From Canadian/Irish/Latvian/French/Spanish son and Chinese daughter to their awesome dad:

Lá na Athair!  Tēva diena!  Jour de pères heureux!  Feliz Dia del Padre!  父亲节快乐!

Happy Father’s Day to all the other dads out there too.  It should be a special day for those guys who take their parenting seriously, giving their kids the kind of experiences that create memories they’ll hold dear forever. Our kids will no doubt have great memories of time spent with their father.  For little daughter, it’s her first Father’s Day; for her father, it’s his first turn with his little girl.

Kman’s a veteran.  It’s his 9th and he loves it.  One of his favourite pastimes is building stuff with his dad. Sometimes Kman buys him build-it-yourself toys, thinly disguised as Christmas, birthday or Father’s Day gifts.  Today was no different.  As we speak they are working diligently on building a Brush Robot that has little eyeballs and will apparently run around our place sweeping up all and sundry so we can finally throw out the swiffer! The other gift is a Leonardo DaVinci Bombard (Genius is Timeless!). The Bombard is a little miniature cannon-like thing straight out of the Middle Ages.  The two of them have built many things over the years:  pin-hole cameras, slingshots, miniature volcanos, creepy toy cars (a la Toystory), solar bugs, airplanes, catapults, etc.  Kman had been searching for a trebauchet to give his dad since the last one went missing a couple of years ago.  (Just between you and me it died a violent death when this bad mother stepped on it in the back yard once too often, which sent it flying recklessly into the garbage can, after which I got into the garbage can to make sure it was truly broken and crushed and would never be underfoot again).  Thankfully six year old little boys suffer from ‘out of sight, out of mindedness’ frequently so the little guy didn’t notice it was missing until about two years later, when I was able to tell him “Oh it broke and I had to throw it out.”

The fun started early today when we took a stroll down to Yorkville for the Exotic Car Show. Yorkville’s always a great place to check out the luxo cars that only the 1 percenters can afford to drive, but today they got to show off their wheels in all their glory.  Lamborghinis, Porsches, Ferraris, Aston Martins, Bentleys, Rolls Royces, Mercedes and a McLaren.  Son has become a car-fanatic thanks to seventeen years of Top Gear reruns so he was in his own kind of heaven.  Not such a thrill for me since it’s becoming tedious when just walking down the street elicits shouts of “Mercedes!  Mustang! Corvette!  Porsche!” sending my head swivelling this way and that until I have to deflate him by saying, “we’re NEVER going to own a Lamborghini and even if I was a multi-millionaire I WOULD NEVER BUY ONE!” or “NO, you can’t have a stretch-Hummer limousine.  Why?  Because they’re just stupid.”  (You can understand why his dad gets more gifts for Father’s Day than I do for Mother’s Day.  Hmmm.)  Today’s spectacle was all about son and dad, though, and they got to soak up the views, taking tons of photos of other people’s vulgar displays of wealth.

Jealous?  Never!

After the glitz and glam we strolled along Bloor St. looking for food.  We stopped in at Hey Lucy! and enjoyed a great meal with beer too.  I had the soup of the day, a delicious minestrone.  The rich tomato-basil broth was flavourful and the soup had big chunky veggies thrown in.  The carrots actually had the wonderful flavour of, well, carrots.  Sometimes when we buy veggies out of season for so long we forget what the real vegetable tastes like. The soup was complimented with a slice of grilled bread drizzled with olive oil.   The only drawback was that the soup was missing pasta, which I thought that no self-respecting minestrone would be seen without. Technically it was a vegetable soup but that’s okay too. T had the marguerita pizza with a zesty tomato sauce with rich mozzarella medallions.  The restaurant actually had a kid’s menu so Kman got the grilled cheese.  It was an adult-sized meal, large enough to share with his little sis, who still cried for more when it was over. The kid’s stomach is a bottomless pit I tell you. (Don’t worry little Jaybird, you can use your fingers to eat that lemon cake that’s waiting for us at home).

And the service was exceptional.  We say “here’s to Lucy!”