Photo dump!

Ok. So after resolving to blog once a week here I am 2 months later. I'm not sure this blogging thing is really for me but David assures me it's better late than never. When I go too long without blogging I get more and more overwhelmed with the number of photos and thrilling events that simply must be posted so it becomes less and less likely I will ever tackle my mountain of un-blogged tidbits. My solution?  Photo dump! 

We went to Harrison Hot Springs and we loved it!  No joke. It was such an awesome little family getaway we will most certainly go back. 

Climbing on the couch admiring our March snowfall

On a walk at a creepy steamy swamp that David has been wanting to check out near Belcara. We didn't make it very far, I could blame the toddler...but really is was super-pregnant mommy who pulled the plug. 

"Please please please can I get this car?!?!"  Unfortunately we are broke so no- fortunately Henry is young so we convinced him that sitting in it in Costco was pretty much the same as buying it. 

Henry LOVES being outside and demands to go out to play everyday regardless of weather. Thank goodness for a MuddyBuddy. 

His hands were red and raw by the time we got him back in the house but he didn't seem phased. 

Assorted "outside playing" photos. 

As you can see the warm sunny weather has brought much joy to my outdoor loving little man. But with the highes come the lows and unfortunately our front yard has stairs made of concrete pavers.  Henry usually calls me (aka screeches) when he wants to walk down the stairs so I can come hold his hand but this time a noisy crow caught his attention and he walked right off the edge. 

He had some pretty impressive facial road rash that has lasted for days and days...he thinks it makes him look pretty tough. 

My baby is one!

Henry is one!

I can't quite believe that my baby is officially a toddler. I won't have much time to lament the passing of my baby's babyhood as I have another baby on the way (in 14 weeks! *freaks out*). Anyway, my first baby is a baby no longer although to be honest in many ways he is still quite baby-ish and I don't LOVE the baby phase so I'm actually pretty happy to turn the page. 

This blog post is WAY late coming. In general I am a pitiful blogger. Everything I think I know about blogging I learned from Nancy over at Heissatopia which is the one and only blog I follow regularly and I adore it. She is an amazing blogger and I strive to one day be as dedicated as her  but in the mean time I am lowering my bar and striving to blog once a week....ish (she does it almost every day, and has three kids!). Anyway. This entry is past due even by my low standards and to be honest it's because I was a bit intimidated by the title. I felt like this post had to be extra special since the subject was extra special. I was going to make a comprehensive list of all Henry's milestones. I was going to compile allll the birthday pics from all the relatives and regale you all with whimsical and tear jerking tales of my first year as a mother. I wanted you to all feel the love and pride I feel for my little Henry in the magical prose I laid out on this IPod keypad. But it was just too much. Too daunting a task. There is no way I can eloquently express the love and joy I feel when I look at Henry nor the pride and contentment that fills my heart when I reflect on the little family I am building with David.  So I won't try. All I will say is I love my life and I am excited for the future. And I am pleased as punch that we all made it through the first year relatively undamaged.

So here is my paltry little "Henry at one" list that has been sitting in the draft folder of my blog for two weeks. 

- he's walking... Really well. No running but very very confidently and steady walking

- he can go from standing, squat down (to grab something) and then stand back up and carry on

- he dances (a lot)

- he is doing lots of funny faces and is very expressive

- he is a ham. His main goal in life is to make people laugh. 

- he waves

- he has no words :( he makes "mama" "dada" sounds but I don't think they have much meaning behind them. 

So ya. There that is. 

Here are the few photos I found on mine and David's I phones. 

A preview of the party. I did a Dr Seuss theme and served green deviled eggs and ham sandwiches (it was pretty awesome)

Henry at the one year birthday party for him and all the babies from the maternity class we took. It was pretty cool to see all our littles together 

Henry and his BFF. My friend and I have decided that our sons are BFFs because I like hanging out with her but to be honest it's a bit of a battle. The boys are about as different as they get and Henry often ends up in tears at their play dates. But anywhoo, for now we will call them BFFs

Aaaaand Dr Seuss party #2 over at David's family's house. 

Ok. That's enough birthday pics. Henry went to a lot of birthday parties. He's a pretty popular dude. 

Oh and here is the cool "Henry's first year" pic I made for him. 

Phewfff. I'm glad that's done. 

Happy Birthday Henry!

It's been a while

It's been a while since I blogged. Just feeling a bit uninspired. We're all still under the weather and david has been working a ton so nothing too exciting going on here. 

David went to edmonton and the truck broke down (have I mentioned that I hate his job?) so he was gone longer than usual. Henry decided to keep me on my toes by slipping in the bathroom and hitting his head on two shelves, the scale and finally the tile floor on his way down. He wasn't too phased by it all but the bump and bruise was very dramatic. 

Henry showing off his first bruise. 

It really looks worse than it was. He is so pale that every little bump and scratch looks so bad!  I think he must have super sensitive skin. 

Daddy finally got home from work and we celebrated by going skating for the first time. I thought Henry would maybe tolerate it. I really couldn't see that being dragged around on ice skates could be that much fun but he LOVED it! I just watched (as I can't skate) while David and Henry whipped around and around the rink. It was quite the sight to see such a little guy out there. He had all the ladies ogling him and his adorable-ness.  We rented the smallest skates and helmet they had (which were still huge on him) and he was surprisingly steady when walking in his skates. 

Getting ready (he had to wear his toque under his helmet to get it to even kind of fit)

They gave him a little shopping cart to push around (which he couldn't do) but he liked playing with it 

Relaxing on a skate break

Now people have been commenting (sometimes rather aggressively) that Henry needs a hair cut. It hurt my mommy heart to think about cutting off his beautiful baby locks but to be honest I could see his hair was getting a bit nasty.  Some hair he has from newborn-hood, so it was getting pretty long and he still has some pretty sparse/ bald areas. This made for a rather patchy look. Also everyone thinks he's a girl!  I blame this on his fine delicate features and angel face...but to be honest the long hair wasn't helping. 

So this morning Henry woke up at an ungodly hour and after some parental jostling I got up and let David sleep in. In this sleepy, heavily caffeinated state I decided to TRIM just the longer bits of Henry's hair while he was sitting so nicely in his highchair. I underestimated the level of difficulty involved in trimming, with scissors, a squiggly baby's hair. 

The stylish (all be it patchy) hair cut mommy gave Henry. 

I will admit it wasn't great but I had every intention if returning to the job to even it out once daddy woke up and could provide an extra set of hands. 

Well David woke up (a bit grumpy??) and was shocked and horrified that I had not only cut his sons hair without consultation (it was only a trim!) but that I had done such an aweful job. He got out the clippers and buzzed it. 

It looks aweful (sorry David and Henry but it's the truth). As previously stated Henry is pale...like otherworldly pale, and his hair is light and fine. Cut that pale boys light, fine hair short and he looks sick...like sickly sick, not cool sick. 

The finished product. 

He looks SO different. It is very unnerving to not recognize your own child. I am still getting used to this little buzzed head running around. 

To be fair he seems to love it. And I think with a couple weeks of growth it could be ok. In the mean time I am watching YouTube tutorials on stylish at home boys haircuts. With my matleave over, austerity measures are kicking into overdrive and with another little boy in the way I see plenty more at-home haircuts in our future. Hopefully with a bit of practice we can achieve something slightly more stylish than the sheep shearing that went on today. 

Sick!

And we are sick again. 

After our brutal long lasting cold, Henry started vomiting a few nights ago. It passed relatively quickly and apart from the throwing up he was in pretty good spirits. 

On Friday night I woke up sick and spent all day Saturday with a pretty violent stomach bug. I assume I got it from Henry but mine seems to be worse that his was (or maybe I'm just the bigger baby). I ended up spending Saturday evening in the ER due to some pretty extreme dehydration and being pregnant no one wanted to take a chance. After some IV fluids and anti nausiants I was feeling pretty good. Still tired and a bit shakey but the vomiting passed quickly. 

The morning after my trip to the hospital I woke up and guess what?  David is sick! David has spent all day today in bed with the same stomach bug.

My lovely view right now :)

I hope we are through the worst of this bug and I hope we are through the worst of this flu season. I have never seen such a bad winter for colds and flu. We have been sick non stop!  I think some of it is the fact that Henry catches everything (thank you play groups and the fact that he puts everything in his mouth). That and the fact that I'm pregnant. I seem to have the immune system of a 90 year old. 

Henry showing off how good he is feeling with a little dress up/ interpretive dancing 

My boys

So as many of you may have heard I went in for my 20week detailed ultra sound. It's crazy that I am already at the half way mark of this pregnancy. David and I decided we wanted to find out the sex of the baby. We found out with Henry and it worked great for us. We like being able to pick the name and get everything all ready for the new one. I also find it helps me to connect with the baby in utero when I know the sex and the baby has a name etc. 

so without further ado. #2 is a ...... BOY!

To be totally honest I was about %99 sure that it was a girl (I guess my mothers intuition is a bit out of whack). So I was pretty shocked when the ultrasound tech told me it was a boy. I asked her to double check lol. But she assured me that it is for sure a boy.  I'm really excited to have another boy. I think David is secretly happy to be a daddy of two little boys as that is a role he's pretty comfortable with. I think he imagines himself coaching their sports teams, teaching them to skate, building go karts ...all the fun daddy stuff. Also Henry and the new baby are going to be SO close in age that I think it's nice for them to be the same sex. I hope they will be best friends. 

I had a little bit of a panic attack after the ultra sound appointment about having a second baby. I think finding out the sex and seeing the little baby made me really realize that it's real, there is really another baby on the way. I am finding it hard to imagine how I am going to manage having a newborn and a 16month old at home. Henry doesn't sleep through the night and is very clingy and baby-ish (duh, he is a baby). I'm trying to think about how I'm going to manage feeding a newborn (every 3 hours) with Henry tugging at me an getting into everything, how to mange 2 nap schedules (in a pretty tight space) and 2 babies up at night. Also David is starting his program at BCIT when the baby is 3 months old. So I know he is going to be so busy and focused on school and I worry I won't be able to manage on my own. Blaaaarg!  I know it will be fine because I have a ton of support and because, well, it just has to be fine. But I would be lying if I said it wasn't keeping me up at night. 

Henry is throwing up every night!  What's up with that?!?  This is his first bout of real true throwing up (not milky baby spit up) and I can't figure out why it's happening. He has no other symptoms and seems fine during the day. But for the last two nights he has been up violently vomiting. 

Here's my late night sicko

Of course he's in bed with me when he vomits and he isn't very good at communicating that he's about to vomit so it goes everywhere. I won't get into the graphic details but lets just say that at 3 am I am up doing laundry. 

Unfortunatly for Mr BunBun he is on the front line and both nights received the brunt of the assault and had to do a turn in the washing machine. Henry was upset to loose his bunny and watched forlornly as BunBun slowly dried in front of the fireplace. 

11 months

Henry is now 11 months old!  He seems to have gone from baby to little kid over night. I wonder if he went through some big developmental leap/ wonder week type thing while we were all sick and we didn't notice. I feel like every day he is doing new things and he just seems different somehow.  Walking is obviously the big milestone but those first steps seemed to have opened the floodgate and ushered him into toddler-hood in many ways. 

The big change is his communication. He suddenly figured out some subtle ways to communicate and it has really made me realize how much he understands things going on around him. When we say "kiss" he plants an open wet mouth on our face (love this).  When he sees a bottle and is feeling peckish he pulls his soother out to signal he would like it replaced with a bottle. He claps. He high-fives. He innitiates games of peekaboo. He points to what he wants and where he wants to go.  This is fun but also a lot of work since he is getting quite demanding. It's like before he would forgive his ignorant parents as we simpletons simply didn't understand what he wanted but now, now he knows we know what he wants and that we are willfully ignoring him. He gets squawky and sometime downright outraged when we don't heed his commands to go somewhere or to be brought something (usually food). He also had his first full blown public temper tantrum meltdown a couple days ago. We were at a local park / lake and I took him out of his stroller thinking he would like to stand by the waters edge to admire the ducks.  He loves ducks, we walk at this park almost every day and he always admires the ducks. Well since he had been released from the shackles of his stroller he was not content to stand idly by and simply watch the ducks. He went limp and crumpled to the ground in an effective maneuver to free himself from his mothers grip, he hit the ground and started crawling, through the mud to the water. I quickly scooped him up and it kicked off. Screaming, writhing, bucking. He layed on the bark mulch path and wailed. Plagued with all the injustices in the world and cursing his blasted mother who would not let him crawl into the lake and out to meet his ducks (and certain death). 

So I guess I am enjoying seeing more and more personality and understanding in Henry. But it seems to have made him a very willfull and demanding little man. Hopefully as the initial flush of power wanes so to will the demanding ways. 

Generally he has been a bit of a pill lately.  Not sleeping well, refusing to nap (maybe trying to drop down to one nap/day???) and generally having trouble regulating his emotions. Hopefully it's all just a phase an we will settle back into a nice little routine soon enough. 

A 3am self portrait of a bitterly under slept daddy

Henry climbing the back of the couch. His walking seems to have generally made him more brave and confident in his physical abilities. 

Tunneling....endless tunneling. 

He walks!!!!!

Henry took his first steps today!!!! (well technicaly last night but that was just one sad little shaky step and Daddy was at work so it doesn't count). So Dec 31 2013 is the official big day (incase anyone would like to note it in their calendar). Henry decided he simply could not begin 2014 as a crawler.  So he toddled his way into the new year.

I never fail to be amazed at how FAST little guys learn. Last night was his first tentative step, this morning he was stringing a few little shaky steps together and by the time David got home from work in the afternoon he was doing 5-10 purposeful and confident strides in a row.  Amazing. 

and the video evidence. Not the first first steps. But steps from the first day of walking...so good enough. 

In less exciting news Henry also mastered his crawl-through tunnel that his uncle hunter gave him for Christmas. He has been interested in it for the last week and would poke his head in for a look. But today he crawled all the way through!  again, and again and again... so I would say he's conquered the tunnel.  

All these milestones in one day. And after the WORST night. Henry has been sick (as you may have heard) and his Dr gave him some one-time liquid medicine to try and help clear his lungs. I'm not sure if it upset his stomach or gave him a headache or what but he started SCREAMING about 6 hours later. My baby doesn't scream (be jealous) he whines and maybe even cries on a bad day but he has never been a screamer. So it freaked me out and of course David was on the road. I didn't know what to do. He flailed and bucked and screamed. I rocked him, gave him Mr BunBun and cried a little bit myself but nothing helped.  He just screamed - for hours.  It was aweful. Finally at about 1 am he just passed out and slept till 830. So that's it, I have no idea what the problem was and I was so grateful it passed quickly and I hope it never happens again. 

And here is a lovely sleepy morning Henry (not screaming). David and I often wake up to this sleepy little face in bed with us and I love it. 

and finally Henry and Lightning McQueen as promised!