The world’s just catching up to our family, it seems.
Since our first Christmas with a tree since the twins were born, Liam and
Morgan had a couple of near-bouts of pneumonia. They're pictured here at home a few weeks ago in the midst of a nasty flu virus.
Also, Janne and I have had even busier schedules at work, and there’ve been no real opportunities to take the kind of pictures worth sharing, so the blog fell silent - until today.
Maybe it’s no coincidence that we’re welcoming the end to a lousy winter and I’m returning to posting something here. The occasion which prompted pulling out the camera was a trip to see Steve and Cheryl in Whitby yesterday. They're about 160-170 kms from our door in Brantford. As you might imagine, that kind of trek makes for quite an undertaking with three-year-old twins, so it doesn't happen often enough.
Cheryl and Steve have been friends with Janne for almost twice as long as Janne’s known me. However, Steve and Cheryl and I hit it off almost immediately upon meeting more than ten years ago, and although we don’t get to see each other very often, we do our best to celebrate milestones together, even if those milestones are occasionally not celebrated on the actual date of their having taken place. Having said that, we haven’t seen each other in close to two years, and it’s been even longer since we’ve seen their kids.
Cheryl may be the most conscientious entertainer/hostess I’ve ever known.
From the moment we arrive – every time we visit – she keeps herself busy putting out finger food, supplying drinks, getting a meal together and then serving it, and all the while conversing as if you’ve got her undivided attention AND making sure their two girls, Jocelyn (7) and Elia (3) are following the house rules. As a guy with four jobs, I’m just a little envious of her ability to multi-task that efficiently.
Speaking of the finger foods, I think Liam was a little more interested in his reflection in the glass coffee table -
although he did manage to devour almost all of the “circle crackers”, as we call them around here.
Janne and I managed to “let go” a little bit, too. While home, Liam and Morgan are restricted by baby gates at both the tops and bottoms of staircases, as well as keeping them out of the ceramic-tiled foyer and many potential hazards of the kitchen. Steve and Cheryl have taken the baby gates down in their house, partly because they have Jocelyn to help watch over Elia, and it seems to be working out quite well. So, Janne and I sat back and watched Liam and Morgan negotitiate the stairs up and down to the playroom – many times...and there were a lot of things to do, including many movies to watch, in the playroom.
At home, Liam and Morgan like to do the stairs themselves without assistance, but they know we always prefer to be right beside them. They did just fine at Steve and Cheryl's.
We were expecting Dave and Leslie with their two boys, Connor and Cole, but Cole was a little under the weather, so Dave kept him home. Leslie brought Connor, and although he and Jocelyn were a little bored with the 3-year-olds’ level of play, they at least had a bit of a chance to hang out together.
For me, there was one element of the day which really made me miss my friends in Nova Scotia. The fact that Leslie, Cheryl and Janne – although only on rare occasions – still get to visit with each other and bring their families, laugh, tell stories and in general just happily share a space together – drives home the fact that the friends I made and grew up with over the first 40 years of my life are nowhere close, and I cannot do the same.
Don’t get me wrong, Steve’s great, and the people I’ve made friends with here are great people, or I obviously wouldn’t have been attracted to become friends with them...but to be able to have Liam and Morgan run around in the homes of people who’ve known me since I began school would be very satisfying to my occasionally weary soul. I feel my lifelong friends may not be aware that I think of them this way, because I left home – so maybe they feel they weren’t important enough for me to have tried to stick around Halifax and find a job and ‘survive’ there, but that’s not true. After the radio industry (or maybe certain people in it) was done with me in Halifax, there was simply no sticking around to be done. And, let’s face it, had I stayed? Janne? Liam and Morgan? Hello? I was meant to come here.
Anyway, I’m glad Janne still has the chance to hang with lifelong friends in her life. I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to stay friends for life with Janne, and people like Cheryl and Leslie would no doubt echo that sentiment.
It was fun to watch how Elia reacted to sharing her stuff with a couple of kids very close to her age.
Having spent many hours explaining to twins how important it is to share (only partly because we can’t afford two of everything, and wouldn’t have room to keep most of it anyway), and knowing that Elia doesn’t have to worry about that on a daily basis because Jocelyn wouldn’t be the least bit interested in playing with the same things, being four years older, these pictures really amused me.
It shows Morgan waiting for a turn to play with one of Elia’s toys and eventually giving up.
The funny part to me is that – if it were Liam playing with the toy (it’s a water-filled gadget on which you push a button to try to propel little plastic balls into a hippo’s mouth – kinda cute), Morgan would simply rip it out of his hands and run with it. Liam would cry, and I’d be back in the middle of a conversation about sharing, explaining to Liam to let Morgan have a turn occasionally, and to Morgan that taking the toy from Liam is not the ideal way to initiate the sharing process.
However, something must be getting through to Morgan, because she was polite enough to wait until Elia was bored with it, and then took her turn with it.
Another of my favourite moments of the day was witnessing Janne being relaxed enough to not be policing the children, but simply engaging them – like here when she felt Liam needed some tickling.
Too often, we don’t get a chance to take advantage of moments like these, and I know Liam appreciated it.All in all, a great day with good friends.
Wish everyone lived closer, though.
Going to have to get to work on that teleportation room.
