You Got It, Dude

No links today, instead you get pictures from my trip to San Francisco.
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First plane ride, followed by…
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… first car ride! Me trying to install this carseat in my friend’s car outside of the airport was comedic, to say the least. I’m like, 70% sure I put it in properly, and nobody died, so I’ll call it a success.
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Hotel baby #tinybuttonsblog
Hotel baby loved crawling around on the bed but required constant supervision as she would try and dive off it headfirst whenever possible. I think that was one of the hardest things for Gwen this trip, the constant supervision I mean. My apartment is pretty well baby-proofed (it has to be) so we just let her roam around. In a hotel room with unsecured cables and exposed outlets? Not so much.
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On the flight down she discovered the joy of tearing up napkins, something she also delighted in doing during most of our meals out.
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Practicing to get her tintype portrait taken at Photobooth SF. I was a little worried she wouldn’t be able to sit still, but in the end, she was a consummate baby professional, and her portrait turned out beautifully.
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outfit details on Tiny Buttons
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Gwen with Margaret, our airport chauffeur and babynapper.
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Little Joaquin, a fellow Tiny Button. He was pretty grumpy but there does exist somewhere a video of Gwen grabbing his hand so like… :3
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Gwen and the Painted Ladies.
Last chance for @blame_simian to squeeze the baby for four days
Taylor giving her last bottle before she and I headed back to the airport.
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Hotel hallways will never not be creepy and weird.
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After a 2+ hour delay with a increasingly fussy baby in the worst airport ever, this was the best thing that could have happened.
The best thing that happened to me today, having the whole row to myself on the plane
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The second best was this one falling asleep on my chest and staying that way for half of the flight.
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And finally, HOME. YVR is SUCH a better airport than SFO, plus it smelled like cinnabons.

Standing Tall

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Gwen has been pulling herself up onto her knees for a while now but this week (just in the last couple days since we’ve been back from San Francisco) she’s become especially adept at pulling herself into a standing position.
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DIMPLES!
I’m proud of her development, sad to say goodbye to another part of her babyhood, but also frustrated because she’s grabbing all my stuff now! I was working on a banner this morning and she pulled herself up on the couch and started snatching things off my craft table. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET ANYTHING DONE???? She’s actually frustrating herself as well because while she can pull herself up, she’s not very good at getting back down. She gets stuck a lot, or falls down and hurts herself.
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I guess the next step is… taking her first step. Seriously, where did my tiny baby go?

Breathe

Last Thursday, on my first day of being back off of work, my family went for a walk. I actually convinced Sym to go without much whining and complaining on her part, which was amazing.

The purpose of this walk was to show Sym where the Nine O’Clock gun is, but it was also to clear my head. I’d been so unhappy and twisted up for the whole of August, I just needed… something. Air. Water. Blue skies and trees. To recharge my soul or be able to breathe again.
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Before we’d even entered the park properly we saw these three wild otters swimming through Coal Harbour. I’m taking them as a good omen.
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It’s easy to see Taylor in this picture, but can you find Sym?
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It’s kind of terrifying how much she doesn’t look like a little kid anymore.
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Boogie Woogie Dancing Shoes

When I was in high school my best friend Danielle had this car, I want to say a Toyota Tercel? that just had a tape deck in it (I mean, this was in like 1993). One day when we were thrifting she bought this disco compilation record and for some reason we got like, TOTALLY OBSESSED with a couple of the songs on it. We taped them off the record and we’d listen to them in her car over and over. We’d sing along and we had like, choreographed car-dancing we’d do at certain parts. It drove everyone else crazy but we couldn’t stop, even when her tape deck stopped working properly and played everything at high speed. We’d just sing and dance faster.

Paper Chase


Gwen is super in to old receipts right now.

Sooooooo I guess I’m not working anymore? The family decided to change childcare providers and idk, it’s a little sad (I really liked the kids) but mostly I just feel relieved. I REALLY didn’t want to be back at work yet (ya think?) and I was so depressed about it that I cried every night. I think a lot of moms have feelings of sadness and guilt about going back to work after having a baby, and even though I work from home it was still a huge change. With Sym it wasn’t an issue because I didn’t start working again until she was three, so I didn’t know what to expect and honestly, it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Maybe it would have worked out if I had started work in September like I’d planned, maybe I would have been more emotionally prepared. Who knows. u live u learn, igss.

Tall enough to pull stuff out of my recycling bin, uh oh

Chip Testers

On the weekend Taylor and I tried the new flavour’s of Lay’s potato chips- this is the Canadian version of the contest. Here the finalist flavours are Grilled Cheese & Ketchup, Creamy Garlic Caesar, Perogy Platter and Maple Moose.

O Canada #truenorth #strongandfree

Grilled Cheese & Ketchup
Tanie: I can smell the cheese and ketchup.
Taylor:The ketchup is overpowering.
Tanie: It’s kind of… spicy?
Taylor: This has a weird aftertaste, and it lingers. I don’t think they know what grilled cheese tastes like.

Creamy Garlic Caesar
Taylor: It doesn’t have much of a smell.
Tanie: It’s mild. It does kind of smell like croutons.
Taylor: It’s like someone faxed you the smell of caesar salad.
Tanie: Whoa! This tastes way more than it smells. That’s pretty garlicky.
Taylor: I’ve got garlic, and then parmesan cheese and the aftertaste has the sharpness of a dark-leafed lettuce.
Tanie: This tastes the most like the thing it is supposed to be.
Taylor: It’s very full-bodied.

Perogy Platter
(for some reason there is no record of our opinions on the smell, maybe because it was so boring)
Taylor: Not really perogy-ish until the end, a perogy aftertatse.
Tanie: Mostly onion with a perogy finish.

Maple Moose
Taylor: That smells weird.
Tanie: Oh, I can smell it from here. It smells like used fireworks. It doesn’t taste mapley at all. It’s like… smokey at first and then sweet at the end.
Taylor: It kind of tastes like wasabi.
Tanie: It’s like someone lit a maple tree on fire.

Results
Taylor and I both picked Creamy Garlic Caesar as the Best and Grilled Cheese & Ketchup as the Worst. Maple Moose got an Honourable Mention for being so weird, and Perogy Platter was named Most Meh.

Get excited to read my & @blame_simian's reviews of these whackadoo flavours next week.

The next day Sym did a blind taste-test.

1. It smells kind of ketchup-y? The taste is so-so, in the middle. (This was Grilled Cheese & Ketchup)

2. This one smells maple-y, it tastes better than it smells. (Maple Moose, although she was the only person who got a maple smell from this chip)

3. It smells like a salad, or salad dressing. [she gave a thumbs up here] Good! (Creamy Garlic Caesar, like Taylor and myself she liked this one the best)

4. Ketchup-y smell. [I ask her how it tastes] NOPE. (Perogy Platter, this was her pick for worst)

Manicure Monday

… the mangled edition.

Essie Mint Candy Apple + Set in Stones glitter gradient
I painted these nails last week but never got around the taking a picture until they started chipping/getting worn down on the tips & sides. I’m actually impressed they held up as long as they did since I made a lot of banners last week and started sewing Gwen another pair of shoes on the weekend. Miraculous!

A Case of the Mondays

Normally I recap my weekend on Mondays but this weekend was a TOTAL BUST. In my draft I started writing about it I outlined all the things I was planning to do as if I’d already done them, but haha I never did. Not that I didn’t TRY, it just didn’t work out the way I’d planned.

There were three things I needed to do:
1. Get a new dog crate for Georgie & Kichou to share and rearrange the foyer accordingly, including setting up a new area for the daycare kids’ things.
2. Pack up all the assorted junk piled at the end of the hallway.
3. Drop the mattress support on Gwen’s crib because this was happening:
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Okay, that one we actually did do, because safety is very important. But the other two? Not so much. We TRIED to get a new dog crate, but the pet supply store near us didn’t have the right one so we had to order it online. And I MEANT to pack up all the hallway junk, but instead I went on an endless mission to try and find gold glitter sheets- I have about fifty billion orders for gold banners and every single store is sold out of gold! Great. After that I was too tired so I just laid on the couch and watched Supernatural all afternoon/evening/my entire life.

After a turd of a weekend, this week isn’t off to a particularly good start. Georgie kept me awake half the night making weird honking noises (she has trachea problems) so I’m suuuuuuper exhausted. A smoothie got dropped on the floor, and after I cleaned it up I somehow knocked a glass off the counter and it smashed all over the kitchen and dining room floor. Broken glass in an open-plan apartment when you have a crawling baby? PERFECT. Just exactly what I want to deal with before nine am.

Thankfully this week is a short one- I took tomorrow off to go to the fair and then on Friday we’re going to San Francisco! And until then some pictures of Gwen being adorable should brighten my morning. Even though I didn’t do the best job in the world sewing the cover for this beanbag, the baby is a big fan.
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