More from holidays...

A photo of our rental house in Penticton:
Gram reading to the girls in the outside seating area. Gram and Papa had brought books for the girls. Eating lunch at the house. Shopping at the legendary used bookstore in Penticton. We love this place. Look at all the books! We bought a few for the girls...a Richard Scarry Dictionary and a Disney/Mickey Mouse one too.
Sam sat in this cute little desk, (she was so warm...see those red cheeks?) wearing the dress she insisted on wearing almost every day of the holiday. (well, not quite, but it took some convincing!)The new water toy that managed to come home with us. Fun, but really, it'll be more fun when the kids are older and can swim.
We (Ben) made lots of sand chairs. This day on the beach, it was a little chillier than usual, so hardly anyone was there. The girls had a blast running up and down in the sand. And sitting in their sand chairs. And jumping in our home made (Ben-made) swimming pools. I honestly could not believe how long they had fun with this one. Crazy. =) I think that's one of the things that made this trip so good...they could have fun doing a number of things for HOURS and it didn't feel like we were so busy going from one thing to the next trying to keep everyone happy. More to come...!

Back from Holidays!

We're back from holidays! (and have been for a week and a half.) Re-entry was a bit slow...partly due to Katie and I getting sick on our last night/morning home, but just because we've been busy doing lots of fun and nothing. Enjoying Ben being home with us. Enjoying the super rainy weather and monster mosquitoes. Yes, it's kind of dreadful here...We have had the odd nice day but hard to enjoy with those bugs. Ah well...shall I tell you about the holiday?

Other than it ending in illness (canceling our plans to go to the Calgary Zoo) we had our best holiday with the kids ever!

This is a stop we took because Katie said she HAD to go to the bathroom. Apparently not enough to use a pit toilet though! =) Anyway, it was a great stop. Good to get out of the car and throw rocks in the water.

We made it to Sicamous the first night with enough time to have ice cream at our favorite place...the D Dutchmen Dairy.
It was our only night camping. The mosquitoes were horrendous, such that Ben and I put up the tent while the girls were in the van and then threw them in quick before the bugs found us. We read books for(ever) a while and eventually all went to sleep. In the past we tried to get the girls down while Ben and I stayed up but that's just impossible and really a waste of time. Going to bed altogether worked well. I had an awful sleep and woke up freezing but overall we were good. Oh, and did I mention that while we were setting up the tent we found that one of our tent poles had a broken elastic...and was cracking. We made it work but it sure was a good thing that we weren't tenting more! Here's the girls in the tent.
After a quick take down we were off and found a super great little local place in Armstrong for breakfast(COFFEE). If I can dig up the card, I'll tell you what it was. Just down from the Home Hardware.
Driving was great. We had bought new sticker books, colouring books and blank paper and crayons (and markers for at the house) so the girls were well entertained. And new CD's from the library! I think the CD soundtrack to our holiday is by a band called Recess Monkey, their album called Field Trip. (favorite songs include Marshmallow Farm, Sack Lunch, Hot Chocolate etc) Definitely, if you're looking for kids tunes that are very adult friendly, I highly recommend!

Ben and the girls in Skaha Lake Penticton. The girls at Skaha.We were lucky that Gram and Papa were able to stop and visit us at our rental house for two nights on their way back from a wedding holiday in Vancouver. It was nice to have company. (They slept outside in their van.)After dinner, Ben made up a show for the girls. They did shows for him too. It was fun to watch.Little Sam and and bigger Dad by the big tree (at Skaha Lake Penticton).There are many more photos but that's it for now. This is only day 3 of the trip and we were away for a week and a half. I'll try and be selective about photos. So I'm not still posting them in Decenber. =)

Heather

More from before...

More pictures from before...

A playdate with some preschool friends.
Face painting done at the Children's festival in St. Albert...did I show you this picture yet? I can't remember...I've gone back and forth a bit now with photos and I'm confused (and too lazy to look it up on the blog). Sam didn't want any face painting.
She and our friend C were more interested in Jumpy Castles (for the record, I call almost all jumpy things "castles" even if they are not. I'm sure there was a castle themed one once, and now they all get called that!) The girls were so cute in their dresses!
Some action shots of Sam...jumping...
...and falling!
The weather was superb and we had ice cream in the sunshine!Which was great since went we went again on the weekend with Steph, Russ and W. it was freezing! (around 4C) And I think it rained too. =( But we still had fun.
And got our faces painted again. And had pancake breakfast instead of ice cream. Yum!
We weren't able to get balloon animals done since the line was long and took forever, so when we got home, I did up a couple of balloons for the girls. Sam wanted SuperWhy,
And Katie, a cat to go with her cat face. I did a bit of work for Auntie Andrea office at the University and Papa and Gram watched the girls. They girls had lots of fun, including enjoying ladybugs at the Muttart Conservatory. The girls were so excited to tell me about it! We went to the nearby mall again for ice cream ( a sure sign of summer!). Notice Ben wearing his new U2 shirt...from the concert we went to. It was AWESOME and though we got home really late, it was such a fun time and a really memorable event. We went to a family dinner at Auntie Gail's house, Auntie Jen was there too. She and uncle Ray brought chalk and little gifts for the girls that were much enjoyed!And Gram and Grandpa brought over the new bike they had found at a garage sale for Sam. She is so happy that she now has a big girl bike too!Yawn...to late to write more about what we've been up to this week. Trust me we've been busy, but in the best possible way! Really happy now that Ben is home for the summer.

5 AM

The girls and I woke up early. 5AM. It's partly my fault....Sam was so tired from our busy day yesterday, playing at the legislature grounds (again!) and playing at the playground after and then playing dressup and other games with a friend who came over that she fussed at dinner time and wouldn't eat much of anything and then fell asleep on sitting next to me while I read Thomas to calm her down. At 6pm. And the girls have lately been going to bed maybe around 7:30 or 8 by the time they sleep. So, much earlier than normal.

Luckily I went to bed early (8pm...shockingly early)... as the day was tiring for me too, and so now being awake at 5AM isn't killing me like it might otherwise.

The girls are colouring Sesame Street colouring pages, (in my hopes that we can win admission to the Science Center's new exhibit, hee hee) and having fun. while they are doing this, they are singing/chanting...

Sam: "I want a bike, I want a bike, I want a bike..."
Katie: "But it's not as big as mine!"

They are colouring with markers...do you remember some of the issues I was having with markers a while ago? Did I tell you a threw most of them out in a huff of anger one time? (sometime last winter) Well, we bought a new batch around Katie's birthday and I'm SO pleased to see how well they've been treated. Sam still needs a fair bit of reminding about putting caps back on, but we've all worked hard to put them back in their box when we're done. The only problem we have now is that they're do so much serious colouring that the markers are drying out from overuse. I think we'll surprise them with new markers when we head off on our summer trip this year (no details about that for blog privacy issues...you'll know when we come back whenever it is!).

Speaking of colouring...have I told you how much Sam has improved? She holds the marker in a proper pencil hold and can colour a solid patch in a picture...she colours within the lines, but not completely in the lines, if that makes sense. She can also draw a circle and fill it all in.

Anyway. Hope my newspaper comes soon...We've been up for over an hour and I'm getting bored. =)

More catchcup (not the red kind)

Some catching up...For some reason, I feel like parts of this batch of photos is out of order and I can't figure out which way they go and I'm not going to bother going through iPhoto again. Sorry! They are all taken mostly back in May.

Cheryl, reading to the girls.
Yay! Ben (who is a year OLDER as of yesterday! Happy Birthday!!) ran a half marathon at the end of May.
Sam and I went to ice cream instead of going to Katie's soccer one night...trying to avoid the mosquitoes. We discovered that the nearby pizza place no longer sells ice cream so we had to make do with big-ish tubs that Sunterra had. I won't tell you whether we ate it all or not. =)
The tulips that we planted at the beginning of the school year (given out by the preschool) grew! Look how much bigger everyone is! (the tulips and the girls!)
Sam, wearing one of our favorite dresses that Gram Cheryl brought back from Hawaii. It was really windy that day.
GG Mary helping us plant our garden...much has changed here...we have been eating green onions already! And we have a lot of weeding to do. We had a playdate with our friends C and her sister G (friends from strollercise).
We met at the playground in Hawerlack park but then it started pouring rain...
...and we ended up back at our friends house where the girls played dress up. Katie especially loves the shoes I think. Katie on the last day of preschool this year. Sam too.As well as Ben's birthday yesterday we celebrated Father's day on Sunday. We are lucky to have such great fathers and grandfathers around us and I'm grateful that our girls have these excellent men present in their lives. I see the joy in their eyes every time we hug Papa and Grandpa and every morning as they wish Ben a good day at work and when they welcome him home at the end of the day. Lucky us!

Yesterday

I have other photos to show you but I couldn't NOT post these from our wonderful day yesterday.

I've been working a tiny bit for the past week or so at the University...a little job for Auntie Andrea's office. Interesting to try work a bit and earn a bit of summer money. It's going well. Thanks to Gram and Papa for doing most of the childcare. Yesterday I didn't start work until after 4pm, so when Megan called saying "It's going to rain all week, let's take the kids outside!" I said sure.

We went to the Leg grounds, one of my favorite summer places. I don't think we went even once last year because I was nervous about watching two girls, Sam only being 1.5 and running all over the place. Yesterday, things were perfect and I was confident that the girls are old enough to handle the water and steps without me hovering beside them. (Mom likes to relax a bit you know!?)

Sam didn't want to wear a suit and Katie wore her new suit...we Finally found one that fits this long torso-ed girl! So beautiful, lots of trees and sunshine!
The four kids had a blast playing together. Walking up and down the steps, splashing in the water and playing pretend. Something about taking turns being the baby and mom/dad? They kept coming up to the sidewalk and lying down to go to bed.
On our way out (after our picnic lunch and more water time) we waded through the lower pool. I did end up going in with them, rolling up my long shorts in the water that went to my knees. (just to be close in case of a fall...Sam did trip at one point, but righted herself quickly...I was glad to be near anyway.)
Moms and kids had a super great time and I can't wait to come more often.
And today, it's pouring rain and gray. (shh...kind of refreshing and the garden will like it) That makes yesterday's adventure even better. =)

Feels like summer

It's beginning to feel a lot more like summer around here.

The garden has been planted (with a little help from Ben, the girls and GG Mary). We play outside a fair bit...and suffer the mosquito bites to prove it! Both girls react alot but Sam especially...a bite under her eye last week made her look like she was in a fight...her eye swelled up a lot. And a bite on her hand this week has her hand still a bit swollen and hot. Upon Dr's advice, we're applying Benedryl cream to the spot and giving her Benedryl liquid oral stuff for general healing (and proactively if we know we're going to be outdoors).

We're blowing bubbles...loving this Gymboree set we got for Christmas...the combination of bubble stuff and the neat wand make lots of bubbles. (PS...I have quickly decided to edit this to point out the girls new hats...have I mentioned/shown them before? Both girls have the same hat in different sizes, the pattern is a reversible bucket hat pattern from the Oliver and S kids sewing book. (Thank you Library!) The fabric is purple Minnie Mouse on one side and blue Little Mermaid on the other. The girls mostly love. Katie's is a wee bit too small...such a big brain in that head!)

Gram and Papa went on holidays for a few weeks and while they were gone we snuck in a visit with Uncle Jerry...and the girls didn't freak out! They've both been strangely scared of him since...forever I think. Katie's improved a lot in the past year, especially since we've demonstrated Uncle Jerry's art skills (they have something in common!) but Sam still freaks out. Anyway...Uncle Jerry was smart and offered them rice krispee squares immediately and things were awesome. (Until I tried to force Katie to say thank you for her second square and then she got all upset at the attention on her...my bad!) here's the photographic proof. (Katie is turning away from the camera, nothing to do with Uncle Jerry!)
One not great photo from Katie's "Sharing Day" at school...a low pressure concert type event. I tried to pick a photo where most other kids were blurry, for privacy etc...but I do think she looks cute with her hair and dress slightly puffed out in mid hop. This dress we've worn for almost a year and I think it may be time to pack it up (or somehow let Sam wear it..I'm not sure if that'll happen without a fight!). School's now over for the summer...they end a bit earlier than most schools. Another reason to feel like summer! It was so hard saying goodbye...those teachers of hers are amazing and lovely and we can't wait to see them again in September.
While Gram and Papa were away we watered their plants and played with (and kind of broke) the umbrella. (No worries, Papa has fixed it now!)
And we also had a picnic at their park nearby...can you tell I was trying to keep busy and make things fun for the girls?
Our major event this weekend (besides freezing our noses off at the Children's Festival in St. Albert in 4C weather!) was getting Sam a big girl bed. It's exactly the same one as Katie's. We've been meaning to get it for ages and when photos from her getting out of her crib a year ago popped up in iPhoto, we knew we had to do it. She's settled in perfectly and seems very happy with the change.

Hopefully blog mojo comes back soon...I've been reading some good books lately and doing some sewing. I think also the change in schedule has thrown me off a bit. I'm not doing strollercize anymore because my foot was bothering me again so that and school ending has given us more freedom and surprisingly made us a bit busier in a way.

Other good things to note...I bought and correctly programmed a new garage door clicker...the other one fell and broke on Thursday and I am SO lazy that to avoid pushing the button by hand and walking the long way every time, I made a big point of getting a new one the very next day ( which I suppose isn't very lazy is it?) (a big yay for feeling like a handy mom!). AND I found some ants in the back landing (well, Katie and Sam saw them first) and dealt with them quickly on Friday too...not something you wait on, eh?! (I think I've gotten rid of them...cross fingers that they weren't just staying away from the weekend rain...a little Raid and a sprinkling of Equal sweetener seems to have done the trick for now.)

Yawn...I should have been in bed ages ago...Still recovering from the Awesomeness that was the U2 concert on Wednesday...Definitely a "never forget it" kind of event. If I get pictures I'll share.