we just order something nice and professionally done at Maxim's. I know my mom loves durian and we used to buy durian cakes from a lady who ran a home business in Victoria but that business is no longer in operation. I have looked into this before and none of the big Chinese bakeries here sell a durian version of their cream sponge cakes. Since I made durian cake once already and it turned out good, I wanted to try a different method and improve on it. Last time I made it, it tasted good, maybe a bit too creamy and it didn't look very pretty. It had tons of potential though :)

For my mom's durian coconut cake, I used the coconut chiffon cake recipe from Tartine and followed the Pastel de Tres Leches recipe. It's basically a coconut chiffon cake with pastry cream, coconut syrup and lots of cream. I started with this recipe and then added a thin layer of pureed durian fruit on top of each pastry cream layer. Then for the icing, I doubled the whipping cream so I could cover the entire cake. Decorating the cake was tricky but I chose a simple design and topped it with some homemade ruffle flowers. Yes, I make fondant now! It really is just like playdoh but you can eat these :) I read that fondant doesn't work well with cream cakes so I made sure to only put these on at the last minute. I also didn't bind all the flowers together so that I could easily separate and serve them with each slice of cake. The other problem is that cream cakes are not normally as sweet as buttercream cakes so the fondant really tasted super sweet in comparison.

I personally thought the cake turned out well. It was moist, flavorful, and even though the cake was slightly denser than typical Chinese sponge cakes, all the layers and cream made the cake a soft and light dessert. I didn't use all the coconut syrup since it looked like too much when I was assembling the cake but now that I think about it, it wouldn't have hurt to use it all up. I didn't put a lot of durian in the cake but the durian was so strong that you couldn't really taste that much coconut in the cake. I ended up using the leftover coconut syrup for lattes and that was actually really good! I might just have to make myself coconut syrup in the future just for coffees :)

Conversations with a 2.5 year old

2011-10-04T12:30:00.000-07:00

Tristan is at the age where we can have conversations together and engage in pretend play. It's funny, confusing, and entertaining! I am loving this age :)

Here is us walking home from daycare. I always ask him how his day was and what he did. Then I ask about his favorite friends.

Me: Was Christopher at daycare today?

Tristan: No, he went on vacation to China.

Me: China? Why?

Tristan: He went to buy Toy Story stickers.

When we stay home together, we get to have lots of conversations. It's getting to the point where it's too awesome to miss and I want to remember this forever so I have restarted recording videos of him again. My hard drive is going to hate me but oh well :)

Today I made banana chocolate chip muffin top cookies. I gave him one of the cookies after his lunch and asked him what kind of cookie it is and what is in it. I thought he could examine the cookie and tell me what was inside. His response: Hmmm.... baking powder, I think. Me: LOL.

We went to story time at the library today. Occasionally, a parent would leave the room with their child during story time. Tristan would then ask "where are they going?" Me: I don't know. Maybe they have to go home. Him: Maybe they are going on vacation to China.

What is up with China?? It used to be Mexico but now everything is China. There was a little boy at daycare who went away to China for vacation. He was apparently gone a long long time so Tristan and probably everyone else at daycare was aware that the little boy went to China. Tristan obviously still remembers.

A couple of months ago, Jean-Louis accidentally stepped on dog poop on the grass by where we parked our car. He made a big scene over it and spend some time cleaning it off before he went back in the car. Now every time there is poop on the grass, and Tristan sees it, he thinks that only Daddy can step on it.

Us: Be careful when you walk on the grass. Sometimes there is dog poop there. We don't want to get our shoe dirty and smelly.
Tristan: Oh. Only daddy can step on it?
Us: Nobody step on it! When daddy stepped on it, it was an accident! Just an accident.

Sometimes Tristan and I have lovely conversations during breakfast. While he was having his milk one morning, he asks me about his milk.

Tristan: This is cow's milk?
Me: Yes.
Tristan: When I was a baby, I used to drink Mommy's milk. Now that I'm a big boy, I drink cow's milk.
Me: Yes.

Later that evening or the next evening, he tried to make the same correlation using yogurt! He said "I am a big boy and I eat yogurt. When I was a baby I used to eat Mommy's yogurt." Me: Noooooo.

Tristan has great memory too. One day I was singing "Down by the Bay" with him and he sang along but only to parts of it. It was obvious he didn't know the whole song. Two or three days later, I heard him singing the song when he woke up. I was surprised to hear the entire song. He knew it all! Well, not all since you can go on and on forever but he knew all the parts that we sang together a few days earlier. It was as though he was rehearsing but we haven't sang it for days and I never heard him sing it without me.

I'm sure there are tons of other examples too but I can't possibly list them all here. From conversations I have had with other moms as well, it seems the 2 to 3 year old range is a very cute age for speech. Toddlers in this age range are learning one to two new words every day and are able to string a lot of new sentences together. Their vocabulary and speech is just exploding! For Tristan, he loves to sing and knows so many songs by heart now. He even teaches us new songs :)

Training for the Victoria Half Marathon

2011-10-03T21:56:00.000-07:00

Jean-Louis and I are both racing in the Victoria Half Marathon this coming weekend. That's in 5 days!!! This will be our first race in over 3 years. Basically since I was pregnant with Tristan. I'm both nervous and excited.

The Victoria Half Marathon always occurs during Thanksgiving long weekend, which is one more reason for us to ferry over to Victoria and spend time with the family. At the same time, it's my mom's birthday too! Good thing it's a long weekend :)

We've ran the Victoria Half Marathon twice already back in 2005 and 2006. It's a beautiful scenic route and I would recommend this race based on just that fact. It turns out that the race also hands out excellent long sleeve New Balance technical shirts to participants, rather than your typical running white t-shirts. Another plus. Being staged in October means that we get the nice summer weather to train for it. Another plus! We've ran the Vancouver Half Marathon once and it just pales in comparison. I mean the route is also very lovely and the biggest bonus is that it's in town so we don't have to travel to get to it. But it's in May and training needs to start in the winter and that means running in the cold and rain :( But it's also the little things. The Victoria race has better snacks and food for after the race since they are sponsored by Thrifty Foods. Overall it seems you get more and it's $5 cheaper than the Vancouver half marathon. Man, I suddenly feel like a promoter for the Victoria Half Marathon :) But honestly, if you are a half marathon runner, you should run the race in Victoria. It's totally awesome and it's my hometown! :)

Are we ready for our race? We are as ready as we can ever be, being parents of a 2.5 year old toddler. Poor Tristan has to sit in the jogging stroller for one hour at a time when we go running together now. He's been doing pretty well. We try to time it during is naps but he barely naps anymore. We run with him in the stroller only twice a week. Jean-Louis and I run together while Tristan is in daycare twice a week. We basically run once Jean-Louis gets home from work and then we run straight to daycare to pick Tristan up. The daycare staff is used to seeing us both all sweaty and gross :) If we're not prepared now, it's hopeless. This week we're taking it a bit easy. We have two more runs left to do before race day. One 10KM and one 5KM and that's it! Running these short distances is probably not the best way to train for the race but we just don't have time to be running a half-marathon in the day. I already feel bad that Tristan is stuck in the stroller for one hour.

5 days left! Sunday around 9:30AM, I'm going to be one happy sore runner :)

Vancouver Museum in pictures

2011-09-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

The 3 and under advantage

2011-09-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

Before Tristan turned two years old, we took full advantage of traveling. We went absolutely no where until he was 18 months old though. At 18 months, we felt he was well behaved enough to take out more in general. We went to both France and Mexico and he was free for both trips. If your child is under 2, they fly for free. It's a sweet deal really :) Because he didn't eat much, the cost of food was almost nothing and every place we visited was also free for him. Train rides were free, bus rides were free, admission to the zoo was free, and any buffet we went to was free. Of course if Tristan wasn't with us, we wouldn't be going to the zoo to start with but you get the idea :)

Once a child turns 2, things change. Tristan is 2 1/2 and turning 3 in a couple of months so he is still free for most things. The big difference is air travel. There are rarely any child rates anymore so he pays the same price as an adult. That is huge! That is something like $1000 to fly for him! Not only that but a lot of vacation tour activities now require a child rate or adult rate for him to attend. Can you imagine paying an adult rate for a 2 year old dinner cruise or Mother's Day buffet? Crazy! So this is how we are going about choosing what to do with him. We look at all the activities we want to do and then we favor the ones where he can still go for free. Some times the child rate is only a few dollars less than the adult rate, which is ridiculous. We figure at this young age, he won't remember a lot of what he is experiencing anyway. For instance, we would rather pay $200 for a helicopter ride for him when he is 5 years old than pay for it now.

2 used to be our goal for doing a lot of things with him but now we're paying a lot of attention to 3. The fact is, besides air travel, 3 and under is a huge advantage. A lot of the tourist attractions such as the Vancouver Zoo do not require any admission fee for children 2 and under. The Vancouver Aquarium is free for children 3 and under. Tristan has already been to the aquarium but we are definitely going to go back a couple more times before he turns 4! The zoo will be new so we're aiming to hit that in the next month or so. Some activities are free for 3 and under but being under 3 allows you to go to most places for free. At Confederation Park, kids 2 and under ride the miniature train for free. Maybe 3 is free too. We just visited the Museum of Vancouver this past weekend and I noticed it was free for 4 and under. Children 4 and under also ride the skytrain and bus for free. Tristan is still free for a lot of meals at dinner cruises and buffets so we'll be hitting some of those too. Some cruises, dinner shows, and buffets actually give freebies to kids under 4 or 5. I mean how much can they eat, right? If your little kid is anything like our Tristan, eating off our plate is plenty!

Daddy is cooking vegan dishes

2011-09-19T22:44:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Jean-Louis used to cook once every two weeks or once a month. It's been so long ago, I don't remember which. Needless to say he doesn't cook much and has very little interest in cooking. I am perfectly okay with this since I love to cook. He helps out by washing dishes :)

Lately, Jean-Louis has been obsessed with the idea of becoming vegan. We have had plenty of discussions about this every day. Discussions have now turned into arguments. I don't even want to get into this here so I'll just say that Jean-Louis is back on board cooking once in awhile. When he cooks, he will cook vegan and I will assist in grocery purchasing, cooking supervision, and the occasional assistance in the kitchen.

This past weekend, we purchased the last few items he needed to make his meaty spinach pesto lasagna. I have to say I was pretty skeptical at first because it contained fake meat and fake cheese. I didn't look at the recipe beforehand myself since I wanted to leave it all to Jean-Louis. As the dish came together though, the house smelled of fresh pesto and roasted nuts. As it turns out, the vegan lasagna exceeded my expectations. Then again, my expectations were pretty low :) For a vegan dish, I thought it was very good. Now, if we had made it vegetarian and substituted the soy mozzarella with real cheese, it would have been pretty close to awesome I think! It was a complete meal and loaded with healthy stuff like spinach, garlic, tomatos, walnuts, cauliflower, and tofu. We couldn't find tofu ricotta anywhere so we just used plain tofu. Now that I look at the recipe, I see that we had to make that! Dude! Jean-Louis must have missed that point. We were all over town at Choices, Whole Foods, and specialty stores looking for tofu ricotta! A non-existent fake cheese. I guess next time I will look at his recipes beforehand:(

The vegan lasagna turned out good. For Jean-Louis' return to cooking, I thought he did well. It did take him three hours to do this one dish, plus chickpea nibbles. He was completely exhausted afterwards :) The hard work paid off though since Tristan ate all of his dinner that night! We also had leftovers for the next day and we froze some for lazy nights :)

Giant zucchini

2011-09-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

From ma's (aka grandma's) garden

Butterfly sugar cookie on a stick

2011-09-12T22:38:00.000-07:00

It has been nearly a year since I started making sugar cookies. Last Thanksgiving, I made my first attempt at making and decorating sugar cookies. I didn't have the proper supplies so it was awkward to decorate and I was embarrassed by the way they looked :( Since then I have been making sugar cookies for pretty much every holiday or birthday I could think of! That's probably once every one or two months :)

When my nephew turned 4, I made him a Lightning McQueen cookie puzzle. This past weekend, my niece turned 7. I thought about making her a cookie puzzle too but in the end I wanted to try something new and surprise her. I had this great idea to make a bouquet of flower cookies but then thought how those would be better suited for a lady friend or even my mom. For a little girl, butterflies would be more appropriate :) I remembered seeing the butterfly cookie post from Annie and loved the way they looked. After all, Annie is like the cookie and cupcake queen!

I made about a dozen big and thick butterfly cookies. I have never made my sugar cookies this thick before but the size of the cookie stick demanded it! Cookies don't rise much when baked and I didn't want to risk them falling off. I chose seven of the best looking cookies and placed them aside for my niece. Yup, one cookie for every year :) I let them dry overnight before even attempting to package them. Again, I didn't want to risk ruining them and I sort of needed more time to brainstorm packaging ideas.

The next morning and the day of her birthday party, I came up with a nice packaging idea. I had to work with what we had at home so I took a large bubble tea disposable cup with a lid and filled it with mini marshmallows. We had bubble tea recently and ended up washing and keeping the cups since they were in such great condition. They also didn't have any designs or logos on them so in our minds they were perfect for reuse. Yeah, we're nuts in that way :) It really was perfect because the cups were tall, somewhat transparent, and worked great in supporting the long cookie sticks. I knew I had to fill it with something to weigh the cup down and further support the cookies. Something sweet would be great and I immediately thought about M&M candies but I didn't have enough of them :( Boo. Then I remembered I recently bought two bags of mini marshmallows to try fondant. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. A cloud of marshmallows with butterfly cookies hovering above :) Not that people would get it but it was enough convincing for me!

I must admit after decorating the cookies, I was scared about the packaging. I really didn't want them to break. I had no idea how to get them to my niece. I didn't even have a box long enough for them. I also hated the thought of having to lie them on top of each other. In the end, I found a way and I was quite pleased with how it turned out. All this brainstorming brings me back to my applied technology class in Junior High. When I was 14 or 15. A gazillion moons ago! You know the class where you were given a limited supply of specific goods and then told to build a building? Yeah, that course!

Toddler at an older kids birthday party

2011-09-12T11:18:00.000-07:00

Because Tristan is a toddler and almost 3 years old, we have mainly witnessed him around other toddlers or young children his age. There's daycare, story time at the library, and StrongStart at the school. We see him playing on his own and interacting with other kids and babies. We see all levels of development and kids are constantly on the move and have little attention span.

Yesterday, we went to my niece's 7th birthday party. Tristan has played with her many times and he has another cousin who is 4 years old. Many of the kids at the party were my niece's age since they were her friends from school. Tristan is turning 3 in November and was the youngest child at the party. Tristan mainly played by himself, as he usually does, but I noticed none of the older kids were interested in interacting with him either. The older kids played with each other and I guess it was because they all knew each other or are all around the same age.

As an observer from the outside, it was interesting to see how different 7 year old kids are compared to toddlers. The first word that comes to mind when I think about how they play together is "structured." The 7 year olds play very well together and have very structured play in that they play in sync with each other and move quickly. For example, a line up was formed to hit the pinata and when it was the older kids turn, they proceeded immediately after one another, without being prompted or guided to do so. When it came time to bring out the birthday cake, again everything happened so fast. There was no waiting and I even missed the photo shot of my niece blowing out her candles later on. The kids sang Happy Birthday first. Immediately after that they all sang a celebration song in French, something they learned in French immersion school. It was as though they had planned it all along but I know they didn't. They sang well together too and they were all in rhythm. I was impressed. Later a slip and slide was brought out for the water play and kids were sliding and throwing themselves on it one after the other. There was no break! I ended up taking 200 photos at the party, many of which were at the slip and slide. There was action every second! 7 year olds are fast and when they decide to do something, they don't hesitate. This of course all makes sense since as children grow older, they mature and become more like adults. After being around Tristan so much and seeing him with other toddlers and kids his age, I have only been thinking about toddler development. Until now. I was just wowed by the structured play and maturity of the 7 year old group.

Tristan will be 7 years old one day and will behave just like this. It's a crazy thought because he is still baby-like right now in so many ways. At 2.5 years old, he still eats in his highchair with a bib and we have to coach him along sometimes. He may or may not want to do something and it could take awhile for him to do it. He's indecisive, moody, and unpredictable. Okay, he's a toddler and there is just no comparison. Toddlers and 7 year olds are too different. But one day, he will be 7. Then 18 and before you know it they will move out and go to university. Crazy. And sad for us parents:(

The "I can't stand still" toddler

2011-09-07T11:34:00.000-07:00

Burnaby Village Museum

First day in the 3-5 room

2011-09-06T22:01:00.000-07:00

While many parents are excited and stressed about the first day of school today, I was excited about Tristan's first day in a new room at his daycare. He has graduated from the Toddler room and is now in the 3-5 room. It's the big boy room! Kids ages 3 to 5 attend this room. Apparently, some of the kids in the room even attend kindergarten as well. Maybe this has changed now that kindergarten is a full day.

Tristan will be 3 years old in less than 3 months. Because he is ready now and there are spots available in the 3-5 room, he is starting this program this month. September is a big transition month for daycare because many of the kids in the 3-5 room are starting Kindergarten or Grade 1 and will leave the daycare. That allows all the rooms to shift upwards and free up space for new kids to join the daycare. Tristan and another little girl from his toddler room moved into the 3-5 room today.

When I dropped Tristan off this morning, he was excited. He gave his lunchbox to one of the staff members, grabbed a book and sat on the couch by himself looking at it. He just made himself at home. Just like that :) I noticed the other little girl from his toddler room was not coping so well. I am not sure she was quite ready to come into this room but if she didn't now, there may not be space for her for months. I think she has only begun potty training and typically, you need to be fully potty trained to come into the 3-5 room. She looks much smaller than Tristan. When her dad dropped her off and left, she cried. She has been to the daycare for a long time too but the new room was overwhelming to her I guess. Poor girl:(

One of Tristan's best friends is in the 3-5 room. We have talked about the 3-5 room change for a long time now and he loves that "he is a big boy now!" In this room, Tristan will learn more independence. There are no more individual daily report sheets. He may not be reminded to drink water and will have to learn to ask for water more when he is thirsty. In fact, when I picked him up today, the second thing he said to me was "can I have some water please?" It makes me wonder how long he has been thirsty for. It was so hot today too.

In the toddler room, there was one staff member for every 4 children. Here in the 3-5 room, there is one staff member for every 8 children. In kindergarten, there may be one teacher for every 22 children. The program in the 3-5 room will prepare Tristan for kindergarten and I am thankful for that. It's a huge transition, especially if a child has not been to daycare before. Tristan is doing great so far and I'm not worried about him at all. They say that some kids have a hard time transitioning from being one of the biggest kids in their room to being one of the smallest kids in the new room. A lot of Tristan's friends are already in the 3-5 room and he also knows the staff there. Even if he hasn't been in that room a lot, he is familiar with the people and has been in that same building since he was 13 months old. This gives him a huge advantage in adjusting to the new room. It's so hard to leave your child at daycare for the first time. Some of the parents are going through that right now in the 3-5 room. I feel for them and thank goodness we won't have to go through that pain again.

Weekends are full of family field trips

2011-09-06T16:26:00.000-07:00

On weekends, we tend to go all out in entertaining our toddler. At least it feels that way. When Tristan stays home with me on Thursdays and Fridays, we mostly stay home and he plays on his own a lot. If we go out to the library or walk down the street to the store, I count that as plenty of outings for the day. Compared to weekends, it's just plain boring to be home with just mommy.

This past weekend was a long weekend because of Labour Day. On Saturday, we went to the Burnaby Village Museum. We shopped at the farmer's market first and then we toured the village. We also took Tristan on the carousel for the first time. This was our second visit to the museum with him but the first time, the museum had just closed but we still went in. I have never been on the carousel myself but we thought Tristan would enjoy it. We decided to put him on one of the biggest horses since they had poles that went up and down. It looked like more fun and the big ones were pretty. The moment I placed him on it, he was scared. He didn't asked to be removed but he was whimpering a bit. I had my arm around him the whole time and spoke to him as the carousel circled round and round. Wow. That was one fast ride! We felt the wind blowing at us. In the end, Tristan said he had a good time. I think it was a mistake to put him on it so early. At 2.5, he may still be too young, especially for the big horses. After all, adults ride on the big horses. Oops.

We finished off our grocery shopping at Metrotown and later that evening, we watched Robots. We haven't watched a DVD with Tristan for nearly a month. During the movie, I dozed off since I was super exhausted. I was also feeling a bit under the weather.

On Sunday, we met up with my sister and her family and went to the playground and water park in Stevenston village. The kids played, Tristan got to bike around in the village and we lunched at Pajo's. We checked out the fisherman's market, had coffee at Rocanini, and went home to whip up a small BBQ. Another long weekend, another barbecue right? :)

On Monday, we let Tristan choose what to do. We gave him the option of watching boats at Horseshoe Bay or riding the miniature train at Confederation Park. He chose the train. We also played at the park and had bubble tea at Pearl Drop, a new place we haven't tried before. Before we left, we picked half a bucket of blackberries across the street from where we parked at the park. When we got home, Tristan had fallen asleep so we decided to head out for a run. He woke up just before we put him in the jogging stroller and he didn't sleep more after that. Doh! Not that he had enough of the park, we took him to the park again after the run before heading back home to prep for dinner.

Weekends this summer have pretty much all been like this. Just jam packed with activities to do with Tristan. In fact, I can't really remember what we did before he came along. I think we spend our days indoors working and maybe a bit of hiking. When Tristan doesn't tantrum, it's actually fun hanging out with him :)

Land of wild blackberries

2011-09-02T21:54:00.000-07:00

One of the things I love about being in Vancouver and British Columbia is the berry picking. Berries such as strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries are so easy to grow. When I was still living in Paris, I remember reading about berry picking back in Vancouver and felt nostalgic and homesick. Unless you ventured way out into the countryside in Paris, you would not find any berry fields. Well there were grapes because of the wine and lavender fields but they were all private. There definitely weren't any u-pick! It was only when we went hiking in the mountains of the French Alps did we pick wild strawberries. I remember being so excited :)

Here in Vancouver, blackberries grow wild! They grow like bamboo and are out of control. Where ever there is a bush, there are likely blackberries. You step out of the skytrain and the bushes are right there for you to pick and eat. Every block you walk, you see a blackberry bush and if you don't, there is one across the street. We live in this kind of neighborhood. There are berries for everyone and the rest the birds will happily eat. We used to plant raspberry in our patio. A year later, it became a raspberry and blackberry bush! The blackberry from outside our fence somehow crawled into our patio. I didn't even know there was blackberry out there.

Last night, we took our buckets and went blackberry picking. We had a destination in mind but ended up filling part of our buckets along the way there because like I said, blackberries are just everywhere! Last year we went picking a bit late and most of them were either already picked or had ripen too much and fallen down. This year we headed out at a good time. Although next week might be an even better time. It also depends on where you are in the Vancouver area. I remember seeing ripe blackberries in Stevenston Village a couple of months ago.

Tristan had a great time picking blackberries. He did better than I had thought. I did most of the picking and thought Jean-Louis could help watch him pick for fun. Tristan did so well that Jean-Louis ended up picking on his own for awhile while Tristan picked and skipped around nearby. It turns out Tristan is a tough toddler. He got lots of scratches and pricks on his leg and we didn't even know because he didn't cry. My bad:( Next time I will send him out in long pants instead of shorts.

Happy picker :)

Tristan's blackberry picking wounds

We picked for less than an hour but got a whole bucket full. That's probably over 5 pounds of blackberries! I ate so much last night, my stomach hurt. Now, we only have a few handfuls left because I made a blackberry tart today. With lavender pastry cream:( Honestly, it is so very hard NOT to bake this summer! Sigh.

Food meltdown update: Since the last post, Tristan has been eating a lot better. He finally finished the leftover corn bake the other day and is listening more at the table. He only got a small slice of blackberry tart tonight after he ate ALL of his dinner of rice, corn, salmon, bitter melon and pork. Phew! :)

Toddler had no dinner tonight

2011-08-31T20:47:00.000-07:00

There is a first for everything, right? Tonight was the first time Tristan did not eat a thing for dinner. Why? He was tantruming and didn't want to eat what we wanted him to eat. His unfinished corn bake from last night was combined with his leftover corn bake from daycare's lunch today. That was his dinner. If he finished that, we would have given him part of a ham and cheese slider. He only wanted the ham and cheese slider. We tried offering the corn bake for about 30 minutes and he screamed and cried and then we called it quits. Everything was taken away and he went up for his bath. After his bath, he went straight to bed. No playing, no reading, nothing. Bedtime was an hour earlier today. This was another first.

It's so sad really. I'm not sure who is more stubborn. Him or us. Or him or Jean-Louis. If it were just me I would have done thinks a bit differently. People talk about being careful with implementing discipline because it could create issues for the child in the future. What about the issues the child is creating for us parents? Now and in the future? I joked on Twitter about needing to save money now for therapy for myself in the future. I could use some now too. It's just one of those days, you know? :(

We tried holding toddler hostage in his highchair

2011-08-31T11:50:00.000-07:00

Almost 10 years ago, we invited Jean-Louis' cousin, her husband, and their toddler over for lunch. We were living in Paris at the time and they were in Vernon in Normandy. Before they came down, I had asked his cousin if her toddler would eat salad rolls. Everyone I know likes salad rolls and it was one of Jean-Louis' favorite. It has shrimp, pork, mint, lettuce, bean sprouts and vermicelli all wrapped inside rice paper. You eat them by dipping them in a chee hou type sauce. It was summer, it was healthy and I thought it would be the perfect thing to make. I asked if our toddler guest would eat this. His cousin said maybe and told me what to leave out so I made a couple of separate ones just for him. When it came time to eating, everyone ate and loved the Vietnamese salad rolls, except the toddler. Now, I haven't been exposed to many toddlers back then. I was still in my 20s after all. Her toddler didn't even try it. He looked at it and said no. His parents tried to convince him to try it and did everything they could to have him eat some. I remember thinking, oh my god. What a picky little eater! Since the meal didn't work for him, we offered to open some crackers if he wanted some. He said yes so Jean-Louis opened a new pack of crackers. Right after it was opened, the toddler said he didn't want any anymore. Goodness! Then came more lecturing from his parents. He basically didn't eat anything at all and I can't remember if he drank anything either. It wasn't until the end of the day closer to dinner time did he feel hungry and wanted to eat something. I was told to make plain pasta and serve it with a bit of olive oil and salt. He ate it all!

Now that I have a toddler of my own, I understand what went on back then. Although, Tristan has never been that picky, he can be picky and when he does, we want to pull out our hair! I mean he ate salad rolls for the first time and liked it. Of course, eating outside of the home may be more challenging. First of all, we're very strict with him about what and how much he eats. If he doesn't eat a balanced meal, it kind of makes us mad. I always try to include foods from every food group when I cook and he has to eat his main meal before anything else. We have very high expectations from him but we always had and he knows it. For the most part, he has benefited well from it and eats all kinds of foods. When I say that Tristan is picky, I mean that he doesn't want to eat what we want him to eat or says no to something we offer him.

Last night, we tried something new. We held him hostage for the first time in his highchair. It lasted around 2 hours. I didn't want to do this so Jean-Louis was put in charge to watch him since it was his idea. How did this come about? I made easy food last night. I made ham and cheese sliders and served it with corn and pepper bake. We presented both of them to Tristan at the same time. After he ate the slider, he picked at his corn. There were yogurt, cheese, and fruit as usual for afterwards but he had to finish his main meal first. It didn't happen. This is maybe the third day in a row he has been picky like this. The same day, he came home from daycare with most of his hummus, half of his pita, and he had only taken a few bites from his corn on a cob. Earlier in the week, he chose to eat only the noodle and fish parts of his stir fry and didn't eat much of the bok choy or mushroom. We know he can eat way better than that so we got mad. He normally loves mushrooms and eats bok choy fine. We tried threatening him with removing his toys and told him we wouldn't read to him at night but he didn't care. He was even helping Jean-Louis remove his toys in the evening!

Every time this happens, I know Jean-Louis likes to blame daycare because they give him snacks and that spoils his appetite for his main meals. It's not really fair to blame them since what happens at daycare is nothing new. Of course, it doesn't help us either :(

We tried holding him hostage but after the trial last night, we're done with it. After tweeting about it, I started to receive many replies from people basically telling me "that's bad" and "don't do it." You know it's a hot topic when everyone on Twitter has something to say about it! It's great though because it probably saved us a few days of stress. Apparently, some of my followers were held hostage when they were children and they now resent their parents and have food issues. The idea of being held hostage never sat well with me anyway. How long would we be able to keep this up? I wasn't convinced it would work at all and it would just suck too much time. I also didn't want to be the one doing it and I felt sorry for Tristan. Were we punishing him for being a toddler again? Another dumb parenting idea.

What now? We're going to try to stay cool and relax a bit. The stress of feeding is what drives us to crazy ideas like holding a toddler hostage in his high chair :) He is only 2.5 years old. He must be going through a phase so we'll just continue doing what we're doing until the phase passes. There is nothing more we can do for now.

Cupcake Math

2011-08-31T09:00:00.000-07:00

Every mom gets criticized for something

2011-08-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

I recently read an article called The Mom-Judging Olympics: A competition nobody meant to enter. It goes through results from their survey asking moms what kinds of behavior would make them judge another mom. 26 000 moms were surveyed and 90% of them would judge another mom. I hate to admit it but I would be one of them.

Have a bratty kid? 66% of moms will judge you. It depends on the circumstance but if you brought a bratty kid to fine dining, I would sure judge you. Tristan is mostly well behaved, which is why we can travel with him and dine out with him. If he were different, we would definitely stay home. Ruining it for others would only ruin it for us even more.

Breast-feeding your 3 year old? 43% would judge you. I don't think I would judge you. I breastfed Tristan and can now understand why some people can be attached to this. I have no problem with breastfeeding as a way to provide milk for thirst but if it were used simply to soothe a bratty child, I would judge you.

Have an overweight child? 37% would judge you and yup, I would too.

Give your kid junk food? 34% would judge you. I wouldn't if I saw this for the first time. We're even beginning to give Tristan a bit of junk food tastings here and there. Even though, there are a lot of things he has not tried and I hope he doesn't eat any time soon like cheezies, flavored chips, McDonald burgers, and pop. If I knew that you were feeding your kid junk food daily, I would totally judge you. If you were feeding your 6 month old junk food, I would totally judge you. But these are sort of different questions, aren't they? I make my own healthy meals so of course I would judge you.

Let your kid watch TV/play video games too much? 32% will judge you. I would judge you. There is no reason your child should be doing this too much.

Co-sleep with your child? 23% would judge you. I would judge you but not harshly. I remember bringing Tristan into bed with us maybe for a few hours a couple of times when he was a baby. We were super tired and just couldn't handle it. We felt guilty every time since we didn't want to develop a habit and have him not sleep in his own bed. It was part of us being scared of too much attachment. Lucky for us the few hours of bed sharing had no effect on his sleeping habits. He sleeps great in his own bed and has been there since day one :)

You work too much? 20% would judge you. I wouldn't judge you, assuming you have proper childcare arranged for your child. I am a work-at-home-mom but I do most, if not all of my work while Tristan is in daycare. Having said that, I really don't over work. If anything, I would love to work more!

Didn't try to breast-feed? 18% would judge you. I would judge you. Not breastfeeding because you find out you can't or it's not your thing is cool. If you don't even try and I mean really try, that's uncool. Breastmilk is the best thing for your baby. Everyone knows it. You got to at least give it a good try.

There is something that didn't make it on their top 9 list, which surprised me. It's something I know I would be judged harshly for. Do you let your child cry it out for sleep training? I did this and was criticized for it. I made the mistake of commenting on an attached parenting site about the issue and then I got bashed over here on my own blog. I was totally outnumbered over there! What was I thinking?

No matter what you do as a parent, there will always be something for someone to criticize. I feel like Jean-Louis and I are pretty solid good parents. We are strict, yet loving, and gentle with Tristan. He is well behaved, polite, average sized, and sleeps well on his own in his own bed. He was breastfed for just over a year but I would have gone longer if he wanted me to. I love to cook and bake so most of what Tristan consumes is healthy and balanced foods. He only drinks water and milk. We rarely give him junky foods and we have no TV so he doesn't watch at all. We do let him play on the iPad maybe 5 to 10 mins a week, which is really nothing. He can play with his toys alone and he loves to read with us. We receive compliments about him a lot and it always makes us proud :)

Overall, it seems like we have it really great here. Ah, wrong. We let him cry it out when we sleep trained him. He didn't end up crying much but we were dying inside when it happened. We yell at him. Sometimes we lose our temper in front of him. We sometimes remove all his food if he refuses to eat or try to eat. That means no food at all until the next meal, which could be more than 12 hours later. We bribe him a lot with things like sweets or a DVD movie if he eats all his main meal. And so on. Basically, there are a lot of things you can criticize me for about parenting. It doesn't bother me as much now that Tristan is 2 1/2 years old. It bothered me back then when he was still a baby and parenting was so new to me. I know what kind of parent I am now and I'm pretty happy about it and that's all that really matters.

1 month boot camp completed

2011-08-22T21:18:00.000-07:00

Boot camp actually ended for me last Wednesday. Just in time for all the desserts for our anniversary the day after :) Yeah, that was somewhat planned.So the results are in! I lost 7 pounds. That's the good news. And that happened after the first 2 weeks. The last 2 1/2 weeks I gained a pound and then lost a pound. That's the bad news:( Oh well.

What did I do for boot camp? I had to drastically cut down my food intake and eliminate sweets. A typical breakfast was suppose to be a slice of toast and a couple pieces of fruit. I would skip lunch or have a few pieces of fruit and then a typical dinner would be 2 cups of whatever we were having, then some fruit. This food contract may have worked 6 years ago when I wasn't so overweight and addicted to sweets. This time around it proved unrealistic and I pretty much cheated on food every day! I couldn't help it. By the time dinner came, I was starving and ended up overeating. Instead of 2 cups of food, I may have eaten 3 or 4 cups. Also I cheated with the sweet desserts maybe once every week or two:( Boo. I suck.

In terms of exercise, I had to run 5 times a week and do body exercises for 10 minutes 5 days a week. The run was pretty much the only thing I did. I did body exercises maybe 3 times a week. Again, I suck.

With all the cheating, boot camp really wasn't that bad. The first week was horrible. Then every now and then was horrible. Now that it's over, I'm not going back to my old ways. No way! I'm going to run a bit less and I will still be careful not to overeat. The baking and sweet treats is my biggest weakness right now but I will try my best to control that too. Wish me luck! ;)

10 years ago, I got married.

2011-08-18T21:48:00.000-07:00

We've been together for 13 years and married for 10 of those. Time sure flies. Because it's 10, I felt like making a big deal out of it. Because it ends in a "0." Isn't that how it works?

We normally don't do much for anniversaries. We'll wake up and say "Happy Anniversary" to each other and then make sure we have a nice meal that day. We don't exchange gifts or even give cards. There were a few instances when we went on fancy dinners but all that was before Tristan arrived anyway.

Since this year was the big 1-0, we did a little more. I woke up to find a card for me at my computer. I was shocked! Jean-Louis had not given me a card for years. We did electronic cards for awhile and then even gave that up. Generally cards don't mean that much to us and is just a waste of money. We both agree. If you must give a card though, pick one out from the store. This at least suggests you put some time and thought into it! Because I didn't expect a thing from Jean-Louis, I was thrilled to get a card:) Inside of the card said the following:

"You're not only a great wife, you're my very best friend! Happy Anniversary"

My gift or surprise for Jean-Louis came in the form of dessert. Surprise? :) I had a couple of weeks to think about it but since my first plan to create us a photo book didn't go as planned, dessert seemed the way to go. I even went on Amazon the week before out of desperation browsing tins and aluminum, hoping some magical gift idea would appear. Honestly tin and aluminum for your 10th anniversary!???! Who comes up with these things?

In the end I came up with the following. He was instead surprised:)

Devil's food layer cake & lemon sugar cookies

I had to keep Tristan busy while I decorated :)

Unfortunately, Jean-Louis came home too early that day and caught me in the middle of creating it. The kitchen was a mess and I was a mess but he was still happily surprised. It was funny really. In case you were wondering about the presentation, I was in fact using aluminum mini bread tins to display the cookies. These were bought from Amazon and delivered just 30 minutes before Jean-Louis came home!! As silly as giving aluminum may sound, I was still able to incorporate it into the gift :)

That night we went out for dinner. Mainly because I spent a good part of the day baking and dining out is a bit of a luxury for us since we seldom do it. It turned out to be a great day. After we got home, we all had dessert around 8:30PM, including Tristan. He ended up sleeping at around 10PM instead of the usual 9PM. Here's to 10 fabulous years of marriage together! We're not as lovey dovey as we were back then but I think we're in a much much better place now :)

Happy 1000th day birthday Tristan!

2011-08-17T21:55:00.000-07:00

Hey, it's not every day you get to acknowledge that someone is exactly 1000 days old! I couldn't resist making Tristan a cookie cake :) Then after dinner, bath, and teeth brushing, we gave him a new toy. Can we spoil a toddler or what??? :)

Just like his 500th day birthday, we found out about this 1000 day by accident. We bought an app to count down my labour when I was pregnant with Tristan. Now that the labour is complete it just counts up in days, hours, and minutes since his birth. We don't monitor it anymore since we have no reason to know. Last time Jean-Louis looked into it for fun, it said Tristan was 499 days old. Oh, interesting. Last night, I was having a conversation with one of my friends on Twitter about anniversary and numbers. It made me think of Tristan and how he was nearly 500 days old when we last checked so I asked Jean-Louis about it. I figured we probably missed the big 1000. Imagine how amused we were when we found out Tristan was 999 days old! True story I swear! Honestly, what are the odds that we could have found out in time in both cases? Crazy.

What a 1000 day old boy looks like :)

2011-08-17T11:23:00.000-07:00

Taken this morning on his 1000th day birthday

Taylor Park's Bike Skills Park

2011-08-16T11:46:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, we discovered a bike skills park in our neighborhood. It's funny because we have been going to this park for years but we never ventured into the area south of the basketball courts. We drive there occasionally with Tristan's bike so he can bike in the field. Lately, I have been taking advantage of the opportunity to run laps around the field while Tristan bikes. It's usually on a day that Jean-Louis does his crazy 100KM bike ride so he doesn't need to run and he just watches Tristan while Tristan bikes.

The bike skills park area is not well maintained but I was so thrilled to see it there. There are weeds growing everywhere but it's still bike-able. I love that it had easy areas for toddlers and harder areas for more experienced bikers. Tristan loves it there and he loves being able to do more challenging things than just biking on leveled ground. He has developed great balance on his Strider and puts up his feet when he goes fast or down slopes. He's taking more risk and of course getting more bruises. It's all part of the process! He's 2 1/2 now but I think next year he may be ready for a pedaled bike and maybe biking camp :)

My version of chewy granola bars

2011-08-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

Since making granola bars for our Whistler trip back in May, I have been making regular batches about once a week or two. I was never a fan of granola until now really. You know what they say, homemade is always better :)

I have made them many times and have tweaked the recipe to my liking. It's based off this thick and chewy granola recipe, which one of my tweeples recommended. Unfortunately, I can't remember who that was that gave me the tip:( The granola bars are great for snacks when hiking or just to take on road trips. The nice thing about them is that you can put whether you like in them, as long as you keep the wet and dry ingredients in proportion to the recipe. We like to use organic ingredients where possible and we don't like anything too sweet. We make granola so much now that each batch ends up being very inexpensive, even though we're making high quality granola each time. And did I mention how great these healthy bars are? Addicting great! :)

Here is my version of the thick and chewy granola bars.

1 1/2 cups rolled oats
1/3 brown sugar
1/3 cup oats, grounded in a blender (or use oat flour)
1/4 tsp salt 
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon 
2 1/2 cups dried fruits, nuts, seeds etc.
1/3 cup almond butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
6 tbsp melted butter
1/2 cup maple syrup
1 1/2 tbsp agave syrup (or honey)
1 tbsp water

For dried fruits, nuts, and seeds, I use 1 cup mix of dried cranberries and currants, 1/2 cup of sesame seeds, and 1 cup of pumpkin seeds/sunflower seeds/flax seeds/roasted nuts. Make sure you buy the unsalted or natural seeds. Keep in mind that if you add more dry fruit to the recipe, your overall granola will be sweeter unless you reduce the sugar further.

Melt the butter in a bowl, add all the wet ingredients to it. Mix. Measure out all the dry ingredients and add it to the wet. Stir to mix. In a brownie pan lined with parchment paper or aluminum foil pour the mixture and level it out. Bake at 350F for 35 mins or until the sides are brown but not burnt. If you want to cut them into bars, here is a tip that will help. Once removed from the oven, use a spoon and press down on the granola some more and level it out. This way it is nice and compact. Let it cool completely before you cut them into bars. Bon appetit!

BC Day long weekend

2011-08-02T22:36:00.000-07:00

We went shopping, visited a botanical garden, discovered a new park, had a barbecue, and watched library dvds. Just the three of us. We had no plans with anyone and it was sort of nice. We did what we felt like doing on our schedule and it ended up being really fun!

My family went to Portland. We were invited but we declined. Having gone away to Whistler in May and heading on another vacation later this year, we didn't want to take more time off. It seemed like everyone but us were going away this weekend. When we drove around or even when we were at the mall, Vancouver seemed a bit deserted. Wow.

On Saturday, we visited VanDusen Botanical Gardens. It was our first time and we were surprised to find that it was so big. The garden took up nearly the entirely block! We brought a panini for Tristan and lots of cherries for us to share. It was a lovely garden but we regretted not bringing the stroller. Afterwards, we drove to Stevenston Farm to buy corn. It's not really corn season right now but we did buy a bunch of other fruits and vegetables. There is just something about being at a farmer's market that makes be so excited! This farm had complimentary Salt Spring Island coffee too:)

That day Tristan got splinters in his hand. He was touching all sorts of stuff at the gardens so it wasn't a big surprise. I'm amazed he hadn't gotten splinters before actually. After his bath that night, I had to use a needle to remove his splinters. We tried to blindfold him so he wouldn't see the needle but he sort of freaked out so we abandoned that idea. He whimpered a bit and tried to pull away from time to time but overall he was very brave. It didn't take long before I removed all three splinters. Phew!

On Sunday, we did our usual shopping at Metrotown, chores around the house, and went running. Blah, blah, blah. Ok, Sunday was totally boring but we can't expect to have fun every single day.

On Monday, we headed to Stevenston Village. We brought Tristan biking at Garry Point Park. The park reminded me of Dallas Beach in Victoria because it was so windy! The wild flowers there kind of blew me away too. The park is great for picnics, flying kites, biking, running or just walking. I was surprised to find no playground though. From the park, we walked to Rocanini to have coffee. On the way, we bought Tristan a vanilla ice cream cone. Not only an ice cream cone but his very first taste of ice cream!!! I think we won the best parents in the world award that day :) He ate his ice cream while he walked and made such a big mess. Tristan is a super slow eater and he didn't know that he had to lick from the bottom up and of course it was a hot day. We were getting all sticky and messy ourselves just from cleaning him along the way so we put a bib on him! If you were cruising Stevenston Village and noticed a little boy walking and eating an ice cream cone wearing a orange bib and his parents holding a bunch of napkins, that was us! :)

We couldn't let BC day long weekend pass without having a barbecue. Isn't it tradition to have barbecues on long weekends in the summer? Well, it should be! I know it was just the three of us but we were cooking for the winter. You may think we're nuts but when we're eating barbecue soulvaki in November, we'll see who's laughing then! :) We made pork soulvaki, quinoa burgers, soy chicken wings, and hummus. We served the quinoa burgers with roasted tomato, avocado, hummus, lettuce and pita bread. We opened the coconut water and we had a feast! Oh so good! That evening, I ended up foodsaving around 75% of the food and throwing it all in the freezer. Yes, it was another great weekend :)

A natural organizer :)

2011-07-27T09:03:00.000-07:00

1st time eating whole cherries & he does this!

We're parent-full parents who can relate to parentless parents

2011-07-25T22:48:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I commented and based a post on a recent article I read. Reading the article "Parentless Parents: What's The Impact of the Grandparent Gap?" made me think about our own situation. Parentless parents are basically individuals who have lost one or more of their parents and then have children of their own. It could also be that when their children are very young, one or more of their parents pass away. When the children grow up, they are growing up without knowing much about their grandparents.

It not just about missing out on the support like free babysitting but also things like family history and stories your children's grandparents would tell them, and being able to share your child's milestones with your parents. If you have a close relationship with your parents and one of them passes away before you had a child or when your child is young, all this would affect you a lot more. The article also mentions that there are parallels between a parentless parent and that of a parent who has a disconnected or estranged relationship with their parents.

In many ways I feel like we can relate to the parentless parents. Ironically, both my parents and both of Jean-Louis' parents are alive and well. Tristan has four grandparents but no close relationship with any of them. Part of the reason is because they don't live near us. My parents live closest to us since they are in Victoria so Tristan sees them maybe once a month or two. Jean-Louis' parents are in France and Tristan visited them once. In terms of time spent with his grandparents, I would say that Tristan has seen his Victoria grandparents a bit more than his French grandparents.

Parenting has actually made me feel very alone. Sure my parents came over to see us when we were in the hospital when Tristan was born and then even stayed with us for two days. That was tremendous help but I often think that Jean-Louis and I are alone. We are somewhat socially awkward and have no close friends to turn to for help. Neither of us have close relationships with our parents. However Jean-Louis is an only child and does talk with his parents on the phone every week. Some times Jean-Louis shares milestones with his mom but at a later time and only if he remembers. In my family, we don't do that unless my mom or dad asks. In fact, I don't even know anything about my mom's parents. I was too young to remember them when we moved to Canada and then both of them died before I met them. My mom didn't really tell me stories about them. Their only existence to me is their picture in my parent's living room wall. It's sad really. We are a disconnected emotionally distant family. I think we are different from most families.

I think it's important that Tristan knows about all his grandparents. He definitely knows who they are but he hasn't been left alone with them much to really know them. He video skypes with his grandparents from France once every two weeks or so. He speaks on the phone or sees his Victoria grandparents for coffee about once a month or two. You know how certain children get super excited to see their grandparents and then they become shatter-boxes and tells them everything? Well, with Tristan some times we have to ask him to say hello or something because he would just look at the video screen and wave. He's also quite shy. Like me I guess.

Jean-Louis is extremely close to his grandparents from his mom's side. They practically raised him. When we asked his mom how she potty trained him, she had no idea. She just said that his grandmother did it :) I have fond memories of my grandparents from my dad's side. Grandparents are awesome and we want Tristan to discover that awesomeness. It's not only about Tristan though. We want his grandparents to get to know him well too, bond and develop relationships with him. I think the next best thing to being a parent is being a grandparent. Some may even say that being a grandparent is better :) We try to involve his grandparents when we can so that Tristan can spend more time with them. We invited my parents along on a vacation with us to Mexico last year and that was great for both of them. Next year when we visit France again, we're hoping to convince Jean-Louis' parents to go on a small vacation with us too.

Maplewood Farm is perfect for toddlers

2011-07-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

We were already in North Vancouver for the Caribbean Days Festival so we thought we'd swing by Maplewood Farm to check out the petting zoo. That is more like something Tristan would enjoy. It was nice to get away from the crowds too :) When we told Tristan about the farm, his face lit up. He loves animals! He is somewhat scared of them but he loves them.

Kids are $4 and adults are $7 to get in. There are also additional things you can buy like little tractor rentals and pony rides. We had a voucher from Social Shopper so we used that for our admission. The farm even has a gift shop, playground by the parking lot and lots of parking spaces.

Tristan had a blast. He especially loved petting the goats, sheep, and rabbits. When it was time, he sort of didn't want to leave. The goats really are friendly. They don't care that tons of people are touching them and they don't even respond much to interaction. I noticed they seem ticklish around the ears. Tristan touched their ears a lot since that made them respond the most. Whenever the goats made noise, Tristan would get scared. Just a bit. It was funny because every little noise they made, Tristan would make a noise back. Bark at him, he barks back! Little kids :)

There were horses, goats, donkeys, cows, chickens, goats, sheep, geese, peacocks, pigs, birds, ducks, rabbits, and a talking parrot. Tristan loved the talking parrot! After that, he was trying to get every animal to talk back to him :) He even yelled at them at some point because they wouldn't respond. Yeah, we tried to explain that not all animals can talk. Or more like only the parrot can talk.

Maplewood Farm is a small but charming looking farm with plenty of animals to entertain small children. I personally think it would be a blast for kids 5 and under. In fact, most of the kids we saw there were very young, just like Tristan. I also loved that there were clean bathrooms and plenty of washing stations outside the petting zoo for washing hands. We stayed there for an hour and that was plenty of time.

Caribbean Days Festival in North Vancouver

2011-07-25T12:10:00.000-07:00

A friend I met in grad school is from Barbados. When she learned that I was planning to go to Jamaica with Jean-Louis, she suggested I go to the Caribbean Festival in Vancouver. That was five years ago. We were interested but we just never got around to going. It's kind of like how we only went to the Greek festival this year.

Yesterday we finally went to the Caribbean Days Festival. It was held at Waterfront Park in North Vancouver. There was food, live music, vendors selling crafts and clothing, rides for kids and bouncy castles. The view of Vancouver was also spectacular. Unlike the Greek festival where there were lots of free kids activities, the Caribbean Festival was charging for everything. We put Tristan in the small bouncy castle so he could jump around a bit. He had a blast but it was $2 for only 3 minutes. There were only about 5 kids in there too and no one else around. Even the food was pricey. A chicken roti was $12 and a smoothie was $5. We ended up spending $28 and we weren't even full. In comparison, we spent maybe $12 at the Greek Festival and we were stuffed. It's not really fair to compare the two since the Greek Festival didn't make any money from their event. All profits went towards funding the Greek event, which I heard was billed at $150 000. Crazy. It was a huge success though.

We will most likely go back to the Greek Festival but probably not the Caribbean Festival. The food was good but too pricey at the Caribbean Festival and I didn't like that the kids activities were not complimentary. Jean-Louis thought the food wasn't good at all. The venue itself was too small and impractical. The walkway separating the food vendors from the crafts and entertainment was too narrow and crowded. Okay, I'm going to stop complaining. It was nice to finally experience it and the weather was beautiful. I even wore my Jamaican t-shirt for the occasion :)

Tristan is potty trained! (knock on wood)

2011-07-24T21:50:00.000-07:00

It has been at least three weeks since Tristan had a wet underwear. He went for nine days at one point earlier and then in the middle of a tantrum, he peed in his underwear. I have a feeling that it wasn't an accident though, if you know what I mean ;) Since then I believe we haven't seen any accidents and daycare hasn't reported any either.

It's been long enough that we're calling it a pass. He is officially potty trained! This of course doesn't count the wet pullups he wakes up in. Somehow he just isn't holding his pee while he sleeps. Maybe I should give him underwear to wear anyway and train him in bed? I hear that some kids will even wet their beds when they are four years old :(

Being potty trained makes it so much easier to go out with him. Being a little boy who can pee standing or sitting makes it THAT much easier! :) We some times will tell him to try and pee before we go out if we know that he hadn't gone for awhile. However, most of the time he just tells us and the odd time, he will just head to the bathroom alone. It's great because we don't have to keep track of his bathroom routine anymore!

On a related note, Tristan has been eating so well lately and is pretty much pooing at the same time every day! Hooray for balanced meals and being regular :) The bad news is that we're now nagging him to hurry up because he takes forever to eat. It's funny because there really is always something bugging us :)

Why I need to go on weight-loss bootcamp

2011-07-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

I made all these desserts in the same week!

I know I am a mom when...

2011-07-20T11:12:00.000-07:00

I splurge on the purchase of raspberries only to taste 1 berry and give the rest to Tristan.
I walk outside by myself and I look for sidewalk entry points that have the dip in them, even when I am not pushing a stroller.
I enter a store and immediately go to the kids section to look for deals.
I follow mostly parents who love to talk about their kids on Twitter.
90% of all my photos in iPhoto have Tristan in them. Ditto with the videos.
I eat a luke warm or cold meal that is meant to be eaten hot.
I can no longer eat a meal from start to end without having to get up at least once.
I drink cold coffee that was made hot.
I start to bribe and give rewards for every day achievements like peeing in the toilet or eating most of the dinner.
I use the word play date, instead of just date.
I know the names of at least three of Thomas the Tank Engine's friends.
I travel with a sippy cup of water because I can't find my own water bottle.
I scan a new room for danger the moment I step in.
I walk around with cute little stickers on my clothes and have no idea.
I spend as much time planning a kids birthday party as I do planning a vacation.
I know when to give out loot bags and what to expect to find inside.
Halloween becomes one of my favorite holidays because I get to live it through Tristan's eyes.
I give out a lot of Valentines cards, but none to my husband.
I know about all the cool playgrounds, parks, StrongStart, Neighborhood house, and toddler story times in my area.
I know the lyrics to Zoom, zoom, we're going to the moon.
I know how our local Toys R Us store is organized. And I know where or how to find all the cool and trendy toys in my city.
I think and care more about the environment. For instance, I look at ways to save the planet by reducing waste of plastic and reusing as much as possible.
I wake up to the sound of "Daddy!!!!" instead of my alarm clock.
I can't stop but think about my child 90% of my day.

Happy 125th Vancouver!

2011-07-11T15:56:00.000-07:00

We had another busy weekend. Saturday we went shopping everywhere at Metrotown (e.g. Superstore, Zellers, Save-Ons, T&T, Chapters) and then we headed to North Vancouver to shop at Jack & Lola. When we finally finished and got home, we all went running, then Jean-Louis took Tristan out for a bike while I made éclairs au chocolat and prepped dinner. Yup, just your typical Saturday really :)

On Sunday, we did chores in the morning, skyped with family from France and then headed to the bank for an appointment. From there we headed downtown on the skytrain to Stanley Park in hopes to catch some of the festivities for the Vancouver 125 celebration. We had a nice 30 minute walk from Waterfront Station and even saw a harbour seal along the way. Tristan enjoyed watching the float planes land and take off in the water. Wow, those things are pretty loud! They remind me of my old skydiving days. As we got closer to the seawall, we saw more and more people. I have never seen so many people walking along the seawall. It was such a nice day for walking though.

We arrived at the park after 2PM and stayed until 5:30PM. We mostly hung out around the Family Stage and walked around the kids zone, which closed at 5PM. There were line ups so we couldn't do the face painting in time but we did do the boat-making, which Tristan enjoyed. Overall, it was a nice outing. I would have enjoyed it more if we had actually sat down and watched the shows more. We didn't have anything to sit on and there were so many people! We tried catching the free shuttle to Waterfront Station but the wait was too long so we ended up walking. We got to hear parts of the Vancouver Symphony performance while we waited though. It wasn't until 6:15PM did I finally get to use the potty and sit down for the first time. I was kind of pooped!

We had dinner at Water St. Cafe. It's an Italian restaurant in Gastown and I have been meaning to try it for awhile now. The food was good and Tristan ate well too. We took the skytrain back home and stuffed ourselves with fruit. We normally don't ever go out so late on a Sunday but it was the only day we could fit in the Vancouver 125 event. It was around 8PM when we got home but it was still light outside. Aren't summers great? :)

Strawberry picking at W&A Farms

2011-07-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, we went strawberry picking and then hosted a barbecue. It was our first time picking strawberries and our first barbecue of the year. Hooray for summer! :)

We went to W&A Farms in Richmond since that was the closest u-pick strawberry farm to our home. They also advertised that they don't use chemical sprays on their berries, which I liked. We headed out late in the morning so that it wouldn't be too hot. There weren't that many people there and we saw that there were tons of unpicked strawberries in the field. I would say about 85% of the berries were ready to be picked too. In fact, I'm not sure they will be able to pick them all in time.

Compared to blueberries, strawberries were easy to pick and we filled our two buckets in maybe 20-30 minutes. We picked 10.5 pounds and were charged $2/lb at this farm. Our total came to $21, which wasn't that cheap but they were local berries so they definitely tasted better than store bought ones. I heard that Emma Lea Farms is a larger farm and they charge $1.50/lb down there. Both berries taste great!

Tristan helped pick some for the initial 5 minutes and then he wasn't too interested. He just wandered around nearby. He was pretty well behaved considering Jean-Louis and I were both picking. He never tried eating any berries since we told him he wasn't allowed to before we got there. He did step on berries trying to hop over the berry lanes though. Oops.

Strawberry season doesn't last long in Vancouver so if you want to go picking, go now! If you are curious about picking, I recommend browsing Chef Heidi Fink's blog post on strawberry picking. There are some good tips there and I made sure I showed Jean-Louis the post before we headed out.

I think we did good, don't you? :)

When life gives you strawberries, you make strawberry cake with strawberry meringue buttercream!! Right? ;)

Lightning McQueen cookie puzzle (tutorial)

2011-07-04T16:11:00.000-07:00

My nephew recently turned 4 years old. I wanted to bake something for him but wasn't sure what. We had a gift for him already but I wanted to supplement it with some bakes since I know he likes sweets. Okay, which kid doesn't like sweets, right?!

Now that I think about it, it was the perfect idea and could be the perfect gift for any kid really. Kids love cookies! Kids love puzzles! Especially my nephew! Ta da! I've seen cookie puzzles before but in smaller form. I wanted something simple and something big so that I would only have to decorate one cookie, in theory. I kind of thought up this idea at the last minute too. That one big cookie turned out to be more work than I thought!

I brainstormed online with Tristan on what I could use for my cookie design. When I think of little boys, I think of trains, cars, dinosaurs, etc. A car would be simple enough. Then I thought about Cars 2 playing in the theater right now. Lightning McQueen! My cookie puzzle idea only got better and better :)

Since I had no giant cookie cutter of a car and I didn't really want to hand cut one, I decided just to do a rectangular cookie with a car inside. I typically bake lemon flavored vanilla sugar cookies but for this particular occasion, I made a chocolate cookie. I've made the chocolate version before without icing and it was quite good, plus I knew my nephew loves chocolate. Did I not say this idea was getting better and better?! Not only would it be a hit but the color of the cookie would make a great background for the car since it would look like dirt. For anyone thinking of making a puzzle cookie and needs a background in color, tint your cookie dough the color of your main background. That would definitely simplify the decorating process :)

Here is the basic process for making a cookie puzzle. Make and bake your cookie as you normally would. Once they are removed from the oven, cut them into desired pieces while they are still hot and soft. Let the pieces cool. When it comes time to decorating, put all the pieces together and then decorate. While the icing is still wet, separate the pieces again and let each individual piece dry.

Drawing the car was a bit tricky, especially since I used a lot of icing, some on top of each other and the colors were bleeding into each other. Oops. I couldn't let the colors dry beforehand since the cookie had to be separated into its parts before the icing hardened. The challenge here was that the heavy icing started to drip off the cookie and I had to cut and clean off the excess. If I didn't, there would be no way to assemble the pieces close together. The other challenge was that I didn't know how to carefully separate the pieces without breaking the cookie up. Luckily, Jean-Louis had taken a picture of it when I had cut it up into tetris pieces. I used his photo to help guide me into cutting and pulling each piece apart. Phew! :) I realized at this point, I was aiming for just a recognizable red car, rather than a sharp clean Lightning McQueen :)

The next morning, when the cookie was completely dried, I put the pieces back together and did a bit of trimming so that they would fit together nicely. I then took a new tin container, decorated it with some wrapping paper, printed out a picture of what the car would look like assembled and taped it on top of the tin. Voila! It looked like such an amateur job but it was just a great idea and I managed to pull it off in time for the party! Since it was my first cookie puzzle attempt, I was quite proud of myself :)

Happy baking and make sure to take lots of pictures, before and after each step! You never know when a photo will come in handy :) If you're going the rectangular cookie route, I would also recommend giving your cookie a border to help with putting the puzzle together. It will also allow you to make use of more icing on the cookie.

Dinner punishment for toddler

2011-06-29T22:17:00.000-07:00

I made pizza for dinner today. I tried a new recipe for the crust and it turned out quite well. I also tossed pizza dough for the first time today. A few words of caution: flour and cornmeal will get all over the place when dough is tossed. Also it's easier to toss than it is to catch! But you probably could have guessed that, right? :)

I was looking forward to having homemade pizza and to have Tristan try my homemade pizza. After we picked Tristan up from daycare, Jean-Louis took him out to bike for a bit while I assembled and baked the pizzas. When they got back Tristan had to pee so Jean-Louis took him up for cleaning and to use the toilet. Then Tristan threw a tantrum. Moments later, Jean-Louis yelled. Apparently, when it came time to pee, Tristan said he didn't have to and then he ended up peeing in his pants, all while having a tantrum. Jean-Louis threatened him with the pizza at some point and so he had to follow through. Curse it! I was ticked off. I made all this great pizza and Tristan couldn't even taste any. He ended up just having a Vietnamese coleslaw salad for dinner. We all had coleslaw but Jean-Louis and I were the only ones enjoying fresh homemade pizza. Sadly:( Tristan did eventually finish all of his salad though so that was a plus.

After dinner, I lectured Jean-Louis not to ever gamble dinner like that. It's hard enough to get Tristan to eat some times so he shouldn't have gambled the main course. Besides, it's not like it was unhealthy since it was homemade from scratch. Am I right?

Our dinner:

Pizza toppings:
maple ham, pineapple, beech mushrooms, fresh basil, fresh tomato, orange bell peppers, pesto chicken breast, cheddar, mozzarella

Sauces:
pesto, store bought pizza sauce

Tristan's dinner:

Weekends are full of activities now

2011-06-28T13:28:00.000-07:00

We do our grocery shopping on the weekend. Boring, I know but it's the only time we can be very productive doing it. I sometimes grab a few things like milk and fruit during the week day but most of our shopping is on the weekend. This Saturday, we shopped in the morning, had lunch at home, then headed off to the bike festival hosted by MEC. It was gloomy and it rained on and off but when we arrived at the festival in the Athletes village, it stopped raining and the sun even came out a few times. It was a nice event. I'm not into bikes but Jean-Louis and Tristan are so it was great. We played a game where we had to go through 10 booths to collect passport stamps for Tristan. At the end, we got a couple of cool prizes. Tristan got a bell for his bike, as well as a small light.

At the first booth, Tristan tried out some of the bikes, but most of them were too high for him. He went on a pedal bike for the first time but he didn't know what to do and Jean-Louis basically pushed him along. Finally, we put him on a wooden running bike and he just took off! He went so fast. Give him something he's familiar with and he'll know exactly what to do with it. The other kids on the running bikes looked like they were trying it for the very first time. Besides riding bikes, we also watched the bike stunt show, which was pretty cool. Jean-Louis went for a test ride with Tristan attached to a bike seat. Because of the weather, there weren't many people at all. We loved it!

On Sunday, we headed to Broadway for Greek Day. It was our first time there. We heard about it in previous years but we just never got to go. This year I was reminded countless times about the event through Facebook and Twitter. In fact the event coordinator is a friend of mine on Twitter! I just had to go this year, obviously :)

It was hot on Sunday! I overdressed myself and Tristan. Ugh. The crowds at Greek Day made it even hotter. We arrived shortly after opening and the place was packed within 30 minutes. I think the nice weather brought out everyone! Greek day is known as a family-friendly event but with the crowds it almost seemed insane to bring small children. Tristan is at that age where he doesn't get overly stimulated in large crowds but I was scared of losing him. He likes to walk on his own a lot and I almost lost Jean-Louis and Tristan in the crowd that day.

On Broadway, they had two areas where they set up the kids zone. Tristan played fishing and then got a prize. We were going to line up for cotton candy but thought it was a bad idea before lunch. After lunch however, the line up was insane so we couldn't even do it. Oh well. The cotton candy was more for us than Tristan anyway. We lined up for the Shrek air castle. It was Tristan's first time in one and from the outside, it looked like so much fun! Too bad he was too small to climb and slide down but he still had a thrill walking inside. I would have love to have gone in myself. I have never been inside one before. If Tristan was a summer baby, we would totally rent one of those!

We ate greek food, watched some music performances, walked around, stopped by a nearby coffee shop, and then took off when Tristan started to go a little bananas. It was way past his nap time. We also had other plans that day to go shop at MEC, take Tristan on a bike ride, and cook dinner. Yes, the weekends are beginning to feel a bit hectic but it's awesome :)

Strawberry picking with Ma

2011-06-22T09:19:00.000-07:00

What we did for Father's Day

2011-06-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

What was supposed to have been a home barbecue turned into a weekend trip over to Victoria at the last minute. We invited my parents over earlier in last week but they didn't want to come over so we decided to head over ourselves. It was also an occasion to celebrate my dad's upcoming birthday this week.

We went out to eat at Heron Rock Bistro Saturday night with the family. It was us, my parents, my two brothers, and my niece. The food was surprisingly good. I'm not a big burger person but their chicken burger was quite tasty. Their steak apparently was very good too. We went home after wards to have cake. Tristan had a small sliver of chocolate cake so we had to take him out to exercise. My parents tagged along to Dallas Beach where we let Tristan bike a bit. It was really windy down there so we took out the kite as well. By the time we got home, it was past 9PM. By the time we all bathed and showered it was more past 11PM. Tristan slept past 11PM for the first time ever. He only napped maybe 15 minutes that day too. The next day he still woke up at 7AM!

On Sunday morning, we went to the flea market with my parents. After wards, Jean-Louis and I pushed Tristan for a run down to the beach. It was a nice 8.8km run to Dallas and through Beacon Hill Park. Then we met my friend and her two boys for some play time at a nearby park. We had late brunch plans with the family at 2PM. It was the only time we could get in unfortunately. We went to Aura Restaurant at the Laurel Point Inn for their Father's Day BBQ brunch buffet. It was good but not as great as what I remembered at the hotel. It was also held on the restaurant side rather than in the big banquet room in the previous years. The food was good but the selection was small. They had a big selection on breads and crackers though.

Overall, it was a productive and enjoyable trip to Victoria. Good food and Tristan got to spend more time with his grandparents (Gong and Ma) and see other family members he normally doesn't see.

Finally, Jean-Louis got a Father's Day gift from daycare as well! It's nice but we both think my Mother's Day gift was cooler :)

Tristan is 31 months old (or 2 years 7 months)

2011-06-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I have done a post on Tristan's developmental updates. Today is no special day, except that it is the 20th of the month. Here is a brief update on how he is doing.

Potty Training

Tristan is well on his way to becoming diaper free. He wears underwear all the time except when he naps or sleeps at night. He has only had 2 dry diapers so far after waking up in the morning but when he does pee in his diaper it only happens once since the diaper is only a bit wet. He's working on it :) This weekend we went over to Victoria and even when we had a diaper or pull up on him, he did not pee in them once. No accidents and he even did number 2 at a restaurant. This is not to say he doesn't have any accidents. There are at least a couple of accidents a week still. Some times we just don't make it to the bathroom in time.

Eating

Tristan is eating everything. He isn't as picky at the moment and will eat anything you give him. If he is picky, we bribe him with an upcoming course (e.g. cheese stick) and that usually does the trick. He has also been eating more sweets such as muffins, cookies, scones, and granola. These are all homemade but he also likes to eat store bought arrowroot animal cookies. I would say that he eats sweets maybe twice a week. He's at that age where we just want him to try everything and discover the world. If it's something that isn't great for him like a brownie, we'll just give him a bite or two. Jean-Louis almost let him try pop but then I said no. That stuff is pure crap and besides, Tristan hasn't even drank juice yet. Okay, so maybe he can't try everything quite yet! :)

Sleep

He sleeps from 9:15PM to 7AM. He naps for 1-2 hours. We can't really complain here. He's quite consistent and sleeps through the night. Some times if he wakes up a bit earlier, we just go tell him to go back to sleep and cover him up and he does.

Tristan is still in his crib and will be for awhile. There is a piece of wood we can move so that he can get in and out easily. We plan to remove that piece in October, after our vacation. Right now, he can jump in and out of his crib but he is usually good about staying inside until we get to his room.

Speech

He can sing but he is shy around others. Some of his favorites are Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Eensy-Weensy Spider, Happy Birthday, and Wheels on the Bus. His pronunciation is getting much better now. He can have simple conversations with my Mom on the phone and she actually understands him. He is still mixing his French and English. He is a little us in many ways. He says "oh my goodness" a lot and I've heard him say "what the heck" and "what the dickens." He tries to explain everything with "because... I'm a big boy" or something else. He loves to say because. You ask him why or how come and he'll say "because" and then try to finish it off with something. We find that he is constantly rehearsing his speech with us. We have to let him too but it's very interesting to watch him.

In the last week or so, he has been saying "love you" to us. Yup, it has taken him this long! Not sure if he totally understands it but we'll take it :)

Growth & Exercise

Tristan weighs 30 pounds. He can jump down from the third step on the stairs. He likes to run because Mom and Dad runs. He walks home one way from daycare and he increasingly wants to walk more. He loves biking on his Strider and requests to do it every day. He is at that age where we can take him out more and he can have fun. Overall, he is just easier to care for and more fun to be with. I think that is a recipe for traveling more, don't you? ;)

Behavior

Tantrums are on the decline. At the moment. Of course this could change but we're enjoying every moment of peace:)

When he coughs, he knows to do it into his elbow. He is an expert at blowing his nose. Bye bye aspirator! He started blowing his nose a few months ago. A couple of weeks ago, he started to spit out toothpaste after we brush his teeth.

Air time!

2011-06-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

Vancouver dragon boat festival

2011-06-12T21:06:00.000-07:00

We brought our toddler to see the dragon boat race today for the first time. If we had gone in any earlier year, it would have been overwhelming for him. He's 2 1/2 now and seems to deal fairly well with large crowds.

It was a nice day out so there were lots of people walking about. In fact both yesterday and today was nice so the festival really lucked out. Vancouver weather is unpredictable and it has been raining on and off for awhile now. Today really felt like summer.

I want to dragon boat race! Like many competitions I am a spectator of, I always feel the urge to join. In fact, I volunteered for the dragon boat event before and all the volunteers got to paddle in the boats when the event ended. I got a taste of it and it was super hard. Padding that fast was tiring and I remembered my arms died after about 30 seconds. I still want to join in though because it is so much fun! I saw seniors and even a pregnant lady competing today. Amazing. Inspiring. When Tristan gets older, we'll do it as a family and try to compete too!

First dry overnight diaper

2011-06-10T14:24:00.000-07:00

We just reached yet another milestone in Tristan's potty training. He's has been doing very well in underwear pretty much all the time except that he still sleeps in a diaper. We let him wear underwear when we go out and we have so far managed to find public washrooms for him whenever he needed it. I have to say little boys are lucky they can pee while standing up! He even peed while standing on a log off a trail when we went hiking in Whistler. He sits and pees too but lately his preference is to stand, since daddy pees that way too :)

Tristan is advancing in potty training because he can hold his pee for long periods. I remember one day when he only peed twice from the morning he woke up to the time it was 4PM. I must have peed like 5 times by then. Since then I have tried to get him to drink more but it wasn't like he wasn't drinking at all. This week he actually wet his bed many times. He wears a diaper to sleep and he pees so much that it leaks. It really annoys me since I have to do laundry all the time. We decided to cut him from any drinking after 8PM. We encourage him to pee before bed but it doesn't always happen. We have been starting to tell him not to pee in his diaper and if he doesn't for awhile, we can put an underwear on him. He seems to like the idea but we just figured he is not ready yet.

Yesterday, I forgot to change Tristan out of his underwear for his afternoon nap. When he woke up, the bed was soaked. He didn't even know until I pointed it out. When he realized what had happened, he cried. He was devastated. This morning when he woke up, he walked straight to the potty, sat down, and pee on his own while I was in his bedroom fetching his day clothes. When I came to the bathroom he was said "look, I peed!" I took the diaper he threw on the floor and noticed it was as light as empty. I was totally shocked! Then Tristan said "I hold it. No pee it there. I hold it." Hooray! Then we both did the happy dance :)

I'm beginning to think that Tristan felt all along that it was okay to pee in his diaper during nap and sleep times. We allowed it since we didn't think he was ready. It seems that he is ready to give up the diaper and that we just had to tell him no. "No it's never good to pee in your diaper. You only have it on for emergencies. Try not to pee in it." I think he understands. And now he is trying.

The fish we didn't buy

2011-06-08T13:50:00.000-07:00

Stevenston village is kid friendly

2011-06-05T21:45:00.000-07:00

Today we decided to drive out to Stevenston village to check it out and to take Tristan biking at the park. I heard good things about this village over at yoyomama and always wanted to check it out.

When we arrived, we were surprised to see that it was a market day. I think they have markets every other Sunday but I didn't check the schedule beforehand. This may have changed now but I was happy to see the market there. What can I say? I love markets! I figured it was the market that made the place so busy. We had a lot of trouble finding parking and had to circle back and forth. Apparently, it's busy like that every weekend.

We walked down to the pier and found Pajo's there. Since it was recommended by so many people, I wanted to try it out. I ended up lining up for 30 minutes in the heat while Jean-Louis and Tristan strolled around. We grabbed the fish & chips to go and sat on the grass in the shade by the market. It was good but I'm not a big fish & chips kind of person so after one or so pieces, I felt kind of grossed out. As far as fish & chips go though, Jean-Louis and I both thought it was tasty.

After lunch, we headed over to Rocanini for coffee. We skipped the siphon coffee this time and just had an iced latte. It was good and refreshing. We headed across the street to the playground and was stunned by how huge it was. It was like five playgrounds side by side and a water park too. HUGE! Behind the playground was a trail that was excellent for biking so Tristan went on that. There was no time for anything else. Next time we go back to Steveston, we'll have to play in the playground and visit Garry Point Park.

Running the Valley Trail in Whistler

2011-05-30T16:25:00.000-07:00

The Vally Trail in Whistler is 35KM of paved and/or crushed gravel trail. You can enter it off trails from Alta Lake to Green Lake. The signs for the trail are not always clear but if you are on a paved long trail labeled "share the trail" at the entrance, you are probably on part of the valley trail.

We stayed at a resort in the Upper Village and we were able to access the trail off of Lorimer Road. We ran to Rainbow Park, around the entire Alta Lake and then back again to the village. The round trip was 11.4KM. It's a gorgeous run through lakes, parks, executive style homes, golf courses, forest, and of course stunning views of snow-capped mountains. We encountered a few walkers and bikers on the trail but it was mostly quiet.

Running or biking the valley is definitely the best way to see it. If you are a runner and especially if you have a small child you can push a jogging stroller, I highly recommend this valley run. The trail is paved and in excellent condition. We timed our runs with Tristan's nap time in the afternoon so it worked out great. Being away on vacation, he had to nap in his stroller every day. When he wasn't napping, he just sat back and enjoyed the views. It must be nice to be pushed about in a chariot for such a lovely tour :)

Whistler: dining out with small children

2011-05-30T14:47:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of families in Whistler. It is definitely a family friendly destination. Not every family will have access to a full kitchen during their stay so dining out is a must. Planning meals and eating also consumes a lot of vacation time. We spent a full week in Whistler and as a result, we dined out a lot. We're not used to dining out a lot. Back at home, we only eat out maybe once or twice a month. Even when we traveled to Puerto Vallarta, we didn't dine out much. There however, we did have access to a full kitchen.

We sat at coffee shops like Moguls and Starbucks. We dined at a small eatery called Gone Eatery three times. They serve organic coffee, sandwiches, soups, pasta, and nice breakfasts. Prices are very reasonable and the place is very mellow with many families with small children there. I wouldn't have known about them if I didn't do my research beforehand since they are somewhat tucked away in the Village Square. You have to access it through the bookstore and I think they are affiliated with Moguls Coffee.

Another place we had repeat trips to was Wild Wood Pacific Bistro. They are also a bit tucked away in the Village North. They have good affordable food. In fact, the food they serve is somewhat like fine dining. They are right next to a tennis court. They have nightly specials and serve big delicious breakfasts.

As for fine dining, we went to Quattro and Edgewater Lodge Restaurant. We visited Quattro mainly for their $10 pasta night. I've always wanted to try this restaurant in Vancouver but here was a our chance. We totally scored with this deal too since their pasta normally sell for $24. I was talking to Jean-Louis about how easy it is to make a $24 pasta dish. You buy good quality pasta, use wine, organic herbs, quality oils and basically use organic wherever possible and that will totally rack up the price. The result? Quattro-quality pasta that tastes oh-so-good!

At Edgewater Lodge Restaurant, we splurged on their dine-out 3-course special. We ordered unique dishes and stuck to fish. We're not used to 3 course meals at restaurants anymore but Tristan was there to help us eat. He tasted pretty much everything we ordered and didn't complain. The kid knows what good food is! :) Besides the elegant tasty meal, we enjoyed the fantastic lakeside views. Because the restaurant sits on an island off of the lake, there are great views for everyone. Because we made reservations and arrived early, we had the best seat in the house:)

There was a restaurant a minute away from our resort called Ciao Thyme Bistro that specialized in organic cuisine and we went there for breakfast on the day we did the Peak 2 Peak. They had a 2 for 1 eggs Benedict. Yeah, we totally took advantage of the dining specials in May! :) We also noticed they had $1 day-old bakes by the till so we grabbed a cinnamon bun and pecan and dry blueberry scone. That evening we decided to order pizza and stay in to watch our last DVD movie. We ordered 2 large feast pizzas from Dominos using my 2 for 1 Entertainment coupon. Am I resourceful or what? We had leftover pizza the next day too when we got home.

Vacationing in Whistler with a 2 year old

2011-05-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

There aren't many tours to take or activities to join when traveling with a 2 year old. Whistler is no exception. When I researched and planned our trip there for the end of May, I discovered that a lot of cool tours like zip-lining, adventure zone for the kids, river rafting, and bear safaris had an age limit of least 4 years old. It turns out because we were going near the end of May, a lot of the summer activities like the mountaintop barbecue was not even opened yet. In fact, there are stores in the village that are closed until June. It's slow season right now in Whistler!

We went to Whistler with Tristan for a week, from Sunday to Sunday. We made the best of it and ended up having a good and relaxing time. As I mentioned in my last post, there were lots of dining specials so that was great. Especially because we ate out A LOT. I saved ourselves a few meals going up since I cooked a huge batch of fried rice shortly before we left for Whistler. I made us what I call, mountain retreat granola for snacks and brought along a couple containers of frozen food. We went grocery shopping beforehand as well so we had fresh bread, milk, and fruit. We were only able to do this because Whistler was a 2 hour drive away from Vancouver. In fact, I think it took us more like 1 1/2 hours. Our room did not have a kitchen but there was a small fridge, microwave, and dishwasher. The dishwasher was just a waste of space, in my opinion.

Over the course of the week, we did a lot of things. We were never bored. Our resort was just minutes away from the village so we walked a lot. We took pictures and stopped by many coffee shops. Tristan played in the nice park in the village. We cruised around and got more activity information and then planned our week day by day while we sipped on coffee. We ended up taking part in two paid activities: 1) TreeTrek Canopy Walk and 2) Peak 2 Peak sightseeing.

We observed the weather like a hawk and chose a nice morning for the TreeTrek tour. ZipTrek, the company that offered this tour, was very accommodating and lent us a hiking backpack to carry Tristan in. We also had a car seat for him inside their shuttle bus. There was no charge for the backpack and because we could carry Tristan, there was no charge for him for the tour :) For those who are too big to carry, kids need to be at least 6 years old to participate in this tour. We had a good time and Tristan was well behaved. The tour lasted around 2 hours.

The Peak 2 Peak opened for the summer season on May 28th. Since we were leaving on the 29th, we had to go on the 28th. I feel a bit foolish because I noted down all the great hikes on the top but there is no hiking at all this time of year. The top is covered in tons of snow and there is skiing until August. I thought maybe some of the popular trails might have been shoveled. No chance! We enjoyed the 20 minute private gondola ride up to Whistler Mountain from Whistler Village and then the 11 minutes Peak 2 Peak gondola ride across to Blackcomb Mountain. We ended up going back and forth a couple of times since we wanted to ride the silver gondola with the glass viewing floor. Tristan really enjoyed riding in the gondolas too. The views from above the mountain was amazing. It wasn't that cold up there but then again, I was wearing a ski jacket. I realized during our trip that I under packed and would freeze up there. Luckily, there were tons of sales for snow gear and apparel right now :) Not all the restaurants on the mountain were opened either. Again, it was slow season. We bought some mushroom soup and fed Tristan inside one of the eating areas while we watched the snowboarders and skiers go down the mountain. It was winter wonderland up there and it snowed too!

It's funny to think we walked and played in the snow on top of the mountain because in the valley below, we were hiking and swimming. In fact, one of Tristan's favorite activities in Whistler was swimming. We took advantage of the heated outdoor pool at our resort and on the day it rained, we went to the Meadows Park Sports Centre to swim indoors. We bought a inflatable life saver for Tristan and he was able to float and move all on his own in the pool. It was the best $1.50 purchase we made at the dollar store :)

Here are some of the other things that we did:

Running while pushing Tristan in the jogging stroller (11.4KM, more on this later)
Hiking to Nairns Falls (1.5KM one way, highly recommended for toddlers!)
Whistler library story time
Dine out event at Edgewater Lodge Restaurant
Watched DVDS together in our room (free to borrow from the resort)
Shopping in the village
Drove south looking for hiking trails (ones we wanted to do were closed:()
Visited Lost Lake Park, Rainbow Park (flew a kite)
Drove to Pemberton and had coffee
Took advantage of many daily dining specials (e.g. $10 pasta Thursdays at Quattro)
Sleep! Lots of sleep!

Whistler was fun. Jean-Louis and I have only been there once for a weekend and it was during the winter season. This was our first trip in the Spring. We had never gone up the mountain either so that was new. The lakes and parks in the valley and in the nearby area are stunning. The food was delicious and luckily for us, didn't cost us an arm and a leg. Tristan more or less ate well. He was really okay to dine with. Surprising.

Since we shared a room, it was hard to do other things when Tristan fell asleep. It was hard for him to sleep while we were still up. The simplest solution was for all of us to sleep at the same time. That meant keeping Tristan up a bit later every night and we had to sleep earlier every night at around 10:30PM. No matter when we slept, Tristan would still get up at 7 or 6:30AM. After a week of all of us together, I'm ready to give it up. Tristan was still a handful here and there so I'm glad this was just a vacation. We're so glad to be back home in Vancouver and back to our routine! You never know how much you miss home until you leave it for awhile :)