More weekend pictures

As the photos in the previous post might suggest, the weather was overcast, grey and a little chilly for much of the long weekend, but Oliver and I did do some exploring and we found a new big park - no playground, but lots of open space and paths through the woods.


Oliver in 'get off my land' mode.


It's the cold air making his eyes water, not the dandelion puff. I hope.


The sand at our nearest park was wet and churned up for some reason, which made Oliver's off-roading difficult.


It was colder than it looks in this picture. And yes, he should have been holding on. It's hard to take trucks, cars, keys, etc., away from him.

Scenes from the long weekend

Why four wheels are better than three.



Sailing the seas of sand.



'Lellow Beetle!'



A walk in the woods.



Music time!

Sunday sleep

Oliver started napping at about 5, an hour after our usual Sunday swim, and as at 9:40 he is still asleep. I changed his diaper and put him in a sleeper around 9, at which point he asked for the 'lellow car' (a yellow toy Citroën I bought for 25 cents this afternoon in a sidewalk sale).

I brought him up to his room and he seemed to sense that I was trying to place him in his crib - he began crying 'Daaa! Dyyyy!' - so I lay with him on the futon for a while. Soon he seemed to be fast asleep and I began trying to move away, but without opening his eyes, he uttered a curt 'Snuggle' (or 'Suggle', as he sometimes says) and I stayed with him for a little longer before I could move him into the crib.

Oliver has discovered a new vegetable he likes, which he calls 'fergus' (asparagus).

Car trouble

Yesterday was one day I really should have brought the camera with me when I took Oliver to the park.

He climbed into the little car that was there. Like a lot of hand-me-down toys in parks, this thing was not in great condition, and we soon discovered that the front wheels were so bent that it could not be moved forward or back.

At one point, Oliver climbed out and I took the opportunity to flip the car over and bend the wheels until the rod connecting them was more or less straightened out. If I had taken a picture, the caption might have been 'See, your front end is all out of alignment here'.

That seemed to take care of the problem. Oliver got back in and I pushed him around and out onto the path around the playground (he pointed to the gate and said 'Open, Oliverrr?' in the same way he asks for many other things these days).

Then we hit an uneven join between two slabs of sidewalk concrete and the left front wheel turned and snapped right off. That would have been a photo too.

Outdoors

'Maybe I'm pretending to be an archaeologist, maybe I'm squatting for another reason'

Notes from this weekend

Oliver and I went to a park on Sunday and for a while, the only other kids there were both named Oliver as well: a local 1-year-old and a 20-month-old visiting from Guelph. There were a few instances of 'Oliver, can you let the other Oliver have the truck/go down the slide, etc.?'

He's starting to identify some cars by the people we know who drive the same model. A neighbour of ours named Julie drives a Mini, so now every other Mini on the road is 'Judie car'. Any Mazda3, whether it's a sedan or a hatchback, is 'baby Jack car', after the one belonging to the parents of Jack , who lives nearby.

Music

'And now, my Sandbox Symphony'

Scenes from a restaurant

We went out for dinner on Sunday evening - it was nice enough to sit outside and we hadn't been to a restaurant with Oliver for quite a while.

For some reason it took over half an hour for our appetizer to arrive (I would have thought that something like hummus and pita bread would be prepared at least partly in advance) and so Mimi and I took turns watching over Oliver as he wandered around on the sidewalk and in front of the store next to the restaurant. When the food finally showed up, Oliver promptly flung the basket of pita bread onto the floor. Fortunately, the replacement arrived in a few minutes. At first, Oliver protested at being in the high chair but soon discovered he liked Mimi's Burmese chicken and noodles. The man from the store had given Oliver a balloon earlier, but he didn't seem to mind much when it popped.