Since my last update, Alex has been busy settling into his new school. He seems to love JK and his teacher and he’s making amazing strides with learning his letters and recognizing words and phonics and other fun stuff. It’s incredible to watch how quickly things change at this age - only a month ago, his drawings were still mostly indecipherable scribbles, but all of the sudden, he’s making more efforts to make things look more clear in his drawings, and add details, etc.
We celebrated Chu’sok this year, which is a big annual harvest festival in Korea (almost like a Korean Thanksgiving). It’s a big three-day festival in Korea, and one of the big parts of this tradition is for Korean families to return to their hometowns to pay respects to their ancestors, and thank them for a good harvest. For the past three years, we’ve tried to incorporate a bit of this tradition into Alex’s life by going to the graves of my grandparents (Alex’s great grandparents, and my mother, Anne’s parents) to pay our respects and tidy the graves a little bit. I don’t think Alex really understands the significance of doing this, but my hope is that it will help him feel a connection to his extended family in Canada, but also to his Korean roots.
We also had fun going to the St George Apple Festival, and Alex had a great time playing on the bouncy slides and riding a pony. We try to do this every year as it’s quite easy to get to and it’s lots of fun. We also went apple picking for the first time ever at a local farm owned by the family of one of my friends. It was a great place, with lots of varieties of apples, and the weather was amazing for getting out and enjoying the sunshine.
We also went down to Bronte Creek (a beautiful provincial park in Oakville) for a walk to enjoy the Fall colours and just get out while the weather has been so nice. I’m not looking forward to the Winter, but they’re saying it will be milder than normal - I’m just hoping that also means less snow than last year!
One bit of big news in our house is that we’ve finally decided to get another dog! We lost our Jack Russell, Gulliver, to cancer in early 2005 and we’ve been dog-free ever since then. Alex has finally reached an age where I’m comfortable having a dog in the house again, and after much research and discussions, we decided to get a Labrador Retriever from a great breeder about an hour from where we live. Two of her dogs just had a litter in mid-October, so we’ll be bringing one of those little guys home sometime in the middle of December. We don’t yet know which of the 8 pups we will pick, but we know we’ll get a male, and our biggest concern will be temperament. We went to visit the pups when they were a week old, and we’ll go back one or two more times before we go to pick ours up in December so it’s fun seeing them grow up over time.
We had a great weekend visit with my parents when they came out to Cambridge to see us. Alex had an incredible time with them, and we really loved that they were able to come and see us.
I also got to head into Toronto to go see a dance show of the US Tour from the TV show, “So You Think You Can Dance”. This was our second year going and it was just great. Jennifer came with two of her friends and we all loved the show.
That brings us to Halloween, which was this past Friday. Alex and I went to buy our pumpkins the day before Halloween (we’ve never left it so late before), and we had tons of fun carving them. This was the first year that Alex got to design his own pumpkin, even if he wasn’t allowed to actually carve it.
As in past years, we went to Toronto to go trick or treating with my nieces. One of Kathy and my friends has a son close to Alex’s age, and they’ve played well together before, so we decided to have them go together. We got them all dressed up for pictures, and then they split up based on ages so we took Ian and Alex with us and they had a fabulous time.
We then drove back home to Cambridge, and were back on the road again the next day to take Alex back to Kathy’s for his first sleepover as we had a work party for Chris’ company that we were going to in Whitby, and we knew it would go late so we stayed overnight and picked Alex up in the morning. He was very excited to go for the visit, but wasn’t that keen on the idea of the sleepover, so we weren’t sure how it was going to go. Thankfully he had an amazing time, and when I called him early the next morning, he told me he now loved sleepovers, and didn’t like them before because he didn’t know what they were *grins*.
Well I think that’s it - I’ve put a bunch of pics into a new slideshow that will hopefully work for this blog. I think you can watch them on the blog or actually click on them to pull up the full-sized image. Hope you like them.
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