party time at the canad…or not

Oops!  I forgot about this one!  It has been sitting there waiting for me to finish it for some time now - like three months.  Sheesh.

Sometime near the end February-ish my darling sister Kim and I took our little baby girls to Grand Forks for the weekend.  Okay, so maybe they are not so little and babyish any more….

The first night we went a little cheaper and stayed at the Holiday Inn Express.  It was quite fantastic.  And lesson learned - we should have just stayed there.  But no, we (okay, I) was drawn (sucked would probably be a better verb) in to the flash and pizzazz of the Canad Inn.  And it sucked too, just like me.

The girls loved the simple, quiet, smallish pool at the Holiday Inn - who knew?  And they almost despised the noisy, chaotic craziness of the Canad water slides.  Plus the price stunk.

The girls could, however, play with broccoli and their cups at the overpriced hotel.  That was a bonus.

(Kim was hiding from the camera….)

They could also make their bread rolls, that they ate only the insides out from, talk.  Quite fascinating.  (the phone wanted to focus on the real talker - Riley - instead of the noisy mouth of the bread-man)

Initially when we got to the Canad, we were put on this floor where we were the only people who were not part of a pee wee hockey team.  The very nice mothers whom I met in the elevator suggested that if we wanted sleep, we might want to request another room.  Either that or we could party with them.  We chose quiet.  So we asked to move rooms.  The second room was good up until about 2 minutes before the girls fell asleep, whereupon the power went out in the bathroom.  Kim tried to fiddle with various things but to no avail.  Since we didn't want the upheaval of moving right when the girls were finally settling down (emphasis: finally), we lumped it and showered in the dark (almost complete and utter if not for the flashlights on our phones).  

The problem was that the power was still out in the morning.  And the hotel only made suggestions on this we could try that Kim already tried.  It did not work.  And they did not apologize or even fein regret. Not pleased.  Needless to say, Canad Inn will never be on our list of desirables ever again - overpriced, under serviced, extra charging, crazy crowded place that it is.

Boy, that was a whole whack of negativity.

We really did have a fabulous time in spite of it all, however.  How can you not when with two crazy 9 year olds.  Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber are a seriously good time.

cleaning up and caching in

First, just a few pictures of the neighbour kids all in our back yard, jumping on the trampoline.  Fun.  Love it that there are all these kids!

A week ago (and two days) was the town's annual "Pick up and walk" event.  Churches recruit volunteers and put teams together to clean up the town - all the public areas.  We did it last year and it was freezing!!! - but fun.  This year was significantly better as it was pretty much a perfect day for it. We did it with one other family from our life group at church - everyone else was gone or busy.  We did the south side of town, right by the dump road.  Considering we were right by the dump road, we didn't get a whole lot of interesting items!

Shortly into our morning Eric exclaimed "I have to pee":

About half an hour later, he "had two pee":

Lucy also found a "4", but there wasn't anything very clever that we came up with that.

Eric cleverly thought of using some old ski poles as pick-up sticks.  They worked quite fabulously.  After we were done the highway area, we moved on to the A.D. Penner park.

After about two and a half to three hours of cleaning up, everyone headed back to the hockey rink (where we all started from) for a hot dog feast.  It really is quite an enjoyable time and it is pretty amazing how much better the town looks when we are all done.  It's a good thing.

The next day, Sunday, we did a little geocaching in the area.  We did five different ones.  And even the tough one we did quite quickly.  Spoiler alert:  if you plan to do some geocaching in the Steinbach area, you may not want to see these pictures.  We don't want to spoil your fun!

The first two were by this cool little creek area just outside of town.... right beside a car dealership.  But it feels like you are pretty far away while you are in the middle of it - pretty cool area.

Mia found that one pretty quickly.

The next one was further down just off of a path.  It took us a minute or two but Eric found the next one.  It took about a minute or two to open it as well....here's a little tip: lefty-loosy, righty-tighty...don't try to pull the lid off.

We forgot all about bringing along some little treasures to exchange in the caches but Lucy, not surprisingly, had a few little items in her pocket.  She left a shell and took a quarter.

On to cache number three.  It was in a different area and also just took a minute or so to find, once we were in the right area.  Cade found that one.

It was pretty breezy that day and Lucy, the sweatshirtless girl, was freezing.  Dad the hero finally sacrificed his sweatshirt for her.

Cache number four was found before I even crossed the little creek on the lovely somewhat stable 2x4 laid across it.

And on to cache five.  This one had a high level of difficulty but had a hint: 24.  Right away Cade had the right idea of adding up the numbers together that he saw on some electric/hydro/what-have-you box.  Surprisingly he mis-calculated.  I recalculated and discovered that it did, indeed, add up to 24.  So then we figured we were at the right place.  We looked around for a few seconds and that was all the time it took for Mia to find the cache.

It was just a tiny folded up paper in a little zip-lock bag behind the magnetized numbers.  Pretty clever!  And our family was pretty clever too - it took mere minutes for us to work together and find the difficult cache.

On the way home I challenged Cade to come up with a clever cache.  He said that he wanted to hide one so I thought we should do something cool instead of just a regular one.  I suggested that we have two different coordinates - one to locate a ball or spear or something and one to locate a target.  They you had to hit the target with the ball or spear to release the cache.... or it could even release the new coordinates to where the cache is!  It probably won't ever happen, but it'd be cool if it did!

hitting double digits

Eric and I are the proud parents of nobody in single digits.  Yup, that's right.  Our baby turned ten.  Sheesh.

Lucy's birthday was on Wednesday.  She requested rainbow cupcakes.  I made them several years ago - maybe in 2011 - and I think she must have recently seen pictures and was reminded of their delights.  It may be one of the down falls of publishing a blog book each year....

Actually I was quite delighted to make them again.  While they are fairly labor intensive, they are yummy and so fun.  And they are fun to take pictures of!

Friday it was party time.  I was much better at being around to take pictures of Lucy's party - I didn't do much for Mia's.  It may have something to do with the older girls being much more independent and going off and doing their own thing the whole time.

After school the girls trickled in.  They played in their very loud, rambunctious way until I had their pizza crusts ready to go.  Then they very quickly made their pizzas and went back to playing in their very loud, rambunctious way.

Then they very quickly ate and went back to playing in their very loud, rambunctious way.

Part of the loud, rambunctiousness included hut tubbing.  How is hot tubbing loud and rambunctious?  Add some Taylor Swift music, and a few cartwheel-crazy girls and you have got..... you guessed it, loud and rambunctious.  In and out, back and forth they went.  Splashing around, getting out, doing a bunch of cartwheels, and back in to splash around some more.

They were quite the crew - quite a mixed bag of girls.  But all great and all full of energy.

Lucy requested lemon bars as her birthday cake and I was very happy to oblige.  Yum.  As with everything else, she very quickly blew out her candles before I got a picture.  So we lit them again.  The second time she was left with several "boyfriends".

(I just want you to quickly note that I did provide some healthy food - see plate of vegetables above!  Eric just told everyone at our life group tonight that I stuffed them full of sugar and that is simply not true.  The proof is in the picture!)

One of the girls couldn't stay for night but the rest all did.  They made themselves a wild mess of chaotic bedness downstairs.  Eric managed to wrangle them into bed by 11:30 and shut their traps by 12:00.  That's a pretty impressive bit of work!

In the morning (they were up by 7:00, and very quickly got very loud and rambunctious - the older sisters were cursing in their beds....), after a pancake and whipped cream fest of a feast, the girls slowly trickled home.

Great bunch of girls, but not too hard to say good bye to.  They were very loud and rambunctious....