November is for Lovers

There's something about November. Something magically romantic.


My little brother got married earlier this month to a girl he met since he moved to Manhattan a few years ago. The weather was perfect for the noon ceremony in Salt Lake City and the evening reception in Park City.


They are such a cute couple and we are relieved to see that his bride had the patience and persistence to overcome my brother's general tendency to shy away from social interaction ... with anyone ... including us. I imagine we'll get more frequent updates about their life from her that we will from him.


The wedding was a great opportunity to get all the family together at once, which rarely happens. With more than 20 people in the family, it always seemed like someone was missing. This time, not only was everyone there, they even showed up in matching outfits.


November is pretty special. Eight years ago in November, we were married. Granted, the weather wasn't quite so warm and the grass wasn't quite so green, but it was just as magical. And now we've got little Scotty with us. We think he's so cute.


To celebrate eight lucky years, we had a little celebration of our own -- heading out to the Kootenay Mountains of British Columbia for the weekend. R's family used to own cabins on Windermere Lake, so it was nostalgic for her to come back and visit the area.

Nostalgia. Romance. Magic. Cute toddlers. November has it all.

Chapters Kids

The Chapters Bookstore near our house has recently opened a "Chapters Kids" section that takes up nearly a full quarter of the store. It has a big tea cup that you can sit in to read stories, a train set, and oodles of books and toys that you are free to play with. It has become our new afternoon hangout for cold-weather days. Plus, they have story time every day at 11am.

The addition of toys to the store's offerings is great because we can redeem our Air Miles reward points for gift cards, so we can buy all of Scotty's Christmas presents at the store without paying cash for any of it. We checked a few prices against Zeller's (another Air-Miles-eligible store) and found that some of the toys are actually cheaper at Chapters, so it seems like a winning strategy.

Chapters: choo-choo!

Twinners

He's 1. I'm 31. We're twins.

The Backlog Blog

If you read blogs (and apparently you do), you've probably noticed how frequently the postings start with something like "Wow, I haven't posted in a long time". It happens to almost everyone. A week turns into a month and pretty soon you've got a pile of pictures and stories that are waiting in queue to be immortalized in your blog.

And that's why it's called a blog.

You may have heard that "blog" is short for "web blog". Yeah, well, you heard wrong. It's actually "b-log", as in "back-log". This is my latest b-log entry:

The few evenings in the week when R has to work, Scotty and I hang out together. For most of the fall, it has been nice enough to go out in the wagon or walk to the park. With winter rapidly closing in, visits to the park are becoming scarce. However, two weeks ago, we went to the park to try out a new camera that we bought for the Scouts to use on camps. It's supposedly waterproof to 13 meters and highly dustproof, because it has no external moving parts.

That's great, but the test subject for this new camera tends to move quite a bit.



We also tested out the video function and I captured a few funny moments, like this wipe-out on the pathway leading to the park:

As soon as we got back inside where it was toasty warm, Scott wanted to go right back outside. I caught the typical routine that we go through whenever he wants to go out and play (which is quite often):

Once we tell him he can't go outside, he leaves the front door and tries his luck at the back door. As far as we're concerned, they both lead outside, so this trick hasn't fooled us yet.

Keyboarding Skills

I let Scotty type at the computer for a minute tonight. I stopped him when the typing turned to banging, but this is what he had to say:

BN NB HMJ'P}{
P/';>
?":?":?>./?

Notice the extensive use of 'shift'. The boy is dextrous.

Dragon Sighting in Highland, Utah

My younger brother got married in Salt Lake City on Saturday (Nov 1) and the extended family on my mom's side decided to gather together the night before to celebrate Halloween together in my oldest brother's neighbourhood in Highland, Utah. Several of his neighbours go the extra mile and set up tables on the sidewalk to serve things like scones, cider and nachos with cheese. I was so impressed, I would consider driving down again to trick or treat there.


Scotty was dressed as a stubby purple dragon and made the rounds with his 2nd cousins E (2yrs) and A (1yr), who were dressed as a monkey and a deviled egg. It was a bit of work herding the little band up the sidewalks to the different houses, but Scott quite enjoying receiving the colourful treats and stuffing them into his basket. However, at some houses he got 2/3 of the way up the walk before turning abruptly around. We figured he had a "bad feeling" about those places, so we didn't force him to go back. After I while, I think I figured out that he was afraid of some of the jack-o-lanterns, but perhaps it was something more ethereal.