April Miscellaneous

David and I both love mornings and we both love cycling. So when we can, we try to get out early on the weekends and go for a ride.

It's a bit of a throw back to when we used to go to the park with breakfast and have a picnic together.

It's also good exercise. Now that we're past the Craft Markets and graduation and everything else, hopefully we can go more often.

The kids had crazy hair day at school. I decided to go all out this year. Elisabeth got unicorn hair.

It was a little harder than Pinterest led me to believe, but eventually we got there.

David wasn't sure he wanted to participate. But when he finally did decide to, we had a late night pinterest session, then a late night Walmart run, and this is what we ended up with!

He he he.

I love school spirit days.

The kids do too.

Then we were at a friends' for dinner. And Elisabeth decided to go in character. So then Haylea joined in the fun too.

I'd been spending a lot of time in the basement working on my crafting. David decided to give me a hand...ninja style staining!

Losing track of time...and my mind.

I have an Instagram account. And occasionally, if I haven't posted in a while, and I haven't left my desk to take any pictures, I'll come here to look for something worth posting. I did that Saturday night and nearly died when I saw how long it's been since my last post.

Andrew and I have been crafting maniacs this last 8 weeks; we have our first spring market coming up this Friday. I'm terrified and excited all at once.

But that coupled with grad and my big publishing deadline at work mean we've had no lives.

So. Yah.

David has been blessed (ha ha) with my sense of humour. Which means we have this great dynamic that I absolutely love. It also means that other people might look at us and wonder if they should call the police. Sometimes I wonder if I should tone it down with him and act with a bit more propriety. And then yesterday, right after I sucker punched him (punch buggy a' la Andrea) he said to me, "I feel sorry for the everyone else. Their moms are so boring."

I love that kid. I really do.

Business Acumen

It's been a long time since I've written an anecdotal post about one of the kids. Between work and my craft business and living life, this poor blog has become a very scant record of our lives. I was looking for pictures yesterday though and spent some time poring over some of my early posts. I'm so thankful we have this record of David and Elisabeth's early days even if the more recent posts aren't very interesting.

Speaking of, let me tell you about Elisabeth.

Have you heard of beanie boos?

That's one right there. The kids are going CRAZY for them these days. One of Elisabeth's classmates has over 40! That represents at least $240 worth of stuffed animals!!!

Anyway, one of Elisabeth's classmates decided to start a business offering day care services for his classmate's beanie boos. He hired several of his classmates (including Elisabeth) to be minders and found clients who needed their beanie boos taken care of. At the end of the day on Monday, Elisabeth was playing with one of the toys. The owner came up behind her and asked her to pass his BB. So she tossed it at him. He missed and the toy almost fell on the floor.

Being protective of his stuffed animal, he filed a complaint and demanded that she be fired immediately. And she was.

That night as she ranted and raved about the injustice of it all, she also plotted her revenge.

And so on Tuesday she opened her own Beanie Boo minding business. She hired her own minders and stole all of her classmate's clients. Without any clients of his own, this classmate was forced to come and work for Elisabeth.

And then, once she'd driven his business into the ground, she closed up shop. Beanie Boo minding is boring, after all.

Moral of the story? Well, aside from maybe a caution not to cross Elisabeth, I'd say this girl is going to go places...

Hopppy Easter

For a while I tossed around the idea of having an Easter party this year. In the end, it didn't work out. But on Easter Sunday, I did decide to decorate eggs. And something like that is always more fun if you invite friends. And so we did.

Rachel had never decorated Easter eggs before. The family she was with last year didn't celebrate Easter. So it was kind of fun to have someone new to Easter hanging out with us.

I bought one of those kits with the colour tablets and ideas on how to decorate. But as is usual, the kids each kind of chose their own path and didn't really use the kit.

Meanwhile, I played with bubble wrap.

And eventually lured Ashlie into joining me :)

Once we'd finished decorating the eggs, we pulled out some Easter gingerbread houses. I bet you didn't know those existed. Oh you can buy that kind of stuff for anything these days. And being as we stopped at Walmart on our way home from church, they were super duper cheap.

Meanwhile these two snuggled and stuff.

While Ashlie and Rachel worked as a team, the three littlers (maybe I need to start calling them middles? We have three teens, three almost teens and 3.5 actual littles. Oy we're growing fast!) anyway, these three each chose a side of their house and worked independently.

Their house was a little less...traditional.

It was hard, but I persuaded them not to eat the house.

Obviously we had a lot of fun.

And ate a LOT of icing.

Happy Easter :)

After days and days of rain, and then more crafting, we decided to take a break on Saturday and head to Rocky Point Park in Port Moody.

There's a gorgeous Shoreline Walk you can do that leads around the inlet.

There are bridges and boardwalks and you walk through forest and marsh and along the ocean. It's beautiful and every part is different.

It seems a great many other people had the same idea as us, and who could blame them?!

The tide was out, which made for some very interesting shore line.

And a lot of photo ops. "You shall not pass!"

Elisabeth was totally into the photo shoot...most of the time. You can see in the photo above that she zoned out while I was trying to figure out my focus and depth of field.

But then she got right back into it later.

Even setting up her own poses.

These two mostly just hammed.

Oh I forgot to talk about the duck blinds. I can see how you would get some good duck hunting here.

While the guys wrestled, or whatever that is, Elisabeth whittled.

And then we were back at Rocky Point and I took pictures of flowers.

On the way home, I wanted to drive to Belcarra Regional Park to see what it was like.

It's worth the drive.

And even though we only spent a couple of minutes there, I can hardly wait to go back.