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.

Us

Yep, we're this sad. We are the only cottaging family to fail to get a beautifully posed in front of the lake family photo. We forgot. Even though, a photo for everyone for Christmas was on my list. Yaou see, my friends Julia and Jenn are really awesome photographers so I was going to steal their skills and skip the pro photographers costs. Except that I forgot. Entirely. So, this is what we have, a very accurate family photo. We're too darn busy to take a pic for you folks, we're shuckin' corn!