Barbecue Season!

If you are Douglas you know that there is no such thing as Barbecue Season! One can barbecue in any weather. At any rate, it is definitely barbecue season at our house, as we have had friends over three times in the last 7 days for barbecue! Doug went to Costco and filled the fridge and a portion of the deep freeze with steak, ribs, chicken....Mmmmm!

I am also excited about our fire pit! I have always wanted one! There is no better place to pass the evenings than a fire pit! Much as I LOVE Doug's barbecue, I can't wait to polish off a bag of marshmallows around it!

Well, it's supper time and we're having ribs! 

Gabriella's World

I love my names, but neither Doug nor I wanted our baby to have an unusual name that gets butchered on a daily bases. Gabriella was the perfect name for our little bumpkin, but a large majority of our community has never heard of Gabriella. They have heard of Gabriel, as that is more common around here, but Gabriella is often pronounced as Gabriel-a. It is very irritating. When we were at swimming last week a couple of "big girls" were chatting with us in the change room and asked me what her name was. When I told them Gabriella the youngest, who may have been 5, said "that's a weird name!". The older one elbowed her and said "Rude!" I could only laugh!

Gabriella and I went to see a friend who was visiting from BC and her little boy who was perhaps 8 months old at my baby shower. It was Gabriella's first time meeting him "on the outside". I was very excited to see her interact with him as much as she did. She usually doesn't care much for children her own age, although he is a little older. He has long blond hair and is a very gentle little man. He would walk over to her and flop his head forward or back in her face so that she could play with his hair! It was so sweet! Well the following week when we went to songs and story time at the library she was trying to pet the little boy next to us. He had blond hair too and was just a little bit older than her. She was also trying to sing along for the first time!It will be interesting to see how she does in swimming tomorrow. She is still very quiet there. She just watches all of the other babies reactions.

If Doug and I had waited till we were ready to have children to have her, we would never have had any! I never thought I would be able to give a child all of the things I felt were necessary to give them a well rounded childhood, but here we are. Gabriella is such a happy girl! She has everything she needs and then some.

I am so thankful to our friends and family who have drench her in love and beautiful things.

Gabriella is Mitsy Moo Moo's biggest fan! Mitsy has been scared of little people for years after being tortured by the many kids we entertained at our house. She had kept her distance from Gabby when she was born, but these days she will sit next

to her on the couch and let Gabriella pet her with slimy little finger,
pull her whiskers and claw her eyes. Of course I do my best to keep Gabriella gentle, but I can only do so much.

Gabriella has been standing since she was two months old. She doesn't have enough balance to keep herself upright, of course, so I have been holding her whenever she feels like standing. I am so glad that I finally got her an exersaucer! She LOVES her exersaucer and has been spending the last few days in it screeching and jumping and laughing.... and now she's sleeping!

Looking Forward to Spring

Thanks to Gabriella there are so many firsts to celebrate! We are looking forward to our first Spring and Summer as parents! There are so many wonderful things to do as a family here.

We moved to a house down the street that backs onto a forested area. Gabriella and I explored it one day in her super awesome off road stroller! It's still pretty muddy with all of the snow melting, so we will have to go back again in a few weeks. Our backyard has a couple of apple trees that the Magpies and Cardinals seem to be enjoying. I just hope they don't attract too many stinging insects in the summer.

Our new house is up the street from the library. Our library is beautiful! It has a few rooms in the children's section just for song and story times. In the children's play area there is even a little puppet theater! Just behind the library is a park that has a track around a lake that connects the park to the theater and swim center that we go to.

We are so fortunate that Gabriella's swimming lessons are in a salt water pool. She will most likely swallow a lot of that water before she can actually swim! We take a class with some friends we met some months ago. I hope that Gabriella will make them long term friends by seeing them for playdates and other activities.

We haven't had a playdate at our house yet because I'm afraid it may be boring for the other babies. our house doesn't have as many toys and gadgets as the others. But we like it! Gabriella has a lot of books!

Doug finally had to put together her crib since she was getting a bit long for her bassinet. She looks so small in her crib though! She used to be such a good sleeper, but now all she does is play in her crib! Hahaha! There is so much room around her that she rolls around and kicks and plays with the cat through the bars... Sigh!



We are still working on our room. I have an idea in my mind, but we will see if it ends up as nice as Gabby's! Thankfully, we have a walk in closet in this house. That help so much, as one of us has way too many cloths!


We are so thankful to be here! It's so nice to be surrounded by beautiful places and people. Sherwood Park is a great place to grow our family. Much as we love and miss our friends and family back in Ontario, we wish everyone gets a chance to come out here and visit us some day.

Back To The Grind

Now that Douglas has gone back to work and the holidays are over, it is time for Gabriella and I to return to our routines. I have made a few changes to it in an attempt to keep my fitness goals on my mind on a daily basis. I am trying not to make a typical Thyra error; over schedule the day and have nothing go according to my unrealistic expectations. Gabriella wakes up and we have songs and story time. I am trying to  get out of bed before her each day or my shower and breakfast fall prey to her stories and songs. Every afternoon we have a scheduled walk witch allows for errands to be run, meetings and lunches to be attended. Her only evening routine is to be fed by, and put to bed at, 10. I think I will try to make that earlier so that I am not up till midnight cleaning every day. Then heading her off in the morning would be so much easier!

I have contracted the detrimental habit of hunching! I may have always struggled with popper posture, but I did not realize that having a baby would encourage poor posture! When she is in my arms my shoulders are always rounded into a protective bowl around her. when I breast feed my back is rounded to allow my breasts to sit below her little nostrils. When I am  out in public my shoulders seems to have a magnetic pull to wherever Gabriella is! So I will have to start rebuilding and maintaining my poor neglected back muscles!

Got to go now! Our lease is up next month and we still don't have a new place! And Gabriella will be needing her stories...

Fun With Family

Today is a couch day for our family. It is far too cold outside to be gallivanting. and I have a lot of neglected holiday tidying up to do. I should put the tree away, but then the gifts under it would need to be dealt with as well. I also need to make soup from the bones of my duck and ham bones... Later.

Gabriella is two months old. She has been trying to stand on hr own two feet for about a month and a half. Her balance has been getting better and better, and at times she manages to stand for a few seconds. I am so proud of my little girl. But she has lazy arms. He back is strong and during tummy time she bends it back for extended periods of time so that it looks like her arms are doing the work, but it is her back. So today I out her on her tummy on her play mat with a few bath toys. I amused she would fuss and end up whacking the toys across the mat. She did, and for a while I would catch them and put them back in front of her in the hopes that she would see the fun in the game. To my surprise she eventually lay contently on her tummy and did nothing. I thought she was asleep. After a while I checked to find that she was watching Star Wars with Daddy! It doesn't seem to matter what I do, this child LOVES television! Perhaps she knows she is not allowed to watch it and is exploring her inner rebel.

The holidays were great to us this year! My mother had a great time bonding with Gabriella. My Little girls did an awful lot of smiling over the Holidays and most of it was at "Grammy". We celebrated New Year's for the first time. It was so nice to get dolled up, eat good food and dance our shoes off! Getting home after 2am was a different story! I don't even know how late we woke up the next day. But January 2nd we woke up at an ungodly hour to take mom to see the Rocky Mountains. We drove to Jasper, down through Lake Louise and Banff to Calgary and back up to Edmonton.

Mom loved the excursion, but not even half way through the trip we ran into a snow storm that

blotted out the mountains entirely and stuck with us almost all the way home! The last two hours of the drive I drove through wind so strong and snow so heavy that the road was indistinguishable from the ditches and you could not see two meters ahead of the car! Thank God for the 18 wheeler that I was able to find and follow until we got toward the edge of the storm! Once the road could be seen again it was sobering to see the amount of vehicles lining the ditches along the way.


We wanted mom to see the West Edmonton mall before she left. We arrived home from the Mountain trip at 2:30am so we didn't take her until the afternoon. Going to the mall  was the perfect opportunity for me to use my new stroller again! While Doug was waiting for mom and me outside of a perfume store, another dad passed him with his child against his chest and a burp cloth over his shoulder. He saw Doug with Gabriella and a pink burp cloth and said, "the cape of fathers!".

Doug took mom to a bead store in the mall where she found a copper chain to hang the Amber pendant she bought me in Lake Louise. Now I have another beautiful piece of jewelry with history with my family.

Mom had a great visit with lots of pictures to take home to show her friends. We had a great time with her and look forward to seeing her again in the summer.