Mother's Day brunch on Grouse Mountain

Last year, we couldn't get in but this year I made sure to book us a month in advance. We go to Grouse Mountain fairly often but never to the Observatory, their fining dining restaurant. Their Mother's Day brunch is very popular and sells out every year. We also have never taken Tristan up the mountain yet so we were very excited!

Yesterday, we went and had an enjoyable day. Our brunch booking was for 11:30AM. The food was good but just good I think. I definitely had better brunches for much less the cost. However, if you factor in the price of a skyride ticket alone ($39.99/person), the meal really didn't cost much :) In terms of food, the Grouse brunch pales in comparison to our Father's Day brunch at the Laurel Point Inn in Victoria. Nevertheless, they had a good selection of dishes and lots that Tristan could eat so that was awesome!

It's funny the kids selection included what seemed like just junk food: chicken strips and fries, macaroni and cheese, and grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. I think we gave Tristan some of the sandwich and chicken strip to try at the end of his meal but he was already full from all the other stuff. His meal consisted of mostly eggs, omelette, bread, pieces of chicken, and some pasta. Then we gave him fruit. Boy, did he make a mess! Now that I think about it, we probably shouldn't have unleashed him to eat on his own so much at a fine dining restaurant :)

After the brunch, we toured around on the top. We visited the bears and then just walked and sat around taking pictures and videos. For some reason, I thought we could do more but the top was mostly covered in snow still. The weather was perfect. It wasn't too cold at all and was sun and clouds the entire time. Would we brunch again on Grouse? Yeah, I think so :) The view of Vancouver was spectacular!

17 month old is one cool toddler on his new Strider bike

Today, we bought Tristan his first bike. He's just 17 months old but the Strider running bikes are for toddlers 1-5 years old. Once a baby can walk, they can ride the Strider. I'm not so sure about that but ok. I can't believe it's his first bike. As first time parents and since he's our only child, I feel like we're totally spoiling him. I have never owned a bike in my life! His dad loves biking, maybe even more than running so I think it's great :)

Only minutes after we put him on the bike, he fell over and hit his chin on the handle. Oops! Now he has a bruise and tomorrow is Mother's Day and we're suppose to be taking lots of pictures. Terrific :( Anyhow, it was so cool to see him on his orange Strider but I can see that he still needs to grow a little bit taller to fit on it well. His feet barely touch the floor. It may be okay with his running shoes on though.

Seeing Tristan on the Strider makes me realize how big he is now. My baby is a big little boy! About to ride a bike, for crying out loud! How did he grow so fast?

A small reflection on motherhood just in time for Mother's day

Since I have a mommy blog and "mommying around" is a huge part of my life, I follow mostly mommies and daddies on Twitter. This past week, I noticed a lot of people blogging about being a mom and the question has been thrown around about how you know you are a mom. For me, I know that I am a mom when thought's about my baby constitute 95% of my day, every day. Nearly everything I do, think about doing, or want to do has to take Tristan into consideration. This is exactly why people say that once you have a baby, life changes forever!

Once upon a time, I wanted at least 3 children and all before I turned 30. Yeah, I was young and nuts apparently :) Once upon a time, I also thought I would grow old with my husband, just the two of us and enjoy life. Neither of those became reality and boy am I glad! Having Tristan and being a mother was a dream come true. The pregnancy, the experience caring for a newborn, a baby, and now a toddler, all feels like a huge accomplishment. In fact, I feel like mother is such an important title and so prestigious that it may even belong on a resume. No, I wouldn't put it but I'm just saying :) I know the world agrees with me about how important and great moms are though because there is a day in our calendar set aside to honor all moms. In Canada, Mother's day 2010 is this Sunday, May 9th. For all you celebrating Mother's day now, Happy Mother's Day!

Part time daycare begins in June

Hooray! Today was a good day. We got the news that Tristan will be able to go from full time daycare to part time daycare. That is what we wanted all along but since full time was available in January, I had to take it so that he would get in. Tristan will remain in the infant room for the month of June but will then move into the toddler room in July.

I am so pleased about June because we actually go away so it's perfect. A mom of one of the boys in the infant room just had another baby at the end of April. When they told me their mom wanted him at daycare full time now, I offered the swap. Their boy is in there 3 days a week and that was exactly what I wanted. Yay!

Although I still get to spend lots of time with Tristan every day even when he goes to daycare now, I feel bad not spending more. The past few months has been great and relaxing for me but honestly, I didn't need that much of a break. I don't do enough contract work to justify having him there full time right now. I know that may change down the road but I figure I can work smarter rather than longer :) What I made from my work never covered the month's daycare bill. Sad, I know :( Now, that he will be in daycare 3 days a week we will only be paying $798 every month instead of $1143. I can still do the same amount of work I already do so we will indeed be saving money. I am so relieved because June will be a terrible month for us. Not only are we traveling but we have big strata levies to pay. Ugh, I hate big bills!

In July, Tristan will be going into the toddler room, along with most of the other babies. They are all about the same age and during the summer, there is a big migration of kids at the daycare. The daycare only supports kids up to 5 years old so all of those kids will leave and everybody shifts up. I was told about 50 kids were getting moved between July and August. Basically, if I wanted full time, part time 2 days, or part time 3 days, I would likely get it right away. My preference was 3 days a weeks so that's what I got. That also means that any chance of me trying to find a full time job goes out the window. I'm okay with that as long as I can work on more contracts and get more iPhone app work out there. The future is still a big unknown for me.

Baby's 1st year iPhoto books

I love taking pictures. I always have. Now, that I have a baby, I take a lot of pictures. I was actually taking pictures daily until the baby was about 10 months old. Since then, I take pictures about every week. When it came time to putting together a baby book, it was a huge task. I only wanted to do the baby's first year book but I had 1603 good pictures flagged for that. It turns out that iPhoto books can only include 100 pages max so we were in a bit of trouble. It took me hours at night over days and weeks to put Tristan's first year photo book together. I ended up trimming it down to three books: Volume 1, 2, and 3. That's 300 pages and exactly 960 pictures inside. Phew!

When it came time to order them, I was a bit hesitant. I wanted to get two of each, one copy for us and one for my parents-in-law. Then I realized how much they would cost. Each book would cost over $100 so 6 books would be something like $650 with the taxes and shipping costs. I looked into other options such as shutterfly.com and artscow.com but they are expensive too and I trust the quality of iPhoto since we have ordered from them in the past. I just wished Apple would have more printing specials :( So since we were not in a hurry to get our copy, we decided to just order one of each. If we ordered them together we would only save around $18 worth of shipping but considering how much we were already paying, we weren't interested in the savings. By ordering just a copy of each, we were actually able to translate the books into French so that was nice. The three books, 11x8.5 inches hardcover came to a whopping $351.54. Yikes!

A week after ordering, the books all arrived today at the same time in separate packing. Apple really should get a cart system working so that we can include multiple print purchases in the same shipment. It would avoid the separate shipping costs too. Come on Apple!



The books are nice. I wouldn't have expected anything less. Some of the pictures look a bit dim but I suppose it's not fair to compare them to what I see on my bright iMac. I think my parents-in-law are going to love them! Now, that the first year book is done, I have to do the "after" first year books. Oh boy! Time to procrastinate again :)

Just the beginning of toddlerhood

Tristan is your typical active toddler. The only time you can expect to see him fairly still is when he is drinking milk or when he sleeps. When he first started daycare in January, I remembered one of the staff there saying that when the babies start to push the highchair around the room, that is a sign that they are ready to leave the Infant room and go into the Toddler room. I thought that was strange because Tristan was already pushing the highchair at home way before he started daycare.

He has been in the infant room for four months now and I am actually quite anxious for him to leave soon. I think after about 2 months, when he was 15 months old, he must have been pretty bored. The infant room is very small and if the kids don't go outside, I can see how it could be very boring for them to be there all day. I think the main entertainment is the staff and other babies. The toddler room is so much more exciting and once they go into that program, the staff puts them on the potty right away. That is something I'm looking forward to :)

Tristan loves to imitate what people do. Big people and small people. Tristan likes to do what we do and copy us, which is nothing new. Apparently, he does this at daycare too. One of the boys at daycare and Tristan imitate each other. One of them would throw their hands in the air and the other would too. Then they would both laugh. Something like that. Also, one of the girls likes to hug and kiss Tristan. When I first saw her do it, I was a bit uncomfortable. Tristan just stood still the first time but then started to push her away and run away when she tried it again, the second time and the third time. The little girl had a runny nose and she was trying to kiss him on the mouth. I actually took kleenex out of my pocket to wipe his mouth afterwards. Then, when I went to pick him up that same day, I saw the little girl do it again and this time Tristan did it back. Oh my goodness! Tristan is making out with the little blond girl from daycare! At just 17 months? Anyway, when they tried to hug and kiss each other, they ending up knocking each other over. I went to catch them but the little girl hit herself on my knee a bit and cried. Yup. That was a quick end to that make-out session. I wonder how often this goes on at daycare. Or maybe I don't want to know. What kind of surprises me is that the staff don't intervene at all. Should we be encouraging this sort of behavior towards strangers? I don't know.

Our once sweet baby is showing signs of throwing tantrums such as stomping his feet and crying when we don't let him have something. Sometimes he rolls on the floor and has a fit too. We ignore him for the most part. I think we're getting a preview of what people call the "terrible twos." It doesn't happen a lot but we would prefer not to see it at all :)

For the past week or so, he has been picky with his food. I hear this is a toddler phase as well. He wasn't sick or anything else so we can only conclude that he was just picky. We fed him how we had always fed him but some times he would refuse to even try the food. This is all stuff that he has eaten and loved before like broccoli, carrots, peas, noodles, and even some fruit. Actually, there was a day where he basically only wanted to eat cereal, fruit, and milk. What did we do? Well, we just kept trying and if he wouldn't eat, we would just skip that course and move onto fruit. We didn't give him any more fruit than we would normally give him because we didn't want him full on just fruit. We figured once he was hungry, he would want to eat. We packed him the same food again to daycare and he refused to eat it there too. It's the first time he has ever refused to eat his main dish at daycare. They were somewhat shocked too. Anyhow, this went on for 2 days and then he decided to eat again. And then he decided not to. It seemed like almost every other day he would eat a bit more of the main dish. That was Friday.

On the weekend, Tristan ate everything we offered him. Not a lot but he ate some of everything, which was good enough for us. I think new food and alternating between two main dishes helped. Things were even better today. Tonight, I made French veal stew with green olives, mushrooms, onions and served it with rice. It has been awhile since I made that. Tristan ate so much we thought he was starving. His daycare report said that he ate most of his food too. He must have really liked the dish and he is probably still hungry too from not eating too much last week. I don't know if we have our old Tristan back yet but we'll give it a week before introducing plain steamed vegetables to him again. If this week goes well, maybe we'll steam a little something green next week or at the end of this week.

Sudden sleep changes at night

For the past week, it has been a bit more difficult to get Tristan to sleep at night. He still sleeps around 9PM every night and sleeps through the night. The problem is that he relies on us more in putting him to sleep now. In the past, Jean-Louis would take him upstairs and put him down and leave right away. Tristan doesn't fuss at all and if he doesn't sleep right away, he will minutes after. It really has been more or less that easy for us since he was sleep trained at 6 months old. Lately, when Jean-Louis steps away to leave, he freaks out. Jean-Louis has to come back and stay for him to calm down and lie back down. He doesn't pick Tristan up, he just stands at the end of the crib. That is enough to make Tristan happy.

Tonight, it was my turn to put Tristan down and watch him sleep. Yeah, we take turns now too. We want Tristan to get used to us both putting him down at night. We have both learned quickly in the past week that Tristan will not cry at all if we just put him down and stand nearby for a few minutes until he is super sleepy or asleep. It's a bit of a dependency but it's not too demanding on us and it sure beats him crying hysterically. I have forgotten how much his crying bothered me :(

When I put him down earlier tonight, I slowly walked away just to see what would happen. He sat up and started to protest so I stopped and turned back. He then laid back down and tried to sleep. After a few minutes, I tried again and got to the door and out of view. There was no response for a few minutes but when I was about to leave, he whined a bit so I walked a bit closer. He then tried to sleep again. I made another attempt to leave and he actually stood up and tried to peak around the corner to find me so I made myself visible. He didn't fuss at all. He just wanted to know that I was still there. He laid himself back down right away and tried to sleep. Then I started to hear him breathe. There was actually the sound of him breathing and I took that as a sign that he was finally asleep. I was right :)

I was in the room with him for 7-8 minutes. He didn't cry at all but I had to be there. He's obviously scared if I'm not. One night, Jean-Louis stood in the room for around 15 minutes. Another night, it was just 1-2 minutes for me. It all depends on how tired he is too.