time to break out the christmas onesies

say uncle!

My brother Cale came all the way up from San Diego this week to see family in Kelowna and also to hang out with Henry and to finally meet wee Walter-bear. "Meet" being the operative word here as Walt pretty much slept the whole time and Cale was quite sure something was wrong with him! {grin} Still, Henry was happy to have him here though he was grumpier than usual as he is experiencing his first double ear infection this week, poor boy. Our run of family visits is over now and we are looking forward to our Christmas trip back to BC coming up ... first time traveling with two and all their accoutrements!

Thanks so much for coming, Uncle Cale, and we hope it won't be too much longer before we can see you again!

his beautiful face

henry loves walter; walt adores henry

both get camera time

{one walking tall boy}

{one spitting up boy}

right now i have ...

... unwashed, pinned up hair, a self-bought birthday scarf, the cutest little boy, and a snap ready computer camera.
what do you have right now?

i'm so glad ...

I'm so glad ...
... that my parents left the country for 5 months this year
... that Sam loves to brag
... that I unashamedly ply friends and family with emails full of Henry and Walter photos
... that we live far away from our families
... that I've spent how many hundreds of dollars on getting photos printed?!
Yep, honestly, I'm thrilled and very, very thankful.

Ok, let me backtrack a little ...
Something happened about two weeks after Walter was born. My computer crashed. My hard drive failed inexplicably. My heart spasmed.
And the obvious question is, did I back it up? And the stupid, but truthful, answer is ... no. That's been on my to-do list for the past 3 years but as I was under the impression that Macs don't fail, well, I let that slide. Assuming I was ok. Apparently not. Random me. Stupid, embarrassed, horrified, heartbroken me. And let's just say I am a documenter of life and let's just say there was over 6000 photos on my computer and let's just say my hard drive failed.

Heartbroken.

We've replaced my hard drive and upgraded my computer now and we have the old hard drive back. Shopping around to where we can send it for data recovery, if that's possible. And if possible, very expensive. Now I'm trying to compile what remnants of my photo library as I can. It's like grabbing one more precious item on the way out the door of a burning building.

Thankfully (and I can't stress that enough) I still had most of Walter's birth pictures left on both cameras. And thankfully Sam has 1800 photos on his old laptop which I'm now copying and transferring over. But that stops just short of Henry's birth and has huge gaps in photos I took in the past. Yet thankfully every photo I uploaded and had printed off at our local photo shop is stored there online and so I was able to get a disk of all those photos. All the big moments from Henry's life that I printed off for both sets of grandparents, Sam's brag book at work, and all the scrapbooking I've done so far. And thankfully I just spent over an hour going through all my emails, pulling out all the photos I sent off to my parents in Scotland, or to friends after parties and events, or to family just to show off Henry's wonderful smile. And even more so, thankfully I uploaded hundreds of photos right to my parents' own computer while we were staying there over Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, plus more on Sam's parents and my sister's computers too, those important events and memories from our trips and reunions that I would have been devastated to lose.

So culling a little bit here and there, I've collected quite a few. Though not all, certainly not. And the worst is remembering certain photos I took from Henry's first year that I neither emailed or printed off or archived in some way and that maybe, potentially, those may be lost.

But today I'm thankful for each one that I'm finding and saving.
Still, it's a very hard lesson learned.

we're off to our baby shower!

if the house is too quiet ... then you'd better go find out why

look who's six weeks old!

i want to remember this

Henry's version of "funny". And more than a little bold as he knows he shouldn't be doing this, playing near the TV. The never ending game of Where's Your Blue Ball? It's always behind the speaker, it's always placed there with a mischievous smirk and a twinkle in his eye, and apparently Mum is always needed to retrieve it again.

Funny boy.
I do want to remember this. But can we think of a new game now?

she charms them all

My friend Katrina popped in for a visit last week ... and a proper Walter introduction finally. Bearing gifts, Katrina-style. I felt spoiled. (Those who know her, know that's certainly not unusual!) I realized when taking this picture of my son gazing adoringly at her, that I have the same photo of Henry taken only a year earlier, and they're both wearing the same onesie as well, oddly enough. (Thank you, Liz, for that!) Henry was rather unsure at first of this loud, happy, curly-haired girl trying to make him play ... but by the end of the hour this massively excited boy and his megawatt smile were captured by my camera as you can see, laughing and flirting with that loud, happy, curly-haired girl.

Katrina, you won him over. And I'm not surprised.

Thanks for coming over to love on my boys. We'll pop in to work to see you soon!

nana and grandad

We finished off the family-helping-Cass-recover-and-meeting-baby-Walter-month with a visit from Sam's parents last week, who made the very long drive out here from the Island. Henry hadn't seen Nana and Grandad since the summer ... way back when he was just learning to clap and pull himself up ... and so was he ever so much more fun (and active) this time! He of course kept his grandparents busy and entertained, so much so that it wasn't just Sam and I going to bed exhausted each night! Walter was a sleepy snuggler, the perfect baby, and Sam's Mom helped out so much in feeding him most every 3 hours during the days, to free up my time and hands for other things. They were both instrumental in helping us renovate our upstairs last spring so we were excited as well to show them all the work we did in repainting the living and dining rooms this summer. We will be out to see them again at Christmas - hopefully with Sam's brother and sister and their families as well - and now that Henry knows his grandparents it will make for a very fun visit for him too. And a very full house with cousins to play with!

Thank you so much for coming all this way, Mom and Dad, to help us and to spend a full week with our boys ... we so appreciate it!

one month old