Baby's Eye View

Weebles Wobble

The Lizard of Lounge

O you sexy thing!

Mommy, do I really have a tractor ass?

Bucky

Kian's got a second tooth pushing through and its almost caught up with the other so now he looks like a gopher with teeth fit for felling trees, cracking walnuts, building dams. Okay, beaver teeth!

And his crawl... last night I positively saw him perform a normal crawl for the first time ever, or at least I think I saw it. He's been mobile for weeks but its hard to fathom just how he gets from one place to the next: a roll this way, a backwards crawl, another roll, stretch, crawl, and the next thing you know he's made it across the room and is sipping mimosa's from his bumbo chair. Anyway, last night I'm sure I watched him crawl forwards like a normal baby, I shouted to Annie but she missed it.

Back to his teeth. I spent a good chunk of an evening it seems trying to capture those teeth on film, preserve the moment for posterity, but Kian wasn't in the mood for cooperating. He was in the mood for making my life miserable and he was having a good time doing it. The slow shutter of my camera didn't help. So, instead of a shot of his buckies you get a veritable goose chase.

"Okay Kian, lets get a toothy shot for the grandmas and grandpas,
help me out here, smile!

Ah, that was close but we missed the teeth,
open up little man!

Nah nah... don't grab, stay still...

D'oh! Bad shutter timing on that one.
Come on, don't grab, oh (btw nice fat sleeves)...

Okay funny boy, would you quit horsing around
and show yer toofers, pleeeeeese!

C'mon, open up and lift them gums...

Get a little closer... closer, don't touch...

Oh, too close, back up... o damn (shit, did i say damn)

Oh yeah, this is it, open the gums, here it is, smile, shutter...
no, watch your hands, ah ah!

Well, here is the best I could do.

I'll try him again when he's a little more tired and less apt to mess with daddy. If that doesn't work I'll hog tie the little monkey. Pictures, MORE PICTURES!

Kiki Fresh

I didn't realize that there were so many pictures on my camera. I forgot that Annie had put together some photo shoots of Kian so we've got loads of shots with odd poses in funky outfits. All cute, of course.





Last weekend we stayed local except for a day trip -- a very loooooong day trip -- up to Snoqualmie Pass for another one of daddies races. A 50k race that seemed to take for-ever! It did take forever, almost 3-hours, because the conditions were so horrendous and slow which made for an extra especially brutal race. Daddy cried and at the finish line he collapsed, weeping. Then we got stuck in traffic but backtracked to Cle Elum for food: Daddy was hungry. But his plan to let the traffic subside backfired and we ended up sitting in traffic for-ever, and didn't get home until super late on a school night.

More later....

Baby in a Bottle

Annie was out and I was home with Kian for a few hours, so I put together this snowglobe that I'd bought and put Kian's picture in it. When she came home and saw it on the table she said her first thought was that I had pickled Kian.

P.S. Madelay

Finally, like the pictures of Loch Ness or Bigfoot, this picture proves the existence of a rare specimen that I have been touting the existence of for years: 5 rows from the top you will see "Canadiano", a drink that I have been ordering unsuccessfully in Canada for 4 or 5 years now, ever since that first one that I had in Nelson, BC many years ago. Apparently the Canadiano -- a double shot of espresso buried in a strong cup of coffee -- is making a slow but successful comback into its natural habitat and its my prediction that it won't be long before you'll find them in coffee shops everywhere.

If you blow up that shot you will notice the small sign on the left: we tried to option that threat but decided Kian was already getting enough caffeine through his milk supply keeping him happily high strung. And we've got more than enough poop to deal with as it is.

Contrabando

Like to see that smile! That's definitely not a squint.

A couple more firsts this past weekend:

Kian's first time out of the country: Canada!
Kian's first time skiing 4+ hours: Pooped!
Kian's first time scavenging an RV plug-in: Poached!
Kian's first illegal border crossing: Smuggled!

We almost didn't get the weekend off to a start at all -- an alternator blow-out from our last adventure meant that we were scrambling to get a new one installed. I pulled the alternator at lunch on Thursday, Annie exchanged the burnt one for a new one in the afternoon (Can you say warranty? Its spelled F-R-E-E), and then I installed it in the dark that night so that we could roll ASAP Friday morning. Lot's of touch-n-go happening, but it all worked out and we crossed the border by Noonish.

But woops! We forgot Kian's papers of authenticity and decided that instead of aborting our plans we'd play things by ear. Playing stupid is our strong suit and it works pretty well in America, but getting back into our own country was going to be our biggest challenge. However, we had 4-days with Monday off of work to hatch a plan, so our priority became maximizing the fun and skiing until then.

Annie drove the Tortuga into Vancouver and I rode my bike from the border and we rendezvoused in Stanley Park. Vietnamese for dinner then drove up to Squamish for the night.

The new Whislter Olympic Nordic Center on Saturday. Skied 3-ish hours, amazing, you saw the pics posted yesterday.



Then up to Whistler Village, the Disneyland of ski resorts, to plug in for the night and to ski the less steep Lost Lake trail system. Kian was a hit in the village sporting his furry Scandinavian booboo-bear ski suit.

Lost Lake was awesome! This place has it all: flats for towing the boy, tons of superfun rollers and zippy turns, and epic steeps and above alpine skiing. The perfect weather helped. Pics below.

Stick a fork in me, Daddy!

Got milk?

Kian's got a belly full of the stuff, you can tell by his
rosy cheeks and his glazed eyes. Somebody cut that boy off.

Another Whata Weekend

The Whistler Nordic Olympic Village was our first cross-country stop of the weekend and we wished that we'd had more time to ski here, it was amazing! But it was tough, steep, especially when towing a trailer full of baby.




Kian and I set off up the Madeley Lake Trail and were confronted with a squal: in 30-minutes the trail and the trailer took on about 2 inches of snow, but we soldiered onwards, and after several 1,000 vertical feet of climbing we were rewarded: Madaley Lake, no way! And sunshine, yes way!




After skiing, we drove up to Whistler-Blackcomb and found a primo place to plug-in for warmth (the low was -10 celcius) just a 10-minute walk to the village. While Annie cooked and entertained the boys, Daddyfresh mixed up some fixins and put his resourcefulness to work: icicles with sticks for ice cubes and swizlesticks.



This was probably my favorite winter weekend of the season this year, and these pics represent just one of four days. Kian is having a blast these days but is wearing his emotions on his sleeve, so if he's not having a blast we know it. The reason that we don't have many pics of his grumpy moments, even though we're striving to show it all here, is that we're usually called into action when Kian speaks.