Our Baby Size Life!

Posts Tagged ‘summer’

We are a couple of weeks past the official end of the summer season, which brings with it mixed feelings. On one hand: summer is awesome.  The weather, overall, wasn’t that bad and we had some good times with family and friends in all sorts of place and all sorts of situations.  On the other hand: Fall is awesommer! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am a Halloween nut! Slowly but surely I am indoctrinating Melissa into the ways of All- Hallows-Eve, and hopefully Sam will be into it later on… Melissa and I are currently working on a couple projects for our Halloween display, which gets bigger every year.  So Fall is a fun time for us but before we welcome those chilly nights, and leaves rustling in the wind, lets say goodbye to another summer with a smattering of pics that I’ve neglected to post.

Check out some pics here…

Freakin' Vacation!!!

Heya Folks! It’s been a while! Hope you’ve all been enjoying summer, because we sure have been.  My lack of posting these past couple of weeks can be attributed to our family summer vacation, plus me starting up a couple personal projects, one of which is a little revamp of the blog… so stay tuned!  As for our vacation, we had us some fun! We had soooo much fun during those sunshine filled (sometime rainy) days, that by the time the sun had set, my energy had been sapped. Thus my creative muscle was exhausted and my intentions to post during the holidays were dashed! Plus, I was lazy…

So let’s kick off right away with one of the first things we did on vacation, a car wash!  Our poor, dirty car (which we recently made our last payment on, Yay! ) was in dire need of a little love and care. So on the first Saturday morning of our holidays, Sam gave us a little gift by letting us sleep in until 8 A.M., and we repaid his kindness by letting him play with the garden hose!

Continue Reading to see if chaos ensued…

A beautiful summer day is a rare commodity around here, so when one of them reared it’s little head, we took advantage of it. Time for some slip and slide baby!

He seemed excited at the prospect of the slip and slide: it’s thirty foot long, banana yellow runway glistening invitingly in the summer sun, with tiny jets of sparkling water jutting up through the length of the slide.  All of which ends in a marooned boat’s hull with large shark teeth looming over the end of the slide.  Looks like fun! He’s was dancing in the grass just watching me set up the thing. His little feet stamping and his arms waving all about.  Why is it, people of the internets, that when ever there is a big summer toy to inflate, the job automatically lands on the father to blow it up? I demand we rewrite this rule of etiquette as we are long past the macho days of summer, strutting our stuff on the beach and blowing up some ladies inner tube in one breath.  Out on the mother-in-laws hot, baking, frying pan of a lawn, I was seeing spots trying to get this stupid shark mouth inflated! Sigh…

I finally set everything up just like it should be: the landing strip is flat and bump-less, the shark and sprinklers are spitting water at just the right strength to land on the landing strip, and the shark and boat hull are inflated nicely to cushion the impact of sliding kiddies.  We are ready to go!

Continue reading here to see how Sam does…

Hey Mr. Gainey! I’ve got your big, hard-checking center right here!!! At 2 feet, 7 inches and 25 lbs, he’s the real deal! He’s part Canadian and part Irish, so you know he’ll bust some teeth and apologize for it after!!  He’s already a mean drinker: 25 ounces of 3.25% a day!!!  He will win you your Cup!

So pay up!!!  Seven or eight million should do it…

Witness his mad skills!!!! Click the pics below!

Our friends Dan and Anna Maria invited us over to their house on a nice hot sunny day to get in a little pool action and, more importantly, to celebrate the birthdays of their two children, which are relatively close together.  We had some great fun and Sammy got a chance to mingle with friends in a non-day care setting. Instead of a dozen little energizer kiddies running around, he’d have to watch out for only two.   As our gift to the birthdays kids, we brought them the inflated pool/shower/slide/basketball hoop/ring toss/bright orange thing in the pics below.  Dan brought out his compressor and blew the thing up in a matter of seconds, which was nice, because I was passing out just getting the stupid basketball inflated.  The kids had a great time and so did we, watching them throw themselves around in this thing.  Sam also got to live out a life long dream of mine: he rode a dolphin! Lucky kid!

You’ll also notice in the pictures, Sam was wearing a bright red body suit with build in flotation devices.  He looked like a mini super hero, all buffed up from the padding! Alas, he didn’t behave like one, as the older kids were a little too rambunctious for him when he tried to get into the kiddie pool.  So explains the pic of Sam hugging his Mom.  But fun was yet to be had as I swept him up and took him into the big pool where he had his faithful encounter with the dolphin.

Continue reading and check out the dolphin here!

I want out! Take the screen off or I'll go through it!

While you can’t tell by the questionable weather we’ve been having lately, the calendar says summer is only days away.  As I type this, looking out the window, sitting on the living room floor, I see nothing but gray, dreary skies and wet pavement.  This is, assuredly, a spring-time climate.  But come on already! It`s freakin` June 18th and I want some sun dammit!

Ahem… Pardon the outburst, I guess I’m vitamin D deficient.

We do get a nice day now and then. Sometimes we even get two or three nice, dry and sunny days strung together.

"I wanna touch... you!"

But that happens tops… tops once every three weeks. That is not enough! Is this global warming? Well I can’t help but feel a little disappointed if it is! When that sun does shine it’s glorious beams of loving warmth, we get outdoors and have some fun!  Sam loves being outside.  He loves it so much in fact, that every evening when we arrive home after work, we unpack him out of the trunk and bring him into the house to eat supper.  As soon as we cross our front door threshold, he loses it! Big tears roll down his reddening cheeks as he throws out a finger pointing back outside and gives one of his best “feel sorry for me” frowns.  He doesn’t want to eat now, he wants to explore! Sam loves the trees and plans and flowers that make up our little yard and it’s as if he has to walk around to each one and say “Hi!”.

Oh! And I was kidding about the trunk comment, he prefers the roof a lot more… He gets a nice breeze up there.

Continue Reading >>

Well, my vacation has been over for just over a week now, and I put off posting about those wonderful last few days, because… well they were just so damn fun! I have to say that I did NOT look forward to going back to work! I guess everyone feels that way about their vacation right? Well, as you can see in the pic on the left, I loved my vacation with Meli and Sam! Lazy mornings… or was that in the afternoon? I forget… and you know what? That’s the point! They were fun, stress free days with family and friends. Check it out!

After getting back from Wildwood, we spent a couple days just lounging about relaxing and getting ready for our next trip down to see my sister in the Toronto area. She doesn’t get to see Sammy often, so we just had to go down there with the pamper packer and get her to change some diapers! And she did! Ummm, I think she actually changed ALL OF THEM. We got there on a Friday afternoon around 2 pm and my sister got home from work at 5, and we never saw Sam again until three days later when we had to leave! She was adamant in taking care of her “Sammy-kins” while she had the chance… Even getting up early for that morning bottle! Meli and I could sleep in… we loved it! My brother-in-law FINALLY got to hold Samuel, as the only other time he saw Sam was last Easter and he was sick with a cold! Here he is on the right, a nice shot of uncle and nephew taking a break on the deck. We had some great meals while we were there, which is the usual when we go to stay with them. They always seem to outdo themselves! I kept my two nephews busy as we played a ton of sports: Whiffle Ball, Basketball, Hockey and Football. We even played some Holey-Board and I brought down my RockBand video game for some nighttime shenanigans! Needless to say, we did rock! The singing was a little weak… I kid! I kid! We had some good laughs. The three days we were there flew by, we all had so much fun, it amazing Sam found a little quiet time to catch up on his reading!

Arriving back home, we took it easy having fun just the three of us. Lazy days just playing around outside with Sam, and taking a lot of pics. I love those days. The kind of day when you don’t plan anything… not even what’s for supper, and I love supper folks. Melissa had the great idea of throwing a blanket outside and just sitting out there staring at the clouds… Sam was a fan of this activity, he kept staring at the leaves blowing in the nice summer breeze. Sam also has a favorite toy. It’s a gift from our friends Aaron and Soizic (thanks again!). It’s a big, blue, plastic tube filled with air and it has three jingly balls rolling around inside it. He just loves it! It’s lightweight so he can grab, kick, punch, toss, yank, chew and pretty much abuse it any way he wants. Here’s a couple shots of him playin’ around with it!

Our last weekend on vacation together was a busy one. We had friends Josée and Sylvain over for supper on the Saturday (that’s Sam and his friend Maxime on the left, after a post meal walk) and my cousins wedding on the Sunday. That’s right, a wedding on my last day off before headin’ back to work! Talk about finishing your vacation in style! The wedding was great fun, the party was rockin’ and the wedded couple are very much in love… But we had to leave early as we didn’t want to inconvenience our babysitters on a Sunday night. I mean, seeing as Sam’s babysitter was, in fact, my boss, I consider myself lucky he accepted to babysit until 11pm on a Sunday night… with work the next day no less! But that’s Norm for ya! A good guy through and through! Luckily Melissa’s sister was there to keep him in line! *wink wink* Thanks again to you both, we appreciated the rare night out together! That’s it for now folks, as always… thanks for reading!

The first blockbuster of summer 2008 is here, and it rules with an iron fist! Iron Man opened on May 2nd across North America and made just over a cool 100 million at the box office. I was among those movie goers who happily paid up 8 bucks for a matinée screening at a local mega-super-duper-plex. I have to say right off-the-bat that I am not a comic book guy. I’ve owned maybe 4 comics in my life, and they were the unfortunate result of a misguided, yet well intentioned surprise Christmas gift exchange.

This review is spoiler free, so no worries! I won’t rehash to much of the plot or characters either. The IMDB plot description will suffice:

When wealthy industrialist Tony Stark is forced to build an armored suit after a life-threatening incident, he ultimately decides to use its technology to fight against evil.

Having said that, I do love a good super hero movie, but have found that in the past couple years, we’ve been flooded with them. Batman Begins, Spider Man2, XMen 2 and now Iron Man are among my favorites. You might’ve noticed that the movies I named have one thing in common: interesting characters. In that category, Iron Man may very well lead the pack with Tony Stark, a performance by Robert Downey Jr that seems tailor made for the man. He’s the movie, plain and simple. I wasn’t a big fan of his before this, and now I’ll probably check him out more because of it. I can’t remember laughing at the movies as much as I did at his deadpan, quiet delivery of some of the funniest lines of dialog this year. His chemistry with Gwyneth Paltrow, playing the involved, strong, yet ‘girly’ Virginia ‘Pepper’ Potts, is natural and never seems forced. Supporting players Terrence Howard and Jeff Bridges (The Dude!!!) also play well and add to the overall feel of the movie.

What does seem forced, however, is the villain of this Iron Man creation story. The overall plot is predictable and the villains gradual revelation is anti-climactic: everyone in the theater sees it coming except for Tony Stark. But I won’t delve into it anymore than that. Go see the movie and let me know what you think, of what may be the only major negative point, in this fun ride of a flick.

Notice I haven’t talked about the action? Well it’s good, needless to say, and the action scenes actually drive the plot of the movie, which is a rare thing lately. Suffice to say that the amazing special effects (check out the details on Iron Man’s suit ) and characters deliver this movie into summer blockbuster goodness territory! It’s a great start to the summer season, hopefully the momentum will last! Iron Man has set a standard, will the other summer flicks step up as well?

We’ll find out soon enough, as Speed Racer (May 9th – retch!), The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (May 16th – meh…) and Indiana Jones: And the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (May 22nd – yay!) all open this month!

For me, a true test to liking a movie is if I would buy it on DVD, and Iron Man will be on my shelf the day it comes out!

Johnny out!

8.5 / 10

Today is the first ‘official’ day of the summer movie season with the opening of Iron Man. IMDB describes the movies synopsis as such:

When wealthy industrialist Tony Stark is forced to build an armored suit after a life-threatening incident, he ultimately decides to use its technology to fight against evil!

Sounds exciting! I guess…I mean we’ve had 42 super hero movies in the past 5 years, I this one gonna be any better? Well, the critics have spoken and 93% of them are saying ‘Yes!’. Head on over to rotten tomatoes to check out that stat. It seems the movie is an all around success, which is a good thing for Marvel who is completely financing the picture with a budget at a cool 180 million US. Will that success translate into box office mulah? We’ll find out soon, but at least they have the comfort of knowing they will have my 8$

I’ll be checking this one out this afternoon and I’ll let you all know about it in a later post. I just have to check it out, with this much positive spin, it reminds me of Spiderman’s opening buzz back in 2002 when it opened (that’s Friday, Saturday and Sunday) with 114,844,116 US!!!

That seems like an impressive number, but it’s not the highest grossing summer weekend movie of all time! In fact it’s only the 7th! Can you name the other 6 summer movies that have had a bigger opening weekend? Let me tell you, I was surprised at some of them!

Check out the answers here!