What are you doing with so many sippy cups?

03 Wednesday Apr 2013

Tags

This weekend, Mom was out having fun, and the guys were hanging around the house trying to stay out of trouble. I don’t get to spend a huge amount of time alone with X, so I underestimate the sorts of things he can get up to when I’ve got my back turned. Things like making a secret cache of chocolate cookies so that he can get his own snacks when Dad isn’t being forth-giving. Or creating a tower of blocks and books so that he can reach his crayons. He can also be pretty clever when left to self play.

While I was doing the dishes after lunch, Xavier kept coming and asking for a new juice glass. He has a tendency to put his glass down and forget about it, so I didn’t give it any thought. I would just full up a new sippy cup and keep doing my thing. After a few minutes he started yelling a lot, and then he came ripping down the hallway with a bowl on his head. Still, not that surprising around our house, so I smiled and waved while scouring pots and pans.

The weird thing is that he turned around, put his ‘hat’ back on, and ripped it up back down the hall again. Then out to the living room, back to his bedroom, out to the living room, back to his bedroom. After 6 or 7 laps he was starting to make me tired so I gave the dishes a break and poked my head out into the hall.

Turns out he built himself an obstacle course out, with sippy cup pylons, and was running wind sprints up and down the hallway. Thank you soccer class!

Not one to let an opportunity for exercise go to waste, I poured a cold glass of wine, and cheered him on from the couch.

Image

The Easter Egg

02 Tuesday Apr 2013

The Egg

This year the Easter bunny was very kind to us. By sheer luck, and the kindness of a colleague, we managed to get one of fifty limited edition Easter Eggs from Messina, Sydney’s premier Gelato shop.

Designed to be shared between 2-3 people, our classic easter egg contains gianduia (choc hazelnut) gelato with a soft calamansi lime and passionfruit ‘yolk’ encased in an ‘eggshell’ of white chocolate ganache (which i should point out took our chefs about 6 hours to perfectly colour match with a real egg!). The Egg is nestled into a hazelnut dacquoise & caramel crunch base, and surrounded by a spun sugar nest.

Posted by Dave | Filed under Blog, Food

≈ Leave a Comment

What, your 2 year old doesn’t get a cheese course?

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by Dave in Blog, Food, Parenting

≈ Leave a Comment

Just recently, we discovered that it’s not ‘normal’ to server your toddler multi-course meals. I only know this because we started talking with other parents about family dinner time, and how tricky it is to have a sit down meal with a little one.

Most parents lament how much time they spend flying the pea-plane and into the toddler hanger. Some would share secrets about how to get pumpkin soup out of the carpet. I would chime in with complaints like “X will never finish his current course if he sees the next course lined up on the counter.”

At this point, I’d get bizarre stares.

“Courses? For a toddler?”
“Oooh, aren’t we fancy!”
“Does he get a personal waiter too?”

Yes, his name is Daddy, but that’s beside the point.

Anyhow, I started to wonder: If you don’t feed your kind in courses, how do you feed him?

Here’s what we do:

His first course is always a bowl of veggies. Ideally a portion of whatever we are eating, or maybe just some frozen peas.
Next comes the carb, and often some kind of protein. Think: Quesadilla, Mac&Cheese, Humous and Toast.
The third course is optional – if we didn’t give him enough protein in round two, we offer a cheese course to balance things out. Or, sometimes, just a big glass of milk.
Finally, he finishes each meal with some kind of fruit. Grapes, a half an orange, or a nanana.

OK, yes, the cheese course is often brie or roquefort, but that’s just cause the kid hates cheddar. Otherwise, I don’t see this as being too fancy.

It doesn’t really take any extra time, just extra plates.
It lengthen’s his meal, and he stays interested because of the variety (don’t like your peas, how about this bowl of noodles!).
If it comes in sessions, he eats what’s in front of him instead of just picking his favourites. When it comes all at once, he eats way less, and tends to use the remaining portion as wall art.

It takes an extra minute or two of prep, but it means that he’s way more interested at dinner time, and Mommy and I can get a short break while we scarf back our daily grub.

New Zealand

26 Tuesday Mar 2013

Posted by Dave in Blog

≈ 1 Comment

We’ve booked ourselves for a two week pseudo-holiday in New Zealand!

The company will be flying me out for some HR related activities that require a bit of travel; Sarah and X will be tagging along to see the sites. The best part about the trip is that it requires a decent amount of driving over the course of two weeks. We’ll be visiting three cities on the South Island, and two cities on the North Island, with a short jaunt through Middle Earth over the weekend.

Our Australian travel checklist is slowly getting crossed off. Next stop – the outback!

Back from Adventure

24 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by Dave in Blog

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

Canada, travel

I think when one starts creating Venn diagrams to describe life’s problems, they may have crossed some kind of mental breaking point. In any case, I’m back. Both physically (from an exploratory journey to NA) and mentally (from a brain imploding what-am-I-doing-with-my-life adventure).

The trip was really great. Not only did I get to spend the better part of a day with a couple of friends – mostly eating and playing with rubber balls – but I talked with 9 different people about possible job opportunities within my current company. I also got a few insightful opinions about opportunities in general.

Last year, after having been here about 8-10 months, I’d asked a few folks about opportunities within the company in other areas. They were super standoffish to the point of being rude. I guess there’s some unwritten rule about ‘thou shalt not so much as talk about changing jobs within thine first 12 months.’ Now that the barrier has been breached, the tone of conversation couldn’t be more different. Each of the people i talked with were super open to change, and were all really keen to talk about best fit from a team perspective.

It’s going to take me some time to sort out what makes the most sense for me – I think I need to carefully balance a few different factors: is the change a good career move? is taking an easy path a cop-out that I’ll later regret? Should I work on a project I don’t like because it has high exposure, or work on something I’m good at that will probably flop, or work on something that’s boring but looks good on a resume, or work with people who are super interesting. Blah. I think I feel another Venn diagram coming on. One thing that we did determine is that one of our geographical options – Seattle – is probably off the list.

Anyhow, does this mean that I’m moving to NA?

Well, not just yet. There are some opportunities here as well that I want to explore. Plus, we just signed a 6 month extension to our lease.

On thing that has been kind of surreal about the whole experience was the timing of the trip in relation to what our plans were last year. Originally I had asked for a sabbatical from my prior employer. They turned me down. Had they agreed, then I would have been taking the same flights through Vancouver, but without the return trip.

Where to next?

18 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by Dave in Blog

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

random

We regularly banter back and forth about where our journey will take us next. We very rarely decide on much (decisions are hard!) but we sort of narrow things down in a way to help us aim at a few good options. It’s become a bit of a stickier issue since having X; we’d really like to be closer to family (and I’m sure family would like to be closer to us) but the people I’m related to don’t live anywhere near people who will pay me to work, leaving us with this nasty geographic triangle to contend with:

If you’re wondering where the intersection is, you may have missed the point.

Thing is, there is no perfect place for us, so we’ve been trying to settle on a near-good-enough place that will still make it easy enough to find work, to see family, and to settle down (for a bit anyhow).

We sat down the other day and brainstormed all of the places where we might want to live, if there weren’t really any restrictions, and quickly came up with a list of 14 cities across 7 countries and 4 continents. That got shortlisted quickly, but only down to nine, four and three. Getting beneath that took a lot of chatting, research, and coin flipping.

The biggest decision points ended up being:

follow the best work opportunities.
stay put; or move within 3 hours of both folks (by plane).
a complete lack of interest in learning the nuances of a fourth country.

After restricting things quite a bit the list shrunk to a measly four places. Three of the top four cities were located in western North America, and all three are much more “where the work is” than “where the folks are” but none are anywhere near as far as Paris or Sydney. The surprise fourth option was: “Stay where we are for a bit longer.”

So, now that we have some idea of where to go, I think the ball is back in my court to see what can be done about the work side of things. I think the decision point will be sometime by my birthday, and July or January look like the best time to move for tax reasons. We’ll see what happens.

Image

The little photographer

15 Friday Feb 2013

Tags

photo, xavier

The little photographer

Xavier loves playing with the photo on our iPhone’s or the iPad. I think it’s something about the flash it makes when it snaps a photo. In any case, it makes our photo albums a little clogged up. This is my current excuse for not posting more photos.

What you see here is 25 pictures of our roof (this is the first 25 in a 100 photo series).

Posted by Dave | Filed under Blog

≈ Leave a Comment

That time we found a still in a flower garden

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by Dave in Blog, Food

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

alcohol, Australia, food, friends and fam, gin, photo, travel

The entrance to the distillery. It just gets nicer after this.

The fourth of six catch-up posts that I hope to get out in February.

One of the fabulous Christmas gifts we received from our chef friends was the Foodies Guide to Sydney. This is not a restaurant guide; I have plenty of those. This is a guide to grocery stores, gardens, markets, bakeries, coffee roasters, and other purveyors of fine foods. Seeing as vacation = food, this was the perfect accessory for our summer excursions.

We consulted the guide on several of our excursions, and on the first day Nick was here we opted to take a short detour through the Central Coast on account of the recommendation of Distillery Botanica – a Gin distillery just outside the city bounds. How could we pass up the opportunity to visit a fully operational distillery, especially one who specialises in Gin, and native botanical liqueurs?

Distillery Botanica — recently rebranded from St Fiacre — is set in an old gardening centre. The proprietor, Philip Moore, has a long history as a gardener, and after developing an allergy to the liquor of the region (wine) he decided to retool a little and start making spirits. In particular, he wanted to highlight the flavours of the region, and he incorporates local herbs and such into his products whenever possible.

A lot of his inspiration in the production was taken from the London Dry Gin style, and the flavours in the Gin are very familiar. He showed us around the distillery, and took us into the back to show us his two copper stills. The big one had six separate filtration chambers, each one allowing him to refine the taste in his raw alcohol to be a little cleaner than the chamber before.

Copper Pot Still

After the tour, he took as back to the entrance for a tasting. We of course tried the gin (delicious!), but also some of his liqueurs. The raspberry liqueur was a clear crowd favourite. It tastes of purse raspberry with a nice balance of sweet and tart, and no hint of alcohol at all. His other, native flavours included things like Lemon Myrtle, Mountain Pepperberry, and Wild Lime. Each one was delicious as a digestif; but perhaps a little too sweet for my palate under normal circumstances. My favourites were all flavours that had a nice tart or spice to balance the sugar.

After the tasting (and buying) we took a quick trip around the gardens to stretch our legs. Philip told us that the entire area had been lovingly brought back to life using a delicate garden tool (a back hoe) about two years prior. You’d hardly know to look at it though. The path from the car park had a wide variety of flowering plants, and was teeming with small bugs and animals.

A butterfly resting on some white flowers near the entrance of the garden.

Lavender lines the interior courtyard.

Canberra

11 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by Dave in Blog

≈ Leave a Comment

Tags

Australia, friends and fam, photo, roadtrip, travel, vacation, xavier

The third of six catch-up posts that I hope to get out in February.

Our first of four road trips this summer was to visit the nation’s capital (and a friend of ours). Canberra is about a 3 hour drive from Sydney, and we figured that we could make a day trip out of it. Note to future travelers – you might want to stay the night. The three hour estimate is maybe a little short.

The drive out was quite pretty. Lots of rolling hills (bigger than England; smaller than Ontario) and sweeping tree lines. We were also treated to an ‘act of God’ (as defined in our car insurance) on the way there when the great big freezer in the sky opened up and dumped giant balls of ice all over the highway.

Look at the size of these hailstones!

Xavier was pretty keen to give them a taste.

Canberra is an odd city, and feels very manufactured. The streets are built in circles, and radiate out from the parliament buildings. From the center point, the city is cut into six parts, each dedicated to a different aspect — markets, museums, parks, and so on. It’s not a super big place, and really feels like it’s just a hub for government. I’m told that it was selected as the site for the Nation’s capital because it was equidistant from the two largest cities in Australia; but, if that’s the case, then Australian geographers cannot be trusted.

During our trip we met up with Jade, a friend of ours from the American Church in Paris, who helped us through a whirlwind tour of the parliament buildings, the gardens near the old parliament buildings, and the War Memorial. We managed to snap a few pics in the gardens, but as you can see, Xavier had a lot of excess energy from all his time sitting in the car on the way up. Thankfully, The space between the new and old Parliament buildings turned out to be an awesome outlet for pent up toddler energy. Had we been there an extra day, we definitely would have hit up the botanic gardens, and some of the national museums.