Today Emily and I had our second swimming lesson together. Although swimming lesson might be a bit too much to describe I think it’s more a dancing and singing lesson for me and a water exploration for our little princess. No there are no moving images from me “dancing” or sound recordings from me “singing” so you can keep on reading without fear…

So far we had a lot of fun and it’s nice to see Emily reacting on and touching  other babies from about the same age. But most fun is watching her smile when we are doing fun things in the water. Today she had a lot of fun while I hit the water with my hand, last week she had fun while I was bouncing her through the water.

Not so much fun is going under water… We started practicing while saying “Emily…Ready…Go” and then splashed water over her head, last week she really disliked it. At the end of the lesson we did the first under water practice, I said “Emily…Ready…Go” and the teacher would put her under water for a split second but not Emily, she decided to start screaming out loud at “Go” and crying/screaming babies are not put under water.

But today she was in a different mood, she didn’t really mind the water in her face. Ok, she wasn’t laughing about it either but she didn’t cry after the fact. After a couple dance routines with bouncing, swimming and jumping through the water it was time for another under water try…and this time she went under for the very first time…

I think she enjoyed for at least a couple seconds, I can’t wait for the next time!

Note from Emily: I didn’t pick my own bathing suit, the teacher made me wear this thing which is called a “Happy Nappy” as a double protection system for some sort of not understandable reason…

It has been a while since our last update from Toronto but a lot has happened since then. Let me start with a post about home improvements today and I’ll try to catch up this week with more about our trips the last 2 months. After we got back from Florida we first got our new chair. It’s a very lazy chair and the way it’s positioned in the living room I can enjoy our both of our extraordinary views while only turning my head.

After the chair we started looking for baby furniture, for everyone who didn’t figure out which secret we told Mickey Mouse: Danielle is pregnant from our first child! After we start looking for furniture we found out that the choices in Canada are quite limited compared to what we are used to in Europe. It’s a couple small speciality stores here in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) or online stores. We also visited a baby show together with one of my pregnant colleagues which we enjoyed and where we learned a lot more about important things for Canadian parents. We got to know a couple of new stores too.

After a couple of weeks of research we learned that a lot of furniture and strollers we did like had delivery times from up to over 12 weeks. We ordered our furniture and the stroller at Ella+Elliot in Downtown Toronto. This made us decided to order as soon as we made the choice. So in March we already found the things we’d like to see in the rooms and by the end of this month they will be delivered, a bit sooner as expected but that’s not something we’d be worried about. You are curious now? I hope you like surprises since you’ll need to wait till September to see the first pictures online…

In between the improvements we travelled to Europe and New York but I’ll write about that in later blogs. After we came back from New York they finally cleaned our windows, not something you should do yourself while living on the 38th floor off course. But we would wish they did it more often as once a year.

And that was also the start of really nice weather which made us decided to a balcony overhaul. We started with a nice grass-green coloured outdoor carpet which I cut to fit perfectly. To honour my work I got a nice bottle of Crown Royal Monarch whiskey from Danielle.

But that wasn’t where we stopped I found a nice set of furniture which would fit exactly onto our balcony at the IKEA website. Just after store opening we entered the IKEA in Vaughan and 40 minutes later we were driving back home to set up the furniture. And 2 hours later we enjoyed the nice weather and the remarkable view from our balcony…

And since we were n the IKEA mood and wanted to add some more storage inside our walk-in closet I picked up the IKEA Stuva later that week.

Besides the fact that our plant is still alive there is not much to mention about home improvements. But the King and Queen from the Netherlands are coming to Canada on an official state visit in May. On official visits they always meet with a part of the Dutch Community and we are part of that meeting. We are both really excited about it and are curious about how such an event will be. So far we went shopping for the appropriate clothing, the dress code is “Tenue de Ville”. For man this means a dark suit, for woman a dress which covers the shoulders and reaches to the knees. And that’s not something every pregnant woman has in her closet so we went shopping this weekend.

Unfortunately it’s not allowed to take any pictures during the event but we’ll make sure to write something about it on a later blog.