Quicktakes - Winter 2014

1. Wavy broke her collar bone...again.  My poor fragile girl. A funny little fall off the couch sent us to emerg. for the evening and she is back in a brace for 6+ weeks.

 

2. We had our first experience with lice.  Thankfully our friends gave us the heads up and we caught it early.  Many hours were spent over a couple weeks sitting in front of the TV combing through the girls hair with a nit comb.  Now tell me your head isn't itchy.

3. We took a mini-break to Canmore as a family.  We did some x-country skiing at the Canmore Nordic Center, some swimming and just hung out.  It was wonderful!

 

4. Nollie, Luca and I did our first x-country ski lopet.  The girls each did the 1km and I did the 11km, more than twice the distance that I have skied previously.

        

5. Curt has been busy in the shop and hopes to be putting up the remainder of the trim starting later this weekend. Some day our house will be finished!

 

6. Finley has been busy.  He loves to grab a hand-full of clothes from his drawer and get himself dressed.  He is a chatty little boy and talks more and more every day.

7. The diamond just fell out of my ring, like right now, and I found it.

End of Summer Randoms

Well summer flew by, I can't believe there is only a little over a week left of September. 

Since my last post....

We spent the first week of September at the Buchan Condo in Sicamous.  We enjoyed a relaxing time of reading and putting our feet up.  The girls enjoyed swimming every day in the pool.  We got out on the boat a couple times and enjoyed being the only boat on all of Mara Lake.  Nollie loved being out on the boat and riding on the tube.  This excites Curt because he can see 10 years into his future when his kids want to be out boating and riding as much as he does.

 

We said farewell to my sister Shelby as she took off to travel Australia with a friend of hers.  I'm sure she is having a fantastic time and we will see her when she returns next spring.

Curtis & I also celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary, OK, so we didn't really celebrate, we poured the cement pad for our shop that day and if it wasn't for calls from family we may have forgotten on the actual day.  We knew it was coming, I guess we're just not so good at staying on top of what calender day it is.

Baby #3 is growing well and kicks me all the time.  I'm 28 weeks now, 3 months to go.

The girls are fun, fun, fun.  Nollie started asking why to everything and I'm sure it was on her 3rd birthday that it started.  Luca started the why's shortly after so I have two girls that just question everything.  They are just learning, learning, learning.  They have both been enjoying riding around on their bikes and they both want to get outside even more now that they have figured them out.  Nollie has also figured out the teeder-totter on the swing set and gets it just rockin'.  It's great because both Nollie & Luca can get on and they don't need me to come push them every two minutes like on the swings.  They play together really well most of the time.  They have their spats but they also have times where they nicely use manners or techniques they've been taught to sort things out on their own.

My garden has been good to me, we've enjoyed the lettuce, onions, potatos, zuccini, beats, beans, peas and tomatos.  My strawberries have been producing but the grasshoppers get to them quicker than I can.  I've mad a couple batches of tomato sauce already and it has been fantastic.  There are still alot of green tomatos on the plants so as long as they don't freeze I will have quite a few more batches to make.

The Saskatoons, both wild and tame were plentiful this year and so I picked and froze, picked & ate, picked & froze, picked & ate.  We have tonns of wild bushes on our land but they are still young, in a couple of years they will be good producers, that and the 10 tame ones I planted this year.  I love saskatoons!

House Update
We covered the decks and put up railings on them so they are now usable & I don't have to worry about kids falling off and breaking their neck anymore.  I still have to paint the railings, maybe next week I can tackle that.

We built proper stairs off each deck, also a bonus since I no longer have to assist the girls in getting down the front stairs.

We finished the parging on the exterior of the house (the area just below the siding)

We have the cement pad poured for our shop and plan to push up the shop next weekend, hopefully.  The pad has been a great riding arena for the girls on their bikes in the mean time, they have both greatly improved their bike riding skills since we put it in.

Other than that we've just been living life, making our messes & cleaning them up.

Back From The Sun

We returned from our first family holiday in two years a week and a half ago and it has taken me this long to post because I was having a hard time getting out of holiday mode. 

We spent just over a week at Mama & Papa Buchan's Condo in Sicamous, BC, it was glorious.  The weather was a nice sunny 25 nearly every day with a couple 30 days near the end.  30's are a bit hot for me but with a pool close by, air conditioning, ice water and lots of frozen treats I handled them just fine.  We invited some friends of ours to come stay with us and I'm happy to report that after the week we are all still friends, it went very well.  It was so nice to have the company for both the adults and the kids.  As soon as we left the condo to drive home Nollie was asking when are we going back to see A & T?  I think they all had lots of fun together.  The condo was really a great environment for the kids.  The building is a u-shape and all the patios open onto a central courtyard, we were on the main level so the kids could just go out the back door and play on the nice grassy area.  There were lots of kids in the building and they would all just meet in the courtyard and play together.  With 5 kids under 5 plannings outings became a bit of a challenge but we just went with the flow.  We enjoyed a few trips out on the boat, time at the beach, walks to the grocery store, a small kid friendly hike to see a waterfall, a trip to Enchanted Forest, lots of time in the pool.  We celebrated two birthdays, Curt's 29th and Nollie's 3rd (OMG). We ate lots of fruit & ice cream, the boys did some golfing, Curt & Linda went on a high ropes course, I did some reading and on top of all that we just generally relaxed and had a great vacation, with no thoughts of the house back home.  We enjoyed it all so much that we hope to go back in September, this vacation thing is good!

Here are some pics

 

  

Things I was Reminded of in Jasper

How much you have to pack to go away for the weekend
How beautiful the mountains are
I ride goofy, that's right foot forward
Snowboarding is like riding a bike, you don't forget
The snow is much nicer in the trees
The hill was much steeper in those trees
Somersaulting down the hill is not so bad
If you're not falling you're not trying hard enough
The importance of making a meeting point when on the hill
How cell phones are a good thing when you lose your group
To plug in your phone at night even if it looks like its fully charged
How good it feels to be outside in the sunshine all day working your body
Its OK to slide down on your butt when you're too chicken to ride
Snowboard boots are not easy to get off when you're having a foot cramp
The burn you feel at the end of snowboarding all day
A drink (or two) in the chalet after a day on the hill is amazing
Drinking all night does not make you feel like snowboarding all day
That its OK to take a day to just putz around Jasper because you're in no condition to board
That I'm too cheap to go shopping in Jasper
How good a latte from a coffee shop can be
The best way to stiffen up is to sit for 4 hours
How your kids can look like they grew & changed after only a couple days
How needy the girls can be after time away from mom
How much there is to clean up and put away after being away for the weekend
That vacations are a good thing