Don' be fooled

Liam is not always a happy, smiling boy. Have a look at the other side of the little man.



 

Helping Aunt Doris

Liam is such a nice boy, that after he opens the drawer and throws everything out on the floor, he hands you some of the stuff. Clearly Doris was looking for a bunch of twist ties or whatever this was. 

Party boy

So Liam can operate a swing by himself now as long as he is securely stuck in there. He was having a pretty good time as you can clearly see. I think once he can really walk and run around that he is going to be running us all ragged at a pretty hectic pace.

I think it is really cool how extreme babies are. I don't know if there is very much that I enjoy as much as Liam seems to enjoy this swing. It is the same thing when I come home from work. He is so excited and happy to see me, I am jealous of his enthusiasm. If I won the lottery tomorrow, my level of excitement would be just a little lower than Liam's when he throws a ball.

 

Pig face

This is Liam making his "pig face." He squishes up his face and then makes crazy sniffing sounds for a while. He thinks it is really funny, luckily I do to and encourage the pig face as much as possible. I also am training him to blow raspberries on command.

Car rides are becoming very noisy.

snort snort snort
bwbwophhhphhphphphp
snort snort
thpppppbpobpbpphph

ha ha.
 

Natural Progression

One Duck on a boat.

Two Ducks on a boat.


Four Ducks on a boat.

 

games with aunt Doris

Peeking around the corner is the funniest joke in the world. My son is a comedian.

 

The walking machine

OK, Liam can not yet walk on his own, but he is really really wanting to hold my hands and walk everywhere at the moment. It is not the fastest way to get anywhere, since every two or three steps he feels the need to stop and step on a leaf. Sometimes he wants to touch some dirt, but whatever the reason, he is not a fast boy.
 

Fun on the visit

Here is Liam the wonderbaby at the United Nations. They would not let us stand him up on the podium and look like he was addressing the world. That is their loss. I am sure he will be up there one day anyway, conquering earth.
Look, I am actually in a photo! Ryan took this one... Still in the UN... Same room... Would not let me stand at the podium like I rule the world either. I think the tour guide was a bit of a jerk. It is not like I was going to go up there and yell out things about making new resolutions proclaiming world holidays in my name. I probably would have made Mitsou's birthday a world holiday though, just to be safe.
Finally, this is Claudia riding a roundabout. I was feeling artistic, so I spun the roundabout around and then turned the shutter speed down to 1 second or so. It made this interesting look.
 

Majestic Facial Hair

OK, this is not actually in Geneva, but we drove accross the border to have a look at a nice little medeival town in France called Yvoire or something like that. The name and even the rest of the town is basically irrellevant since we saw this guy there. Check out the amazing 'tache on this dude. Why don't young people do this sort of thing anymore. I think my office would be a much more exciting place if more of the men I work with sported this kind of amazing facial hair.  

still in Geneva

Still down visiting Doris and Ryan in Geneva. The weather is good and I will have some more pictures to put up as soon as I get back home. Yesterday we went on a tour of the united nations. Liam was a good boy, although I way kind of hoping he would have a big poop. Then later in life I could tell him about the time he pooped in the UN. Instead he just crawled around the UN.

Climbing machine

Liam is a climbing machine. He can get on and off the couch, rocking chair and sometimes, the coffee table. He can not quite manage to get up on our bed, but it is close. I think climbing things is currently 2nd on his list of favorite things to do after opening containers and throwing the contents all around the room. 

Junior Couch Potato

Liam loves the remote controls. I have heard from other people that all kids seem to like playing with them. As soon as he sees one, he make a bee line for it, then has a seat and presses all the buttons. I am not sure why this is fun. It is not like that there is any sort of feedback from the remote. No noise, no lights, and there is no way he can connect what is going on with the TV/DVD/VCR with what he is doing...

Oh, the cordless phone is also a favorite. My colleague's kid made a 7 hour phone call recently. ha!

 

Worst brand name ever

I forget if I posted this picture or not. But I still think it is funny.

I was not reassured to be in a hospital where they use "maimed" brand gloves.

 

I like ducks.

I was looking through my pictures and I seem to have a lot of pictures of ducks... when I think about it, I do like ducks a lot and I feel compelled to take a photo of one whenever I see it in a park or what not.

I believe that for the next while, I am going to include a "duck of the day" along with whatever else I post on this site. Just to see how long it takes me to run out of unique duck pictures. This family of ducks was in a park in Stuttgart. It would have been early June when I took it.

 

good bye summer

So summer seems to be essentially over, bringing the standard german weather back. It has been cold, grey and raining for about a week now. At least we have some pretty impressive rainbows in my area. This is out of our upstairs window.


 

Hello up there

Liam likes to climb everything now. He is also starting to take a couple of steps without holding anything. As fun and entertaining as this is, it is resulting in lots of falling and head bumping.

He looks pretty funny when he tries.

 

Meeting of the minds

Yesterday my Canadian colleague (from Montreal) came over with his son Julian. It was pretty interesting to see the two little guys play around. This is the first time I have seen Liam play with another kid, normally he just plays by himself in the same area as other kids. This time they were racing around the house following each other and playing together with the toys. It was pretty funny.

I like when they 'talk' to each other, basically mimicing the wierd noises the other kid makes.

bweah... beh... mummummum.... beh.

 

Farmer Fritz

Our Neighbour Fritz has Chickens. These are some of those chickens.

bock bock bock.

 

Living the Dream

This is an old picture, showing the time that Claudia was able to realize her life long dream of driving a tractor. It is of course, Mike Starr's tractor and as an added bonus, Randy the crazy dog rode along. It should be pointed out, that the evening of this ride, Randy ate an entire roast beef that was supposed to be our supper.

Randy was banished to the garage to live with his shame. I forget what we ate, but it was some sort of pizza or fast food. Bad dog.

 

Simcoe Day at Last!

The waiting is finally over! it is SIMCOE DAY in Ontario today.

I have been on the edge of my seat, counting the days to my favorite holiday. Commemorating Lord Simcoe, discoverer of Lake Simcoe (I think.) I really have no idea at all what he did other than that, but it was certainly enough to have the "civic holiday" renamed "Simcoe Day"

Lets all join in our thanks for the majesty that is Simcoe day. I will celebrate tonight with the traditional Simcoe Day feast of left over spinach and cheese pie.

Uncanny

I think it is amazing how often Dilbert accurately captures what goes on in a large company. It certainly reassures me that most of the other corporate drones have the same daily problems I do.

This particular one is very close to my heart, as a business analyst, I am regularly asked by people for reports that very often have 50 thousand or more data points. Then I am asked to summarize the data in to a single sentence or so... just before a meeting... hooray!

Opinions please

Ok, so I was playing around with photoshop and the picture I posted a day or two ago and I ended up with the following two versions. I thought that since there was not all that much colour to begin with, it may look interesting as a Sepia (or maybe even B&W.)

Otherwise, I just cropped it and fixed the perspective, and then removed the electrical outlets and some other background crap.

I invite opinions on which looks better.