December 28, 2011 by Dad.

The sun, the sea, the sand, rocks to throw, what more could a boy ask for…

Sticks ! Running with the seagulls.

The beach charge !

I sure am glad not to be on the receiving end of all that aggression. A final wave to Mommy before heading home again.

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December 10, 2011 by Dad.

Oupa gives Etienne a trim before we take a couple hundred photos in the hope that a few are good enough to use for our annual Christmas card.

A little milk for stamina, it could take a while to get all these pictures taken just the way Mom wants them…

What a cute couple. Merry Christmas to you all. Think of this as a behind the scenes look at the making of our Christmas card for 2011.

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November 20, 2011 by Dad.

Lanelle and I were tired of all the work needed to setup the kids to paint or draw or do art so we looked at getting them a blackboard they could share. Lanelle did here interweb surf search thing and found that most people just ended up painting a part of a wall with black board paint, we took it a step further and with some addition online investigation found motor oil drip pans to be the perfect material for our project and at $5 each they fit the budget too. Black board paint, a little surgical cutting for light switch plates and voilà…

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November 13, 2011 by Dad.

Lanelle found some plans to build a book shelf for the kids out of rain gutters, yes those things that typically go on the outside of the house and ferry water from your roof to the corners and then to a downspout… Well we made some rain gutter bookshelves while the kids were playing and you can see the finished project behind the two as they share a book on their beanbag.

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November 9, 2011 by Dad.

I found these on the camera, I never took them so these are obviously just a mother taking some pictures of her special little boy.

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October 31, 2011 by Dad.

So we had a Candace and a Perry the Platypus this year. Etienne loved being Perry / Agent P (study up on Disney’s show Phineas & Ferb) and played along with his sister.

Lanelle made some homemade decorations - the milk jug ghosts seen above and the kids needed to be in the pictures when I was taking photos of them for her. I have no idea where the pirate eye patch came from or why it was being worn, but there you have it.

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October 26, 2011 by Dad.

Our sweet little baby boy was transformed into a big boy in a matter of minutes when we gave him his first hair cut. We had wanted to make a big deal of the event and take him to a kiddie hair cut place like we did for Cezanne, but after two different places were just so uninterested in our business we took matters into our own hands. Lanelle did a great job and even shed a tear when we saw the results. Baby no more…

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October 18, 2011 by Dad.

Not quite sure if you could call this evidence or crime scene photography but this is what we found after Lanelle baked brownies and left them to cool on the stove.

Etienne had seen her making them and had even told her “I like dat”. Lanelle then went upstairs and left Etienne downstairs thinking I would keep an eye on him.

When Lanelle returned she found Etienne sitting on the floor in the kitchen, he had helped himself to the whole dish, it is amazing that he did not drop the dish. He got it down and poked the brownies full of little finger holes. See the delight and satisfaction and total innocence on his face…

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October 15, 2011 by Dad.

Etienne has been asking to paint for a while and so as a treat I setup the outdoor easel for him and he loved it. We also did some pumpkin painting as a “fall craft” which he also really enjoyed but when that was done it was back to the easel…

It was actually warm enough to turn on Cezanne’s water hopscotch which she loved but Etienne was a little bit more cautious of. He gets cold pretty quickly and needed a helping hand to hop through the sprayers.

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October 11, 2011 by Dad.

Cezanne had her first field trip and parents were encouraged to attend. Lanelle and Etienne joined the class for a morning in the corn sandbox, pumpkin picking and running around in the hay maze. The “big kids” did not seem to scare him off and he warmed up soon enough and then was in amongst them as if he was one of them…

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