Category: 30-36 months

This post needs a bit of explaining.  Ryan is obsessed with trucks and his new favorite kind of truck is garbage trucks.  Daddy was doing some shopping on Amazon.com and found a cool orange garbage truck and they had a video of a kid playing with it.  Ryan freaked out and wanted it really badly.  Then one day we saw it in a shop in Vancouver – Ryan freaked and cried for it like I’ve never seen him cry for something before.  We couldn’t give in – who can justify $70 for a plastic garbage truck!

Ryan was still freaking out about it when we got home and talked about it everyday (actually, it was the first word out of his mouth the next morning).  Anyway, there was no way we could give in to such an overpriced toy.

After arriving in Los Angeles we looked at a couple of the discount stores and found some other trucks (Bruder is the company name).  Ryan liked them but still really wanted an orange truck.  Then, daddy found a truck on clearance at TJ Maxx that was missing it’s garbage bins.  He bought it anyway (while Ryan was sleeping).  In the end, we figured that Ryan would not want a truck that was missing such a key component and returned it before he woke up.  When we got home mommy found some extra garbage bins on Amazon.com for super cheap that could be delivered (via Santa on Dec 25th).  We rushed back and bought the truck for $20 and ordered the garbage bins.

When we came to LA we didn’t bring many toys so we let Ryan have the truck right away to have something to play with.  After 1 minute of playing with it, he asked “Where are the garbage bins?”  We told him that if he was a good boy Santa might bring them for him on Christmas day.

This year Ryan really seems to understand the whole Christmas thing with Santa, presents and holidays.  Ryan was very specific to Santa on what he wanted in terms of gifts.  Our regular mall is the Richmond Centre  and they celebrate Christmas there like nobody else.  They have elves running around the mall and you can collect cards from each of them.  Ryan loved going up to the to ask for their cards so that he could collect them.  On one of our trips there Ryan was lucky enough to get a card from Santa.

We really wanted to do a photo with the Richmond Centre Santa but the line up was always so long.  On our last day in Vancouver before our trip to LA we decided to go to Oakridge mall to see their Santa.  In the end, he was awesome – very authentic, a real beard and very jolly.

In the photo below there is a small Thomas train.  The funny thing about it was, as Ryan sat on Santa’s lap and asked for his specific gifts Ryan blurted out “why is Thomas hiding here?”  Nobody seemed to understand until we found a Thomas train.  See if you can find it in the photo.

As many of you already know Daddy has become somewhat of an ice skating and hockey fan.  This excitement for ice skating and hockey is rubbing off on Ryan and he has been bugging daddy to take him skating (like Caillou in one of his books).  The first few times daddy took Ryan (when he was barely 2) ended up being very difficult on daddy’s back.  As you can only imagine daddy need to carry Ryan the entire time.

We decided to wait until Ryan was about 2.5 and finally bought him a pair of ice skates last week.  Since then Ryan has become a much better skater and daddy’s back is very grateful.  From the beginning Ryan refused to use any skating aids to help hold him up.  Also, one of the first things daddy taught Ryan was how to get up after falling.  Now, Ryan insists on getting up himself and skating to daddy.  Actually, now Ryan stands up with his arms out and says “Daddy, come skate to me – I’ll catch you!”.

Check out the video of Ryan skating.

Part of our new tradition as a family at Christmas time is to go the the Christmas Light Festival in Stanley Park.  They do a wonderful job of decorating an entire section of the park in Christmas Lights.  It is always very exciting.  This year we left it kind of late and we almost missed seeing it before leaving for our flight to LA.

We did end  up going and left immediately after Grace’s work and brought our own food.  When we arrived the train was already sold out for the entire evening (it was the only non-rainy day in a long time) so we enjoyed our food beside some live musicians.  After the music daddy & Ryan went into the petting zoo to pet the animals.  In all honesty it was really lame and Ryan thought it was really stinky.  He had his nose plugged the entire time.

After the petting zoo we got some hot chocolate (which Ryan loved!)  It is Ryan’s new thing to ask for hot chocolate after ice skating but we haven’t had any at home  – it ended up being a real treat for him.  It took like 15 minutes for it to cool down and both mommy & daddy wanted to drink it!  We resisted the temptation and saved it for Ryan for which he was very grateful.

We took some photos of the awesome lights for you to check out.  Here they are!

Kind of weird	This is just wrong But in our defense, we didn’t know what we were posing behind

This year we decided to start early with our preparations for Christmas.  In all honesty we had to restrain ourselves from decorating even earlier.  Needless to say, Ryan loved helping out.  We even had a blast going into storage to get our Christmas tree because Ryan was able to find some of his older toys that he had outgrown.

Here are some photos of us putting up out tree!