Keira

I was cleaning my camera the other day and Keira was the only one home with me. She was fresh off of loosing another tooth. So that's what she is admiring in her fingers in the first shot.

You can see the nice gap in the last picture. That tooth hung on for dear life. Can you believe she will be 7 next month!

Kylie's Speech

This week Kylie participated her school's Speech Fest contest. She was very excited to enter this year and spent all of Spring Break working on her speech. She worked so hard. She spoke on Geo Caching which has quickly become one of our family's favourite hobbies.

First she had to make it out of the classroom preliminaries. There were about 6 other classmates vying for 2 spots to speak in front of the school. She made it through and on Wednesday had the opportunity to speak in front of the whole school. Four kids from our school were then chosen to represent in the district wide speech fest, 2 primaries and 2 intermediates. Kylie was one of them!!

We were every proud and excited! So yesterday we loaded up the car with Grandparents, kept Keira home from school and off we went to the district speech fest. All 3.5 hours and 47 speeches of it!! Oh yes. That's right.

Lots of very interesting and entertaining speeches were heard and when the results came in, Kylie won second place in the primary division!! We are so proud of her! I felt she really deserved the win (of course) but not just because I am her Mom, but she really worked hard on it. Very hard. So I hope she learned a valuable lesson, hard work really does pay off!! Way to go Kylie!!

Turn up your volume and you can listen to her speech. I missed a wee bit of the beginning. Oops.

Here she is! The silver medal winner!

Silly Statues

We made a little trip to the zoo yesterday with the Kirby kids and their Dad. My girls like to play statue as they run through the North American Wild section of the zoo. We come upon them along the trail, standing in a crazy pose. We make a silly comment about the statue, poke them or just keep walking. Usually they laugh before we get past them and then run ahead for another pose.

Yesterday they taught their friends the game.

First Day of Spring

Not only is this a first day of Spring post. It's the first blog post on this blog for 2011!!

The first day of Spring, brought the sun! We are craving the sun so badly. The rain seems endless lately and even flowers and blossoms that were in bloom this time last year are still curled up and hiding.

We hit the geo-caching trail with the Floyd Family along with another Twitter friend Vicki and went off to Burnaby lake. 5 adults and 5 kids we traveled the paths searching for treasure. 9 caches we found and lots of pictures were taken. Both Gwen and I armed with our macros, there were plenty of new growth, buds and even a frog waiting for us to photograph. Oh, yes there were a few pictures taken of the kids too, I have included those :) . Gwen and Anthony's little guy has a real liking for Keira and they held hands for most of the day. Sometimes Kylie jumped in too.

Last signs of old, bring in the new!

Kaylum was showing the ducks his little hippo. They weren't really interested.

Hand holding

Coordinate checking

Bush whacking

Classic Keira

Sandwich Monster

Goofy boys

"couple more meters"

Gingerbread House

The annual decorating of the gingerbread house should be re-named, the half hour where Kaylum gorges himself on as much candy as he can shove in his mouth event. Because for the second year running, that's what he did!!

This year we bought the pre-assembled kit from Costco, which is awesome! The kids don't want to wait around for the walls to dry, they just want to slap on candy. I liked it because the walls don't always cooperate.

There was left over candy, you can see it in the picture above in the little bowl. In that little bowl Kaylum and Keira made "candy soup" where they mixed all the left over candy together, got out a spoon and did more shovelling. I can't believe they didn't barf and I can't believe I let them do it. They even ate their dinner after. Shocker. I know.

The tree is up!

On Friday we made our fastest tree purchase EVER! It happened so fast because it was after 4pm when we got to the tree farm and I totally forgot, hey its winter, it gets dark at FOUR THIRTY!! HAHA! That's ok the kids picked it and its a great tree! It wasn't raining or snowing (the kids weren't happy about that). I had to tell them that if we waited to get our tree until it snowed, we may not get a tree! So because it was a spontaneous trip, there were no photos of our excursion and there are only a few of the decorating process, strange I know.

Disney on Ice

On Sunday we took the kids to Disney on Ice. We haven't been since Kaylum was a baby so we were excited to get to go again. We were even more excited that it was held in Abbotsford at the Abbotsford Entertainment & Event Centre! It was so great to be able to see this kind of event without making the hour or so trip into Vancouver. In fact, it was probably better because the arena is smaller so even though you are in the "cheap seats" and higher up from the ice, you aren't as high up as you would be if you were watching it in the "cheap seats" at the Rogers Arena/GM Place, so really, the cheap seat were good seats! That's a mouthful!

In case you are interested, most of the photos I took of the characters on the ice, I took with my point and shoot and without my flash. Chances are if I used my flash, I would have lit up the head of the guy in front of me and may have had the characters show up dark. Your flash will illuminate the first thing it hits (which is usually the guy in front of you). The nice thing about this situation is, you don't need a flash. Those spotlights are perfect and give plenty of light. I did crank up my ISO to 800 so there is some grain. But I'd rather grain than flash.