Big Boy Bed

Yesterday Jaden figured out how to climb out of his crib, so it was time to set up the Big Boy Bed. The first night he woke up a few times (his favorite pillow kept falling down) but he stayed in bed! Now if only he would nap there!

Summer Review

Since I was seriously lacking in my bloging over the summer, here's a recap of some of the things we did this summer:

we had some playdates with our cousins;

my grandparents celebrated their 65th (!!!) anniversary and my Grandpa's 90th birthday.

I think there's 24 great-grandkids with another on the way.

We ate lots of berries (yummy!)

and icecream and gelato, too.

We went to White Rock

where we had fish & chips

and saw the big train.

We went to Burnaby Village

and rode the carousel.

We went to the beach

and built some cool sand castles.

We went to the park

with our twins (Kaitlyn and her BFF)

and went exploring.

And we went to the waterslides. It was a fun summer!

First Day of School

I must appologize for my lack of posting during summer, but with the cameras on the new cell phones it makes it a lot harder to upload from 3 camera sources than just one. I'll try and get everything up to date one of these days, but in the mean time school has started again!

I cannot believe my little Rachael is already in Grade 5!!! This is her last year in elementary school!!! I am so not ready to think about next year so we'll just try and keep her a little kid for another year. (Good luck, I know.)

And little Kaitlyn is in Grade 3! Man, time flies. Wasn't she just 3 years old last year? Crazy.

At least Jaden is still my little boy, though he had to pose for first-day-of-school pictures, too. Don't grow up too fast like your sisters, Jaden.

The Beach

Finally we had weather warm enough to go to the beach! It's a family tradition that when we go to the "good sand beach" Darcy digs a hole and fills it with water which is kind of gross to look at but gets very warm very quickly. Well now we have three kids, so this means three holes. That's a lot of digging, so we don't mess around with no wimpy beach shovels, we bring out the big guns!

Rachael and Kaitlyn decided to connect theirs and somehow this lead to the idea that they should connect all three, and then remove the "island" in the middle, making a huge Mickey Mouse shaped swimming hole.

We thought about asking if we could borrow that big digger behind Jaden...

Uncle Gord helped shovel and even Jaden did his part.

The kids had fun playing in the puddle

and in the lake, too

But when it was time to go Darcy and Gord decided to break the walls of the puddle, which the kids tried desperatly to repair.

Here's hoping for some more sunny days!

Awards

The other day Rachael brought home a notice that she was going to be recieving an award at the school's awards assembly today. (Awards are given only to kids in grade 4 & 5.) "It's no big deal, Mom," Rachael said to me. But being the pround mom that I am I came armed with my camera ready to document the moment for posterity's sake. After singing O Canada in both french and english and handing out the birthday pencils for the month of June they started on the awards. Rachael was called up for a Citizenship award. Aww, that's great! She's always a nice kid.

Then she got called up for another award. I wasn't expecting that, but hey, great! This one was for Outstanding Effort. Cool. She always tries her best. I like that. And two awards is great!

Then she got called up for another award! This one was for Academic Achievement. Her report cards have always been great, but I wasn't expecting an honor roll award. Way to go, girl!

Wow, three certificates is impressive. I sure wasn't expecting that! But they weren't quite done yet. Those kids who received all three certificates also got a medal! (Ok, it's really plastic, but still.) Now that's impressive.

Not only did she get all the awards they were handing out, but her two best friends got them all, too. What a great group of girls! Alex and Alexa wanted Jaden to join them for this picture.

Way to go, Rachael! We're proud of you and love you lots!

A Dog's Life

Rachael wanted to celebrate her dog Caspian's first birthday, and since the weather was sunny (for once) we took him to the creek.

Sports Day

When Darcy grew up in "Smallville" his school's version of Sports Day was really more like Track & Field. So since work is a little bit slow right now he took the day off to go watch his girls at a "real" Sports Day. Rachael, being one of the big kids on campus, was in charge of creating and supervising an event for the younger kids to do.

(Apparently wearing the 3D glasses with the lenses popped out is "in" right now.)

Then after lunch the older kids got to play team events.

They had a lot of fun and thankfully the rain held off.

Grandma came and rescued Jaden from the torture of only being allowed to watch and took him back to her house for the rest of the morning.

The Three "R"'s

No, this time we're not talking about reading, writing and arithmatic, we're talking about Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

I went with Rachael's class last Friday to the recycling plant.

We made a bird feeder

out of reused household materials

and got a tour of the plant.

We learned all kinds of things there.

Did you know they get more money for the recycled milk jugs if you take the lids off?