recent photos

Here are some of the cute recent shots.

I'm too sexy for my hat,
too sexy for my hat,
whatcha think about that?!


Adam is well on his way to mastering the zipper. When I got him out of bed this morning, he had almost gotten his entire body out of his sleepbag. grrrrr.....

How did it only occur to me today to put his highchair at the piano? Also, it's just far enough that he can't drool on the keys. There's been a lot of drool lately.

LOL

Cameraphilia
Adam still wants the camera whenever he sees it but I won't let him touch it. And so, we're still getting a lot of photos like this:



and this:

and this:


and this:


Playground Fun
Most days, Adam gets two trips to a playground: one with Poh-Poh/Gung-Gung and one with mom. We're lucky to have lots of play areas within easy stroller distance. On rainy days, we'll go to the Bay/Bloor Indigo to play with the trains and other toddlers. The Ontario Early Years Centre that Adam attends in the mornings with Poh-Poh or Gung-Gung has a playground out back. I take him there in the morning on weekends. We un/fortunately usually have the place to ourselves. After his/our daily nap (usually 2+ hours!!!) we go to the playground at our local K-6, Church Street Public School, which has three slides. We meet lots of moms and kids there and the occasional dad, too. Yesterday, Adam played with a kid I'd guess is in grade 2 or grade 3. The big kid's friends had just left and Adam started begging for the kid's ball. So the two of them passed the ball to each other and played peek-a-boo for almost half an hour.

These are from Church Street today.

at the top of the slide.

at the bottom of the slide

Climbing on-and-off the slide is a favourite pass-time.
As is trying to climb up the slide.

It's hard to tell from this photo but I got my hair cut Thursday. Birthday present to myself, I guess. I was in the middle of another errand and just popped into one of the umpteen nail/nail-and-hair places along Yonge. I'm happy with the cut but I'll never go back. The fumes from the nails were suffocating. But "interestingly", for the first time in my life, I was accused of having curl in my hair. I've had hairdressers blow my hair smoother with a brush and dryer now and then but my hair's so straight that I hardly had curl when I got one of those spiral perms in Grade 7. This hairdresser actually used a flat iron on my hair. no kidding. Aren't you all glad you know so much about my hair?

12-month check in/up

Recent (last twoish months) interests and likes:
- hiding and finding things and people
- opening and closing things
- holding hands under the coffee "chest"
- looking at things between his knees with his head upside down, being upside down in general
- Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb
- keys ("ghieeess")
- Shreddies and cheese ("zheeess"), which he asks for by name pretty much every meal
- teeth ("dzees") and tongues ("dhuuuh")
- Mega Blocks
- zippers
- vehicle noises (we have a little book of them)
- clapping
- going for the mail
- following birds around the playground
- slides
- spinning on the recliner
- magnets
- other children and babies
- flushing the toilet
- The Hokey Pokey

Recent (last twoish months) dislikes and waning interests:
- Dr. Lindzon, evil needle man
- door springs
- hats (sun hats are even more annoying than toques as they obstruct the view)
- egg yolk
- rattles
- spoon feeding
- bananas

Adam is really understanding a lot, like instructions to "sit" and how to use the phone - you press the buttons and then put it up against the head of someone who knows how to talk. He'll also choose books or particular pages for reading (usually "your giggles... and cries!" from I Love You Through and Through or the nursery rhyme Old King Cole). Today, he suddenly got up from my lap, walked across the room to retrieve a sock I had left on the floor, returned, and set it atop my foot.

Plus, another clean bill of health, growth, and development today.

age	WEIGHT			HEIGHT
mos	lb,oz	%ile		in	%ile
0	7,1	25		20.5	75
1	9,11	50
2	13,4	84		24	85
3
4	17,12	93		27	95+
5
6	20,4	90		28.7	95+*
7
8
9	22,12	82		30	94
10
11
12	23,12	65		31.5	92

Percentiles from http://www.mybirthcare.com/favorites/babygrowthchart.asp. I guess he's getting slimmer. As evidenced ...


This is the first time I've really lost my head when shopping for Adam. All last week I had this nagging feeling that Adam had to have new clothes for his birthday. And newly purchased, too. It's not like I didn't stock up on stacks of clothes for him to grow into in the after Christmas clearance sales (Sears! really cheap!). So Thursday night, I went to Winners for a new outfit. And not just any outfit, the most expensive one they had. I tell myself he might get two or more years out of it. I had to safety pin the shorts to keep them on. When I ran into Kevin and Su on the way home, Kevin declared that the outfit is more a present for Dion than from Adam. probably true.

Here he is in his real birthday suit, Gina. Whaddya think? Was this worth $40? Yes, those are matching Nike socks.



FCBarcelona for the uninitiated amongst you, I mean us.

Keep scrolling if you haven't checked in in a while. There's been a flurry of posts.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to our friend, Kevin, and the rest of his quartet, Chameleon, for winning the right to represent the Ontario district of the Barbershop Harmony Society at the International Convention Quartet Contest in Nashville this coming July.

Yesterday's Festivities

Birthday Poses

these photos and MANY more unscreened for quality and in print quality at http://picasaweb.google.com/dion.lew

I Love You Through and Through*

I love you through and through.

I love your top side.

I love your bottom side.



I love your inside and outside.



I love your happy side,



your sad side,



your silly side,



your MAD side.



I love your fingers,



and toes,



your ears, and nose.



I love your hair and eyes,



your giggles,



and cries.



I love you running and walking,



silent,



and talking.


I love you through and through,

yesterday, today, and tomorrow, too.

I've been meaning to make this post for a long time. I just imagined that I'd be taking photos from the whole year. These are all from when Adam was 11 months old (or just a couple days shy thereof.) Believe it or not, I had several more 11-month photos that "deserved" to be published but didn't make the cut. Mostly, they were attractive photos but didn't fit the poem very well.

*Poem by Bernadette Rossetti-Shustak

365.25 days

Okay so April 18th is Adam's date of birth but it is now very close to 365.25 days (one astronomical year) after he was born. (His first year had a leap in it.)

Eye Colour 11 months. Click the image to enlarge.

a new rule

"No standing in the tub" is not the only rule for Adam's bath time. I had to create and enforce a new bath time rule today. "No sleeping in the tub." Hear that, Ian?

Earth Hour

Power (MW) versus Time of Day (h)

Red is last Saturday's power consumption in Ontario. Green was yesterday's. I had to tweak in Paint to make the axes true.

I created this graph-like thing from data and images from the ieso. I was really surprised that I didn't see any comments on their front page about Earth hour. It must have made their scheduling nightmarish. How does one predict the effect of Earth hour?

I'm such a geek.

You know that you've been spending too much time surfing Wikipedia when you know that the every-day pronunciation of "writer" and "rider" are distinguished only by the consonants by British English speakers, distinguished only by the vowels by (many) Canadian English speakers, and not distinguished at all by most American English speakers. The writer/rider vowel distinction and house/houses vowel distinction in Canada are a result of "Canadian raising." This confirms my discovery during my 1999 travels that the distinctly Canadian pronunciation occurs when the following consonant is unvoiced.

The Diaper Chronicles meta blog entry

I followed a link from Strollerderby (ha ha, get it?), which is a group parenting blog at babble.com, to Kendra's blog entry about cloth diapering. Kendra and her husband admit that they are pretty hard core about it. They certainly are. And here was my reply. It's kinda rude, I don't know what possessed me. Sorry, Kendra.

That sounds like WAY too much work. I am more committed to disposables than ever. 17-20 per day. I don't know if you guys are martyrs or kamikazes. Good for you, though.

Kendra responds...

We're neither martyrs nor kamikazes (though we admit to being pretty hardcore) - and the number of diapers per day has diminished considerably. I did have to use an emergency paper one when we were out longer than expected two days ago, and couldn't even tell whether it was wet or not! Those are freaky.

I lightened up and responded...

Okay, okay. Lemme be a little more open-minded. Either my imagination is too vivid or I lack imagination entirely but I can't imagine the switch to cloth now that I'm a year into disposables. But we if we have more children and if cloth is really better, then it might be worth investing now. It's not just the folding and washing, the increased amount of changing and waking is also daunting. Or are these myths? I do know that I never used 17, let alone 20 disposables in one day. Disposables can be wet more than once (much more overnight) without bothering the baby. Some questions:

-Will an otherwise sleeping cloth-diapered infant wake up at night for diaper changings?
-How often does a cloth-diapered infant need to be changed during the day?
-during the night?

Kendra tracked me down here and gave me some helpful information...

Hi Karen - What a beautiful boy! Just wanted to respond to your comment on our blog. We cloth diaper for many other reasons - to save money, to save landfill waste, to avoid disposible diaper chemicals (some contain known neurotoxins!), and because we like the way it feels! We sleep with our son, so if I hear him poop in the middle of the night I change him. If he's just wet, and I am quick enough with feeding, he sleeps on. I haven't really been counting changes during the day, but yes, it's more than disposables. He feels it more when he is wet - and supposedly, this will help him not like being wet and potty train faster (may be a myth too!). In any case, we're pretty new at this, so we'll see how it goes. But I love being able to cloth diaper.

Kendra gives me more credit that I deserve. Of course, the question I meant to ask was, "Will an otherwise sleeping mother be awakened to change a wet diaper?" The baby feeling the wetness of a cloth diaper may help with potty training (less diapering later) but I'm guessing it means more diapering now.

I know that the new pocket styles make cloth diapering easier than ever and Dion and I are pretty, er, frugal, but ... I still don't think I'm game. Add that the jury is still out on the environmental considerations* and I'm sticking with the Seventh Generation disposables. Indeed Becky and I drove to Richmond Hill to get some on sale the other day. Of course, I bought many, many more than she (24 packs! versus her 4) because Becky has switched over to cloth. I saved 28% compared to my local health food store and Becky saved 39% compared to hers. I saved $124.

*A pretty major UK governmental study undertaken to justify a "real nappy campaign" proposal found that it was a tie. Hence, the campaign never happened. Advocates on both sides criticise the study's assumptions, which are pretty much worst case for both sides - cloth diaper service (transport, high temp/lots of detergent laundering) versus landfilling bleachy disposables. Many people home launder and disposables can go in Toronto's municipal compost.

overdue update - gross motor development

s I read on Baby Squared, hitting the walking milestone is not an overnight event. Adam was cruising at six months, standing at seven, taking a few baby steps at a time at eight months, and spent a month practicing walking at nine months. At ten months he was walking as much as crawling and now at eleven months, crawling is a thing of the past.

I remember reporting at his nine-month check up that he was taking 3 or 4 little steps at a time but it didn't really seem like that counted as walking. There are two times I might say marked the official start to walking. At almost exactly ten months, we went to Indigo where he'd take around 20 straight steps towards the Thomas train set table. If he got down to crawl, it'd be too high for him to see, so he was pretty motivated. Then at 10.5 months, the first day of our visit to Great Auntie Joan's, Adam decided he was done with crawling. I counted 98 steps one time.

My brother took some video with his cellphone while Adam still doing the zombie walk. Now he still holds up his left hand for balance as he toddles along. That leaves his right hand free for doing stuff. He's more and more clearly right-handed these days.

some recent photos

These are all from when Adam is 10 months old, except the first shot (almost 10 months old)

"See Adam, I know I wasn't in many of the pictures, but I was around while you were a baby."

pretty chill. And horizontal stripes do add ten pounds. :P

I like to call this piece "Over-exposed."

Not the best shot but it captures the delight from the piano.

A bit of a cleaner shot.

still chill

My cousin Bruce was in town on business one day and my Aunt Joan tagged along for the ride.

Things that make you go .... Hmmmm
Photo credit: Rebecca Ho

Pretty in Primary!
Guess Who.
Photo credit: Rebecca Ho

Eye Colour Ten Months Edition.
Click the photo to enlarge.

By the way, I tried the crop in on my own eye. Don't try it at home folks. It weren't pretty. I really didn't need to see the circles under my blood shot eyes, the crows feet, or every enlarged pore on my nose in such detail.

Adam's protovocabulary

Adam has been crying, "mum,mum,mum,mum" from his crib for months now. Certainly since well before New Year's Eve, when Steve Caranci gave us third-party verification.

Adam also performs the signs for "up," "yay," and "squeeze/squish." Squeeze is fun because it can make his rubber froggies "squirt" and his rubber giraffe "squeak." He's been waving for a while but is inconsistent in its application and often waves some 30-60 seconds after the triggering departure or arrival.

We think Adam might be saying "duck" to refer both to his rubber duckie and his rubber froggies. On Friday, Sai, Heather, and Kaitlin gave third-party verification to "banana." Banana is less frequently "banana" than it is "nana," "anana," "nanana," or even "banane."