The Holliday Family

Today, Feb 21st is Ruby’s due date; but then you check the blog every day so you know that:)

According to our medical system up until now Ruby has been living in the negatives, as in she was negative 43 days old when she was born and steadily approaching zero days old every day since.

Marla and I are of course very proud of Ruby hitting her zero day and we’re doubly proud of what she has accomplished before she was technically zero days old.  Now some people like to brag about their kids walking early or talking early but in the Holliday house hold, where we tolerate nothing but perfection, that’s just not good enough.

At this time I’d like to celebrate some of the things that Ruby did while most other babies were passing the time in their mothers womb… I give you:

Ruby the first 43 days, a pictoral history

Met 75% of her grandparents

Grandpa Doug Holliday

Grandma Barb Holliday

Grandma Jane Panasik

Toured with Led Zepplin

John, Robert, Jimmy and Ruby on tour

Napped… oh boy did we nap alot:)

The best place to have a nap

Went on a car ride

Ruby calls shotgun!

Had her first bath

Bath and dress up time:)

Meanwhile Kent guarded the house

It’s common knowledge that if you want to protect your house from intruders you don’t buy an alarm system or a pit bull. The wealthy these days, all turn to magic cat to protect their home. Any would be robbers that look into magic cat’s eyes quickly meet their end.

It's rumoured that those glowing green eyes shoot laser beams

Toodles,

Ruby, Mars and Chris

Many of you have bought, donated or given( on the condition that we don’t return them) baby clothes for Ruby.  Marla and I would like to thank you all for clothing our daughter.  However due to the huge amount of friends we have, we now have more than enough clothes to last Ruby for the foreseeable future.

If you have not already bought us something and you feel as though you really need to we are now so booked up that we are currently taking names for people who are willing to buy Ruby clothes for her early teen years.

And if you act now you can reserve your place as the official purchaser of Ruby’s wedding dress.

Don’t scoff at this once in a life time opportunity, kids grow up so fast these days.  Why just last week Ruby had her first male suitor over, see photo’s below.

Which brings us to the part of the post I like to call:

Backstreet boy or Binkley

This is a game where you can vote on the pictures below.  Your job is to guess which of the two photo’s below is the real backstreet boy.

Photo #1	Photo #2
Is this the real backstreet boy?	Or is this the real backstreet boy?

 Loading ...

Please vote for your pick and feel free to discuss the options in the comments section.  The real backstreet boy will be revealed in an up coming post.

Sorry my dad hasn’t done any blogging lately.  He’s been busy.

Until he gets back to it I’ll leave you all with a kiss.

Toodles

Ruby

A kiss to all my fans

The shaved forehead cut

When Ruby was at the hospital, one of the things the nurses constantly struggled with was the best place to put an IV into her.

For tiny babies the best place often turns out to be the head.While it may not be the most aesthetically pleasing place to have a tube coming out of, it turns out to be the best location in-terms of not falling out. The hands and feet move around too much.

To put in Ruby’s IV line the nurses first had to find a vein. In order to do this they had to first be able to see the veins in Ruby’s head.

Now being a Holliday, Ruby of course had a lot of hair on her head and this is what lead to Ruby getting her first hair cut.

Will this haircut adversely affect the rest of her life?

Since this hair cut is a little unorthodox it’s prudent to ask what’s happened to the life of those who’ve had the same hair cut.

Let’s examine a cross section of those people.

Other famous people who’ve had a shaved forehead

David Beckham, he of the $250 million dollar contract, has had a shaved forehead.	Lt. Commander Worf has been in space and battled the Borg. He proudly display's his bald forehead.
Marvin Emnes currently plays for Middlesbrough. He has signed a 4.3 million pound contract. His bald forehead hasn't hurt his career.	When Britney's career went in the toilet what did she do? She shaved her hair into a "Ruby cut". Since the she has appeared on the TV Show "How I met your mother", opend the 2008 MTV music awards and had her last latest album vault all the way to number 1 on the billboard top 100 charts.

The Final Word

From this I think we can safely assume that Ruby’s new hair cut can only help her later on in life.

After 3 and a half weeks in 2 different hospitals we were deemed ready to go home on Tuesday.

On our way home

For those of you who don’t know our schedule, Marla would go up to the hospital at lunch for a few hours and then the two of us would return for 6pm and stay for atleast an hour or two.  Considering the hospital is a good 30 minutes in each direction, we’ve spent alot of our day just on visitations.

So we’ve been busy, but being the multi tasker that I am, I’ve been able to find time to work on what can only be described as a very sweet looking beard.  Please see the first photo for proof.

We have only good things to say about our time at the hospitals and the care Ruby has received.

Due to Ruby’s low birth weight a public health nurse will come to our house a couple of times a week to check up on us for the next 4 months.  On top of this, we have our team of midwives coming to our place 5  or 6 times over the next few weeks.  And of course we have a parade of family members coming out starting Thursday.

There’s really no way that Marla and I can screw this up.

Home activities

Since coming home we haven’t had time for too much.  We’ve basically been doing one of two things:

Taking time for myself

All business, all the time

1)  We’ve been relaxing in bed in between feeds.

Ruby is starting to go through the giant pile of clothes that all our friends have gratiously donated.

Due to her size we haven’t tried to give equal time to each outfit we’ve been given, instead we’ve been having her wear what ever fits at the time.

On the left Ruby is wearing something from the Shandra and Harman winter collection.  To the right she is wearing a sleeper donated by the Guelph girls.

2)  We’ve been on the phone constantly to friends and family.  Needless to say we’ve had a lot of questions and both families have been teriffic.  Thank you:)

I’m not sure who Ruby is talking to in this photo:)

A comparison of cool

Given how cool Ruby’s parents are, it’s only natural to ask…. “How cool is Ruby?”.  Well on the popped collar scale she’s off to a good start.  You can see that she has 2 popped collars.  Compared to the gold standard 0f 4 popped collars shown on the right, Ruby is well on her way to being very cool.

2 popped collars cool

The epitomy of cool

First some housekeeping…

I know I haven’t written in a while and for than I’m sorry.  I’m going to try to stick to a schedule of 2x a week, with a promise of atleast one post per week.

…and now on a serious note.

Ruby came home last night(Tuesday Feb 3rd).

There is a post about that to come, but this piece of information is germane to the story. This is somewhat of a sad story about the forgotten man in this whole baby business, and by man I, of course, mean Kent.

Those of you who know Kent will recall that he has always battled with his weight.  Just a few short months ago he was down to a svelt 12 lbs.  I picked him up today and he’s no 12 lbs anymore.  We haven’t had an official weigh in yet, but I think  he ma be tipping the scales to the tune of 17-18 lbs.

What happened to Kent?

As with many problems, Kent’s weight has multiple factors all coming together to cause his “growth”.

Problem 1

His weight was kept artificially low by having sore gums.  This was remedied by our friend Dr. Jason Tolton**, no wait wrong link try this one.   He had the solution; a simple teeth cleaning was all that was required.  Kent was in and out in a day.

Problem 2

Coincident with this was Ruby’s early arrival and our time in the hospital visiting her every day.  Now when we are away that means our friends will feed Kent, and what does everyone do when taking care of someone elses animal?  That’s right, feed the crap out of them because you’ll be damed if your the person who caused someone else’s pet to die to to malnutrition.

Problem 3

Kent used to sleep on our bed every night.  Now that Ruby has come home, Kent has been banished to the hallway.  He hasn’t reacted well to this.  Last night he scratched at our door, stalked me in the hallway when I got up, and puked on the floor.  The man is seriously bummed and eating his pain is his way of dealing with it.

Resolution

Now that we’re home and we’ve got a stash of diet cat food we should be able to get his weight back under control.  We still have a stand off on the issue of sleeping in our room.  We can’t allow it due to what he could do to Ruby and Kent has let us know that he will not be ignored.

Wish us luck.

FootNotes:

** Bet you didn’t think I could work in a Carrot Top reference into a blog about our family:)

After you get finished watching this video the first question you may have is why the heck anyone would want one of these.  These geniuses have taken a garden variety bath robe, turned it around and attempted to corner the market for household blankets.

Guys, Kriss Kros called from 1992 and they want their backwards clothes gimic back.
Now, I’ll allow that there are two plausible reasons for wanting to wear a snuggie…

1) Your job description involves trying to kill Darth Vadar

We love our snuggies

2) You are rocking a stone mason tatoo and you happen to know where the templars lost treasure is buried.

These people look good in snuggies

That’s it. There are no other possible reasons that you would want to wear, much less pay for one of these things. Just listen to their marketing pitch. There target market is people who  either:

1. have trouble getting their arms out from under a blanket or
2. those who don’t have access to a coat for times when they are outside.

Trust me, the market segment defined by people who can’t get their arms out from under a blanket or who don’t have their own coat is not a very lucrative one.

The best part of the snuggie informercial is that they’ll send you two for the price of one.  The flaw with this is that anyone who would consider buying a snuggie more than likely doesn’t have a significant other which wich to share their second snuggie.

…. well actually this is almost completely picture of me at their wedding.

As some of you may know, my brother Matt got married over the weekend.  I couldn’t make it due to Ruby’s premature arrival so my family did the next best thing.

How was the wedding you ask?

Well just have a look

With the bride and groom	Here I am celebrating with the bride and groom.Erin obviously has a great sense of humour. Come to think of it.  You really need to be able to laugh, both at yourself and at others to be a Holliday. Erin will do fine with her new family. The only problem with this picture is that it makes me look shorter than Matt when everyone in our family knows that I am the tallest.
Upsetting my brother	Now I’m usually well behaved, but get a few adult beverages into my cardboard self and there’s no telling what my hands may do.My brother Jim is clearly disgusted with my behaviour.
Playing games	Here my brother Matt is very happy that I successfully anchored his “tip cup” team.Grandma if you aren’t aware of what “tip cup” is, some people will describe it as a combination of cribage and crokenole…… I have yet to meet any of these people but I’m sure they exist. Also pictured is my younger sister Ashley.  Though to be politicallly correct since she’s living in England now she may also answer to the moniker of “bird” or “The Mrs”.
Jim and Allie	Allie, showing that she’s not the jealous type, forgives me for what I did to Jimmy earlier. Though Jimmy seems to be keeping good track of my hand.