starcatcher.ca

How time flies! It’s twenty-ten, now (it’s also twenty-TO-ten; thanks Emilia for going to sleep before 11 and not letting me fall asleep for once that I can get stuff done), and it’s time to reflect on the previous year and to offer some insight as to what’s ahead for the coming decade. All things considered, it was a good year for us, namely because we’re all still here and nobody killed anybody yet. Our family got a little bigger with the arrival of Jonathan and Jolene’s daughter Madison, coming in the baby-filled month of September (2009 featured no fewer than 6 friends/family members having babies, 3 of which came in September), it got a little zippier with our new Matrix (bye-bye to the Esteem after over 6 years), and it got a little more spread out with David and Jackie moving to Ontario. We didn’t finish painting our deck yet, but Emilia’s soon-to-be new room (whenever we finally pull the trigger on moving her in there) was painted a bright blue and green, and we did have a hole in our kitchen ceiling for about 2 months (caused by a strange leak in the roof, unrelated to the painting).

Emilia kept us pretty close to home this year, but we managed to hit the beach a few times this summer, and to record a considerable amount of home movies that Emilia insists on watching all the time. That is, when she’s not watching Finding Nemo, A Dog Year, or her latest obsession, The Iron Giant (one of my favorite movies). To be fair, she doesn’t spend all her time watching TV… She spends a lot of time running laps around the main floor of the house, coloring on her coloring table (or on anything else), not eating (although she’s getting better at that one), calling people “garbage trucks”, and talking on the phone (especially to Nanny Veaux Nanny).

Christmas and New Years were quite nice… Emilia got a kitchen from Santa, and a little shopping cart and lots of play food, which is pretty much strewn about our entire house at any given time. She loves her kitchen. Also, we ended up having people over to ring in the New Year… We hadn’t expected people to actually stay until midnight, but we were thrilled that they did and that a good time was had by all, and not much cleaning up was required. (Which is always nice). This video is from Christmas morning, featuring Emilia (of course) crashing around with her new shopping cart and serving up some BBQ in her kitchen, as well as opening her gift from Uncle Mike (video is ~11mins).

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So what’s in store for 2010? Lots of new adventures, I’m sure… Emilia will be turning 2 soon, and next thing you know it’ll be summer vacation again, and then Christmas and New Years once more! And, I’m sure there’ll be other shit mixed in there too. Can’t wait!

Lots of concerts in Halifax this summer, but I didn’t go to any of them, partly because of the $$$, and partly because I really didn’t care that much (although there’s an outside chance that I’ll be catching Metallica in concert in October, which would be pretty awesome). Tall ships were here, totally missed that one. Buskers is on now, and I doubt we’ll make it…

All in all, despite the many opportunities, our summer has been pretty uneventful, with pretty much just a bunch of rain, me working, Melissa taking Stats, and Emilia not eating, but we’re working on fixing the latter with KFC fries and other nonsense. Thankfully, I had last week off which allowed us to go to PEI and to the beach a few times, and I also got to hit the ol’ Seaport Beerfest, both of which contributed to making this whole ordeal actually feel a little bit more like summer.

In the meantime, we took a bunch of pictures and video. Pictures are here (including beach pics from Aug15), video will be around later.

Quick update (I mean on writing a bunch of stuff, but I can never get around to it): Emilia does not crawl anymore, it’s all walking, all the time (except when she’s running, sitting, or clinging to Mommy/Daddy). She’s also spouting out a bunch of “words” (e.g., “beh-but” for belly button, “Meh-ee” for cat, “ma-na” for banana, and “pe-ka” for just about everything else). She had a haircut last week, and she’s sleeping in a big-girl bed! (when she’s not awake or howling about something or other). Here are pictures.

It’s safe to say that Emilia is comfortable walking around now. Barring the occasional crash n’ burn, she can pretty much get around on her own. Observe (~2 mins):

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Instead of uploading videos to the likes of YouTube or Facebook (whereby I would undoubtedly lose ownership of the file), I’m hosting my own videos (which probably means it’s going to go slow). I post two now: The first is of Emilia walking around (yes, she is walking now, although primarily between people). It also shows her doing the walking/crawling hybrid thing that she does (upright crawling on her knees). (~5 mins)

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The second is a VHS-rip from a family gathering at the Heritage Inn in Tignish on New Year’s Day 2002, and features Dad singing part of two French songs (that I always associated with my uncle Daniel when I was a kid). The videographer (my cousin Sarah, I think) cut off the tape halfway into each song, so what I have here is what there is (generally speaking, there is precious little video of Dad, so I take what I can get). Melissa and I are in this video (I’m playing guitar!), as are David, Jackie, Mom, my Nanny (Mom’s mom), and numerous other family members. Much younger, of course. (~3 mins)

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So. We had a birthday party for Emilia today, and it definitely lived up to the promise of being mental… Lots of kids, not enough food, and a giant caterpillar (no pics of that, but take our word for it). Thanks to everyone who came out to wish Emilia a happy birthday, in particular the Mingo family (coming from Truro for two hours? hardcore.), Charlie and Angie (who bravely faced a kid-filled world without kids of their own), and Wendy and Vinnie (for being gracious enough to let us know that Tristan was a little sick before coming over). Big thanks to Aunt Jackie for taking most of the party pictures, and Mommy for making the cake (4 hours of frosting)!

Now, sleep. Well, first UFC, THEN sleep.

(PS: pictures are behind the “Read the rest” link)

Read the rest…

Yes, it’s been exactly one year (well, 366 days), and Emilia is still around, causing us grief and not going to bed. Today was her first birthday! We started the day off by getting up REAL EARLY (so Mommy could take Emilia to Nanny’s, as usual)… You can see the evidence of the “early” in the first few pictures. After a long, hard day of doing baby toddler things, we came home to a dinner of somethingorother, followed by dessert, consisting of orange cake that Daddy made! Of course, a few nibbles of cake went a long way towards fuelling this child (thankfully, she didn’t care for Mommy’s ultra-rich icing, otherwise I’d still be chasing her around), leading me to only really be able to get her down at around 9:30pm, which is not long after her actual birth time (9:10pm).

In any event, it was a good day in Emilialand. I can only imagine what her little “birthday party” will be like. I figure it will be something on the side of “mental”.

Clearly. One of these days, I’ll write about something interesting I’m doing at work in codingland (I’m on the fringe of a GP project right now, we’ll see if it turns into one). Or maybe I’ll go on about how awesome it is that KISS is coming to Halifax (granted, most of their songs are pretty bad, but I’ll probably end up going because I’ve invested a lot of time in Gene Simmons through his reality show that I figure he owes me a good time; that, and KISS is awesome live, with the fire and blood and the loud, loud music). Or I could talk politics, but everybody does that.

Oh well. Another time. For this post, some Emilia pictures. FYI, not quite walking yet, but she has three “offices” in the house where she does all her work (pantry, lazy-Susan cupboard under the sink, and linen closet); she has either 10 or 11 teeth now (depending on who you ask), and eats entire bananas in a single gulp. She’s also turning 1 next week. Shit.

Yes, Christmas has come and gone, and we now have a pile of more stuff to pick up. Emilia gave us a few gifts too: she cut her 7th tooth today, and she learned to climb stairs. This last bit goes very nicely with her crawling all over the place, pulling herself up to a standing position on everything she can get her hands on, and wanting to walk whenever she gets a chance. It looks very likely that she’ll be walking before her 1st birthday. Ugh.

Anyway, here are a few pictures from the past few months!

It’s nice to get out every once in a while, especially in the fall when the colours are so bright and diverse. Sonja invited us to go apple picking in Windsor today, so we bundled up the tadpole and drove on down the 101 to the edge of the Annapolis Valley (somewhat; don’t get into semantics, please). The terrain was too treacherous for strollers, so we busted out the Snugli and carried her around. The girls (Sonja, Mia, Zoe, Melissa and Emilia) all enjoyed themselves, as did I (although being the only guy I had to keep the crude comments to a minimum). We are now all appled up and should be stocked in pies and crisps and cobblers until the spring. Or until we run out of apples. We ended up taking the scenic route on the way home (Highway 1 through Windsor down to Mt. Uniacke) to enjoy more of the fall colours.

Today was Jolene’s birthday! We had steak at Melissa’s parents’ place. Kaylee tried to eat Emilia, as usual. Here are pictures.

I do believe that August of 2008 was the first month that I didn’t write anything here. No, I’m not apologizing, I’m only making an observation. For anyone interested in Emilia-related updates, I think she’s sleeping with Mommy right now (because I don’t hear her). She’s cut two teeth so far, and she stays sitting up for extended periods of time (only falling over sporadically), and she also likes standing (with Mommy and Daddy’s help, of course). She made another trip to PEI last month (she drove half-way), and next week she starts junior high! She was laid off from her job last week, but they said they’d give her a good reference for further on down the line.

Some of this stuff is true. In the meantime, here’s some Emili-media, courtesy of our new camera (woohoo Airmiles!). These pictures are 8MP, so they’ll be slow loading until I go and ImageMagick them to a smaller size. There is also video of Emilia and her cousin Kaylee, uploaded manually (and not through Wordpress) because of some filesize limitation that I didn’t feel like working around.

Melissa’s mom turned the big 6-0 this weekend, and we had the family (and Jonathan, by phone) over to celebrate! HERE ARE PICTURES, courtesy of Ashley. (happy now?) Most pictures are of Emilia, because, well, she’s the cutest thing around!!

Is it odd to think that when I’m at a party with lots of people I don’t know very well (and some that I do) that I don’t want to talk about Emilia? Many of my friends don’t have kids, and I feel as though if I start in on such sundry topics as “sleepless nights”, “shitty diapers”, or “being puked on”, that I’m just going to alienate them or turn them off from potentially having children of their own. Most of them can’t relate, and the impression I get from many is that frankly, they just don’t care about those little details.

This isn’t it: I feel guilty if I *don’t* talk about Emilia! She’s pretty much my entire life now (except for at work, of course, where I manage to keep the Emilia talk to a dull roar, and try to focus on actually getting stuff done.)

That’s it, now… I’ve become that parent who can only truly relate to other parents, despite the fact that my daughter is only 4 1/2 months old. Such is life, I guess.

Oh yeah, she’s getting big. Here are pictures!

Last weekend, we bundled up Emilia and ALL of her stuff, and took off for PEI. It was a fun-filled vacation wherein we got a LOT of sleep, for some reason. All of Mom’s siblings finally got to see Emilia. On the way home, we stopped by David & Jackie’s place in Moncton (we hadn’t been there yet), and scooted over to see my aunt and uncle in Dieppe (who graciously fed us and entertained us for a few hours). As usual, we have pictures documenting most of the weekend’s events.

(after the break)

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This site has pretty much become exclusively about Emilia. Which isn’t bad, if for no other reason than before it was about nothing in particular. You might say that Emilia gave this thing purpose… I say that it’s just given us a way to show her off even more.

Oh yeah. Melissa had a great Mother’s Day… She says I did “really good”, which is saying lots given how I usually bung up special occasions. “Movie, food and jewelry: what more could a girl want?”

(Pictures after the break)

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So I got some new Wii games, Guitar Hero III and Mario Kart Wii (my Kart friend code is 1676 4091 9980, set me up and give me yours). They are awesome, and take up just about all my free, non-Emilia time (which only partly explains the lack of posts; the other reason is that life with a newborn is usually quite boring, unless you’re one of the parents). Oh yeah, speaking of Emilia, did you know that she’s growing? Here’s an update:

• She can lift her head!
• She rolled over the other day, but we think it was coincidence
• She occasionally sleeps through the night, but that means she’s not eating
• She went on her first road trip yesterday, to her first birthday party!
• She’s getting really long. She’s probably still at around 9lbs, but she’s close to 25 inches
• She can’t talk yet, but she will soon. (soon is a relative term)

After the break are some pictures taken over the last few months. She’s much more awesome in person, though.

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I know Emilia has a few fans out there who anxiously await updates on her (FYI, she’s fine, albeit awake RIGHT NOW, and she’s getting big), so allow me to take this opportunity to post a few more pictures of her recent adventures (around the house), and some of her new friends.

Even though there’s a little more to write in Emilia’s Story, now’s a good time to show the world our little girl over the past few weeks. She’s one month old today (4 weeks and 1 day), and sleeping at the moment, I think (I’m hiding in the basement), but don’t get me wrong, we wouldn’t trade in any of it. OK, well some of it. The giant poops, yeah those can go, but at least we know she’s healthy. Anyway, on with the pictures!

Today, Mommy and Daddy brought little Emilia home for the first time. It was an uneventful trip, punctuated by idiots at the hospital that were parked illegally by the University Ave. entrance, making it difficult for the trip to begin. Nevertheless, we’re all home now!!