Here is tinker visiting with an Abbotsford cat this afternoon.

She's not sure about that cat...

But Davey seemed to like him. He was such a friendly cat. And really liked strokes.

Here Davey is telling me about how he fell over and scraped his elbow.

But somehow it turned into a story about how he lost (and found) his arm...

Laughing at his hilarious story...

Back to Tinker and the cat:

Snacking on butter cups.

Then she wanted to stand with daddy.

But when Davey saw me taking a picture, he wanted to come and be in one too.

Somehow I feel like we had a crazy weekend, but in retrospect we didn't really do all that much. Strange how that happens sometimes. On the other hand, we have a HUGELY busy 8 days ahead of us (well, I do) and it's already making me tired!

Here's a picture of the kidlets having their morning bottle. Yes, I still let Davey have a bottle. Especially with him having been sick so much this spring I feel it's important for him to get some kind of nutrient in him. And we don't drink milk (davey is massively allergic anyway) so this is one way to do it.

Elisabeth likes to get some stretching in while she drinks.

I tried to get a picture of Jade, David and Elisabeth, but Ellie would only cry. Her crying seemed to bring out the maternal side of Jade...


But this is what happened to Davey:


Davey loves hugging and kissing his sister. She's not always so receptive to it. See the protective hand on her back?

And how he's leaning in to give her a snuggle? And notice how she's leaning as far away from him as she can?? Little rat!


Yesterday, Elisabeth decided to start trying to pull up on things. She's tried on our couch before, but there aren't really any good places to get a good handhold so she usually ends up falling over. Yesterday she managed to get to standing several times though. Encouraged by this, today she decided to try proper crawling (as opposed to the sitting down scooting she normally does). She's been crawling up a storm today, though she does alternate between scooting and crawling.

We also discovered that she likes to practice these tricks in bed. A couple of weeks ago she was crying in her bed and Andrew found her sitting up against the back of it. To our knowledge she couldn't sit up on her own. Then last week I found her stuck on her belly...she'd been rolling over and got caught in her bedclothes. Only she's never rolled over in our sight before. If she falls onto her back she only lies there crying until you rescue her.

So obviously she could both roll over and sit up, just she only does it in secret. Well it seems maybe she's more confident in her ability as she's started sitting up, rolling over and crawling in public now. I wonder if walking will follow soon?

Elisabeth Crawls...sort of

My mum keeps telling me I need to video Tinkie's scooting. It's so funny how she gets around. So here's a shot from this evening.

A Monster of A Duet!

Anyone out there remember the Gaither Album that came out for kids? And the Monster Song from there? Davey LOVES it and makes me sing it to him continuously. So tonight after I'd gotten a shot of Tinkie scooting, he wanted to sing for the camera. And this is what he choose. But pay careful attention to the sound of Tink trying to sing along with him...I think this illustrates perfectly how she's always trying to imitate every sound we make!!

Eensy Weensy Spider

You are My Sunshine

So incredibly, super, busy

On Sunday we went out to Fort Langley. We decided to stroll over to the train museum to show Davey the trains and SURPRISE! For the first time ever when we've been there, it was open! So here's Davey looking all mad because, "It is NOT!" the way you would sit to ride on a real train (I guess he noticed this one doesn't move?)

Tinky sitting on one of the steps off the train.

Well, he liked this part.
This caboose has a model train set up on the inside. The far car is set up with several different things inside and lots of information. The lady working on Sunday used to commute between Ontario and BC regularly. She lived in Ontario and worked out here. Now that's quite the commute!





While the guys checked out the model train, Tink and I checked out the flowers in the grounds.

Then we had to walk down to the river to check out the flood levels.




And have some lunch.

Got this awesome shot of all Davey's hair, thought I would share it with you all. It's coming in like crazy now. He's got a real quirky curl to his hair. The day after his bath it's very curly all over...very cherubic. But by the middle of the week it's pretty much straight except for this one crazy section through the top of his head. No matter how much I try to tame his hair, this is how it ends up. Lucky for him crazy hair is en vogue these days...

And below, a great shot of him making eye contact with the camera. He especially liked this shot, though he commented, "My shirt is wet. I need a new one" after seeing it.

On Wednesday night my friend Nicole came over to watch CNTM with me. Davey just would not go to sleep and after checking on him several times over the course of the evening, I finally got him up at about 830. We were snuggling on the couch and watching TV and I noticed he was really really hot. Sure enough, after tylenol and a Popsicle, he still had a temperature of 88.4. Yesterday I noticed he was getting pimply type sores on his lips. But since he's getting molars and drooling a lot, I thought it was just from the drool. Nope, today the sores looked worse so I googled it and sure enough, he has Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease.

I also wanted to document some of the cute words my kids are saying.

Tink is actually saying quite a few words, though right now they all sound very similar, but here they are

cat
dat (usually with a finger pointed at something she wants)
Da or Da Da (for daddy)
Day or Day Day (for Davey)
mumma (but only if she's stuck somewhere or Davey is making her mad)

She loves to look at our family picture in the hallway and point to Daddy and Davey and say their names. She also will have long conversations with you if you show any interest in what she's saying. Of course it only makes sense to her at this point.

Davey gets very excited every time we drive over any of the local "fridges". The Port Mann is currently his favorite.

Hmnn, I obviously spent too much time talking about Tink. I've forgotten the other things I wanted to say about Davey. It'll come to me...

Happy Birthday Miss Ash!

Ten Months Old Today!

This is the dress my neice Emma wore for our wedding waaaaaaaay back in 2001.

Found some pictures

Monday night a very exhausted Tinky went to bed at 6 pm. That's a good 60-90 minutes earlier than usual. She's been waking up pretty regularly at either 2 am or 5 am for a bottle then going back to sleep till about 7. Well she slept from 6pm till 5 am, had her bottle and slept until I woke her up at 1130am!!! WOW. The only thing Andrew and I can think of (since she has no other symptoms of not being well) is that she's growing. So I measured her this morning: 30.5 inches! That means she's about an inch taller than Davey was at a year old!

Just now I was looking at Davey and thinking he's really tall so I measured him too...39 inches on the dot. That's 3 inches in the 7 months since his birthday. Wow. No wonder I seem to go through clothes like crazy on them.

Davey has been personalizing songs more. Take Monday for example: We'd just spent a very naughty half hour in London Drugs with Davey tormenting his sister the whole time I was trying to talk to very nice man in the camera department. Once we were in the car on our way home Davey reverted back to "sweet child" mode and began singing "You are my Mummy, my only mummy. You make me happy..." Melt my heart! (oh, and he's not deliberately naughty...I think he's trying to play with Tinky. But she doesn't like it when he touches her, her hair or even her half of the stroller...she's a rotten little sweetie.)

And speaking of my angelic daughter, she's been scooting for a while. This morning she scooted all over the living room, examining anything interesting she found along the way. She stopped briefly at my computer to gnaw on the printer cable and then made her way to hers and Davey's bedroom where she's happily playing with the jingle bells in there.

Which reminds me. After hours of crying, we did manage to get her to fall asleep in her crib in her room last week. But since then she absolutely will not even go in the crib, crying hysterically if we even get her near to it. So this morning I moved the play pen into my closet and we'll see if she'll sleep in that. Cause seriously, she's getting permanent grooves on her head from being squished into that bassinet!!

It's her TEN MONTH birthday today, so once we've got ourselves a bit more organized I'll try and get a picture to add to this posting...

This is Davey and Drew on the balcony of our hotel room at Harrison Hot Springs last year. Why did I choose to reuse this picture? Well, apart from the fact that it's almost a year ago (it was last june), we decided to skip church today and head out to Harrison for a beach day.

For those of you who have never been, Harrison has the most amazing sand and they're actually world renowned for it...so much so that they have sand sculpture competitions there every year. It's also a lake that is surrounded on every side by mountains, so I think it's one of the most beautiful beaches in the world!

So, beach lovers that we are, we packed a picnic, some sand toys and lots of sunscreen and headed out to play. We got there at 11, which was already too late for finding an easy parking spot right on the beach, but we loaded up the double stroller and hiked a whole block and found a great spot for sand castle building right by the lagoon. Usually I don't like to be by the lagoon, I prefer the open lake, but because it's still fairly early in the season we thought the water would be warmer.

Turns out our daughter is quite the beach bum. Though we've been to Crescent beach loads of times, we've never set her down in the sand with a shovel and let her play. She was so good. She didn't try to eat the sand at all, though she would forget that her shovel was sandy and absentmindedly start sucking on it and get a mouthful of sand every now and then. She would copy everything we were doing (scooping the sand, scraping it away, trying to dig). We dug a big moat and piled all the sand in the middle to build a big mountain with a castle on top. Well she kept scooting over to the moat and trying to scoop up the water. Later she just wanted to dangle her fingers in it.

Every hour and a half or so I would take her in to the water to desand her and reapply sun screen. HOLEY MOLEY does she ever love the water! She was so excited, jumping up and down and laughing. Even when I would sweep her across the top of the water she laughed. I had her standing in water up to her armpits and she thought that was the greatest. So apparently we need to take her swimming more often!

And of course Davey has always been a beach bum. He's not quite so free in the water, but he does love digging and playing with sand. And he kept trying to liberate our little plastic fish and seahorse by tossing them into the lake as far as he could.

Just before we left Harrison, I headed into Beach Potato to have a look round. By the time I came out both kids were zonked out. Slept through diaper changes, being put in their car seats and most of the way home!!

It's strange going through life without a camera to document every second. Yesterday I had Dave's camera. But we were still out with it and he needed it...so today I decided we wouldn't steal it. I thought it might be good for me to experience a day without being more absorbed in taking ten million pictures. I sure missed having it. So many good picture ops...

We went to the Aquarium. And you know, it was nice not to have to keep track of a camera. Or to be trying to decide whether to take pictures or focus on the kids.

It was SO hot today. And we watched both the beluga show and the dolphin show. Both the kids were really impressed by the dolphin show. Davey got a big concerned when the announcers were saying where the splash zones were for the beluga show. Kept insisting he was too hot and wanted to go inside. When that didn't work, he tried standing behind us so we'd get splashed and not him. He's pretty smart. I'm surprised he could hear the announcer, let alone put all that together. Anyway, we watched part of the show, then he and I went and stood far away (we weren't in the splash zone before, but...). Apparently when the belugas did splash people, Tinky just pointed and laughed at all the dripping people who were in the splash zone!

tink may or may not be sleeping in her crib! YAH!



Exercising his faith: Davey's two favorite things to say? "the Lord is coming!" and "Jesus is beautiful". My little preacher/prophet :)