Winter Wonderland

  We had such a snow dump last week. Seriously, the most snow I've ever seen fall in one sitting. Maybe a foot and a half in just over 24 hours. It was wet and pretty and great for pictures.

 

Luckily, we had just bought some sleds so I could pull the little kids in one every day when I walk to pick Alec up from Kindergarten, since our stroller does NOT work well in the snow.  However, the snow was so deep and wet that it was almost impossible to pull a sled through it. I had to give up 1/2 way across the school field, leave Charlie and Gwen (who was bawling at this point...she did not like being in her snow clothes or being pulled almost at a 45 degree angle in the tippy, bumpy sled) ...leave them stranded in the field so I could run the rest of the way to get Alec since he didn't seem to see us out in the field.  It was a tiny bit easier on the walk home when Alec could help me pull and it got WAY easier once I realized I should just walk in the road where some of the snow was flattened by the cars.

Just before I left them in the field -- But this picture doesn't capture well how deep it was or how high / tilted the sled was because of all the snow stuck under it. Even though the sled is super light and my kids aren't too heavy, the extra 50 lbs of snow caught under it all added up to quite a load.

 

 

 

By the time we got home my head was soaked since my jacket hood kept coming off and I was hot enough from pulling the sled I didn't mind the open air. The boys had lots of fun playing in the backyard. The boys tried to build their own ramp to sled down from the trampoline.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They did a pretty good job by themselves! The next morning I went out with Charlie (counted it all as my exercise!) and got the ramp pretty big.

 

  The snow is still all here and deep. There was a warmish day a couple of days ago where any shoveled sidewalks melted to bare cement and our car no longer looks like a snow monster.

 

I can still think of this all as Fun Fun Fun. It probably helps that I'm counting on this being our last winter here. But who knows what the future holds or if we'll be able to get a job elsewhere for the next Fall. Oh well, no point worrying about that now. I'm still going to try and enjoy this crazy weather winter. (Maybe another helpful reason is the treadmill we just found on kijiji and got. (!!) Not even the snow can stop me running this winter!! ...although there are other factors in my life besides snow so I can't start planing the next 1/2 marathon yet.

Swimming lessons

Alec has been taking swimming lessons at a local community center twice a week for the past month.  Its been really great. After a year of having no where we had to be at, at a certain time, I was worried what school every day, piano lessons once a week, swimming lessons twice a week, and playgroup once a week would do to our family. Its not bad so far and I actually really enjoy getting our days started early so consistently.

Alec is getting so brave in the water and will put his whole head under for 3 seconds quite regularly  Also he as good confidence at trying things by himself first, like his star floats.  He seems to really enjoy being in the water and he has some good teachers.  The things we need to work on are blowing out air slowly through his nose so he can stay under the water for as long as he can hold his breath, and trusting himself to hold his floats and breath for longer.

 Now that Charlie is 4, he gets to start this week too! They'll actually be in the same class until Alec turns 6 next month.  Both boys are really excited about this, they are such good friends most of the time.  I can't wait to see little Charlie in the water and see how well he does.  He is super brave, quite squirmy and a good risk taker so I think it will be really entertaining to watch him.

Its getting really cold and it was really slushy the past couple of days (most of it melted yesterday!) and so coming out of the warm pool with wet hair seems really uncomfortable.  For this reason, I think we'll stop doing swimming lessons for the first couple of months of the new year and pick back up in early spring.  I'm thinking we'll try gymnastics in the meantime. I love seeing my kids do physical/sporty activities because they are so good at them!

Halloween

This year we had lots of chances to celebrate Halloween.

First, I was feeling in a crafty mood and wanted to do something fun with the kids and we made Halloween T-shirts using fabric paint and freezer paper. I had the kids draw their own spooky picture and then I helped them draw it BIG on the freezer paper and then they painted them! We even found glow in the dark paint to make the shirts super awesome. The sad thing about this whole experience is that we forgot to wear them before Halloween! We were saving them, and then we forgot about them.

 

Charlie and Gwen had a nice little Halloween party at their playgroup last Friday. They had Halloween games, enjoyed a super cute shadow puppet show / poem that we tried to copy at home later, wore their costumes and ate huge cookies.

 

 They got these silly glasses and Gwen looked so funny wearing them while we waited inside the schools boot room to pick up Alec from Kindergarten.

 Friday night we were given tickets to a Spooktacular at the big West Edmonton Mall's indoor amusement park: Galaxy land, costumes encouraged.  We debated getting a sitter and just Chris and I going by ourselves but ended up taking the boys and leaving Gwen to get a good nights sleep since the party didn't even start until 7:30pm.  Good decision. It was fun to go on rides and the boys were so good despite it being so late (it wasn't until the next day that their distress showed....)

 We found some friends to take pictures with!

 The perfect Alec-and-Charlie-sized roller coaster.   I wish I would've gotten a picture of their faces after the first lap! They both looked SOOOO concerned and shocked, but by the end they were smiling and laughing.

 I love their faces in this next one:

 Chris and I were some random Scottish couple. I think we put these ensembles together for our first Halloween as a married couple since Chris had an awesome authentic kilt to work with (a gift from his sister, Jess from her semester in London) and my dress is a hastily cut up dress we found at DI all those 8 years ago.

SHEESH I don't really like these monster posts, but its what I've got to work with at the moment so lets keep plugging on! Next up is Pumpkin Carving.

 I made the mistake of getting pumpkins early (for decoration) and left them outside where they froze in our past weeks of constantly below freezing.  So we had to carve them at a delicate balance between not thawed enough to be mushy but thawed just enough to stick a knife into.  With pot holders to keep our non carving hand from freezing it was actually quite easy to scrape them clean since frozen pumpkin innards aren't actually slimy. 

 

 

 

 

Charlie's turned out pretty cool I thought (below). Gwen's is the smiley face in the middle above. She keeps saying, "My pumpkin is happy!"

 

Alec got to wear his costume to school on Wednesday and I was able to go help with his party. It was fun to stay for an entire day of kindergarten and parade through the school with him, serve treats and work at some of the special Halloween centers with him and his friends.

 

 

Wednesday night we had our little family party and had my friend Anna and her son who is Alec's age and in his Kindergarten class over too. We played the donuts on a string game then went trick or treating before it got TOO dark and cold THEN we came in for a warm dinner of chili and cornbread. I actually really liked doing it in this order. It was fun to be done trick or treating by 7:00 and have some calming down time while we ate a warm dinner and then the kids were almost too full  and tired to eat buckets of candy and didn't complain when we stopped after 2 pieces.  (We've since eaten our fill and Alec is currently laying next to me on the bean bag since we both have tummy aches from too much sugar!)

  Me helping Gwen cheat...

 Gwen cheating on her own...

 

 Chris, just about to win...

 

 

 Waiting for Gwen...

It was SOOOOO cold. The kids wore 2 layers of fleece pajamas under their warm costumes and I wore my biggest winter-est coat and was quite warm until the cold reached my toes and fingers after an hour.  The wind was biting and Chris took Gwen home a few houses early.

Alec was a cheetah, Charlie was Batman and Gwen was a ladybug.  Chris and I put the kids down by 8:00 and watched a few episodes of Mentalist while we answered the door and I eventually fell asleep.  All in all, it was a very fun Halloween.