Secret’s up! Here are our costumes for this year’s Halloween costume contest at work:


We’re Mr. and Mrs Pacman, in pixels!!

There was also a jack-o-lantern contest, and here are our entries :

The tree is mine, and Frank did the other one from an image I pulled from the web. He later drew a terrified face on the little pumkin.

Winners aren’t voted yet: the Halloween activity is lunch, so we’ll know then. There are some pretty good costumes and pumpkins today… I’ll post an album of everyone at work later on if I can.

Happy Halloween everyone! Here are some treats:

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Update after lunch:
It was Larry who won best costume, and Claude best pumkin! Congratulations! I put up an album of pictures of Halloween 2007 at work:

Halloween 2007 au travail

After lunch, we went to visit Félix and his mommy; Félix was ready too for Halloween! Here are the two sweeties in disguise, a bunny and a monkey:

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Update at the end of the evening:
*Sigh* Halloween’s always an eventful night! Grandpa Maurice and grandma Manon came to say hi for a couple minutes, then Frank came in with grandpa René and grandma Lucie (and a huge load of toddler clothes… and some lunch!) for dinner and for a little chatting and games with our favourite little monkey! We also gave out a lot of candy to a lot of little Halloweens. Then, Eric, Geneviève, Romane and James came around; Frank joined Eric and James for a little candy run in the streets around, while Romane and Ge stayed with Xavier and me to play some more.

The front door light is now turned off, and our little man is out for the night… time to get some rest for ourselves! Here is a little pic of Romane and Xavier on their Halloween night:

Transl. “An evening of nostalgia”

Saturday was my high school reunion. I think there was a committee that was supposed to take care of this, but nobody planned anything in the end, so one gal decided she’d start a chain reaction of calling a bunch of people and tell them to invite everyone they still had contact with, and we’d all meet up at a coffee-bar – co-owned by a former student – from mid-afternoon. (I think the Facebook wave might have been a catalyst to the event at the start, but I don’t have all the details.)

Turned out it worked nicely, as when Amé and I got there by 3h30 or so the place was already full of people. I’m terrible with crowd-count… but there was maybe a hundred people around at the reunion’s high point. Granted, my year probably counted a lot more students, but it felt like most people were there, still.

Amé and I were thinking we’d drop by and, if bored or annoyed, we’d just leave. I figured it would be much (boring?) recounting of everyone’s life in the present (and I had forgot to rehearse my life story, shoot!) but, while there was a lot of that indeed, it didn’t weigh down the conversations as much as I thought, and we had fun seeing everyone again. I talked to a LOT of people through the afternoon, and by 6pm Amé and I were still there, finishing up a plate of nachos for sustainment. We went out for dinner with a bunch of old friends around 7pm, for some catching up and general nostalgia, and it was 10pm already when Amé dropped me off at Christine and Mathieu’s place. Fun was had, in the end.

The evening didn’t quite end there. To attend the reunion, I’d been bailing on a party with the people from work – nothing less than sushi and an evening of games and hanging out, darn! – but I joined in at 10pm, to find everyone playing the same game of cards we play every lunch hour of the week, albeit with more merriment and liquor. We had entrusted Xavier to the care of Frank’s family for the night, and so Frank and I – we work for the same company, and he’d been at that sushi dinner while I was out – ducked parental responsibilities for the evening – except I couldn’t drink alcohol for being all pregnant, but oh well… – and stayed up late having fun. More nostalgia springing up there, in the form of old video clips (YouTube 480×360 streaming videos on a high-definition big screen, whose idea was that?). We went to bed around 1am… which might not seem very crazy to you, but remember that we’d started all this mid-afternoon and we’re the parents of a toddler. Morning after came quickly for Frank. I handled it better: I hadn’t had any alcohol and I have insomnia these days anyway, so I’m often sleepy by default. The nachos were the toughest part to handle for this pregnant girl’s stomach.

Halloween
Alright, this recounting is done. Next week is Halloween, so this weekend Frank and I need to find some costumes and carve some pumpkins – work is having costume and pumpkin contests at lunch, so we have to come up with something good. We also have to stuff many bags of treat for the over-a-hundred kids that will show up in the evening. Our house is at the epicenter of our suburban district, next to the school and library, and the trend nowadays is to pack all the kids in a minivan and head for the neighborhood with the most streetlights, which results in bands of 10 knocking on our door all evening.

Only one chocolate per bag this year.

Transl. “Collect them all!”

No, we’re not planning on cross-dressing Xavier in the near future… This little dress is destined for his future little sister! Yup, today was the 22 week ultrasound, and the doc believes we’re having a girl.

Even though they can never guarantee and it’s easier to identify correctly a boy – and that missus was quite shy of private parts and kept her legs close to her all through the ultrasound – the doc was confident enough that she was seeing a baby girl. (As a bonus, doctor noted her predictions haven’t turned out wrong so far.) So looks like we’ll be having a “couple” of children, hehe! I allowed myself to shop for some clothing for my future baby girl, including the dress above (which was only available in size 18 months, but oh well… she’ll wear it eventually) and some girlie pieces for newborns.

As for the medical angle, baby 2’s development is very well, she has all her mini-organs and her dimensions are correct. Perfect health, then!

The gynecologist allowed us to videotape the ultrasound (yay!!), and Frank put together the best parts and placed the montage online in our Picasaweb archives. It lasts about 4m30: .

And, to finish off, here are two little shots of our future little princess:

See you soon!

I started taking my own photographs! There’s no leaving all the image capturing in the house to mom and dad anymore. Mom showed me where the button to press is on the camera, and now I’m a photo pro! Here’s my very first shot, it’s a self-portrait:

and here’s my fourth shot of a sunrise:

Bye bye!
- Xavier

Geneviève’s last post about her baby 2 – still no way to leave a comment on an MSN blog without owning a LiveID, damn you, MSN! – reminded me it’s been long enough since I’ve had a look at our own baby 2’s development stage. Pregnancy.org’s useful calender tells me baby 2, at 20 weeks, is now about 6.5″ long (buttocks to head) and weighs around 10.5oz! And I’m allowing myself to steal one of their images to show you what mini-sweetie looks like these days:

By the way, for those who have never seen the video of an ultrasound, or simply feel like seeing a 20 weeks ultrasound to better picture where baby 2 is at right now, I found a lovely and clear one on YouTube.com, just follow this link (note, just to be clear: this isn’t ours! it’s strangers’s, but still…).

The 22 weeks ultrasound is in 14 days only (this is the one where we might learn the baby’s gender), and I’m taking my inspiration from Marie-Claude, who had hers a couple weeks ago, to launch Nuestra Familia’s first ever poll!… Let me first remind you that our first child is a boy (Xavier, duh!) and inform you that statistics show that, in the case of a second birth where the first child was a boy, chances of having a girl/boy are 50/50, basically, so all bets are on!

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