Crab apple sauce with Max

The University of Waterloo has a few stellar crab apple trees on its property.  Today we augmented our routine dog walk with a bike trailer full of empty baskets.  We stopped at one of the bountiful trees and picked to our heart's content.  It took us 15 minutes to pick enough apples to fill an entire cooking cauldron.  Max helped us rinse the apples.

"It's Shake 'n Bake, and I helped!"

A rare shot of Max doing something productive.  He spent most of the time throwing the apples onto the ground.

This is our entire haul.  Not too terribly much.  But not bad for a few minutes of leisurely picking.

You rinse the apples, dad.  I'll pull the rain hose out of its socket.

The hard work was processing the apples.  Last year we painstakingly peeled and cored hundreds (maybe thousands) of tiny crab apples.  We also burnt the sauce last year.  Imagine our dismay at having burned days worth of work.

This year we tried a lazier approach suggested to us by both Mike and Heidi.  We simply dumped the untreated apples into a cauldron with a bit of water, boiled it until it was mush, and then forced it through a sieve with a stirring spoon.  It was a lot less work than peeling, though Mike seems to think we could cut out even more of the work if we bought ourselves a food mill -- perhaps in the future.  We ended up with four-and-a-half containers.  The containers are old feta cheese containers from the grocery store.  They hold a kilo of feta each.  That's no small amount of crab apple sauce!

The sauce was initially runny.  Rather than try to boil off the excess water, thereby wasting energy (not to mention possibly burning our sauce again!), Greta had the brilliant idea of re-straining out the water, which was then canned as crab apple "syrup" -- a tasty sauce for ice cream, drinks, pancakes, etc.  It worked beautifully.

Binge visiting

As Greta already mentioned, the Gutoski-James trio recently returned from a twelve-day visit to Saskatoon.  Greta's sisters Heidi and Wendy live there with their families.  Teela lives in Indiana, but she was also visiting Saskatoon at the time with her own family.  Moreover, grandpa Lee, the father of these four lovely James girls and resident of Ottawa, was also in town.  It was a big ole' James family reunion.

We stayed at Wendy's house with her family.  They were extremely accommodating and the food was always top-notch.  For the first couple nights Max slept in his playpen in the hallway adjoining the guest room (our room) with Wendy and Mike's room.  For whatever reason Max did not take well to this arrangement, so Wendy and Mike were often awakened by Max's crying in the night.  They took it like champs.  Even so, we took pity on them and moved Max into the guest room with us.  Of course, they could still hear him cry.  But the frequency of such events decreased significantly.

We visited Heidi and her family almost every day.  Max quickly learned the names of his four Saskatoon cousins: "Lee-oh-ah!" (Leora), "Aeh-weh!" (Anwyn), "Eick!" (Eric), "...." (Anthony -- I can't remember how he says that one.)  There was no shortage of great food at Heidi's place either; Gary even stepped up with a couple of his world-famous, all-out dinner parties.

The days were packed.  The activity that sticks out most in my mind at the moment is our trip to the Saskatchewan River.  We canoed out to an isolated sandbar where the girls played with Max for hours.

See how the baby ape stays close to his mother.  This rare shot of the elusive hairless pink-skinned ape with her baby was obtained only after days of waiting in a blind.  More photos at uncle Mike's photo album.

After an exhausting flight into Hamilton we returned home to find that Radka had cleaned our house from top to bottom.  The entire place was vaccuumed.  She even went into our bedroom and cleared the dresser of junk so that she could dust it.  She cooked a couple of fantastic dessert pizzas and left them for us.

Despite Radka's thorough and much-appreciated cleaning, we came home to a tri-fold infestation: the ants had returned in our basement, the fruit flies had returned in our kitchen, and the dogs had fleas.  Fruit flies and ants are no big deal.  Fleas are a whole other ballgame.

Because of the fleas, we could not go visit Gus' sister Sue and Greta's parents in Ottawa this weekend.  (Neither family was keen on inviting flea-ridden dogs into their homes.)  Unfortunately, our Ottawa plans also included Radka -- she was to spend a couple days touristing about.  Moreover, Sue and Jeff needed a babysitter for Saturday night.

Our solution was to send Radka to Ottawa alone on a bus.  She is currently touring Ottawa.  (She even went to Montreal yesterday!).  She will babysit for Sue and Jeff in our absence tonight.  Then Sue and Jeff will take her back to Waterloo when they visit tomorrow.  Quite a whirlwind.  Mean time, Greta and I are secretly grateful for the excuse to sit at home and unwind after a hectic two weeks in Saskatoon.

While visiting family like this is always fun, it's also exhausting.  Everyone's life in Saskatoon was put into temporary chaos while the visits played out.  Routines were interrupted.  Max's potty training went into relapse.  The fact that people need to travel so far for visits like this one implores guests to spend as much time with their hosts as possible during the visit.  We love that time, but it's also an overload.  (For context, consider: we'd never shack up with gramma and grampa Gutoski for twelve straight days -- they're only a ten-minute drive away!)

I can't help but think how much more we could all benefit from our families if only we could structure our lives so that we all live in the same city (or even the same street).  Of course, modern life makes that impossible.  We follow the jobs, first and foremost.  Even if you do live in the same city as a relative, it's almost impossible to get desirable real estate within walking distance of a relative.  Indeed, thanks to the dangerous highway overpass connecting us with gramma and grampa Gutoski, it's virtually impossible for us to bike there with Max even though the trip is only 30 minutes.  I wonder if there would be any positive effect if some houses were sold in bundles of, say, five, instead of the one-family one-property model we have in most of the developed world.

Yeah, yeah, leave it to Gus to find doom and gloom in a super-fun family visit.  Of course I'd do our Saskatoon visit all over again.  It was undoubtedly a positive experience.  I just find it hard not to notice the problems and think about how to solve them when they're rubbed in my face.

Max flies to Saskatoon and back again - almost...

Gus, Max and I just finished a trip to Saskatoon to visit my family.  All and all the trip went very well and we had an enjoyable visit. (For some pictures check out uncle Mike's album.)

That would be the end of this post if Gus and I had not been foolish enough to book a connecting flight out of Hamilton to Saskatoon instead of our usual direct flight from Toronto.  Besides the frustrating experience of flying past Saskatoon to Calgary so that we could get on a new plane and fly back the way we came, the whole transfer wound up doubling our travel time.  Nevertheless, Max behaved like an angel on the plane and we managed to make it to Saskatoon with only one lost bag.  Out trip back was not so smooth.

Before we left Wendy cheerfully informed us that all of southern Ontario had severe weather warnings and some areas had tornado warnings as well.  Many flights were delayed.  Fortunately, our flight from Calgary departed on time and with only a few bumps we landed 3 hours later in Hamilton.  What a relief!  No delays!  Until the pilots informed us they weren't going to let anyone off the plane.  Apparently there is a rule that no one is allowed on the tarmac if lightening is within 5 miles of the airport.  The plane unloads directly to the tarmac, and besides, no airport staff were allowed on the tarmac either.  The airport was under 'red alert' and so we sat in the plane...for an hour.

The plane was packed and insufferably hot.  In spite of the fact that we were completely stationary, they wanted us to stay seated and wear our seat belts in case of a sudden turn or stop.  There was no where to move and we had already been on a long flight.  Max, at least, was asleep.

Finally, the pilot announced that they has some information about the storm.  We were in the middle of it and it had a 30 mile radius.  It was travelling at 30 miles an hour.  Silence on the plane.  Gus claimed to hear the collective psyche of the plane going 'ok...so that means at 30 miles an hour we will be on the plane....no wait....carry the 1....'  The captain announced, 'so we will be on the plane for another hour' - the entire plane erupted in groans and shouts.   Gus looked at me incredulously.  "They needed him to tell them it would be an hour?"

Half an hour later they declared that the red alert has been lifted.  The plane cheered.  That was faster than expected.  Normally, Gus and I would wait until it emptied to try to get Max off, but we were so anxious to leave that we pushed and shoved our way off with the rest.  I was half-way down the ramp to the tarmac when an airport personal came running towards us, yelling "red alert! red alert! Get them back on the plane!"  I quickened my pace, rushing to the end of the ramp.  "I'll take my chances with the lightening," I said to the woman as I pushed past.  They closed the plane doors behind us.

Being stuck in the airport was markedly better than being stuck on the plane.  We were happy to meet Grandma Gutoski inside the airport with food and childcare reinforcement.  We could move and stretch out.  Max was now awake and he could run around, but we still couldn't leave.  Half the passengers were still stuck on our plane, as was our luggage and Max's car seat.  Most passengers that had gotten off opted to leave and come back for their luggage in the morning.  We had no such option.  We lived an hour away and Max's car seat was still on the plane.  So we waited.  Almost home.

Another hour and a half passed with no word.  Finally, the red alert was lifted and the rest of the plane's passengers made it into the airport.  Another half hour later our luggage arrived.  Then a one hour drive back to Waterloo.  We pulled in at 5 in the morning, a whopping 5 hours late, but we were home.

Next time, we will take a direct flight from Toronto.

Max "masters" potty at a young age - PART 2

The potty saga continues.  The news cold (it has taken me two weeks to get around to writing this) off the press is that Max has finally started asking  to use the potty when he needs to go.  At first, he would only ask if he was not wearing a diaper (and even then, only half the time), but now he asks when fully diapered, even when we are out and about.  When he needs to go, he declares "Boo!" and sometimes even runs to the potty.  He still has many accidents, but we have already cut our diaper use down by more than half.  The past two days he wet only 1 diaper all day! We have decided that is grounds to declare that he is potty trained at 15 months - although most would consider that parental pride more than accuracy.

Max hasn't yet learned how to sit on the potty on his own, however.  He sometimes makes attempts, the most successful of which involve facing the potty and straddling it.  On the less successful attempts he just steps right in. Mother would say he is just like I was at that age....

Max wows Yale with Intellect

Our friends Christina and Rob visited us for dinner last night, which was a rare treat.  Christina is currently living in New Haven because she had to go take some stupid graduate program at Yale.  Anyway, she was back for her birthday, which gave Max the perfect opportunity to make his first move on his path to Yale.  He was a charmer all evening, flashing big smiles and displaying his impressive vocabulary ("light, light, light, fan, light, light").  But it was on our walk that he really blew Christina away with his brilliance.

Christina (to me): I'm convinced your child is a genius.

Greta: Yes I am too.  What convinced you?

Christina:  While he was just ramming the chariot into that construction fence over and over again and repeating "open"  which I thought was pretty stupid, but then I noticed there was actually a small hole in the fence...maybe 2 or 3 inches wide.  Isn't that smart?

Now, all in all, I would say I tend to cut Max a fair bit of slack when it comes to my judgements.  He is only one, after all, so  I overlooked it when the dogs learned sign language faster than he did (in spite of their lack of hands) and I don't judge him too harshly when he points to himself in the mirror and declares "Anne!"  But it is a stretch, even for me, to consider this most recent fence display as evidence of his genius.

Greta: Christina....he is trying to fit an object that is 3 feet wide into a 3 inch hole....  Which part did you think was smart exactly?

Gus (impersonating Max):  Now if I just line this up....there we go.  Hunh.... well maybe if I just... push... a... little harder.    I don't understand...it lines up perfectly on this side....

I'm not sure what they're teaching them these days at Yale, but if this fence episode reflects badly on Max's intellect, I'm really not sure what it does for Christina's!