Harrison Takes His First Steps!!

Harrison took his first steps on Friday morning, and is sooo proud! I don't think I've ever seen him grin quite as wide as he does when he's walking. He took his first single step for me on Thursday night, and I felt awful that Rob was at firefighting and didn't see it. In a show of beautiful symmetry however, he took his first series of steps the next morning for Rob while I was upstairs sleeping. He's repeated the performance several times, and manages about 5 or 6 steps each time. Heidi, previously totally uninterested in any sort of walking activity is now trying as hard as she can to replicate her twin brother and will likely take her steps any day now. She is trying to walk on tip toe though, so that could be a little more challenging. Her obsession is sitting. She moves around the house going from one seat to another. When she arrives she sits for a moment, looks around, smiles, and then pushes on to the next seat. Her favourite seat these days is a Tow Mater push car that Harrison likes to hold on to and walk. When he's done, she crawls over, climbs up onto the seat side saddle and swings her feet happily.

It's been a week/3 days full of milestones! Moments before I sat down to write this Harrison said his first word! No. Same as Brendan's first word, apparently I raise instictively oppositional children. He's been repeating it (in very situationally appropriate ways) as I attempt to write this blog entry. I told Rob just now when he came in and Rob said "oh yeah, he's been saying that a lot lately". In a similar anticlimactic presentation, I suppose this is a good time to declare Heidi's first word; Dadadad. She has been saying it for about a month now in a wide variety of situations; when Rob comes home, when she sees Blaze, when she's playing with her Cheerios, so we'd been reluctant to call it a clear first word. However, she has begun to become a little more specific lately, and Rob always gets Dadad, and Blaze always gets Dad, which sounds an awful lot like Dog when she says it to Blaze. The Cheerios still get Dadad too, but lets not be too picky!

On Friday, the twins also had their 1 year checkup. Heidi is 18 pounds, 11 ounces and Harrison is a whopping 22 pounds 8 ounces. Despite eating better than her brother at every meal, Heidi continues to skip along at the 6th percentile for weight. She's only just barely on the growth charts but absolutely consistant. As the doctor so eloquently put it "I think she's just going to be small". Wee Heidi. Her head, however, continues to be above average. For the third checkup in a row, her noggin is at the 75th percentile for size. She must be brilliant. If Heidi's head is big Harrsions's is massive. At his last checkup his cranium was tipping the scales at levels the put him just over the 95th percentile. That's the top of the graph! This time it's even farther above the curve leading this proud mama to declare he has the largest head, of any child, ever. And that's supported with statistics. For reference Brendan's head was also freakishly large - 90th percentile. Since he was 10 months old, Brendan's baseball cap has fit me. Snugly, but fit me. So I guess that means my genetic code for males selects for both giant heads and stubborn personalities. Harrison's length is right at the 50th percentile, and his weight is right around the 40th, so he's not extreme in all ways! Just because I'm on a role comparing numbers, Brendan was 19 pounds 3 ounces at his first birthday - right between the two twins. Interesting!

It's felt like a big week; we hosted the twins first birthday party yesterday with friends and neighbours. It was a fairly low key event - the standard Lock backyard pool party we do regularly with extra helium balloons and extravagant murals by Brendan on the windows. We did have a bouncy castle and some "TwinOlympic" events and lots of kids running around. How life has changed! 5 years ago Brendan was the only baby around and yesterday we had baby neighbours Micheal, Jeff, Sean, and little friends Reid, Colton, Callum, Owen and Will. Forget physiotherapy, Rob and I need to open a day care!

Another huge change this week is going to seem very anticlimactic to everyone but me. After hours of research (not an exageration) I discovered that it is possible to fit 3 car seats across in a Corolla. I thought I had exhausted this topic before the babies were born, and again when Brendan grew big enough for a backless booster (about 6 months ago), but after buying 3 different boosters and having to return them because they didn't fit I gave up. Well, if at first you don't succeed... I spare you, mercifully, the full details, but long story short we can now stuff all three kids stuffed into the Corolla when we need to. I'm thrilled to not have to bring the gigantic truck everywhere we go. Rob not so much. Blaze also not so much, since he hasn't a snowballs chance in... uh, Arizona, of fitting in the backseat with the rest of the brood. We also could never fit a weekends worth of stuff for all of us in the trunk, especially now that we've gotten used to the luxury of entire truck bed worth of gear. But at least we now have a choice of vehicles when we drive into town for errands or Kingston for appointments and I'm not stranded at home if Rob has taken the truck to a fire call.

We had a wonderful neighbourhood birthday party for Rob last weekend. Our crazy neighbour Roslyn had planned a Hillbilly Marathon, complete with costumes and Mr. Clean lemon punch in a wash bucket. Everyone dutifully attempted to run the 5 kilometer loop around Lonsdale. Attempted is the operative word however, as it was a very hot day, and there are several obscenely large hills on the route. Several of the neighbours took it quite seriously however, stopping only once for beer and a swim at our place and were quite demoralized to be beat by an 11 year old who joined us on a whim for the run. Aging sucks.

The fun continues this week; we're off for two nights camping with my brother and his family; Brendan is over the moon - he absolutely adores "Widgee" and Rowan. We'll be at Silent Lake, near Bancroft, a new park for us, so we're excited. That marks the beginning of the end however, as it's the last camping trip we have planned for the year. We're home on Wednesday, and then on Saturday I leave for a vacation to Las Vegas. Almost 7 days of childless time (I'm going with 3 other neighbourhood girls), I may do nothing but sleep. Rob is totally unfazed by his week of non-stop parenting though - I don't know how he does it - father of the year. After that, the party is over; Brendan starts school the Wednesday following and Rob and I start work the same day. The end of an era. It may also be the end of the blog, I can't imagine how we're going to have time to do anything; we'll see though. In the meantime, enjoy the sunshine and wish Rob luck next week!!!

Testing, testing...

I have finally gotten a new fancy phone in honour of starting work in a few weeks so this is a test post of the new onboard camera and of the blogger app. We bought a new collapsible high chair in my ongoing quest to regain floor space, it's the red one!

Home At Last

Well, it is true. Sane people should probably not try to camp for 10 days with 1 year old twins (and a 5 year old and a rather large dog). People who have long ago (say a year...) lost their sanity should go ahead and do it, since they have nothing to lose! It was wonderfully exciting to hit the road and see new terrain these last 10 days, and it was a very special trip of firsts for Brendan. Among the highlights were the sort of memories that great nostalgic movies are made out of like learning to ride your bike without the training wheels (he's a very quick learner!), first rescue pet (Brendan found an injured dragon fly and "nursed it back to health" - it "flew away" on the third day after Brendan found it) and those first tastes of freedom (there was a swing set within sight of our first campsite that we let him go to if he returned at a specified time on his watch - he did beautifully, very law abiding, this kid). We roasted marshmallows on the fire, and weiners, played on the beach for hours (we were lucky enough to have been able to reserve campsites 100 feet from the beach at both campgrounds), read bedtime stories beside the campfire and stayed up late. Doesn't it sound so idyllic?!

Our only real downer of the trip was the constantly impending rain. For essentially the entire trip the weather was in a state of "will it or wont it". As a result we were constantly setting up outside for lunch; high chairs, cooler, food, water and then deciding two hours later that it was about to start raining so we'd put it all away again. After repetition number 100, that got old, but it was very, er, cramped in the trailer so trying to all cram in there was hardly a better option. We found some creative solutions to our space issue; instead of the bulky double stroller, we turned our side by side bike trailer into a multipurpose stroller, bike trailer, place to lie down and have a bottle, luggage carrier combo. We tried a variety of sleeping arrangements and eventually slept with Blaze tucked under the main bed (the folded down sofa), Brendan in the upper bunk, one baby in a playpen and one baby under the kitchen table with a gate across the two benches to enclose that area. Trying to attend to that crying baby in the middle of the night required some fairly advanced gymnastics, but believe it or not it was preferable to the gymnastics required to squeeze around the second playpen when it was set up. It also meant you could open the door to the bathroom. Yay for portapotties! Outside we set up two tents; one for Brendan to play in with his toys and another for the babies to play in. The baby tent essentially worked as a giant mosquito proof playpen and worked amazingly. We did occasionally let the babies out to explore on their own, but they got so filthy so quickly, and ingested so many pine cones that it hardly seemed worth it.

Harrison grew his first top tooth a few days into the trip and finally had the second top tooth poke through this morning. That makes four teeth for each of them now! Heidi is sporting quite a gap, which just adds to her not-so intellectual look. (:

The twins had some not bad nights of sleep and a some fairly horrible nights, thanks I think in large part to those teeth (Heidi is working on the upper tooth, left of the middle pair). Naps were rough too... but enough complaining!

We left at 4 am, in a desperate attempt to find a way to make driving to Northern Ontario more manageable. We stopped once for an hour to feed the babies breakfast in the camper around 7 am near Port Perry and then didn`t have to stop again until we arrived at Marten River Provincial Park (45 minutes north of North Bay) about 11:30. Northern Ontario before noon! We may leave at 4 am everywhere we go! Martin River is on the southern border of the Temagami area; very pretty, with lots of Eastern White Pine, and very reminiscent of Algonquin or Killarney. We did a great hike on our third day here through the forest to a 300 year old pine. I had bought a new camera (yeah for Shoppers Optimum Points) with a fancy panorama feature that I made good use of with all these tall, tall trees, and wide forest vistas. We stayed here for 4 nights and then headed onto Ivanhoe Lake Provincial Park for another 4 nights. This was a full days drive north through Timmins through all sorts of places I've always heard of like New Liskeard, Kirkland Lake (where Rob's grandfather lived for a while) and Matheson (where my grandfather worked for a while) so that was very cool. The scenery was nothing like what we expected. Around New Liskeard it was positively prarie-like, and the pictureasque Canadian Shield abruptly ended north of Temagami and didn't start again until we were driving home. All the areas north were full of white Silver Birch forests, and Ivanhoe Lake itself was full of sand dunes, moss and lichen. So, we've had to adjust our mental picture of Northern Ontario... isn't that what travel is all about! Sadly, we weren't able to connect with our cousins in Timmins, they had a wedding to attend, but we kept ourselves busy with bike rides, hikes and more trips to the beach. We even did made bannock on the fire (see picture) in a ranger led program. Finally, it was time to head home. We'd had some hope that we might be able to cover the distance in one day, but realized that was both unrealistic and inhumane to the poor kids in the backseat (especially Blaze), so we stopped at an awesome KOA in Parry Sound, that as you can judge from the previous post almost had us excited to stay on the road an extra day. Sadly, amusement parks are less amusing in the rain, so we drove over to Huntsville to ride their Steam Train instead for the twins birthday, and then hit the highway for home. I have to say, it was a wonderful trip, but by the home stretch I don't think a single one of the 6 of us wanted to be in that truck one minute more.

Fianlly about 10 oclock last night we made it Home Sweet Home. Hallelujah.

Change of plans

Change of plans- rough night and heavy rain threatening, I think we'll make it home tonight. This #&%$ rain has been a defining feature of this trip. The new plan is to take the babies on their first steam train ride for their birthday.

Happy birthday!

Very quick update - we're not home yet... We made it to Parry Sound tonight on our way home from Timmins and are settled in at a very nice KOA (with free wifi no less! ). However, instead of making the twins sit in the truck for 5 hours to celebrate their birthday we've decided to stay another day and take them to Santa's Village tomorrow. Brendan may also enjoy himself. (: Rob says he always wanted to go and I feel guilty that we didn't buy the twins any presents, so we'll be home soon (we think) and again (its midnight now ) Happy Birthday to my Happy Babies!