Food Faces Hall of Fame

Since we started solids three months ago there have been some pretty epic food faces caught on camera and countless others undocumented. Here are the best of the best, enjoy!

Pumpkin Patch

The hayride!

Dan, my lovely brother Gavin and Lily

Dan, Lily, me and my dad. 

Lily has her pumpkin picked out!

Our little trio of pumpkins

we picked up some mini pumpkins for decorating the house.

we also got some of these gourds for fall decor. LOVE.

My dad came down from Gabriola Island for the weekend and the weather was incredible, super warm for fall and really sunny and lovely. I had really been wanting to go to the pumpkin patch and get pumpkins for Halloween carving. We took the hayride out to the patch where we scoured over every pumpkin for the perfect three to represent our family. This was totally one of those things that I dreamed about doing with my kid(s) and it was even better than I expected it to be. I think we will definitely make it a fall tradition for years to come.

Biker Babes

I've been meaning to write this post for a while because it is something I am so passionate about! Biking with babies! Combining two great things, babies and bicycles, what could be better? We have made a family decision to drive less and walk, bus and bike more. Dan has always done a lot of biking and I did a lot of biking as a kid because we were a car free family (yay!). I think somewhere along the way I got scared off from biking, thinking it was too hard and too dangerous to do all of the time, especially as a family. But as I started reading more blogs about family biking I realized there is a real movement to biking with children and going car free or car-lite. Europeans have been doing this for ages and I wanted to take a page out of their book, they make it look so easy and fashionable! So we had decided we wanted to give it a try, now we had to find some gear that worked for us. We looked seriously into getting a Bakfiets cargo bike until we discovered that it would be around five thousand dollars to get one to Canada. We ended up importing a BoBike baby seat from The Netherlands. These seats are awesome, they are mounted at the front of your bike much like the available in Canada Wee Ride or Ibert seat but they have a much more supported back so you can start biking with your child earlier (they suggest 9 months) and they can be comfortable for longer. We started Lily in the BoBike for short trips around 7 months (GASP!), I know technically this is "illegal" in Canada and you aren't suppose to start your child until they are 1 year old. We felt this was such an arbitrary number and since babies develop so differently, we thought this was a safe guess as to when they might be ready. The idea is that they wouldn't be developmentally ready to sit for long periods of time and that their neck wouldn't be strong enough to hold up a helmet. (We also got Lily the Giro Infant helmet which fits really small head and is super lightweight). At 7 months Lily had been sitting unassisted for a month and was comfortable to sit and play for long periods of time, she was also pulling up on furniture and in our opinion was strong enough. So far it has been two months of biking as a family and it has been great, Lily sings and blows raspberries down the road and we take slow and easy backroads which leaves lots of energy to laugh, talk and play as a family. So much more enjoyable than driving in traffic with a screaming baby strapped into her car seat. This past Saturday was a gorgeous fall day and we spent it biking around our lovely neighbourhood. We stopped for a snack and a coffee at our favorite local coffee shop before heading home. If you are able, try adding biking into your daily life, you will be amazed at how much happier it makes you! (and your wallet and the environment)

Sidney by the Sea

My really good friend Elaina is visiting from Denmark so we decided to do a day of tourist activities, even though she grew up here. It was so fun to do things that both of us remember doing as kids and loving! We went out to Sidney, which is such a cute little town. We went to the Ocean Discovery Centre and checked out some of the local sea life. It is really amazing to see up close what is lurking in the ocean that surrounds our beautiful island. The abundant life and vibrant colours are so incredible it is almost hard to believe they live in the bottom of the ocean that is a block from my house. It was a really fun thing to do with Lily and I think it will be a great place to go back to when she is older and can really understand what she is looking at. After our aquatic adventure we walked along the pier at the harbour, went to Mineral World (which we were both crazy about when we were kids!) then checked out some thrift stores. We headed over to Saanich to a restaurant called The Roost, a super adorable little farm house with tons of locally grown pumpkins all carved up and little checked table cloths. We had a lovely lunch of sandwiches and soup topped off with some tea and home baked goodies. The perfect ending to a perfect day.

Lily Modeling her dad's hat.

Gimme dat camera mom!

Nice snot bubble!

How the hat fits my nine month old.

How it is suppose to fit (depending on who you ask)

So I finished knitting Dan's hat out of the lovely Noro Kochoran wool. It was so nice to work with and really beautiful, it ended up having quite a bit of pink and purple in it so I just cut that section out, not that Dan wouldn't have been man enough to rock a pink hat, I just don't know if he would want to wear a pink hat everyday. I finished the hat while Dan was still at school and wanted to photograph it so I used the only model I could find and she was super cute so I thought, why not. She ended up crawling around the house in her dad's hat for about an hour, I think it was a good test drive. If a nine month old thought it was comfortable, it was probably approved to wear. Honestly, I didn't even try to get these faces out of her she is just this funny. I used the "chunkeanie" pattern from woolly wormhead, it was a really awesome and easy pattern I will definitely be using again. I knit the largest version because Dan has big brains like that.

Apple Picking

Nothing better than a fresh picked apple

Lily loved them too!

Just one of the three huge bushels of apples we picked.

This post is a little late but a few weeks ago we went apple picking. Our original plan was to go out to a farm and pick apples and pay for whatever we picked, then I started noticing apples everywhere I looked. Every other neighbour had a tree full of apples! I put the word out that we were looking to come and pick apples and luckily our friends parents had a tree ripe for the picking. We packed up our baskets and a ladder and honestly within twenty minutes of picking apples we had three baskets overflowing with ripe organic apples, yet the tree looked like it hadn't even been touched. These were seriously the best apples I have ever tasted in my life. AH-mazing! We made applesauce, apple pie, apple muffins and cut and froze a ton of apples for the winter. I wish I knew how to can otherwise I would have canned a ton of readymade apple pie filling, maybe next year. A huge thank you to Elliot's parents for letting us pick their apples. How amazing that you can grow organic apples on a tree in your yard for many to enjoy for years. We will definitely be planting an apple tree if we ever when we buy a house of our own. When I think of fall I always think of apples, you?

Booties for Celia

I knit my first pair of baby booties. I knit these newborn sized booties for Celia Elizabeth aged 12 days. Even though I had my own newborn just 9 months ago, when I finished these I was shocked at how tiny they were. It is so amazing to me how fast these tiny beings grow. Hopefully these are the first of many adorable and warm booties that I knit for friends and family over the years. The pattern is from the book "Easy Baby Knits" by Claire Montgomerie.

9 months in, 9 months out.

This photo was taken at 39 weeks, a week before Lily was born.

Lily, one day old.

Lily, one month old.

Lily, Two months old.

Lily, three months old.

Lily, four months old.

Lily, five months old.

Lily, six months old.

Lily, seven months old.

Lily, eight months old.

Lily, nine months old.

As of today Lily has been outside in the world as long as she was growing in my tummy. My little girl is nine months old today. I cannot believe that nine months have gone by, I can't believe how fast she has grown and I can't believe that I can love her more each day. She is so loving and playful and smart and beautiful, I am just in awe of her all the time. She is now crawling, sometimes on her hands and knees, sometimes scooting on her bum, sometimes walking on her hands and feet. She is OBSESSED with standing on anything and everything, she can pull up on every piece of furniture we own, the walls the windows, anything! She can cruise around the furniture, stand with one hand, stand with no hands! (only for a few seconds). She babbles all of the time and she can say "mama", "dada", "nana" and "papa" along with some other sounds, blowing raspberries and clicking her tongue, laughing and singing little tunes. She is such a character and really fun to be around, she is generally super happy, curious and hilarious. I am so proud to be her mom.