Spring

Spring is finally here! The snow is slowly melting away from our deck and backyard which means we’ll soon be able to take Emma outside to play. I can’t wait to go play outside with her. Spring is my favourite season of the year. You can finally throw away your winter boots, open the window, go outside and smell the fresh air. For my husband it means that the bugs are about to return and the hockey playoffs are about to start, but for me it means warm weather and eating outside.

Since we haven’t been able to go outside much in the past few weeks, we have been staying inside and have been working on Emma’s new skills such as: spaghetti eating, pea picking, crawling and as of today ... refrigerator exploration!

Last Sunday Emma paid a visit to her grand-father.

And today was also his 71^st birthday so we went for cake and coffee. Emma’s grand-mother and aunt just came back from Europe where they spend time in Holland, where her grand-mother is from, so she received gift from her aunts and uncles over there and we got some yummy goodies (stroopwafel, speculaas and mergpijpjes)! I’m hoping to take Emma to Holland soon to visit and show her where her grand-mother grew up.  Spring is supposed to be gorgeous in Holland. Maybe next spring we’ll go visit and we’ll take some photos of the windmills, tulips and all the other things Holland is famous for. Uncle Frans here we come!

81 years old

I even got some photos of “mommy-and-me”

The four generations

Later on, we went back to our house and played some board games. Emma discovered that she loves Dominos.



I’ve been taking photos for a few weeks now with my new camera and I’m starting to realize what type of photo I prefer; simple and very organic: no flash, only natural light, no zoom (most of my photos  are 50-55mm), no special effects, no retouching. I don’t like to retouch my photos. I might crop them a bit to remove a stray hand or nose (!) but I don’t like to alter my photo. From my point of view, a photo is a still shot of exactly what I saw at that particular moment and if I alter it, it’s a little bit like lying to my eyes. If the photo I took is not satisfactory, I try to figure out what I did wrong, make a mental note for the next time and delete it. I guess that makes me old-school. SLR cameras, compared to compact cameras, have the uniqueness of taking photos “in-real-time”. What you see in your visor is exactly what the naked eye sees (through the mirror of the mechanism), and I feel like I’m cheating when I modify it.  My next purchase will be a 50mm lens because that’s the kind of photo I like to take. One day, I will buy Photoshop and get Lucas to show me how to use it, but I’m not ready yet J



My grand-mother, Emma’s great-grand-mother and also my godmother, turned 81 years old last week. 81 years old! She’s still in very good health and gets to play with Emma every week when we visit her and my grand-father. Yesterday, we went for a family brunch to celebrate her great joy of being healthy and surrounded by her family on her 81^st birthday. I feel incredibly blessed that Emma gets to know her. She took care of me all my life and some of my best memories as a child involve her. Emma also got to interact, for the first time, with her two cousins, William and Kevin. They’re the sons of my cousin Natacha, whom I don’t get to see often, so it was really cool for them to meet.

Rainy Weekend

Since Emma was born, friends and family have been visiting almost every weekend. It’s an amazing blessing to be loved by so many people. This weekend nobody was planning to visit and it was a bit weird to not have any visitors, but at the same time we got to spend a lot of quality time as a family. The weather was gloomy; it has been raining since Friday afternoon (unusual for this time of the year) so we spent 2 days cocooned in our house, playing games in front of our fireplace, making Emma crawl back and forth from the kitchen to the living room and generally having an awesome time just being with each other, Anil, Emma, Kyra, Maya and me.

It was the first time that Emma was exploring on her own. She found the dog bowls, the bathroom, the CDs, and several other treasures.

When you tell people that you’re expecting, one of the first thing they all tell you is “enjoy every minute of minute of it because they grow so fast” and you can’t help but to roll your eyes a little bit because you think you know. They are right ... Emma has been growing so fast! I love to go back and look at all the pictures I took of her since she was born and I’m amazed at how much she changed and grew.

I love my family!