If my daughter should ever decide she wants to read my monthly recap blog posts, I hope she’s not surprised to discover that, despite the titles, I don’t just discuss the minutiae of her existence. Rather, I use the occasion of her “month-birthday” to take a look back at the month-that-was in all of our lives. Otherwise, quite frankly, I’d never do it. I’ve always been a journal-keeper, once believing my extensive writings would be discovered centuries later and become a best-selling novel. (So much so that I recall tracing over entries written in pencil for fear they would fade away before they could be discovered.) With Cub, I actually made a journal entry for pretty much every day of his first year. I started off keeping a similar log for Little Miss, but it quickly morphed into a blog to-do list and helpful scribbles from her big brother.
On the weekend, we always try to do fun things for the kids. We were pretty sure we were going to win Parents of the Year for taking our super-hero-obsessed son to Calgary’s Comic Expo dressed like this:
Sure, he thought it was neat to see some super heroes milling about the venue, but we could’ve saved $90 and run around our house wearing his Batman and Ironman masks and gotten the same effect. Cub’s favourite part of the expo? Likely the bucket of mini donuts which we could’ve purchased on the fairgrounds without even paying expo admission. I’m pretty sure my husband had more fun than Cub; which is what happens when a man named Gandalf attends a comic expo for the first time!
The beginning of May was unseasonably warm, leading me to laugh in the face of everyone who cautioned us against moving to Alberta. Sure, by the middle of the month, we’d had a bit of snowfall, but we also had lots of days like this one:
I still can’t get over how much there is to discover within a few hour’s drive of Calgary. We just didn’t explore the destinations around Montreal, but that was mainly because my husband’s job had him working most weekends. The work/life balance that brought us to Alberta is taking us to some stunning destinations, like Elbow Falls:
Things weren’t all sunshine and lollipops this month, though. Guess what happened on Mother’s Day? Little Miss Cub puked all over me. Multiple times. Cub also vomited a lot, but he was very proud of his ability to get his throw-up into the aforementioned mini-donuts bucket or the toilet. (Yay?!)
Naturally, I also got sick, and my husband—despite claims of immune-system superiority—had succumbed by midweek. Oh, the glory of the stomach flu.
Since he had to miss work to look after the kids while I was puking my guts out and then miss work for his own sake, Papa Wolf couldn’t miss another day that week to attend the Thomas the Train event at Heritage Park with us. We bought tickets for this earlier than you would for most rock concerts (way back in November), so he was pretty disappointed. As with the comic expo, Cub was decidedly underwhelmed by seeing his favourite train in person.
I can’t really come up with a segue into my next topic, which is KITTENS. Before having kids, my husband and I fostered kittens and cats in Montreal. When Cub was born, we didn’t have room for a baby, our own two cats and fosters, so we gave that up. When we moved to Alberta, our cats remained on their grandpapa’s farm. Back in March, I applied to be a foster with Calgary’s Meow Foundation, and we had been patiently waiting for a litter of stray kittens to be orphaned. (Okay, that sounds a bit morbid … ) Anyway, four black kittens have come to stay with us.
Yes, it is as adorable and awesome (and smelly) as you would imagine. I have been tasked with socializing these felines for adoption. It’s been super hard.
Okay no, it’s been ridiculously easy. The challenging bit has been telling them apart. I’m proud to say I can now distinguish between Cyborg, Beastgirl, Starfire and Raven without looking at genitalia!
Little Miss Cub is crazy about the kittens: she picks them up and mauls them as if they were stuffed animals, and they just keep purring. I spend most days trying to keep her out of the litterbox and cat dishes. Cub loves the kittens too, but the honeymoon phase ended when one of them pooped on his Avenger’s bedspread.
In terms of milestones, Little Miss has two bottom teeth poking out and is almost chubbing out of her Size 1 AppleCheeks!
She’s also pulling herself up to standing (and crawling everywhere at lightning speed):
Her big brother is not a huge fan of her mobility, but he has his sights set on a video game console so he’s putting up with her as best he can. This month, Cub started soccer en français with his Papa:
It’s essentially a gong show of three- and four-year-olds ignoring their coach and their parents … in French.
How was your month?
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