Standing tall

This morning I entered the nursery to find Dexter standing tall in his crib, holding onto the crib rail for dear life. And so begins the next big phase--learning to walk. He's reached that stage where his purpose in life is to uncover every single hidden hazzard in our home and make a beeline straight for it. Also, he enjoys eating dust bunnies. With the kind of housekeeping standards we have around here, he's got plenty to chew on.

Suddenly, it's summer

We're in the midst of a fabulous stretch of hot, sunny days. The temperature has been in the mid-20s (high 70s F) since Thursday, so except for a few random piles in shaded areas, the snow is all gone, the snowsuits are packed away, and our horrible, horrible winter is officially over! Yee-haw! I'm so happy to feel the warmth that I'm not even going to lament the rotten timing of my return to work (the very week I go back, it gets nice!), or fee too sorry for myself for somehow throwing my back out to the point where i can barely walk, let alone go running or otherwise properly enjoy the sun (I have no idea what I did. I just woke up crippled on Thursday morning. I'm working on it).

It's pretty remarkable how fast the change happened. Take, for example, this photo of my mom and dad with the boys. We're out for a walk last Monday afternoon (I left work early), checking out the flooding at our neighbourhood park:

Notice the jackets, vests, and hats? It was sunny, but there was a brisk wind that made it pretty chilly. Now, here's a pictures from today:
Bare arms, bare heads, bare legs. Henry spent much of the weekend tagging the neighbourhood with chalk drawings of dinosaurs. Here he is at work, and a sample of his handiwork:

All good things must come to an end. . .

I headed back to work today. Dexter's first birthday is still several months away, but since Tom took a few months of parental leave, I was able to take "only" 8.5 months off rather than the 12 months most Canadian women take. That's still a far cry longer than the 12 weeks I got after having Henry down in the good ol' U.S. of A. So I'm really grateful that I got to spend this time being a full-time Mommy. I was getting into a groove around here. But I don't regret going back to work. There was never any question that I would be going back when the mat leave was up, so psychologically I was well-prepared to walk out the door this morning.

My parents are in town right now to help me with the transition back to paid employment, so I left my boys in loving hands. When my mom goes home, Tom will be on the Mr. Mom gig for a week or so, then we have a nanny starting full-time in May. So that's the plan. Unfortunately Dexter isn't sleeping through the night yet and tends to like a lot of attention (i.e. nursing) from Mommy between 3-5 a.m., so I'm bound to have days where I'm a little out of it at work. But that's life.

Now, when I actually showed up for work today, I discovered that my login password expired, and no one in IT got back to me to reset it. Since I couldn't access my email, or even boot up my workstation, I wandered around and said Hi to people, hoping they'd remember me since i was actually on leave longer than I worked there in the first place (they did). I went to a meeting where the CEO reviewed Q1 results. Then I went home because there was nothing else for me to do. Ah, office life. Maybe tomorrow they'll remember what they pay me for.

Another milestone passes

I received this 9 fl. oz. bottle of baby shampoo as a shower gift in April, 2004. This week, we finally used the last of it. . . and opened another bottle of baby shampoo I received as a shower gift in April, 2004.

When your kids are pretty much bald for the first two years of life, you just don't go through shampoo very quickly.

8 months old!

Dexter is 8 months old as of yesterday. To celebrate, he finally figured out how to crawl forward. This trick had him flummoxed for over a month, so it was pretty exciting to see it happen. Before he mastered forward motion, he would push himself around backwards on his belly. If I left him for a few minutes, invariably I'd return to find him stuck under the couch or Henry's train table (don't worry, it's not as bad as it sounds. His head wouldn't end up under the furniture, and he was only stuck in the sense that he couldn't figure out how to get himself out of the predicament). Dexter has also become adept at getting himself from a sitting position onto his belly, so he's all ready to start moving around like a little demon.

He's also getting more interested in eating solid food. It just took a bit of experimenting to find out what he likes. He prefers stuff he can grasp himself and crunch, so toast and Cheerios are popular. I discovered this when Henry gave Dexter a pizza crust when I wasn't looking, and he immediately started gumming away (that's what he's eating in the picture). It's pretty funny to watch him munch on toast with his two little teeth. I also discovered a line of organic, gourmet baby food that comes in little frozen cubes rather than jars. It's pretty good--I can even stand to eat a spoonful of it, while the jarred food makes me gag. Of course it's relatively expensive compared to jarred food, but we're not talking big bucks here. And he'll eat it, so it's money well spent. Round out all that with some fruit purees and fruit-flavored baby cereal, and he's eating pretty well.