Just in Time for the Long Weekend

Some people stopped by for a few hours today. Some really lovely people who are really, really good at their jobs.

Let's let the photos do the talking today...

Crazy, right? In a few short hours (the whole project took about 5.5 hours), we went from this:

to this:

It was a good, good day.

The "faux" grass was installed by Design Turf here in Toronto. I couldn't be happier with the product and the service. These guys were absolute professionals and a pleasure to have on our property. They left our backyard cleaner than when they arrived and the entire installation seemed to run extremely smoothly. If anyone has any questions about it, let me know!!

The turf itself is a mix of green, brown and curly fibres to give it a more realistic look. Luca loves crawling on it already and it is soft on his little knees. And the best part?

The raccoons won't tear it up (or so they say)!!

Sayonara, raccoons. You won't be missed.

Backyard Project #2364

This is it friends, the beginning of the end. The end of backyard posts. The end of the quest for grass. And most importantly, the end of the....

WAR AGAINST THE RACOON

After many, many attempts at fixing up our backyard, we are hoping this is the last one. For real. I'm not joking - if this doesn't work, we are paving it. 

So last I showed you, the backyard was looking like this:

We used to have a great flagstone pathway but it was next to impossible to lay so that it wasn't a seriously awful tripping hazard. Each stone was a different depth and it was a death trap. If you didn't watch where you were walking, you were definitely falling down.

Which is not only embarrassing, but dangerous with a babe-in-arms or (soon enough) one who was learning how to walk.

So we sold the flagstone and bought something that would work a bit better. Last weekend, J got busy and started putting it back together!!

The stone is actually man-made (ahem, concrete). I looked at natural stone and it was really, really expensive ($12-14 per square foot). Since this was not the first time we had spent money on the backyard, we decided to be a little more frugal (this was $2.44 per square foot).

I actually found some very inexpensive natural stone (Indian Sandstone) nearby, but after a quick google search I decided it wasn't for us.**

So we purchased the "Banff" stone from Armtec in "Slate". When it first arrived, I wasn't so sure about it. The colour looked lighter than I remembered and it looked....like concrete. I think it was because you could see that each stone was 4" thick and almost identical. Nothing natural about it. So I did what I always do after making a purchase.

I panicked.

Did I make a mistake? Should I have picked something else?

I reminded myself that the natural stone was not in our budget, so panicking wouldn't help. I couldn't change my mind now!

Each stone was about 50 lbs so J had to take a few breaks:

but I helped a little by smoothing out the sand:

Let's all take a minute and appreciate my outfit. The day we laid the stone had the craziest weather ever. It was decent when I got dressed (hence the capri type pants and a tank top) and it quickly got cold (insert thick pink sweatshirt) and then it started hailing (hello orange Hunter wellies).

Guess this isn't a fashion blog, eh?

Luca chilled in his playpen:


And eventually it looked like this:

(the stones are wet in this pic)

It isn't done yet - we still need to cut the stones for the little bit by the garage where it gets wider and do some adjustments to make some of the stones a bit straighter. Once that is done, J is going to put some special sand on top and then it will be done!

Since I wanted the stones to look a bit darker, we might seal them down the road but the concrete look is kind of growing on me so I think I will wait for a bit. What do you think?

All of this is in preparation for our grass solution which is coming later this week!! Can you believe it? By this time next week, the backyard should be in (almost) final form. A form that will (hopefully) win the battle against the raccoon.

Cross your fingers it works!

Now that you see how the backyard is coming together, what colour would you paint the french doors on the garage? White? Navy? Yellow? Black?

Arizona Trip

Happy Monday! I hope everyone had a nice Mother's Day and spoiled your mom (or the mother of your child(ten) rotten :-)

I thought I would do a little recap of our trip to Arizona!! A few weeks back, hubs and I packed up lil'Luca and flew down to Phoenix to visit my parents who have a place down there. We've been to AZ once before but that was about 6 years ago.

After our trip to Florida, I was kind of nervous about the flight. I figured it would be easier with J there but the flight was 5 hours so I was anxious. 

It was a much easier flight than I expected!! It was much better with a second set of hands - Luca is a busy boy and just sitting on my lap was rarely an option. I even got to have a Coke on the plane (which when you are travelling solo is out of the question). I even convinced Luca to sleep for 45 minutes. Which if you have a baby who was sleep trained, you know how hard it is to get him to sleep anywhere other than his crib.

I felt like a super-mom!

And then he was awake.

Arizona is really, really beautiful. I think we saw only a few clouds the entire time we were there (and by clouds, I mean the white, fluffy kind). The rest of the time it was just big, blue sky.

Between mine and Luca's skin, we spent a lot of time putting on sunscreen and worrying about finding shade. haha.

Even the walls next to the highway were beautiful:

We went swimming:

We went to Tuscon (which was nice but weirdly quiet and deserted):

...to the Casa Grande Ruins:

and hung out around the house:

Tried on new headgear:

but he wasn't a fan:

Went to a bbq in 103 degree weather. Luca had the right idea;

Ate ribs:

and watermelon:

And did a little online shopping for the master bedroom:

All in all it was a great trip!! Luckily, we missed some crummy weather in Toronto so that made it even better!

**

I've had a few questions about how Luca slept on holiday so I wanted to give a little update!!

He was a STAR!! My mom set up a little nursery in her walk in closet with a crib that she found at a garage sale. We brought his sleep sack and his white noise machine and kept everything like it is at home with his routine and he was amazing. No problems going to sleep, slept through the night and napped like it was his job.

While we were flexible with his afternoon nap (i.e. if we were out of the house, we'd hope for a car nap but didn't worry about it too much). However, we were pretty diligent with his bedtime and his morning nap so that he didn't get too cranky on us. Little guy needs his sleep and really relies on his routine so I wanted to respect that. It also meant that we had our evenings to eat dinner, sit outside, etc and we could take our time in the mornings.

With the time change (AZ is 3 hours behind Toronto), he woke up early for about 2 days (5:30 a.m., then 6:30 a.m.) but after that he was back to his regular 7/7:30 am wake up. I couldn't have hoped for better!!

Upon returning home, he didn't even really adjust!! Our flight home had us putting Luca to bed around 9 p.m. (very late for him, but only 6 p.m. AZ time) and he woke up at 8 a.m. From then on he was right back to normal!

Baby Video Monitor Review

I am not being compensated in any way to do this review. This is all me. Just thought I'd help some other parents out there. If you are not a parent or a soon to be parent, I'd totally ignore this post. For real.

When I was pregnant, I did a bit of research on what monitor to get. Although we heard a lot of "what do you need to see him for?" and "in my day, we just used our ears", we knew we wanted a video monitor. I'd seen my friend's and I loved the idea of being able to see Luca while he was in his crib so that I could know whether or not I needed to go in the room and check on him. (I would actually go so far as to say it was one of my favourite 'must haves', especially during sleep training).

We decided on the Summer Infant Baby Touch Screen Colour Video Monitor. It was pretty fancy - touch screen interface, night vision and you could make the camera move so you could see all parts of the room. It has a bunch of other features but I'm not going to list them. 

Anyways, I'm sad to say but we've had a number of problems with this monitor. So bad that as of yesterday, I am on my 3rd replacement monitor (so 4 total). 

#1 - this one made some CRAZY loud noise when the volume was on (even at the lowest setting). Granted, had I known that I would usually just turn the volume off, maybe I would have kept it, but I thought that using the volume at night seemed like a good idea). I called customer service and they couldn't fix it, so they sent me a new one. Great customer service.

#2 - this one had a problem with the 'touch' buttons - I couldn't pan the camera in one direction. This one also went back, but of course their policy on returns had changed so I had to pay to ship it back. Not too bad, but annoying.

#3 - I used this one the longest. I thought it was fine, until I moved the camera 5 feet away from Luca's crib. Then the night vision picture looked like this:

Um ya - that looks bad, right? So I tweeted Summer Infant and they replied really quickly saying that was NOT right and would send me another one. By this time, I explained my frustration over all of the problems with these monitors and they said that if I wasn't 100% happy with the new one, they would refund me for the original and I could send it back. I'd have to pay for shipping again, of course.

#4 - so far this one is fine, but honestly not much better than the above. Maybe my expectations were too high and I thought this one would just work and look good, but it was still pretty fuzzy at night unless it was right next to Luca, which is almost impossible now that he is standing in the crib and grabbing anything he can reach. 

So I started leaning towards returning everything and starting over. I think that having to go through 4 monitors to find one that worked is ridiculous, and didn't leave me with a lot of confidence that #4 would continue to work.

Before sending them all back, I figured I'd order a new one to see the difference. On the recommendation of a bunch of people, I ordered the Motorola Digital Video Baby Monitor with 3.5 Inch Color LCD Screen. It has pretty much the same features as the BabyTouch (minus the touch screen) and also includes a temperature gauge so I can see how hot or cold it is in the nursery.

It came really quickly from Amazon.ca which is good because I wanted to get this all figured out quickly as I'd have to send at least 2 back. Plugged it in and tested it out. It worked. That is a good start :-)

Here is a comparison (albeit a crappy iphone picture of the comparison) showing both cameras in the same spot watching lil'Luca sleep.

The Motorola is on top, and the BabyTouch is on the bottom. What do you think?

J and I both thought that the Motorola seemed much clearer and that after all of the problems with the Summer Infant BabyTouch we should just wipe our hands clean and start over. So back they go!

Of course - time will tell whether they actually refund me and don't give me any hassles, but so far their customer service has been fantastic so I hope that continues so that we have an amicable break up. I will let you know.

One last comment - I think it is AWFUL that Summer Infant is now making the customer pay for return shipping in all situations. By the end of this, I will have probably paid 30-45 in shipping fees for a monitor that (until #4) has been clearly defective. That is a problem with the product, not the customer. I'm sure they implemented the new policy because they were spending so much money for the shipping because so many are being returned. If you google Summer Infant you will see LOTS of praise for their customer service, but if what makes the CS great is that a) they get called, A LOT, and b) they are quick to send out new units, then there are a lot of shipping charges being paid by the customer (and a lot of problems with the product!). Sigh.

Anyways - I'm not saying Summer Infant is bad - I just think that one particular policy is bad (and as it ends up, expensive).

Hopefully I have better luck with the Motorola!!