Rachael's Christmas Concert

Rachael had her school's Christmas concert yesterday. She had an afternoon and an evening performance. There were no individual class productions, just primary and intermediate, French and English choir, and ukelele performances. Oma and Opa Stobbe were so pround of how well Rachael sang, and how she kept her eyes on the choir director.

Only one more day of school, and it's a pyjama party day! Rachael is very excited!

Christmas with the Froese's

We had Christmas with the Froese family a little early this year. Darcy's parents are in town until the 19th only and Kendra and the Walls are going to Ontario with Claire for Christmas this year, so we had our celebration after church on Sunday.

Darcy got a nice Star Wars figure set thing. It'll go nicely with his Star Wars book collection.

Christmas Concert

Having been snowed in for the last two Sundays we didn't know what Kaitlyn was supposed to learn for the Kids Quest Christmas Performance. It was actually the same poem that they've been doing for the last few years, but she's only four so she didn't remember it. But she got to stand up there with the rest of her class and look cute. There were only two or three kids who knew the poem and song, anyway.

A Hard Day

We never got to hold you
Or kiss your little head

Or watch you sleeping soundly

All snuggled in your bed

We can't count your tiny fingers

Or your even smaller toes

We won't see your smile, your beautiful eyes

Or your cute little button nose

You're gone too soon, we don't even know

If you're a girl or boy

Our hearts are filled with sorrow

When they should be full of joy

We know you are in heaven

Where there is no pain or tears

You'll never get hurt or sick

In heaven there are no fears

And though we're sad you're not here right now

For us to hold today

We know we'll hold you in our arms

When we're in heaven with you someday

In loving memory of our baby - due today but Gone Too Soon.

It Still Counts As Snow!

While there was no white stuff falling from the sky today, there's still remnants of it on the ground - so it still counts as snow on Kaitlyn's birthday! That's snow on her first birthday, her second, third and fourth! No snow the year she was born, though. We're definatley hoping to end this trend for next year!

Happy Birthday, Kaitlyn! I can't believe you're 4 already!

Winter Wonderland

It's dumping snow outside right now, so I had to set up my Christmas Village, even though it's before Kaitlyn's real birthday. I try not to set up Christmas stuff before it's her birthday to keep it more special, but we had her party on Saturday and it's snowing now, so up it went! Besides, it's really more of a Winter Village than a Christmas village. It's certainly not the village Baby Jesus was born in! His "village" aka Nativity scene will wait until Friday.

Come by and see it IRL (in real life) - pictures don't really capture the atmosphere of all the little glowing houses. This is the first year I've got the little duck pond and train station up, too!

Kaitlyn's Birthday Party

We celebrated Kaitlyn's 4th birthday on Saturday with lots of family who came over to help with the festivities. Auntie Kendra made another amazing creation! Kaitlyn requested a My Little Pony unicorn cake and look how great it turned out! Not that we ever doubted! Of course no child's birthday is complete without a pile of presents. And Rachael was right there to help out. She got lots of fun presents, but the favorite was the Ponyville teapot house that plays music. Often. And not very quietly. I think it's time for this toy to go downstairs to the play room where they can play it all they want!

She has to wait until her real birthday to get presents from Mom and Dad. You can't have a real birthday without some presents, even if it's not the day you have the party.

Miss Independant

Little Miss Independant here (not even 4 years old yet!) knows how to make her own Peanut Butter and Jam sandwich. She can do it all by herself - she just needs help with taking off the lids and getting the bread out of the freezer.

Post- Wind Storm Campfire

With all the trees and branches that fell down on Sunday and Monday we decided to go across the street to the new lot and have a little campfire. It was never a very big fire. The wood was too wet, but the girls had lots of fun.


Apparently some of you don't know about the new blog all about building our new house. Well there's a link to the left of this blog called "The House That Darcy Built" or you can just click here http://darcyshouse.blogspot.com/ for all the latest on how our house is coming along. We're getting forms for the foundation tomorrow and they pour it on Friday. Then about a week to get all the services in and back fill it, then around the 26th Darcy will start to frame it!

Trick or Treat

The girls had fun Trick-or-Treating yesterday. Kaitlyn dressed up as a scarry lion. She walked around for about half and hour and that was enough for her. Rachael and Daddy went a bit longer. Rachael dressed up as a butterfly. It was nice she could put her wings on over top of her jacket because it was COLD last night! Daddy took them around the neighbourhood while Mommy stayed home (where it was WARM!) and handed out candy. We had maybe 30 kids. After a while I was giving out big handfulls of candy and we're still left with a ton of leftovers. Not that they won't get eaten. But we had way more kids at the last house than here. Next year I'll have to remember to buy less candy. (Or, maybe not!)

Smashing Pumpkins

Don't our pumpkins look smashing?

I carved Kaitlyn's lion pumpkin this afternoon and I asked her if she wanted to watch. No. She wanted to play computer. What's this world coming to? She's not even 4 yet! At least she picked out the lion picture to go on the pumpkin. I thought it was appropriate because she's dressing up as a lion for Halloween.

Then Rachael got home from school and I asked her if she wanted to scoup the goup out of her pumpkin. She did, but then she saw how slimy it was. And then I told her to scoup it out with her hands! That was just too gross. So I told her to get a spoon. Well, a spoon is good for scraping the walls of the pumpkin, but not so good for actually getting stuff out. So she proceded to "scoup" at a rate of about one seed a minute. And then I pulled out my goupy hand and bumped hers and got slime on it. "Ewwww!" After which I said either scoup with your hands or get out of the way! So she went off to color and didn't watch the carving, either. Oh well. Maybe when they get bigger and can actually use the knife they'll be more interested.

Grandma's Back

Since NOBODY ELSE has updated their blog recently, I guess I will. Grandma came back for a quick visit again last weekend. She was here to see Amanda get baptized. And she came to play with Rachael and Kaitlyn. They had lots of fun last Saturday playing Scrabble Jr. and down in the play room. It was a nice visit, even if it was really short. Next time they'll have to come for a longer time.

We're All Set...

We got our passports in the mail today, so we're all set to travel the world! We were going to go to Hawaii in February, but with this whole house thing sucking up all our time and money, that's on hold for another year or so.

The passports got here pretty speedy. We applied for them at the end of August and it's only mid-October. We weren't expecting them till Christmas!

Thanksgiving

Rachael sure had fun playing with her cousins on Thanksgiving! Rachael hasn't seen Tim since summer last year and she was looking forward to playing with him and Abby. We hardly saw them - they were too busy playing lego downstairs. We just saw them when it was time to eat! It was a full house - 33 of us, and there were lots more who couldn't make it.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Soccer Star

Rachael had her first indoor soccer lesson yesterday and she loved it! She's been wanting to take soccer for a while, so now she's getting an hour a week for the next 8 weeks.

They practiced dribbling the ball...

...and then they had a little soccer game at the end of class.

Rachael's friend Ryan from school was even there!

New Blog

So, you may have heard that we're building a house. Ya, I've heard that before, too - but this time it's really happening. I still can't believe it!

If you want to see the progress on our house, check out our new blog (linked at the left).

Maximus

Gramps and Gram got a new puppy! His name is Maximus and he's three months old.
Rachael had a blast playing with him!
Kaitlyn... not so much.
He's much nicer when he doesn't give kisses!

Grade One

Well, Rachael has her real class now. Her teacher is Mme Lageaux, the same teacher she had the first couple of days of school, so that's nice. She's in a 1/2 split class - and there are only 5 grade 1's!!! I thought only 8 kindergarten kids in the k/1 last year was pretty small, but 5??? I guess that's just how the class sizes split up. I think they took the top 5 students and stuck them in with the grade 2's. Of course, I'm saying that because Rachael is stinking smart, but I think at least 3 of the other kids did really well in kindergarten last year, too. So far the days aren't too long for her. She said today felt like only a half day, so that's a good sign. Learning a new language can be tiring! But, so far so good!

First Day of Grade One

Hard to believe, but our little girl is off to Grade One! It was kind of a rainy start to the school year but at least it wasn't really hot after the lousy summer weather we've had. They put kids grade 1-5 in all the classes for the first few days of school, but she knew 3 or 4 of the kids in her class from last year, so that's good!

Cousins Day

It was a little chilly at the waterslides for Cousins Day this year. But at least there were no lineups!
Rachael really loved the tube ride. I think she would have gone on it all day if someone would have taken her!
Those swimming lessons she had in July really made her much more confident in the water.
Good thing Mom brought sweatshirts for keeping warm in between getting wet.
Rachael and Kaitlyn had lots of fun chasing bubbles with Amy.

PNE

What? A post with no pictures? Yes, I'm sorry, but you'll have to use your imagination!
Yesterday we went to the PNE. We hadn't been the last two years because we found the entertainment was too repetitive. But Rachael wanted to see the SuperDogs again, and it looked like they had a bunch of new stuff, so off we went.
The first thing we went to see were the Bejing Acrobats, and let me tell you, they were amazing! The flips and tricks and the way they could twist their bodies was incredible! It was very cool. Then we went to see the SuperDogs. They had a new sponsor and a new host (which isn't a bad thing!) but the tricks were the same old. But the girls really liked it and that's all that matters! We saw the cartoon parade and Rachael shook Brother Bear's hand, and Kaitlyn shook the big bad wolf's hand. There were lots of characters they recognized like the Berenstain Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, Clifford (though he must have been the Small Red Puppy still, because he was not big!) the Cat in the Hat and the dinosaur with Fred Flinstone that we just saw at Dinotown! There were lots they (and we!) didn't recognize. My girls just don't know about Saturday morning cartoons, and I'm fine with keeping it that way, thank you very much!
We also saw the miniature horse show, which again was a bit of a snoozer but the kids liked it. The last show we saw was the Illusions and Beyond which was really cool. They did lots of neat magic tricks and we all enjoyed it. And of course we saw the show home and the market place and had lots of snacks to eat. It was even nice and sunny, but not too hot. Perfect PNE weather. If only the weather will cooperate for Saturday's waterslides...

Butterfly Castle

It was Girls Only when we went to the beach on Wednesday. Gram had the week off and decided we needed to go to the beach! So we picked up Auntie Andree on the way and headed in to Centennial Beach for an afternoon of fun while the boys went to work. The tide was out and you could walk for miles before you reached the edge of the ocean. The tidal pools were lots of fun to play in. And they were warm like bath water, too! We made a sandcastle and decorated it with seashells that looked like butterflies, so we named it Butterfly Castle. We made a moat around the castle and put tiny fish and crabs in it. It was lots of fun on a hot day!

Scrapbooking

By popular demand, my scrapbooking site has been updated! Click here http://www.scrapbook.com/galleries/21531/list/-1/0/1.html

to view my latest scrapbooking stuff or click on the link to the left. Thanks for looking!

DinoTown

I guess we're having a Dino-mite summer, cuz this is the third time we've gone to see dinosaurs! Rachael and Kaitlyn loved going on the "train" ride, the boats, the go-carts, playing mini golf, and all the other fun stuff to do there. Mom and Dad were just along for the (over-priced!) ride.