Four Kids?!

Yesterday our neighbors came over to play. It was a very full day! The highlight of the day was the pool.

Rain is the same age as Davey.

Here's a close up of her so you can see how pretty she is.

And here's my Ellie girl!


My two babies watching the two neighbor babies playing downstairs.

Rain found these angel wings and wore them for almost the whole day. Then she wanted to clean house because she was my house fairy.

Snuggle time!

Picture time

Our realtor is coming tomorrow to take the pictures of our house for MLS, his website and the virtual tour. Since we've moved in, this mantel has proven to be my decorating stumbling block. It's 25% of the reason we bought the house and yet, I have no idea how to style it. This is before. I still had my nativity scene and candles up because I didn't know what else to do.

I rummaged around my house and came up with this which is less colourful.

Anyone have any ideas or advice for me?

I have 45 minutes until this day gets crazy...

...and I decided to share them with you.

My neighbor's day care is on holiday this week. Today her kids are coming over here for the day. There are only two negatives to this arrangement. 1. We just (re) listed our house on Sunday and 4 kids 4 and under means I'm going to be cleaning (again) tonight! and 2. Today is the first day in 2 months I've had a car at my disposal. And I don't have enough seat belts in it to go anywhere with the kids :(

Luckily, the day looks like it's going to be gorgeous so we're going to spend it in our backyard. With the kiddie pool. And I'm going to drag their backyard toys over here so we have a real adventure land in our backyard.

Anyhoo, as I was making my morning cup of coffee today, I started thinking about all the things I'm looking forward to in our new house:

That's the side of it right there. And you can kind of tell what our backyard is going to be like. Surrounded by gorgeous, gorgeous trees...I can't wait for morning coffee on my balcony in the peace and tranquility of my backyard.

This is the side from slightly further back. Can you see Andrew in there? He's standing in the basement next to the wall of the garage. Those are just the footings though so it's going to have gravel poured in and the hole around it will get backfilled. We're not really going to have 13 foot ceilings in our basement.


Which is a good thing if you ask me!

Yesterday they finished framing Kathi and Cody's house. The clean up guy did a stellar job of tidying up the site. I'm hoping that the concrete gets poured at our house today. And then the framing will start on our house and I'd really better make up my mind whether I want white kitchen cabinets or dark...

I'm off to enjoy my cup of coffee on my current gorgeous back balcony. Ciao!

Trip to Whistler

Andrew's annual Staff Conference happened this past week in Whistler. I came down with a stomach bug on Sunday, and was too sick to travel on Monday. But by Tuesday we made the trek up - just in time to miss the rock slide.

As always, our room was amazing.

You can kind of see that there is light coming above the fireplace, see?

First the kitchen - can you see me waving from the microwave?

This is where all that light above the fireplace was coming from. Nice, hunh? There was one running the whole length of the ceiling above our pillows (in the bedroom). That woke me up every single morning!

Anyhoo, here's Tink. Very excited to be in our room.

Friday morning I was finally starting to feel better. The conference was over. But we walked down to Starbucks and everyone had some coffee. These little birds were very eager to share our goodies.

Hey! It's me again!!

Another bird. I tell you, I was scared for my ankles!!

Later, and back in the room. Tink having a snack.

Then we went for a walk down to the playground.





On Saturday morning we left for home. Via Lillooet. First we stopped in Pemberton for gas. Only one of the stations still had any.

(I thought this sign was very funny!)

And this mountain reminded me of Switzerland!


We passed several recent rock slides. Here's one that was scary enough.

See? Scary.
But later (after Lillooet, but before Lytton) we passed another rock slide where the rocks were still littering the road way...and a whole lane of the road was missing. It was very, very scary. Especially since the it was basically a wall of loose rock on one side of us. We had one lane to drive in (traffic controlled so that people could travel in both directions) and the other side was a sheer drop hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of feet down to a raging river.

This is Lillooet.
And this is where we stopped for lunch.

We also stopped at Hell's Gate. Not to do the tourist thing, but at the pull off to see if we could see anything. We couldn't, but the kids enjoyed the mini hike.


I had this strange feeling that I needed to take a picture of this diner.

Oh. Fancy that. Well now I know why :)

Tonight, after dinner:

They're growing up so fast!









*sigh* we go through this every time we have to bath davey. Serious hystrionics. It's so tiring.

And once he's in?! We can't get him out. Sheesh!