This past weekend was rather busy. Saturday was a rare sunny and warm day, so we decided to try to take full advantage. We started with our regular video chat with Grandma and Grandpa, had breakfast, and then biked down to Granville Island for Ocean Construction Supplies’ annual open house. Last year’s open house was of mixed success. This year was much better.

Ocean is an oddity. It’s a fully functional and operational and industrial concrete plant in the heart of a tourist destination. It actually fits quite well into its environment, with brightly and colourfully painted concrete trucks. (Note: We didn’t actually take any pictures of the cement trucks, so the next shot is by Maurice Jassak as found at http://www.seegranvilleisland.com)

Unlike last year, Aidan was excited to actually get in the cabs of some of the construction vehicles, like this large front-end loader. The cab was ok, but he didn’t want anything to do with the tires, bucket, …

Mommy was allowed to do this, but he didn’t like it very much…

He also sat in the cab of this concrete truck (this photo also by Maurice Jassak)

Part of the fun is a big pile of sand that they put out in the middle of their marshalling yard. They sprinkle this sand pile with Tonka trucks, and it ends up being swarmed by mostly boys, aged 3-6. This shot shows a rare moment when there were no other kids on the edge of the sand pile. Typically it looks like a very confusing hive of bees.

Lastly, he went back to the Bobcat that he sat in last year. This year, the camera survived.

After biking back home, we grabbed some lunch and then headed out geocaching!

We headed down to Delta, just south of Vancouver. There were a number of caches that were placed as part of the BCGA’s Cache Blitz 2008. These ones were rated 1.5/1.5 and there were about a half dozen of them so we figured it was going to be easy going.

It was no such thing. The first cache’s ground zero put us in the middle of a parking lot, with various heavy machinery nearby (a wood chipper, for example). It was right beside Splashdown Park, which was preparing for the coming season, so there were lots of muggles around. And lots of trucks. After poking around for a short while, we stopped. We just weren’t comfortable, and it wasn’t an appropriate area for Aidan.

Our next stop was out in the middle of nowhere, beside a fence post, a drainage ditch, and a pile of discarded building supplies. We searched for a while — the GZ put us in the middle of a field-like area — and then another geocaching crew pulled up. They found it in short order, in the pile of rubbish. I was refusing to look in there, but had pretty much figured it must have been there since it wasn’t anywhere else. I mean, I hate digging through garbage to find caches. What is that teaching Aidan? And, once again, the coords were off.

The third stop was much more satisfying. It was a short walk along the edge of a ball field, and Gwen found the cache within seconds of arriving at GZ.

The last stop was next to the highway, in some trees, surrounded by more trash, in an extremely hilly area. All the found logs noted that it took them forever to find it. We DNF’d this one too. 1.5/1.5? Not a chance. Also not appropriate for Aidan. And the trash again?

I was quite steamed by the end of the caching — quite frustrated. So, we went to DQ, grabbed some ice cream and drove down to Boundary Bay park to overlook the marshes and mud flats and eat some ice cream. It helped considerably.

Back to Vancouver and cleaned the apartment better than it had been cleaned for quite some time! Put the boy to bed and then Carla and Tomer came over and we played Thurn and Taxis for the rest of the night. It’s an interesting 2 player game; I’m not sure if it’s better with 4 or not. Tomer won both times, I’m sure he enjoyed himself.

On Sunday, it rained.  We stayed inside.

Today, we joined 59, 176 other people and participated in the annual Vancouver Sun Run. A record size crowd on a record cold day (at 9am, it was 2 C, with a -6 C windchill!). This is Aidan’s third Sun Run and our fourth. Read about last year’s Sun Run.

Here’s a shot from Flickr in the middle of the crowd many blocks back from the start line. We were about another 3 blocks further behind where this photo was taken.

And a shot from the start line, taken from the band stand (also from Flickr). We crossed the start line about 1 hour after the first runners.

Here’s a shot Aidan took using his camera around kilometre 8.

And another from Aidan:

And one of Aidan using his own camera:

On the plus side, I didn’t have to carry Aidan on my shoulders for the last two kilometres. On the minus side, Aidan started asking around kilometre 2 if we were going home. And asked continually until we got to BC Place. And of course, we walked home back across the Cambie Bridge and nearly for the whole length of the bridge, Aidan was crying that he didn’t want to go home. Sometimes, it feels like we can’t win.

We crossed the finish line outside the Plaza of Nations about two hours after we started. That’s a pretty good pace pushing the stroller and with a bathroom break and refreshment break thrown in for good measure.

Completely unrelated but on the walk back across the Cambie Street bridge we got a pretty good look at all the construction happening at the future Athlete’s Village on the old industrial lands on the south side of False Creek. Count the cranes. There are two more out of frame to the right…

Home again, and we rocked out with two hours of Rock Band after two hours of ‘nap’ by The Boy and relaxing by The Parents :)

Carla and Tomer’s ringette team had a free skate last night for friends and family and invited us to come.

So, we did! It was Aidan’s first time on skates and ice, and he was looking forward to putting on the “skate shoes”. We all borrowed skates from the equipment room and hit the ice.

Gwen knows how to skate and even has taken adult figure skating. I can stand on skates and even glide a bit, but I’ve never really learned. Aidan, as mentioned previously, had never been on skates.

It went really well. Aidan was quite excited and thrilled, although it was a little frustrating for him. The rink did have some of those learn-to-skate pushing-things (I’m sure there’s a name for them, but I don’t know what it is). They helped a bit, but Aidan kept getting his skates forward and rode a bit on his heels.

A little bit later, some one gave him a small plastic hockey stick. This was icing on the cake! He absolutely loved passing the puck back and forth with Mommy, despite the fact that Daddy had to hold him up while he was doing it.

After some 30 or 40 minutes on the ice, we got out of the skates and sat in the stands drinking hot chocolate while some of the team changed up positions and had a chance to try some different things. Well, some of us sat. Aidan spent the time running up and down the bleachers.

It was well after 8 pm when we left, and after 8:30pm by the time we got him to bed. With the excitement, and sugar, I figured were in for a battle royale for bed.

Instead, he was asleep within 15 minutes, perhaps the earliest he’s been asleep all week. And he slept for 12 hours. Go figure.

On Saturday, Gwen was busy with other things, and it was an unusual occurrence for November: a nice, sunny day! Determined to make the best of it, Aidan and I went on a grand adventure. We went out for a walk and came to a stop by the bus stop on Broadway. When I told the boy that we were getting on a bus he was super excited! So excited that rather than wait for the bus to come to us, he tried to cross six lanes of traffic to get to the bus on the other side of the street. Fortunately I had a hold of his hand. When the bus came, the driver lowered it (we’ve got fancy kneeling busses!) and this dampered the excitement only a little bit. Aidan doesn’t like hissing or compressor noises and when the bus kneels, it makes a noise exactly like that. So, we got on the bus in a flurry of excitement as I tried to negotiate the bus, the toddler, the stroller, and paying the fare. Anytime I’ve been on the bus before with the boy, I’ve been with others so this was a new experience for me. The boy was really good though, and waited patiently for me rather than take off down the bus while my hands were full.

While on the short ride down to Granville street, he was telling anyone who would pay any attention to him that we were on a trolley bus. “On the trolley bus!” “Riding the bus!” “Aidan’s on the bus!”.

A few blocks later (we usually walk those 4 blocks) we got off and took another bus downtown. Side note: one of the great things about living where we do is that we never pay any attention to bus schedules. A bus comes along every 5 minutes or less, so why bother?!? After living in a place where the bus came by once an hour or less, it was a bit of a shock. At any rate, although this bus was packed, we managed to get on it and get settled a little easier. This ride was a bit longer and we got off near the Waterfront Skytrain station, at the old train station downtown. A short walk to the station and he was saying “Going on the Skytrain! Aidan’s going on the Skytrain!” before we even entered the building. I don’t know how he knew that — I don’t think he’d ever been to that Skytrain station before — but I think he recognizes the Skytrain logos. Another side note: his logo or brand recognition is scary. The McDonald’s Golden Arches always gets called “French Fries”. The Dairy Queen logo always gets called “Milkshakes!” Various toys are called “Fisher Price xxxx” if the FP logo is on them.

We got on the Skytrain and travelled on it (packed) all the way to Patterson Station in Burnaby. We were sitting near the rear of the train and we could see the tunnel through the rear window (the “Skytrain” is strangely underground until BC Place). This was pretty exciting too, but after a while he got distracted with entertaining the young Asian couple beside us. He took great enjoyment from telling them that we were on the Skytrain on a bridge, or in a tunnel, and so on. In fact, we got off at Patterson and the young couple got off too, only to discover that they weren’t at the station they intended to debark at and had to get back on the next train along!

Patterson station is the nearest to Central Park in Burnaby. Central Park is an urban rainforest, full of towering Douglas Fir and Western Hemlock, along with some maple and poplar trees in a few copses here and there. There are lots of paved and crushed gravel walking trails throughout. There were also supposed to be three “easy” geocaches within its perimeter! :) We took our time walking through the park, constantly chased and harassed by Black and Grey Squirrels, trying (quite successfully) to fatten up for the weekend. Strollers and toddlers are rightly identified as ready sources of food. They are bold enough to come right up to the stroller and nibble at the fingers. Aidan liked this quite a bit too, and a few squirrels managed to get some alligator crackers from him. He was out of the stroller for quite a bit too, and delighted in chasing the squirrels, running after them with arms wide open imploring them to “Come! Come!”.

Central Park is quite popular with walkers and dog-walkers. One such was a young woman with one of these irritating rat-dog things. As Aidan was following the latest squirrel off into the woods (he doesn’t mind bushwacking in the least) he saw this tiny yapper (whose owner had it off leash and was encouraging it to chase the squirrels — although if one of the squirrels had stopped to fight, it would have been even-odds) he exclaimed in a loud voice “A dog squirrel!”. Perfectly descriptive in my mind.

And so we continued through the park, past the duck ponds and up to an place just off the main trail with a stream and a distinctive cluster of poplar trees. Hidden in this cluster is a box of Tupperware. After signing the log, we traversed the stream again, but this time I thought I’d let Aidan walk across the rock “bridge” on his own. Nothing doing: he decided to ford the stream without using the rocks. Fortunately I pulled him out before he got too wet, but I guess I should have expected that he’d take advantage of the opportunity to splash in the water. The picture above was taken near this cache.

The loop around the park is long … about 5 km, and the boy was starting to tire. Gwen called as we were heading towards another cache, and we arranged to meet at the Safeway near the Broadway Skytrain station. We walked back through the forest, through an area of filtered sunlight and back to the Skytrain again (slightly muted excitement, the Skytrain was even more packed and Aidan wanted to get off by the second stop) then home for a 2 1/2 hour nap!

What a grand adventure.