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Long time, no update from me (Rob) on the Girards.com. I have loads of pictures I want to post from the summer, but just haven’t had the time. As most or all of you know, I started a new job recently…. OK, it’s been a couple months now. I’ve been super busy with work, and really enjoying it. Love being engaged in a complex project with lots of moving parts again 🙂

But apart from work, the home front hasn’t been all that calm either. If there’s anything that Kim & I are well known for, it’s that we’re constantly in a state of change… whether that be changing jobs, getting married, having a child, etc… this time, among other things, it’s MOVING!

We found a great new place to move into…. a small bungalow that we’ll be the sole occupants of! A great house to raise a family in, if you ask me. Or at least a great starter place until we get everything in order to build our dream home up north.

We spent the weekend in our new home painting and getting it in order so we can move in next weekend. Laura (my sister), was kind enough to come up this weekend to help us paint and keep us company. We had a great weekend and got a lot done!

My original intent for this post was to share a picture I just made with you. Last week, in the new house, Kim took a funny picture of Alice in her Jolly Jumper, wearing my boots. She posted it on Facebook and our friend Greg made a comment that we should photoshop out the jumper and give her an Elmer Fudd Hat. Greg: Thanks for the inspiration! 🙂

Alice is getting so big, so fast… hard to believe she’s:

A) Already 5 1/2 months

B) Only 5 1/2 months!

At her last checkup last week, she’s now in the 90 percentile for length and weight! At this rate, she’ll tower me before she can even say her first word!!!! I’m so happy she’s healthy, happy, and brings us so much joy 🙂

Hope you’re all doing well… The Girards are doing great! Enjoy the pics!

It’s been almost a month since the last update and since most posts have been about Alice (who’s now 4 months old!!), you can probably guess why there have been no updates!

A quick recap of the last month:

1. Kim & Rob celebrated their first anniversary on August 1st! 1 down…. MANY to go 🙂 Things just keeping better and better…. I am truly blessed to have such an amazing partner to go on life’s many voyages with!

2. Rob’ s back to work. I started at WWF Canada (wildlife, not wrestlin!) as their new Infrastructure Architect. Lots of fun server virtualization in the works as I design and build out a new infrastructure. For the geeks out there: HP Blade System (C3000 enclosure) w/ latest gen BL460c’s, loaded w/ CPU & RAM, Flex-10 virtual connects, LeftHand SANs (2 for multi-site) and more! Busy times ahead… so unless Kim’s doing the updates, don’t expect too many 🙂

3. We have a new brother-in-law and are happy to welcome Steve Scott into the family! Kim’s sister Yvonne & Steve got married on July 24th. Beautiful ceremony and a great time! 🙂

4. Trip to Alberta – Although the wedding was the primary driver for the trip, Alice’s Opa, Aunts, and Uncle hadn’t met her yet. She traveled really what a trooper! I had never seen the Rockies before, so while we were out there, we took a very casual 900 km one day road trip to “tour the surroundings” 🙂 Got some great pics, but haven’t had a chance to put an album together yet.

5. Down to Windsor for a visit. I’m actually on the train right now, heading to Windsor. Kim & Alice left 2 days ago, but I had to work so I am taking the train to meet up with them. Kim sent me a great shot of Alice’s first swim! I really didn’t want to have to wait until she was as old as she is (4 months) before getting her in the pool…. but we had little choice due to scheduling conflicts! 😛 I guess I could have brought her in the river up @ the nutshell, but the water was a wee bit chilly for me…. Alice would have turned 6 shades of blue!

I’m sure a lot more happened over the past few weeks, but that’s all I can recall for now.

Alice is doing great, as are the rest of the Girards. See you back again soon for another update…. hopefully one that includes some pics!

Cheers!

Happy Birthday Kim! Today, July 11th (07/11 – aka Slurpy Day @ SevenEleven) is Kim’s birthday! Alice wanted to give her Mom something special so I helped her out using photoshop. For a 3 month old, she’s pretty impressive on the computer!!!!

I know

Happy B-Day Mom!

Kim, hope you have an amazing birthday! Lots of love from Rob & Alice!

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Non-birthday-related: We haven’t posted any updates lately, and we’re overdue for some! We were out of town last week, up at the Nutshell again for some family camping. I’ll post on that a bit later and include some pics from our time up there. Stay tuned….

Day by day, Alice’s vision gets a little better and her world gets a little bigger. Mommy & Alice are enjoying some sightseeing out our window.

Some quality mother/daughter time

Here are a couple more:

Last week, Wednesday to be exact, Kim & I loaded Alice & Sally into the car for a little R&R out of the city. Destination? The Nutshell! For those of you unfamiliar with what or where a “nutshell” is, it is the nickname we’ve given the property we bought up North last summer.

There are some cleared sections on the land, a beautiful view, and RV, and outhouse and a fire-pit. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell (couldn’t resist!).

Alice turned out to be a happy camper for the 5 days we were up there. The weather was mostly amazing, and the bugs weren’t TOO bad. OK, so there were some black flies, deer flies and no-see-ums to deal with, but they weren’t overwhelming.

Here are some pics from our trip…. enjoy!

Although this site has been all about Alice, the site itself is not allaboutalice.com, it’s TheGirards.com. There are 2 other Girards in this immediate family and I thought this would be an appropriate place to share Kim’s great news. Last night Kim was awarded with CAMH’s “Transforming Lives” award at a beautiful gala, held on the grounds of CAMH , here in Toronto.

With 900 people in attendance, the evening was a huge success, bringing in over $800,000 to support CAMH. Of the 4 Transforming Lives recipients, Kim was one of them. And her speech, in my completely unbiased opinion, was the best of all. It had people laughing and crying with Kim’s amazing ability to speak. Seems only natural that she is making public speaking her full time career!

Here are some pictures from the festivities last night. Again… congatuations (inside joke) Kim… Alice & I love you very much and are very proud of you! 🙂

This morning Kim left to go shopping with Toni, a friend of hers (and mine!). So what happens when the cat’s away? Hell ya, the mice will play! So that’s what Alice, Daddy & Sally did – photog stylez!

Alice has decided her 6 week growth spurt has started and her hunger has picked back up again, demanding to be fed every 1.5 – 2 hours. In between the rigorous feeding schedule, Alice and her Daddy and Sally decided to play photoshoot again. Hope you enjoy the pictures!

The last couple shots of Alice are her in her swing that Grandma & Opa gave her way back while she was still a zygote. We tried it out for the first time yesterday (she was too small for it before) and it works great! The pics I posted are before and after…. insert crying baby, wait 2 mins, observe happy baby. Rinse & Repeat 🙂

Sally (our beagle) met Alice for the first time today. I was amazed at how interested Sally was in Alice, and how much she seemed to respect Alice. Beagles probably have the best smell of all breeds… so I wonder if she’s able to “smell” the genetic link between Alice, Kim and myself? I’ve seen Sally around other children and babies before, but she never seemed to like and respect the other kids/babies as much as she did Alice.

When Sally Met Alice...

There’s a good chance I’m viewing this through the eyes of a parent with their own dog and own child… but I really do think that Sally knew where Alice came from. Pretty weird! Do others have anything to share with respect to their own children & pets?

Anyway… can’t wait for Alice to grow up a bit and enjoy spending time with her puppies and kitties 🙂

Apparently babies have growth spurts. And from what I can tell, they happen at day 4-7, again at 3 weeks, and then again at 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months and 9 months. Alice has hit a 3 week growth spurt… with a vengeance! No more of this casual eating every 3 hours. Every 1.5 – 2 hours, she is hungry. And when hungry, she REALLY lets us know! We are about 3 days into her feeding frenzy and apparently it can last from 2 – 7 days. I took this picture because it is such a delightful scene: formula that’s ready for her to drink.

Ahh.... a fridge ready for a hungry baby!

The opposite of this what seems like only a few hours later. OK, more than a few hours, but much less than a day! That’s when we don’t have formula ready to go for her, and it’s most likely going to be in the morning after exhausting every bottle we’ve made over night. So far it’s only happened once where we had to result to a bottle of ready-made we had left over from the hospital, but we needed it FAST!

There’s not too much to making formula, but it takes planning and time. You boil water, sterilize bottles and nipples, let the water cool, measure water & formula, mix, and refrigerate. But from when you first start to having a bottle ready, is probably about 2 hours…. you don’t want to burn yourself making the formula, and you definitely can’t feed boiling formula to Alice!

And from the fridge, it’s another few minutes in the bottle warmer. No biggie… just a few minutes, right? Unless you’ve got a screaming baby who’s just decided feeding time started 15 minutes ago and you’re late! Small price to pay, but worth documenting so when I look back at the sleep-starved first few weeks, I can remember all the formula I made, a couple times a day. And you can’t get ahead of yourself… it’s got a shelf life of 24 hours once you mix it. And once served to Alice, that specific bottle and its contents are good for only 2 hours, max. Just another one of those things you don’t see yourself doing until you’re doing it. I’m sure this is barely just the tip of the iceberg of things I never really anticipated doing….  🙂 It’s OK for all you parents to be snickering at me… you probably shared similar experiences one way or another!

My post wasn’t all about making formula all the time. I also wanted to post a few random pics taken over the past couple days. 2 are from a couple hours ago when the 3 of us had our first family outing… a BBQ on a beach hosted by some friends of ours: Thanks Jana & Tomas!

The other 2 are a shot of Kim holding Alice in our kitchen, and the other is Alice’s view above her crip with Winnie the Pooh decals and a mobile Aunty Laura made for her.

I was looking through all our photos from the past few weeks and thought it might be a good idea to post pics belonging to a similar theme. Today’s Theme: Friends of Alice! Thanks to everyone again for coming by for a visit at the hospital or home, and for your very thoughtful, generous gifts and kind words 🙂 Alice is so fortunate to be able to be brought up around so many great people! 🙂