Nov 28

Yesterday the Granparents came over to celebrate Kaitlyn's birthday with us.

Kaitlyn also wanted to set up the Christmas tree, even though it wasn't quite after her birthday yet. Here she is posing in her new dress from Grandma.

Rachael is somewhat less cooperative in her new outfit from Grandma.

Jaden didn't get a new outfit, but wanted lots of pictures with Hobbes in front of the tree. Who can resist?

Kaitlyn's 7th Birthday Party

Kaitlyn had her 7th birthday party yesterday. How could she possibly be 7 already?

They played a few games like Musical Pillows

and Clean Your Room - the sock fight game.

Then they watched How To Train Your Dragon.

Auntie Kendra made a Tinkerbell cake for Kaitlyn this year. It even sparkled!

And of course there were presents.

Everyone had fun, especially the birthday girl.

O Christmas Tree

Since we have a busy weekend with Kaitlyn's birthday, and there's no school today we decided to go out in the snow and pick out our Christmas tree today.

Jaden wanted this little guy,

but the rest of us opted for a big one. Good thing Daddy came with us to carry it! We won't decorate it until after Kaitlyn's birthday but now we've got it!

First Snow

We got our first dump of snow for the season yesterday.

It was the first time Jaden remembered seeing snow. He kept saying it was "raining".

When we went out to play in the snow the first thing he wanted to do was what he always wants to do - "sing".

It was the first snow for the puppy, too. He still liked playing with his ball.

Jaden eventually got down off his swing and started cleaning everything because it was "dirty". He cleaned the ladder, the railings and even the trees!

Being a toddler, everything still goes in the mouth - even the snow on the trees! Better than yellow snow, I guess!

Happy Birthday, Daddy!

Today is my Daddy's birthday so I made him a cake! I did this while my big sisters were at school.

That way I could lick all the spoons by myself.

I made a big mess making this cake,

so I helped clean it up.

Yummy!

Back to the Patch

Kaitlyn was terribly disappointed that she couldn't come to the pumpkin patch when I took Jaden for his sweater pictures with Johnathan, so we decided to go on Thanksgiving Monday - the busiest weekend of the year, but at least we had nice weather.

This time we found lots more fun things to do. There was a giant bouncy pillow, we went on the hay ride to the pumpkin patch but we didn't bring any home this time because we just got a bunch from Gramps & Gram. We went to the petting zoo and bunny town and Jaden found a tractor just his size while the girls found big slides and a zip line.

Pumpkin Patch

After an unfortunate delay caused by a power failure (couldn't open the garage door! Why don't they come with battery back-up?) Jaden and I went to meet Andree, Johnathan and Elizabeth at the pumpkin patch.

We went for the sole purpose of getting some cute pictures of the boys (in their new sweaters hand made with love by Gram) but the boys were far too distracted with interesting things to look at than to bother with giving smiles for the camera.

It's a good thing they're cute even without the smiles!

The boys had great fun "driving" a tractor.

Jaden doesn't know who this is (Tow Mater - for those of you who haven't seen the movie Cars), but in a few years he'll think this picture is pretty cool.

Our Trip To Whistler

...also known as The Trip We Saw A Million Diggers. More about that later.

We had lots of fun and great weather on our trip. We stayed in a hotel right in the Village so we were able to park our car and just walk everywhere for the rest of the weekend.

We saw the Olympic Rings,

and found a playground with a neat swing and a view of some diggers. We saw so many diggers on our drive up on Friday that we decided to keep a tally and count them on the way home. Guess how many diggers we saw from Whistler Village to our house (not counting the ones in the village or up the mountain.) I'll tell you at the end of the post.

On Saturday we went up the gondolas on the Peak2Peak ride. Thanks to Kaitlyn being still a "tot" (in grade 2? - not that I'm complaining or anything) she and Jaden got to ride up for free! Bonus. We went up the mountain in one gondola

and then across to Blackcomb on another which breaks three world records: Worlds longest free span lift of it's kind; World's highest lift of it's kind; and World's longest continuous lift system. We went there and back again, so we went on four rides. Gotta love those fall colors! Amazing views up there!

We even saw a few bears from the safety of the air. (Don't you see? You can totally tell that black dot is a bear!) At the top of the mountain was a giant inukshuk

and snow! Not much, but enough that we had to get a picture of Rachael in her shorts and t-shirt in the snow. We tried to tell her that it was cold up here, but she didn't believe us. We had an amazing time, and after so much fun it's hard to stay awake. So did you guess how many diggers we saw? And I mean just diggers, not the rollers or dump trucks or things like that. (And not counting diggers that were in sales yards.) Ready??? One hundred eleven diggers. Yes, that's 111 diggers on a Sunday. I'm sure we saw more on Friday driving up. That's a lot of diggers.