Family and Friends - Day 17

We have made it home. The trip was uneventful, though we discovered that the few ants that were making their way through the patio door before we left became an ant army in our absence. The dining room and kitchen have a ton of ants that I now need to deal with. Just the perils of owning a house, I guess.

Xander has his own camera, so during the trip, I decided that I would put a bunch of his pictures on this blog entry, so that you could see our vacation through the eyes of a five year old. Unfortunately, when I grabbed his SD card tonight, it only had 17 pictures from today on it. I managed to find all of his pictures using a recovery program, but for a few minutes I thought his pictures were gone. I then went through the 1000+ pictures (including 500 of his shoes and the back of Evan's seat, since he would only really use his camera in the car) and picked out the best for your viewing pleasure.

So, without further ado, here is our trip, as Alexander saw it.

On the way to Calgary

 

 

 

 

At the Calgary Zoo

 

 

 

 

In the Mountains

 

 

In Edmonton

 

On the way to Loon Lake

 

In Loon Lake

 

On the way to Regina

 

 

Unknown

 

 

 

Family and Friends - Day 16

Today was our final day of vacation, though as my wife and in-laws have pointed out, yesterday was really my last day of vacation, since I don't normally work on Saturday. I spent the morning building LEGO with my oldest two kids and I built them a castle to play with. I thought it turned out well for just using regular bricks, but people did object to my lack of colour coordination.

After lunch, while the boys curled in the semi-final, we took our kids to the Turtleford Museum. Colette came down from Loon Lake with her kids, so they came along as well. The museum is located in the old CN station and contains an actual caboose that you can go into. We spent a short time looking at all the old stuff in the museum, and then had fun going through the caboose. My kids had a lot of fun, especially sitting up in the chairs in the cupola of the caboose.

Once everyone got back from the curling game, we took all the kids to the giant turtle to get their picture taken. A few years ago, we had a grandchildren picture taken at the turtle, so we decided to update it. Unfortunately, Tyler and Michelle's child wasn't able to be there, so the picture doesn't actually contain all the grandchildren. We may have to Photoshop him in.

We then had a birthday party for Allison and a nice BBQ supper. After supper and giving the younger kids a bath, I won my third consecutive Munchkin game this vacation. While we were playing, Grandma fixed up some mistakes on Evan's haircut and then used a trimmer on Xander's hair, so his hair is now super short. He kept saying that he wasn't Xander anymore, because he didn't look like him. After putting the kids to bed and playing a final card game, our vacation is pretty much officially over. Tomorrow we head back to Regina.

Family and Friends - Day 15

I did nothing substantial today. It was a great vacation day.

The kids drove around with Grandpa on the lawn tractor and played in a Toy Story kiddie pool.

Family and Friends - Day 14

Dear Blog Readers,

Good evening (or morning or afternoon). I hope you have had a good day (or night). We had a fun and relaxing day today. Grandma and Grandpa made us bacon and eggs for brunch and then we headed over to Jason and Allison's for the day. The kids played, while the adults visited. After lunch, we played a number of board games, some with the kids and some with the adults. I got to play Munchkin twice, since Emily enjoys playing a game with the adults rather than the children. I, of course, don't mind whenever I get to play Munchkin.



When it got late, we returned to Grandma and Grandpa's, let the kids watch the end of the chuckwagon races (sigh) and then put everyone to bed. I guess this blog has gotten boring, since we aren't doing anything more than visiting. If you are getting bored, feel free to reread the first week where we did all the interesting stuff, and hopefully it should get back to more interesting stuff next trip.

Well, that sums up our day. Tomorrow will be much the same. I'm going to bed shortly, so hopefully you have enjoyed this short blog post.

Jason



P.S. Sandra has complained that my blog posts have no beginning or end, hence the introduction and salutation in this post.

Family and Friends - Day 13

We started off the day by heading to Livelong to curl a game in the Livelong summer bonspiel. Sandra's family curls a lot and I was on a team with her father and her two brothers. I've only curled two games since grade school, and both of them were with my in-laws, so I wasn't expecting to contribute a lot. I managed to get some of my rocks across the hog line, and I think I managed to help out a bit with the sweeping. We didn't win, but I had a lot of fun playing. I even managed to put up a really good guard in the final end. While we were playing, the kids went outside and found a pile of frost that had been scraped off the ice, so they spent some time making snowballs and throwing them against the outside of the curling rink.







We came back to Sandra's parents for lunch and then put the kids down for a nap. Right after Xander was in bed, the power went out. Everyone was asleep in the house, except for Sandra and her mom, who were outside in the garden. I didn't think too much of the power outage until Rene got up and said that power outages were fairly common and due to the way the power grid is setup in northern Saskatchewan, if the power was out in Turtleford, it was also out in all the communities in this area. That meant that the power was off in Livelong, making it difficult to keep the curling ice frozen. The rest of the afternoon was a flurry of phone calls to see what was happening and to keep the regular member of the team (whom I replaced today) informed, since he lives a long way out of town.

We barbecued for supper, since there was no power, though the power did come back on shortly after supper and the curling games from today were rescheduled to tomorrow and Friday. Before going to bed, we gave the kids their baths and got Grandma to cut the boys' hair while they watched the chuckwagon races with Grandpa.