You Know It's Spring When...

...you have your first picnic of the season! (Even if it is in the driveway instead of the backyard because the dog killed our grass - and would eat the food!)

A Whole Decade!

Hard to believe, but Rachael is now 10 years old! How did that happen? In anticipation of her new room downstairs we got her some furniture for her birthday. Rachael's birthday is in the middle of Spring Break so we're having her party with friends later. On her real birthday we went to Gramps and Grams' house and the girls stayed for a sleepover.

Happy Birthday, Rachael!

What Are Those?

One of the places we went to visit this weekend was the Victoria Butterfly Gardens. We saw lots of beautiful butterflies who weren't very cooperative when it came to taking pictures.

After we had been there a while and we were getting ready to leave I asked the kids if there was anything that they still wanted to see. Jaden said, "Dine-dine." Dinosaurs? You want to see dinosaurs? I don't remember seeing any dinosaurs here. You show me.

So he wandered around for a while looking for these dinosaurs he was sure he saw

and

after

a

while

he

lead

me

here:

I guess those long necks do look sort of Brontosaurus-like, now that I think about it!

Be A Tourist In Your Cousins Home Town

We went to Victoria this weekend. The girls skipped school Friday and we hopped on a ferry over to the island to do some sight seeing. We had Darcy's cousin pick us up some "Be a Tourist In You Own Town" tickets - for $10.50 we got to see lots of things for free or for reduced prices. Even the hotel was cheaper.

The first thing we went to see was Miniature World. I remember going when I was 12 or so and knew the kids would like it. Jaden loved watching all the choo choo trains.Even the weather cooperated with us. It was sunnyish but still not very warm. On Saturday we went to see the Parliament building. Amazing how they built with such detail so long before all these fancy machines we have now. We couldn't go inside because they are closed on weekends.

We went to the Undersea Gardens and got to hold some Sea Stars

and then we went to the Royal BC Museum. We spent hours here just looking at all they had to see. We also saw an IMAX about horses.Sunday was our last day but we didn't need to catch the ferry until 3:00 so we had lots of time for fun. First we went to the Beacon Hill Children's Farm.

They had some cute baby goats Rachael fell in love with.

Then we went to the Victoria Butterfly Gardens. They also had birds, fish and flamingos there.

And we even had time to go to the Scratch Patch in Mineral World where the girls each got to pick out some pretty rocks to take home. Unfortunately we were too busy chasing Jaden around to get any pictures. We had lots of fun on the weekend, but chasing a two year old around everywhere doesn't exactly make it relaxing. Good memories, though.

Reading Link Challenge

Rachael participated in the Reading Link Challenge at school this year. The top 7 readers in her class each read the same 6 or 7 books. Their team was the Flaming Canadians and they challenged the other teams in the other grade 4 & 5 classes in their school. A librarian from the public library came and asked the teams questions about the books and the Flaming Canadians won! They then went to the public library and competed against other schools.

Some of the questions were really hard - like "How much did the flash light cost," and "What was the exact name of the steamboat." They did great but did not win.

Rachael did win one of the books she read, though. She later traded it for her favorite book, "Riding Freedom" which was won by one of the boys on her team.

Once they got back to school they had a drum presentation in which all the kids got to play drums. They presented their speaches in the morning, had pizza for lunch, went to compete in the Reading Link Challenge after lunch, and then came back in time to play the drums. A pretty good day of school if you ask me.