This is what progress looks like

Today I laid some of the concrete blocks that will eventually compose our new retaining wall.  To understand how momentous an occasion this is, please indulge me while I list the tasks that had to be accomplished before the first brick could be laid:

• Painstakingly tear out the old rotted rail ties that composed the previous wall
• Dig and haul wheel-barrel after wheel-barrel full of dirt away from the site
• Acquire and install a trailer hitch for our vehicle
• Fixing up Grampa's trailer up at the river (with much help from Grampa)
• Use the trailer to acquire two types of gravel
• Shovel gravel into the trench and tamp it down
• Haul a wheel-barrel full of sand -- the very same sand that I earlier removed from the site -- back to the site, shovel it into the trench, tamp it, and painstakingly level it using a standard six-foot level and some scrap wood.

The result is what you see here:

The black tube is for drainage from our eaves trough.  In addition to laying the blocks, next on the agenda we have:

• Lay landscape fabric behind the completed wall.
• Backfill with gravel.
• Place some weeping tile and the rain drainage pipes behind the wall and embedded in the gravel
• Glue a finishing layer of bricks on the top of the wall.
• Construct a ramp so that we can get our bikes behind the house.

This retaining wall is a ridiculous amount of work.  Retaining walls are expensive.  Every retaining wall you see represents a flaw in design.

Radka cooks sauerkraut soup, helps us get our lives on track

Now that Radka's stay with us is almost half over, I thought it prudent to finally take her picture and post it for the world to see.

She has been a tremendous help to us.  She frequently rises well above the call of duty to put in extra time with Max and do our dishes for us.  Today she even vacuumed the house.

Today she also cooked us a traditional Slovakian Christmas dish: mashed potatoes with sauerkraut soup.  (How this dish came to be a Christmas tradition in Slovakia is beyond me.)  Greta enjoyed the meal.  But I'm not a huge fan of sauerkraut.  Of course, I ate the whole dish anyway, being a human garbage can and all.

Greta and I have been chipping away at the backlog of items on our respective to-do lists.  Thus, Radka's presence has not reduced our workload -- it's just that our workload has shifted from Max to more mundane things such as earning a living or maintaining the house.  I'm exhausted with all the work but happy that the immense weight of things I need to accomplish is lightening ever so slowly.

Just for Wendy, here's a list of some of the things I've accomplished:

• A few days ago I completed some minor renovations and cleaning in the laundry room.
• I spent much of today hauling wheel-barrels full of dirt away from our soon-to-be-built retaining wall and then filling the trench with gravel.  Leveling the tamped gravel is exceedingly difficult.  I'm not yet sure how I'll accomplish that.

As today is Saturday, Radka is nominally off-duty and so Greta and I made a token attempt to watch Max and do housework ourselves.  As I already mentioned, Radka vacuumed our house.  So much for being off-duty.

As part of this token child care I took Max in the bike trailer to Gramma and Grampa's to feed the cat. We then biked to the FreshCo where we purchased $67 worth of groceries, piled them into the chariot and saddle-bags, and biked all the way from Bridge & University to our house -- an 8km bike ride through busy suburban roads. The biking was especially tough due to our abnormally heavy groceries (Wendy-list):

• 8 litres of milk,
• 3 litres of olive oil,
• 4 litres of vinegar,
• many canned goods, and
• a 12kg child

Max got a little irritable by the end of all this, but he took it like a champ.  I'm tired.

Conversations you would rather not over hear

Gus:  Max....? What are you eating!?

(pause)

Gus: No Max!  That's dog food, we DO NOT eat dog food.

Max: Mmmmmmm!

... And I was worried about raw bread.....

Riding a bike before sixteen months

Teela gave us her old front-mount bike seat for babies.  We finally got around to attaching it to a bike a few weeks ago and Max has been in heaven ever since.  He rides right up front.  He likes to stare down at the ground as it zips by, ring the bell, and grab the handle bars to veer the bike into a ditch.

We've even taken to "walking" the dogs on our bikes with Max in the seat.  It's a great way to give the dogs some exercise when we're short on time and the experience is more enjoyable for Max (and hence for us) than if we walk with him in the chariot.  (He's developed a need for speed.  The chariot at walking pace no longer cuts mustard.)

A while back gramma and grampa got Max a bike helmet.  We've decided that the easiest way to get children accustomed to wearing a bike helmet is to raise them so that they never know any different.  Today I snapped some pictures of Max in his favourite bike chair wearing his helmet.

Mommy's sportin' a funky new sun-hat-plus-helmet look that's sure to be all the rage.

"I like sitting here so much I forget I'm wearing this helmet!"

I'll finish with a couple more unrelated pics taken on or before our dog walk this morning.

These mongrels are the whole reason we march in the baking sun day after day.

Our clothesline doing what it does best.  It's mounted on our deck at one end and 20 feet up a pine tree at the other.  Note the beans growing on a railing box in the foreground.  What a great yard.

More strawberries than you can shake a stick at

Last month (June 27, to be precise) the Gutoski-James clan drove out to Herle's farm for an afternoon of pick-your-own strawberries in the baking midday sun. The strawberries we picked cost $110. We probably would have payed at least $200 for the same amount of strawberries had we not picked them ourselves.

That's a lot of strawberries.

Greta made two strawberry pies and strawberry shortcake. We canned approximately 30 jars of strawberry jam and filled 5-10 freezer bags with strawberries.

Mom loves her strawberries.

We planned the trip so that Max would sleep through most of it in his chariot.  Unfortunately, he slept for only 20 minutes, so we had to tag-team juggle him for the remaining hours.  It slowed down our picking considerably, but we still got all we wanted.

Our Slovakian-French-Spanish nanny has arrived

On Saturday Greta and I picked up our new summer au pair (nanny) from the airport.  Her name is Radka.  She's originally from Slovakia (complete with living memory of Russian occupancy!) and has spent several years in each of France and Spain.  She speaks more languages than I have fingers.

For those who don't already know, Greta and I have been searching for a while now for an au pair (similar to a nanny, but often with less responsibility).  The offer is that we will provide room and board in exchange for 24 hours per week of child care for Max.  I like the idea because it relieves some of the pressure of constant child-care while simultaneously extracting some value from the half of our house that has gone unused since our tenants left.

First, we found an au pair who has agreed to live with us for the eight-month stretch from September to May.  (I'll write more about her when the time comes.)  Then we found Radka to pick up the slack from now until September.

It's only been four days but thus far I'm quite happy with Radka and with our arrangement.  It was a little overwhelming at first because a lot of time went into preparing for her arrival and helping her get oriented.  Today was officially her third day on the job.  She's taken care of Max for us for 4-6-hour stretches every day this week.  She even does dishes.

Now that she's had a chance to settle into our home she's been a godsend.  Already I feel like I'm slowly getting my life back under control.  So far, I've spent my new-found Max-free time on two very important tasks:

• research (yes, I'm foolish enough to work while on parental leave)
• destuffifying, sorting, and cleaning the house

Other than destuffifying I have several house projects that I plan to accomplish during future Radka-Max times, most notably the retaining wall in our front yard, which is currently nothing but two piles of gravel and an ugly wall of dirt on top of which stands my neighbour tapping his foot and waiting impatiently for me to resume construction.

Unfortunately, Greta has not yet benefited from Radka as much as I.  Greta's day is still filled with the usual tasks of occupying Max in the morning, working hard during the day, and cooking us food in the evening.  Today I cooked dinner to help relieve some of the pressure.  Tomorrow I'll go shop for food at the market instead of Greta.  Hopefully with enough ad hoc measures such as these we can make it so that the benefits of Radka are more equally distributed between us.

Alas, our digital camera is MIA so I cannot post a picture of Radka today.  Rest assured, we'll catch her on camera sooner or later.