LONG beach vacation! And, some Lake W. favourites!

Just got back from the beach yesterday! What a great time!

More on that in a bit! Had a great time at Lake William!

Some special buddies:



A new toy:



A favourite activity:



A Lake William moment:

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Home for what felt like 7 minutes - long enough to take a picture of lilies I won't get to enjoy:



Then on to the beach... picking blueberries:



and saskatoons:



Enjoying the new fireplace on a cool, rainy day:



Then going for a walk to get some fresh air and exercise... otherwise we're a bit squirrelly! Hmmmm.... thinking about jumping in...



A new "Brobie" doll for our Little One, from Nana who knows it's from his favourite show:



Click HERE for a Broby song...

It's okay if you are frightened... it took me a while to get used to it!

...then it started to get nicer out so off to watch a sunset:



Off on an adventure to Sandy Bay on our bikes! Takes a while to get there through the paths etc, but a fun day trip:




Found the "Lost Lake" lagoon with lots of exciting tadpoles, snails and leaches! I'd say "Ahhhh, boys", but I'm the only person in my family who willingly picks up toads and snakes, so there goes that theory!



Waiting for the "right" wave to jump:



Playing with a popular toy at Nana's:



A quiet moment:

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A canoe ride in Nana and Bop's canoe:



Dragonfly:

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The resident eagle:

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Our Little One likes props:

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Relaxing:

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May, June, July!

Wow! I almost forgot how to login! I am behind! May... Went to the cottage for the first time, even though the boys were a bit sick... we figured they can lie on the couch at home OR at the lake, so we went to the lake! Turns out they were feeling a bit better that day, so we had fun!



Our little one's knock-knock joke: "Knock Knock" (Who's there?) "Ewan" (Ewan who?) "Ewan...outside!" He loves that one, and will laugh heartily if you tell it to him too..



Making silly faces

Without training wheels at VB:

Making it across the monkey bars at the zoo for the first time:

Losing more teeth (June 5th 2009):

JUNE:

Had fun with the soccer season, The Children's Festival, and here we visited MTYP and played with their costumes at the family day:

JULY:

We have such a great time on the beach at VB that it's hard to get off the beach! Next thing we know we're eating supper pretty late, and it's hard to keep our eyes open:

Playing some golf at the Beach Events:



making tye dye shirts at the Children's Crafts:


Kurt with his new sail:

Earth Day!

I don't have pictures, but Kieran, Schaefer and I wandered up and down our street today and picked up all the garbage on our side of the street. It's a small thing and we have SOOOOOOO many things we could do better, but every little bit helps, and I was glad to take those little guys around to get them to feel like they are helping. Schaefer proudly pulled the wagon and said "noder one!" meaning "another one" every time he saw more trash... it was cute! Then we came back to our house just in time for all the neighbour kids (about 10-15 of them) that are anywhere from 6-18 years old all come to happily, sweetly and simultaneously play kick the can, hide and seek, and draw on the sidewalk while picking Schaefer up for hugs and trying to teach them their various names... such a fantastic street! They've always happily let soccer games accept dragons, or lions, or Anakin depending on who Kieran is at the time!

Dr. Gordon Neufeld

Sorry I missed this gentleman... he was doing a presentation today. I have been a huge fan of Attachment Parenting, Dr. Sears, and all related books that involve responding to your child's cues/feelings such as "How to Talk So Your Child Will Listen, and Wow to Listen So Your Child Will Talk", "In Praise of Slow" (Carl Honore), "The Highly Sensitive Child", "Raising your Spirited ChildL"... so this sounds like it would have been another person that I would enjoy because it is my philisophy of how to relate to kids.

Click HERE for his website.

TODDLER-ISM

“You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.” - Franklin P. Jones

Well! Our little one does NOT need our help to put on his pajamas. Do NOT ask him... he can DO IT HIMSELF... as demonstrated below (pictures are in order... I just kept snapping... I had nothing better to do seeing as I wasn't allowed to help):

At least it's extremely fun for me to watch!

Our little one's family portraits...

First, let me get this out of the way:
AUGH!!! HE SWIPED THE BOARD BEFORE I COULD TAKE A PICTURE OF HIS "SELF PORTRAIT" So cute... it would have been his first self portrait! He said it was him (in the picture)... and then swiped it as I was walking over... trickster! Ahhhhh... the art that is lost in the world...

(Ahem... I feel better now)

Anyway... Our little one says this is his big brother... well he said it was his big brother WHILE he was drawing it. Today he says it is me.





Pretty neat, because my big boy and I watched him as he deliberately drew the head, eyes, eyelashes, nose, mouth, ears... and his chin! I don't know if that is because he notices his brother's dimple on his chin... I think it is... he very specifically named the parts as he drew them. Also interesting is he drew this all sideways, like this :-) so we couldn't tell what he was doing, and then he held the board up and we could see what it was. That's just his own way of drawing, I guess. By the way, he's choosing to be right handed... for the moment! I'm still pulling for him to join us "left-handers"! :-)

He said this was me, as he was drawing it yesterday (today he says it's his brother):

...And he said this is Kurt:

Our first visit out of the country...

....or to another planet?

Relaxing in the hotel room.

Driving home... or boating...

During the video Kurt says something like 'at least this is washing the car off'' and I laugh... That was only a short patch near Oslo. Unfortunate, because mostly GF was very similar to Manitoba, except so many people cancelled their visit due to being cautious, that I think there was a lot of lost business for GF this past week from Manitobans! We just kept actually checking with people in GF itself for our information so that we knew what it was actually like there, and not what speculations were. I have never gone there for spring break before, but from all accounts our visit was very unusual in that we were often part of only a handful of people in places like Target.... Oh well! Being cautious isn't necessarily a bad thing, either.

Dinosaur Diorama

I forgot to put this in here. Just before we went to Glenboro, our big boy got up on a Saturday morning and said it was Dinosaur Day. He wanted to do dinosaur things. So, we watched a dinosaur show, pretended we were paleontologists, colored dinosaur pictures... I looked up dinosaur crafts and saw some dioramas. I showed him some of the pictures, and gave him a shoe box, and he pretty much decided what everything would look like. He painted the ground and sky himself, and coloured/cut out all of the dinosaurs and vegetation. I showed him how to get one of them to stand up, and then he did the rest of the propping up himself.

March-ing through the years...

I thought I would look at pictures I have from the month of March during the last several years, to see if it was as snowy as it is this year:


I don't have a date for this one.. it's just under a category called "14 months" which equals March 24th and on, during 2004:


2005:

2006:

2007, and it's hard to see here, but I know that the weather was very nice that week:


And then this week:

Waiting for spring!

Our big boy is Indiana Jones lately:

... but still finds time to fit in some baking (thanks again, Aunt Barb):

... bought some "sand" toys from Dollarama... so that we could play in the snow! Might as well enjoy it! And we did, yesterday:

(He's saying "Got it!") As you can see, we'll be waiting a bit before we ask our little one to shovel the sidewalk! It would take him months! Not sure why the lighting looks like film from "The Wonder Years" but it worked better when I was inside after... whatever! :-)

Today we went to the Museum of Man and Nature for the dinosaur exhibit.



Did some digging for fossils:

and enjoyed the regular exhibits, which are new ALL the time to our little one.

(He's saying "Turtle!")

Here, you can here his budding career as a circle researcher... he finds them everywhere...
Maybe there's a pattern!



He's saying "Circle" over and over... and then I call it "O", which is what he USED to call circles or the letter O, so I'm not moving with the trends...


Other famous examples that circle researchers have found:

I was more thinking about the Rory Tate, circle researcher on the Reese's Peanut Butter cups commercials, but I couldn't find any pics from that! Those were funny.