Matthew meets Fred Penner's Dog.

We went for a walk tonight - Matthew and I - and by walk I mean more of a meander, or perhaps a dawdle. It is great if you don't really need to accomplish any particular distance in any specified time. Often the walks involve traversing the sidewalk in front of the three houses between us and the end of the block and then carrying him back. This is regularly a solid 45 minutes. Why? Well because everything is fascinating - which is also fun. Every vehicle (moving and otherwise) requires commentary; every plane passing overhead requires exclamation; every animal requires noting; and every twig, stick, branch, and now pebble and rock requires intimate investigation, consideration and ultimately retrieval should the item in question somehow surpass in some way the items already held tightly in his tiny fists, at which point the new item will be exchanged for the current item with great excitement and fanfare. God help us when he figures out pockets.

Tonight I decided that we would get into new territory. I carried him to the end of the block and we started there instead. Very exciting. Tonight we also discovered that we could hold more than one item  in our hands. It started out innocently enough. We found a stick that we simply had to add to our collection, but the stick and rock that we had were so good that we couldn't bear giving them up. So we simply picked up both sticks and the rock. Well, this breakthrough caused a bit of a run on carried items. In about 5 minutes Matthew had 3 sticks, two rocks and a leaf held firmly in his grip, and he was considering another fascinating stick and how he might shuffle his loot to pick that up too. Luckily a "bu-bee!" (puppy) was spotted coming along the sidewalk taking its owner for a walk. As the puppy and its owner approached it turned out to be none other than Fred Penner. He lives in the neighbourhood and we have run into him before - he has even helped me push my dead car into our garage once. Anyway, he talked with Mathew and introduced his dog, which Matthew then started calling "Doey" of course. Matthew sat right down and pet the dog. It was quite fun. Fred had a bit of a conversation with Matthew and then we talked a bit. It came out that we were expecting number 2 right soon-like, so Fred offered, in a very humble way, some advice for when number 2 arrives. He said (and he didn't claim this wisdom as his own) that we should get Matthew a present from the new baby so that Matthew will feel special and start the relationship between Matthew and the new one off right.  Now Matthew may be a bit young to figure that out, but thinking about how to make sure Matthew is special as baby number two takes up residence firmly in the centre of the universe is going to be an important part of this next month.

Eventually Matthew and the dog were done with each other, so Matthew said "bye-bye bu-bee" and we carried on. Fred and the dog on their walk and Matthew, me, and our various and sundry sticks, rocks and leaves on our meander.