Another Komoka adventure

My first ever road race

After two knee surgeries in the last two years, I set a goal to run a 5 km race. I did it!

Wildflower seeds and Elvis Presley

A trip to the Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron for an Easter Weekend scavenger hunt, then burgers in Grand Bend at Denny's Drive-In.

Learning to Skate

We visited Storybook Gardens for a skate around the ice track.

Another Family Trip to the Calgary Zoo

We spent the day at the Calgary Zoo to see the penguins, hippos, and tigers.

A Trip to Sulphur Mountain

We took a road trip to Banff and took the gondola up Sulphur Mountain.

Craft Beer Is Here.

Over the last few weeks, I've been travelling around southwestern Ontario, checking out craft breweries. Check it out:

#tbt to a handful of #craftbeer breweries I visited over the last few weeks.

Posted by Travis Dolynny on Thursday, March 10, 2016

Thames Valley Tobogganing

Through the hole in the fence on Forest St. and onto the golf course for some great tobogganing on the sixth hole.

Morning Bubbles

When we go outside in the morning, the bubbles must fly.

Bog Walk

Some photos from a morning walk along the Sifton Bog in London.
Camera: Canon EOS 600 - 50mm f1.8

Miles Davis Cool

There's probably little coincidence that my son has taken an interest in his little plastic trumpet after we started listening to Miles Davis. While August has no idea who Miles Dewey Davis the third is yet, I hold hope that his music will play some kind of a role in his development.

Even before my son was born, I consciously selected music that I wanted him to hear. I am not only into the music and lyrics of artists, but their back stories also lend to my impression and appreciation of them. When I look at Miles’ beginnings, it’s cool to learn that at a young age his mother wanted him to learn piano, as she, unknown to Miles, could play the blues. Miles didn’t start learning music formally until he was 13, after his dad gave him a trumpet.

At our house, August is surrounded by drums, percussion, guitars and a piano. We’re not pushing him to one specific instrument, he is way too young to even understand what they really are now, but we don’t keep anything away from him. My true love plays piano, she’s classically trained, so there’s a good chance that will influence my son.

The little plastic toy trumpet, which is not the easiest instrument for a one-year-old to get sound out of, keeps getting picked up. Then again, it also keeps getting dropped, for what I can only guess is for the sound it makes when it hits whatever surface it lands on. That might seem annoying, but to him, that’s pretty cool.

The Attack of the Tunnel Monster

When I woke up beside my true love this morning, I felt like I was an inch away from falling off the bed. Some time during the night, my son woke up and wanted nothing to do with doing back into his crib, so he ended up in our bed.

I don't mind when the night plays out like that because he is a morning person, just like me, so it's all fun and games until my true love gets her bearings.

The morning was the first in eight days that I got to wake up with my family, so we made breakfast and tidied the house before taking a walk to the playground. You can watch my son eat pancakes and strawberries for over two minutes if you like.

While at the park, fun sparked an idea to create a short horror film as my true love played the role of the Kraken and my son, the baby pirate.

Enjoy.

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Is Colder Than You Think

I was nominated to complete the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge by my friend Ken Steeves, London Police's media officer.

In the days leading up to my nomination, I did hold some reservations about the campaign because of criticism over the actual challenge drowning out the cause. Despite the skeptics, the challenge continues to raise buckets of money, and awareness. To the nay-sayers, get dunked.

After my nom, I took some time to learn about ALS and how it affects those who have to live with it. I gladly dumped the bucket of ice water on my head a couple of hours after being nominated, and contributed a donation.

For more information on ALS and where to donate, visit ALS Canada.

On Saturday, September 27th, there is a fundraiser walk for ALS my family and I plan to attend.

Here's video I took of Ken Steeves taking a total of six buckets of ice water to raise money. The guy is fearless.

9 Weird Things at Ikea

We love to shop at Ikea. There isn't an Ikea store in London yet, so we have to take the hour plus trip to Burlington if we want to get our Swedish shopping fix.

The other weekend, we decided it was time get a few things for the house, so we went. Besides the obvious weird names that everything in the store gets branded (those actually do have meaning), we thought it was time to document some of the other weird things we saw.

Adventures in Video

I noticed I have been creating a lot of content lately, but have been really lax with my site, so here we go. Here are a few videos I created lately using my iPhone or GoPro when my family and I are out.

We Like to Walk

Gaining momentum after a little creative buzz, I've been taking lots of video and putting together shorts, sort of like a video diary.

This one was filmed with my iPhone 5s.

Taking August On His First Trip

It's hard to imagine what, if anything, goes through the mind of a nine-month old baby the first time they board an airplane, fly across the country and land in a completely foreign city with people he most recently only knows through online video chat.

We touched down in Calgary just three days ago and it's been filled with ups and downs. The downs being mostly horrible sleeps as August wakes up to new smells, new textures and new rooms. Poor guy. The ups, however, have been pretty cool.

August met his cousins for the first time. He only has two, so it was an equally exciting experience for all three of them.



We took part in an Easter Egg Hunt, which was also full of excitement -- maybe too much excitement and too many new people, but none-the-less, an experience. It will be cool in a few years when August can get in on the action with the other kids.

Showing little interest in his regular bath routine, we weren't sure how the little guy would take to going to a rec centre with a flowing river, water slide, and the like, but he was awesome. He even lasted just over an hour before we took his pickled self out.



My true love and I even got to go out for a nice meal and saw the play The Mountaintop. The funny thing about having a kid is that when you get a little time away, you think it's going to be awesome, but truth be told, you just wonder what he's doing most of the time. Also, the sounds of children at a nice restaurant that used to annoy me, somehow just make me miss him even more.

Repose Overtakes You

I Have A Boy!

"Raising children is an enormously important part of life. I think one of the most important, or the most important, period." - Eric Braeden.

I had an inkling of what to expect with the arrival of my son. The consensus was that I was no longer going to sleep and I would no longer have any time for myself. There was speculation that I may even shake my opinions about mini-vans and replace my small VW with a dreary box with automatic sliding doors.  I arrived prepared for the worst.

Then along he came.  His little self with strawberry blonde hair, big, wandering eyes, and what I already assume to be a bit of an ambitious and almost feisty personality.  I even think he's a lot like me; constantly hungry and curious about everything around him.  He is, of course, only one month old now, so I can't be certain of anything.

There is something fascinating about being okay with being woken up constantly throughout the night. It's 2:14am and the faintest wimper of hunger interrupts my dreams and there I am, standing next to his bassinet calmly whispering, "Hello there! Should we check your diaper for a poopy?"

"There's plenty to read about keeping your sanity while raising children, but it's all common-sense stuff about task division and taking breaks and the relentlessly repeated magic date night with your spouse. What's missing is some 'tude." - Jeffery Kluger

I will admit that even though I am mostly tolerant of the late night interruptions, the mid day and later evening roars are not so pleasant. But then, I hear that will be short lived and there will be something new to challenge my patience. And even though my life as a parent is also in its infancy, I'm reminding myself that all the little things that might bug me now are just small sacrifices for what's to come. In the words of the late artist, poet and writer Kahlil Gibran, it's not really about me anyway.

“Your children are not your children.

They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. 

They come through you but not from you.

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the make upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness.

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He also loves the bow that is stable.”

What I Have Lived For

After reading Stephen Fry's latest blog post, Only the Lonely, I found myself on Tumbler reading a passage from Bertand Russell's Autobiography.  This prologue speaks to the three things I, and I assume most people, would consider salient to living a fulfilling and compassionate life.  Love, knowledge and pity. As one of the world's biggest Moulin Rouge fans, I sometimes get sidetracked by the pursuit of love, truth, beauty and freedom, but alas, truth is only found through knowledge and there can't be beauty and freedom without liberation from abuse, oppression and hate.

“What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

— The Prologue to Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography