Tea Parties and Islands and Road Trips with Family

July 12th my brother Rob and his wife Eireen had a teaparty in their backyard to celebrate their love. So we dressed in our finest and took a day trip to the island. 

Don't let this photo fool you. My little shrimp of a niece isn't taller than me yet.

 

Kathi and Cody are the cutest. They weren't even pretending to like each other for the camera, they're just like this. That's them with their girls above and the two of them canoodling below :)

My boy. This hair do is in aid of a halloween costume. That's almost a year of commitment to a hair do for one night of glory. But he does have lovely hair.

The three middle cousins. Still best friends.

Cara is the princess in the dolphin swing. They have an amazing community of friends. I was a little bit jealous.

Eireen and her family decorated the backyard beautifully. It was magical.

David isn't one for delicate sandwiches, cakes or cookies. But he sure loved the jellybeans and popcorn.

This is Eireen's niece, Janet, who has been in Canada for the summer.

More of Cara. We don't get to see her enough.

And these two strutting their stuff for an impromptu photo shoot.

So much fun. I love my family.

Eureka!

David and I were antiquing in Fort Langley on Sunday, and he asked me if we could go to Fort Langley after work one day. So yesterday we did.

They've made a lot of new displays around the site with interactive areas for the kids to learn. Each of the kids also got a passport with activities to complete at each section of the site; questions to answer; and a comment card to fill in. It was a really cool way to make sure they didn't just race around the fort jumping on everything (though they did that too).

Here, Nate and Elisabeth try their hand at smithing after watching the blacksmith demonstration.

Obviously they took their projects very seriously.

(Notice the similarity to Thor, anyone?)

There were also costumes and props to try on and make your interactive experience even better.

Always a highlight, building a house.

Next we watched a weapons demonstration. Everyone came out to see this one (of course). We started with a presentation on different guns and how they were used.

Then moved outside the fort to watch them get fired.

Then we moved on to the cooperidge to try our hands at making barrels.

And into the trading post to make some trades.

Lizzie carried her bales of pelts (or whatever) to trade them for other goods.

Part of the demonstration garden.

Have you ever milked a cow? Well, you won't get to do it here. But you can pretend you are. And this cow never runs outta milk. Fill your bucket? No problem. Dump the contents back in her udder and start again. Endless fun :S

Seriously. It never ended.

Finally, on to panning for gold! EUREKA!

BEACH DAY!

Guess what? We still LOVE the beach. Big surprise, hunh? Back in June, when the teachers were having their rotating strikes, Dave and I took our children and the Goldstone boys to Crescent Beach.

 It was a magical day.

 I really love having a toddler to play with at the beach again. Everything is so exciting to them. Ada didn't disappoint. And she is definitely a water baby!

 Oh, and hey! I got an iPhone since last I blogged. I have no idea why I resisted for so long. I love the pictures my iPhone takes. And the portability! I almost never bother bringing my dslr anymore.

 Anyhoo, back to the kids and the beach. Ada just wants to get as deep as possible. And splash. Which is actually a little icky at the ocean, cause I don't really like creepy things (like seaweed and mud. Or fish. Or crabs. I know, I know).

Dave buried all the kids and then had fun setting up hilarious scenarios. Like this one.

 And this one.

 The only way we could pull Ada out of the water was by giving her food to eat.

It was a brilliant day.

rad-tastic!

 A very long time ago, one of David's friends told me about colour runs and suggested that our family would probably love them. Fast forward a few months, when I started to get excited about racing (that's another story, for another time) and I decided to look into colour runs again. We signed up for the Run or Dye event taking  place on Grouse Mountain in September. But then I found out that Color Me Rad was coming to Cloverdale, so we decided to do a test run on family 'runs' in May.

Not everyone was terribly excited at the prospect of running. But then we watched some videos and it became apparently just how much fun we would have despite all the running.

For those of you who haven't heard of colour runs, you do a 5K fun run. Which means you're not timed and there's no pressure to complete the run in a specific time. In fact, the entertainment stays until everyone leaves and it looked like a lot of people were taking extra long to get extra coloured.

At each kilometer mark along the race path, they have stations where volunteers shoot colour at the participants. AND everyone gets bags of dye (it's corn starch with colour in it) to throw at each other. My boogers were rainbow coloured for DAYS.

There was a lot of THIS going on. It was pure awesome.

Our next colour run is the Grouse Mountain one in three weeks.

 We can't wait!!

This is us.

It's been a few years since we last updated you all on our lives. Since then, our kids have grown. A LOT. And we've added two more cousins to the mix. So, in case you're not following us on Facebook (mostly looking at the Menary side here...), that's David on the left. Sitting in the back row is Jade (Kathi's youngest), then Lizzie who is holding my brother David's oldest, Ada. And then Ashlie (Kathi's oldest) is holding Rob's Cara. Give us a couple months and there will be ANOTHER BOY to add to the picture. As you can imagine, both Davids are terribly excited about this. And I'm excited to buy cute baby boy clothes and toys again. yay.

We old folks are getting...old. You can picture that yourselves without any help from me :)

We like it here

David and I spent a good few hours today looking through pictures on here. And we came to the decision that we love this blog. It was a good way to document our lives (cause goodness knows I'm never going to get my act together and print all our pictures. I have ten years worth to print. It's too overwhelming). 

So here I am blogging again. I'll try and start with July. Here's a picture of us to start:

And a story:

Lizzie is away for her first ever WHOLE weekend away (WAAAAAAH!) but before she left, she made sure she took care of some important business - she took her brother aside and schooled him on her "tips to be the favorite child". David, unfortunately can only remember one of them. "Listen to mom more."

I said, "that's sage advice, David."

"Meh, I don't think so. Not very much of what you say is important."

And THAT is precisely why SHE is the favorite