You hear it from everybody but there's still no way to prepare for how quickly the time flies.  Six months already.  Wow.  (Full disclosure - the picture on the right is from his THREE month birthday.  I don't have a current version of this shot but will get one next weekend.) 


Latest milestone - crawling! - which started two days ago.  I try not to be competitive and get into that "my baby can do this early, my baby can't do that yet" stuff since we pretty much all learn to walk and talk eventually, right? 

But I still take a measure of pride that he's on the early edge of the scale for crawling which happens somewhere between 6-10 months.

In completely unrelated news, this is pretty damn funny.

Pace needs to work on his game face but he's young - it'll come.  (And no, that's not spilled beer on my leg.  And yes, it's baby drool.)

On a related note, we went to see Brent Butt at Casino Regina for my staff Christmas party Friday night.  I have a completely unprovable theory that Saskatchewan's current status as a "have" province with a booming economy, low unemployment and various other positive economic indicators is directly related to the debut of "Corner Gas" five years ago and the pride the show's success has instilled in this province since then. 

Should the Riders beat BC today to advance to an all-prairie Grey Cup against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, the team's success would be another indicator of the province's new optimism - natural resources and high dollar be damned! 

Pace has a new cousin!  Almost six months to the day after he was born, Pace's cousin, Dennon Robert Thompson arrived in very similar circumstances - breech position requiring an unplanned c-section. 

It was a weird sense of deja vu for me all day - finding my way to the labour and delivery unit, sitting in the same waiting room, visiting the same Robin's Donuts to kill time.  Tallie (the new mother) was even put in the exact same mother and baby room as Shea had been.  Speaking of which, Shea enjoyed the day too as she got to see things from a different perspective including being part of many of the things she had to miss when she had a c-section of her own such as the baby getting its initial assessment and so on. 

For a break later in the afternoon, we went to visit the ward Shea works on and ended up having a conversation with one of her co-workers about the unsolicited "advice" you get from everyone and anyone when raising a child. 

"Use what makes sense to you, ignore what doesn't and say 'thank-you' to everyone who offers some nugget of wisdom."

This was a timely conversation as this advice seems to be coming  more frequently lately as people comment on some of the decisions we've made on how we're raising Pace. 

In fact, I decided to write a list summarizing our most  "controversial" choices:

1. Co-Sleeping
Not to generalize but there are a lot of people who tend to be our parents' age (er, I didn't say "our parents...period", did I? ) who can't understand our choice to have Pace sleep with us.  Comments range from "you'll never get him out of your bed once you let him in" to "he's more likely to die of SIDS if you do that!" - both of which are pretty much bunk as far as we're concerned.  We love the connection, the comfort and the convenience of having him between us every night and that's why we do it.  (Oh, and also because he's been nursing every two hours lately. )

2. Disposable Diapers
Shea and I were sure that we were going to use cloth diapers - either a service or laundering ourselves when Pace was born.  I think it was Quinn who passed along a Wired article late last year that changed my thinking on this.  It said that each type of diaper - cloth and disposable - was pretty much equal in terms of its environmental damage - they just occurred in different ways.  Plus, with us being on the road so much because of the job I ended up taking, disposable diapers were simply just so much easier. 

3. Exclusive (and Extended) Breastfeeding
It's unreal that this is even considered a controversial idea in our society but the fact that Shea has chosen to breastfeed exclusively for the first five months of Pace's life and intends to breastfeed for at least a year and possibly two is exactly that - controversial to many people.  So very very sad.  (Shea's so militant that she even refuses to pump breast milk to be given to Pace by bottle - "I want to be able to say that my baby has never eaten from a bottle." is something I've heard more than once)  On a semi-related note, Shea also loves to breastfeed in public and enjoys any shocked reactions she gets. 

4. Eating Everything (including meat! )
Traditionally, the way you introduce food is, at six months, you give your baby rice cereal.  For a month.  Then you introduce a bland vegetable.  For a week.  Then another one.  For a week.  Then another one.  For a week.  Then, after a month or so has passed,  you try a fruit (veggies are first since they're less sweet so the thinking was that a baby who got fruit first would never grow to like veggies.)  Meat was reserved for nine months at the earliest.  So the news that we've introducing a variety of foods in rapid succession, including pureed meats (or a large piece of steak to suck on ), gets a fairly negative reaction from quite a few people including our family doctor (who is otherwise a great guy and in fact, won the Saskatchewan Physician of the Year award a few years back.)  But various medical professionals are increasingly saying that meat can be introduced as early as six months, especially in exclusively breastfed babies, to give them sufficient iron (see question 7 on this linked page) and also because of the theory that meat is simply another food that humans eat and babies are, after all, human.  (I should note that we're not completely stupid and are not giving Pace nuts, strawberries, wheat, dairy or any other common allergens.) 

5. NHL Training Starts Early
Jason has put Pace on a training routine including pretend skating on the slippery kitchen counter, "bodychecking" pillows stacked on the couch and regular watching in-depth analysis of Saturday night hockey games.  Occasionally, Shea has to point out that shouting "if you don't make the NHL, daddy doesn't love you!" is probably counter-productive.  Then she hands Jason a Youth Soccer pamphlet. 

Anyhow, here's a pic of Pace napping with his new cousin (who is only a couple hours old). 

They don't look like it now but I can pretty much guarantee they're going to be hell on wheels in about ten years. 

It had to happen sometime and the first of many to come, I'm sure.  (I'm just glad it was his mom who let him do the face plant into his exersaucer instead of me!  But then again, is it wrong that I took a photo of it?)

Five Things Grandpa Peet and I Talked About During Pretty Much Every Conversation We Ever Had
1. The Stock Market
2. The Price of Oil
3. The Blue Jays
4. The Weather
5. The Stock Market

I was honoured to give the eulogy at Grandpa Peet's funeral this year, him having passed away only a week after Pace was born.  Needless to say, that was a time of the highest of highs and lowest of lows of my entire life, all within a period of a few days. 

The funeral was a decent affair as far as these things go - fairly light on the overwrought rhetoric and sombre tone that marks so many funerals but with a couple unique moments I'll never forget. 

One was right at the end when three couples that Grandpa and Grandma used to dance with regularly, waltzed right out of the chapel where the funeral was held to Anne Murray's song, "Could I Have This Dance?".


I knew in advance that this would happen and thought it would be the part of the funeral where I'd be most likely to get emotional.  But it was such an uplifting, happy way to end that instead, any tears I had were (strangely at the funeral of your last living grandparent) tears of joy - a fitting final tribute to a long, well-lived, successful life. 

The other moment that I didn't expect to affect me much ended up hitting me much harder than I ever thought it would.  It was when some members of the local Royal Canadian Legion stood to perform a tribute to my grandfather - something that apparently happens at the service of any deceased member of the armed forces.

One member read "The Ode of Remembrance"...

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

...and then, as "The Last Post" bugle call played over the speakers, one by one, six different Legionnaires marched to the front of the chapel, saluted, marched to a wreath that the first person had placed and pinned a poppy to it, returned to their spot, saluted again, then returned to their seat. 

I'm not a complete pacifist but if you know me, you know that I lean pretty strongly that way.  So as I said, it was a bit of a shock at how much this brief ceremony affected me.  It made me realise that my grandfather had done things in his life that I likely would never have to (partly because he did them when he did).  It reminded me how different our lives had been, not just that he had been to war and I hadn't but just how different our entire experiences of being alive were even though we were born only fifty-odd years apart.  It affected me because I knew the reason I was able to get the job that I did right out of library school was because a young man with a value set very similar to my grandfather's had chosen to go to Afghanistan out of a sense of duty to his country with all the risk that entailed rather than contentedly sitting at a desk in Weyburn Saskatchewan, buying books and supervising a network of rural library branches.  And it hit me because, as each of those octogenarians marched, slowly but with purpose, to the front of the room, I thought what it must be like to do this ceremony for yet another one of their deceased comrades, knowing how close to the end of their lives they were as well and what it would mean to our society to lose this generation. 

A bit more about one of these points which I also touched on in the eulogy I read that day - what a stunning relevation it was to realise that my grandfather and I had both been in England as young men in our 20's - him as a soldier risking his life as a tank driver in the Netherlands, me as a student who, because of what he and so many others did during the war, was able to visit the Netherlands during my time in Europe as a carefree tourist with not a care nor concern in the world. 

This is an extremely hard thing to admit on a public blog but I don't wear a poppy in November. This is partly because I feel that if you show support for one cause, you should show support for all of them that you believe in, partly because of my feeling towards wars (even just ones) in general (I think of the hypocrisy of people saying "I'm against the war but I support the troops") and partly because of my inherent resistance to anything which 99.9% of the population partakes in as the ultimate form of peer pressure and conformity. 

Are those good reasons?  I don't know.  Have I ever worn a poppy?  Yes.  Could I wear one next year?  Maybe.  Would I feel like a hypocrite if I did?  Ask me when I do.  Do I slip money into the bins where they sell them?  Sometimes.  Do I think about what Remembrance Day means each and every year?  Probably more than many people who slip that poppy on like a politician's smile. 

In fact, I usually shed a tear or two on Remembrance Day in my own private way. It's just that today, those tears will be more directly meaningful than they ever have been before.

I'll end the way I started...

Five Things My Grandpa Peet and I Rarely Talked About
1. His experiences as a tank driver in Europe during WWII
2. What It Was Like For Him Growing Up On the Prairies in the First Half of This Century
3. How He Met and Fell In Love With My Grandma
4. Politics, Religion and Philosophy
5. His Dreams, His Hopes, His Fears Throughout His Life

But we did talk about each of these things at least a bit during his life and for that, I am grateful.  And more than anything, those are the things I will remember today.

See also, my insightful analysis of my picks in this pool.