Christmas Tree

A few weeks back we finally got around to putting up the Christmas tree along with the help of my good friend Lisa.
The carols were on the stereo, the hot chocolate (and wine) was out along with the dark chocolate. It was a red letter evening.
As always, Adara was a big fan of the box that the tree comes in. It's a great little house.

And I, after a lovely and lengthy evening of tree decorating and imbibing found myself sleeping in front of my gorgeous tree. Some traditions never get old!

Preparing to Skate

The first time skating requires a lot of planning and preparation. The new skates from Auntie kristen, Uncle Greg and Liam had to be tried on. The helmet had to be adjusted and had a face plate added. Everything had to be sharpened. It was all very important.
In the end Adara was thrilled with her first skate, but my back was nearly broken by the enterprise!

Baking Cookies

Adara and I have been doing a little cookie baking lately. So far we've made vanilla sugar cookies and peanut butter, toffee cookies.


The lovely Dennnie bought Adara her own apron which she loves to wear as we go to our mixing and arranging. She's so darned determined to crack the egg on her own though! Do you guys remember what a victory that was the first time you succesfully cracked an egg?

Another IATSE Christmas

Len's work (the stage hands union) alwasy does a party for all of the kids of the members for Christmas on a sunday morning so that all of the members can attend. It is an affair to remember, taking over three of the Canadian Opera Company's rehearsal halls it's so large. So, this morning, we got dressed all pretty to go...

We got there and got ourselves some bacon (and eggs, sausages,pancakes, coffee, ham, potatoes, etc.)

The event was massive as always, with a acrobat/balancing act this year, two craft making tables, three bouncy castles, a blow up train and...
The electric rider track. This was the highlight of the party! Adara was so amazingly adept at steering around all of the other kids that the operators and other parents were commenting. Particularly remarkable since there wasn't another child under five years of age even attempting navigating the ring on these bad boys.
And then, we got our faces painted, got a gift from Santa (last this year, and she was without a complaint for the enitre 45 minute long wait) and called it a day.

Walking Baby

I have to say that I'm thrilled that Adara and I had our first trip out to "take baby for a walk" a few weeks back on a lovely sunny day. This was the first time she asked, so i made sure that there was room in the big stroller for both "baby and baby and baby stroller" in case they got tired and off we went. She walked a very solid six or seven blocks before giving into exhaustion. I loved it as I have such strong memories of walking my babies up and down the street.

The Great Ship Alvie

Tonight, Pirate Captain Adara and Pirate Mamma built a ship. A great and mighty ship!
With a bold and brave flag!

And many passengers carefully tucked into their beds with their babbas in the below ships...

As well as on the fore deck. We can't wait for Pirate Captain Dadda to come home and see it!

Celebrating out west

Adara got to celebrate her actual birthday out west with Len's mom and dad, and cousin Jericha and Aiden and all the aunts and uncles.

The Fairy/Pirate, Dragon/Cowboy

Halloween with Adara was an interesting event requiring much inventiveness and creativity; but we were up to the task!
For weeks Adara had been saying that she was being a transformer. So, lazy mom that I am, I had established that such a costume existed at the store. Then she returned from out west saying that she would be a fairy as she'd been playing fairy with cousin Jericha. Fine, she'd returned with a new fairy dress and wings, so all good, nothing required of us. On saturday when we had a toddler halloween party, I realized that she'd envisioned a fairy wearing wings and nothing else. Hmm... that wont' work. So, I suggested fairy pirate as obviously pirates must wear pants and boots and hats and things. No problem she loved that. We dressed her in jeans, a shirt, her tall brown boots with the pants tucked in , her pirate hat, fairy wings and fairy wand. All good.
Then on sunday, 5 minutes before trick or treating she announced that she would be a cowboy. What? I don't have anything resembling a cowboy costume except the same brown boots and a neck kerchief. This was no costume that anyone on the street would recognize, she was going to be dissapointed. So looking desperately around the room I yelled "how about a cowboy dragon?" She loved it and so we were off. jeans, jean jacket, neck kerchief, her cowboy hat (because it has a lariat tie), ever popular brown boots (thanks auntie Kristen!) and the dragon tale (thanks Gretel of Fancy Pants Kids). A cowboy/dragon. The neighbours loved it and Halloween was saved for annother year! I shudder to think of what next year might bring!

Adara's Birthday, Very Belated

Here's Adara's birthday as celebrated in our backyard on thanksgiving and then, at Liam's request, at Casa Loma in Toronto.

Gratitude

We've had a pretty hard couple of weeks here between massive work being done on the house, jury duty for me and a lot of difficulties at work. It's been challenging and we've been tired.

That being said last night when the drywall dust was finally cleaned up, the laundry done, Adara's birthday cake prepped and everything cleaned up, I was happy. It is a cliche, but we are lucky. I was at the Mayors luncheon for the arts this week and the incomporable Molly Johnson was singing here song Lucky. If you get a chance to check out the tune on itunes, do. It's a swinging, glorious anthem to how lucky she is to lead the life she does. And you know what, us too. We are surrounded by brilliant artists and craftsmen all of the time who's job is to use their knowledge to bring joy (or sorrow) to the masses on the stage. It's a wicked cool job and the only thing that I ever wanted to do, even when it's not going very well this week.

Meanwhile, I have these two gorgeous ones to frame my days. Adara is joyful and excited right now as she learns to count and learns her letters it's like every day she can't wait for one more discovery. There is no anxiety to her learning, it's just plain discovery.
So, today with the whole family (except for Greg who is in Afghanistan) coming, we are filled with gratitude.

Daddy/Uncle Time

Jury Duty (advance notice, I'm whining here people, whining)

So, I went in for jury duty as called at the beginning of this week. Everyone I know who had been called sat and worked on their laptops all week waiting to be chosen for a jury and was sent home. So I was expecting that and thinking, "Ok, I can still launch my eight show season from the jury room, this is doable". But no, not for me. I got put on a jury pretty much right away. Which means that all this week from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm I'm in the courtroom listening to witnesses. At night I'm racing home, spending time with Adara and then trying to get my real job done. I'm completely overwhelmed and Len is working crazy hours too. I haven't cried this much from stress since university. I get that this is my civic duty and all, but all the rest of the jurors are just being jurors, not running a company too. Anyways, that's my whinge for today. It will all be done on tuesday or wednesday if we can agree on if he's guilty or not. Then, back to regularly scheduled programming.

Wordless Wednesday

Royal Bottanical Gardens

Last week I was looking for a fun family labour day activity that took advantage of being outside. I found it in the Royal Bottanical Gardens in Burlington.
Len and I thought that maybe we'd get to wander for an hour or so and see a couple of the gardens.
An hour and a half into a thus far picture perfect day we headed out to hike 1.2 km from one garden to another through a marshy area with Adara in the stroller. It was amazing! We got to see all kinds of birds on the way and people gave us seeds to feed to them so that they would come and land on Adara. And they actually did land on her hand.

We saw a muskrat and a hawk and countless chipmunks, cardinals, blue jays and chickadees. Adara got to pet a lot of dogs. The day was sunny and gorgeous and pretty much perfect. To top it all off after three and a half hours of wandering the gardens, Adara was still in great humour. So, we sat at a tea house under a big umbrella as it started to rain and had a lovely lunch and glass of wine while she coloured. Pretty much my ideal and perfect day.
So, what does one do when they find the perfect family outing? Buy a membership of course! Anyone want to join us next time?

Adara's fashion sense

Adara has a quite distinct sense of fashion. She prefers bright coloured shirts with graphic images of boy like things like dinosaurs or planets or robots. She in fact choses these shirts almost every day. She absolutely refuses to wear dresses.
Except in this case, where she was bribed with candy because I just had to see this gorgeous dress on her. The bribe held, she wore it all day. Thanks for the gorgeous dress Auntie Kristen!

Adara and Griffin

Will either end up married or bloodying eachothers noses, the jury is out.

They had all these amazing moments of quiet imaginative play together. They played Doctors and Vets and Mom and Dad and a lot of Dragons.

But in the end, ya gotta go for the classice, Pirates! These hats were the end of the week, as the pirates sailed off into the sunset.

Jumping

From jumping on the bed, to jumping in the jolly jumper to jumping with an Auntie, jumping never loses it's charms.

The adults

Yep, we were there too!

Attack!

An extremely popular game at the cottage was ATTACK! in all it's forms. From the ever popular hammock attack with all of it's vagaries, to more direct forms of attack it was a great use of kid energy.

Mostly I admit that it was used for evil. Ie: All of the tired adults suggesting that the kids attack Rafa as in these pics.

Fireside

Here's Adara's first campfire. After sitting by the fire for about 10 minutes and collecting crab apples for "stew" for another 20, she declared herself tired. Stumbling into the tent set up for Liam's privacy, she watched the fire out the front flap for 5 minutes before falling into a very contented, fully dressed sleep.

Quiet Cottage Moments

In case it seems like there wasn't any, here's some quiet cottage moments.

Located on Rice Lake near Cobourg, our cottage was a gorgeous lake front property with two docks, two hammocks, a swing, and a ridiculous number of random outbuildings, boats and motorized vehicles!

We enjoyed gorgeous sunsets, quiet moments on the end of the dock. We taught Liam to play euchre and backgammon, the boys watched a kung fu movie, the girls drank wine and Len even got in one nap on the dock.


Sadly, Adara chose this moment to cut all her naps, so the quiet was pretty intermittent, but present nontheless.