Christmas 2016

Christmas was very fun this year! We stayed in Victoria and had my Mom spent the holidays with us. My Dad joined us after Christmas.

We visited the museum, did a fun art project at 4Cats, had a great early Christmas morning, had our annual brunch with Debbie on Christmas day, walk on the break water, and Butchart Gardens annual Christmas light visit. I love our holiday traditions and spending time with family.

 

Pre-Christmas Museum visit:

4Cats art class:

Christmas day:

Break-water walk with Nana & Papa:

 

Butchart Gardens:

Snow day!

The house we live in has a giant front & back yard. There is a slope along the side of the house that runs from the back to the front. One morning in December we woke up to snow! It does not snow very often in Victoria so when we saw that it was frozen and cold we knew it would be an epic day to sled.

Our van was iced in the driveway so we couldn’t get out anyway to take the kids to school. So….I booked a day off and the kids took a snow day! Sadly, Jimmy can’t take days off work since he is on-call with the school district.

At 6am we bundled up and headed outdoors to sled. The day was great…lots of sledding, building snowmen and making snow angels. We took regular trips inside for hot cocoa and to warm up. Claire & Rhys both said “best school day ever”!

 

Jumping for joy- no school!

Somehow Rhys had Claire pull him up the hill each time!

Videos- click to open:

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Science kits!

Claire & Rhys received very cool science kits from Auntie Wendy, Uncle Chris and Cousin Senna for Christmas 2016. We put them away until weather got better and warmer outside as this was definitely an outside job! Well…we forgot about them for a while and found them one day in November.

Claire & Rhys are all about science so they LOVED working on these kits. Claire had a geode to crack open and Rhys had a shark fossils he had to chisel out. It was super fun.

 

First hockey game!

My co-worker was selling tickets to a Victoria Royals local hockey game as a fundraiser for her sons hockey team. We mentioned many times to the kids that we should go see a live game even though none of us are huge hockey fans. Live games are always a good time so we bought some tickets and had a fun family night out!

We didn’t realize we were sitting in the family area where no beer is allowed. While sipping on a cold brew security came over and Jimmy & I got into trouble 😉 We had a good laugh afterwards.

 

 

 

Halloween 2016

We had a great time this Halloween! We went to the schools annual Halloween dance. They had a haunted house, dancing, quiet room, photo booth, games etc- fun! The kids are so independent now. Claire & Rhys ran around with their friends while we followed them around. I think we stayed at the event the longest ever.

Claire & Rhys both wanted to be Star Wars characters. Rhys was Kylo Ren and Claire was Rey for their school Halloween dance and a Storm Trooper for trick-or-treating. Jimmy and I dressed up too- as Ewok’s using the kids costumes from when they were toddlers.

Pics from Halloween dance photo booth:

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Pretty sure Claire did not read the prop before she used it 😉

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Pumpkin carving:

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On our way to trick-or-treating:

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