that was a weekend

had a great time on sunday. we went with Tim and Lissa over a suspension bridge and along a treetop walk. it was kind of cool ... but not so impressive that it warranted opening both eyes simultaneously. we got a good view of Grouse mountain though. not enough snow to play in there so we went home and got out the X box.

dad and Tim spent a good couple of hours practising their snowboarding, and then Tim felt ready to take me on. i won't tell you the score, but lets just say i'm a canadian and he's an aussie - hardly a fair match. who do you think won?!!

songs of the day:

through the barricades - spandau ballet

trouble - coldplay

8 weeks old

my vital stats for all the ladies out there (especially my grannies):
today i weigh 12lbs 10oz (5705g) and I'm 23.5" tall.
my hair is definitely growing and darkening, and i can pack a mean punch.
my vocabularly is enlarging all the time, and i now have a wide range of coos, gurgles and squeaks, not to mention the cries and yells i've been perfecting for a couple of months now. i'm now working on expanding my range of facial expressions.
my breastfeeding skills lack finesse (mom doesn't often take me out to eat) but what i lack in style i more than make up for in suction. apparently i should be putting on 15-30g a day at the moment. i like to push that envelope to over 50g myself. i've largely accomplished this feat by demanding to be fed at very regular intervals (sleeping is for wimps) and by hoovering milk directly from the breast, rather than a bottle, so mom doesn't know how much i'm eating and stop me when i've had my ration.
i've grown out of my newborn and some of my 0-3 month clothing and have moved up to size 2 pampers. i'm making good use of the increased capacity which impresses dad more than mom!
anything else you need to know, just ask

Shopping

mom gave me my first lesson in buying Rice Krispies this week. we went to Safeway and put two big boxes in the trolley. they were on special offer - usually 7.99 each, this week they're only 2.99. bargain! even better mom had two coupons, each for a dollar off. when we came to pay however, they tried to charge us 3.99 a box. my mom's too sharp for that though, and we went to see the nice man at customer service (the one who let me change my newborn size diapers for a bigger size when i was a few days old). he got cross with the naughty pooter for charging us wrong, and gave mom the first box for free, and the second box at the right price. that meant he gave us five dollars back. are you keeping up with this? so far we've got 15.98 of Rice Krispies for 99 cents. BUT each box has a coupon on it for 50 cents off our next purchase, so in effect they gave us 1 cent to take them away. Mom's good at this kind of stuff!

Just two questions. why is cereal so expensive? i thought we grew grains and stuff in Canada, and secondly why does mom think i need to know how to buy Rice Krispies?

I'll scream and scream

until i make myself sick, but i'm not going to eat, and i'm not going to lie down, and i'm certainly not going to sleep even if it is 4am. i want to be upright and walking around like the big people. dad didn't seem to appreciate this too much, but mom was much more sympathetic. she walked me around the apartment and we had proper adult conversation. it can't have been too interesting though because i some point i forgot i wasn't going to sleep and must have dropped off. the next thing i knew i was waking up in my sleeping bag, back in my bed. sneaky trick.

smiling

this is a message to all the miserable kids out there. smile ... lots, it makes life so much better. it's particularly rewarding smiling at the big people smiling at you ... they love it, and the world's a better place. :) breastmilk and smiling, joel's favourite drugs!

Eaten alive

mom often complains that i've eaten her alive, so recently i've been trying this out for myself. i don't know what she's complaining about. it's my latest discovery - i LOVE eating my hands. when i'm hungry, when i'm bored, when i'm going to sleep, when i'm waking up....pretty much any time is a great time to eat my hands. mom now gets upset when i try and eat her and my hands at the same time. you'd have thought she'd be glad i was trying to feed myself.

more sweet music thoughts

thank you for your comments on my blog, i have international friends ... what fun.

uncle nick - i don't have a gramophone, so your two tribes 12" is no good to me, however dad tells me that he did record the pleasuredome album onto mp3 complete with full static, scratches and pops, so i will happily listen to two tribes and tell you what i think. grandpa wasn't very impressed when daddy bought that album, but daddy won't tell me why yet.

feeling christmassy today, so dad played me the definitive christmas song ... wizzard : no, slade : no, cliff richard : i don't think so, george michael : no. dad tells me this song was a perfect lullaby for me a few weeks ago. it is of course ...

a fairy tale of new york : the pogues and kirsty mcall.

dad says it's the only christmas song i'll ever need. if you've never heard it, let me know and i'll send you the mp3 - recorded from record with static ... so cool.

'to do' lists

dad has always been the master of 'to do' lists in this family. if it's not written down, it doesn't get done - at least not by dad. since i arrived mom has started writing lists too. i guess that's probably because she's trying to set a good example for me. some of mom's stuff i approve of: she has good intentions to get me at least one passport - a nice blue canadian one to match my eyes, and a british red one that'll match my face after i've been screaming for ten hours on an aeroplane. two passports, two birth certificates - it kind of makes sense .....less than two weeks until christmas though, which means less than two weeks until mom can cross off 'buy christmas cards' from her list.

i'm a bit worried that neither of them has 'buy Joel christmas presents' on their list. if it were to appear on both lists then i'd be doing really well. i overheard that dad's planning on going out and buying an X-Box later "for the youth group" so he says. i know it's for me really. i need to practise my snowboarding tricks ready for when i'm big enough to go out on the mountain.

all i want for christmas ... is ...

... a limited edition U2 ipod, in the meantime, i'm quite happy to borrow dad's!


granny and granny and grandpa gave him the money in the summer, and he really really likes it. i really really like it too, it currently contains 4.5 days of music if you listen to it non-stop, and he's not finished loading it up yet.

track of the day: I don't know what's going on - The Cure

growing pains

sorry not to update you for a few days, but I've been seriously busy. I'm now six weeks old and have had a growth spurt. Growing's hard work and uncomfortable - requiring some serious eating to keep up my energy and some serious yelling. I've not had time for blogging or sleeping or anything else recently. However, I now weigh 11lbs and have caught up with my friend Noah, even though he had a two week head start on me.

mom and dad don't look so good right now, but I think they still love me. I tried weeing up the sleeve of mom's dressing gown to make her laugh. I think she appreciated the joke. she certainly admired my aim.

english language one

CAN: zipper ENG: zip (incidentally it's a canadian invention!)
CAN: snap ENG: popper

Go figure! (or "work that one out" in ENG)

as you may gather, the household is considering diaper options right now.

I have a feeling this will be the first of many ponderings on the bizarre intricacies of the english language - specifically the difference between english english and canadian english. mom and dad continue to use these strange phrases and words that just don't make sense to us canadians, eh?

clothes

Yesterday was all set to be a pretty busy day. Church in the morning, a baby shower in the afternoon (now i know there's no water and lots of presents, i was prepared to go this time) and a christmas mulled wine and mince pie do in the evening.

After all the flattery i got at the reunion about my blue sleeper and how it brought out the colour in my eyes, it was so obviously the outfit for yesterday. Somehow mom and dad missed that. First thing in the morning they produced my yellow and white stripes - personally i think this makes me look a bit jaundiced. i gave them long enough to rethink this decision by spending 30 minutes on the change table pooing, but no, into the yellow sleeper i went and off to church - late. Having successfully soaked through this outfit, i drew dad's attention to the fact before the baby shower and succeeded in getting changed - into a white sleeper. not only was this not the blue one i wanted, but it was too small. there's no point me making all this effort to grow if mom and dad are going to cram me into clothes that don't fit. After a lot of fuss i got myself changed into a bigger white outfit.

the baby shower started well. i was doing my alert, attentive thing and attracting some attention even though there were two other babies there who were really being fussed over. when it appeared they were getting all the presents too there didn't seem a lot of point staying awake any longer, so i dozed off.

back at home after tea, i knew we were going out because i was dressed up in real clothes - a shirt and dungarees. not really my idea of party clothes. where's my blue sleeper? we had to go to a meeting at church on the way but i don't think mom really wanted to be there as she spent the first part of the meeting cleaning milk i'd thrown up off me, my clothes and the car seat. we went back home and i was changed again. mom fed me with no clothes on at all which was pretty outrageous, and then when i was certain i was going to get the blue sleeper this time (i don't have many more clothes do i?) they put me into my PJs ready for bed. i blew it. we didn't get to go to the party at all. i guess mom just wanted to stay home and do laundry instead.

party tricks

so I've learnt some new tricks. we had a party on thursday night. 8 car seats full of new "friends of Joel" descended on Chad and Sarah's apartment in Burnaby, and we shared secrets of how to keep 8 sets of inexperienced parents busy. this was a prenatal group reunion. the word prenatal means little more to me than whale sounds, gentle rocking and a lot of liquid. also, you know, it's bizarre: my hiccups didn't make any noise back then.

anyhow, I digress. the important thing is that Finn (28 days older than me), told me all about projectile poo'ing.

sweet. dad was the lucky witness of my inauguration the following morning, but I'll get mum soon, don't you worry. bit liquid, but great distance! a further tip picked up from several babies in the room was that I really don't have to wait 3 hours to feed. 2 hours is perfectly acceptable, especially when mom and dad are in the middle of trying to regain a normal life. hey if i'm hungry, it's all about me right? mom picked up lots of stories about feeding me. i'm doing really well at that, but could do with causing a little less pain for poor mommy. what is this word chomping?

fabulous evening - excellent fun watching all the adults laughing at us while we tried a group photo.


thanks so much to thea, oliver, sol, finn, james, alexander and hailey for a fabulous evening. In case you're having trouble working out where I am, I'm the one in the dark blue, pretending to sleep in between sol (the really amazing one who actually looked at the camera), and Finn, who is actually quite heavy. I promise not to tell you who cried first, but the evidence is before you all.

happy christmas : card

Click the title of this post for a little Christmas card.

to all my fans .. I think you're great.