Art journaling....

While Christies Daughter D was staying, we did LOTS of art journaling.....all the children made their own art journals....Susannah made her own music themed art journal where each page is to do with the lyrics or title of a song or to do with a band she likes - she is looking forward to taking it to school next week to show her music teacher. She also has one which is for creating pages about love/ boys she likes.....

I sent D home with a ziploc full of supplies to add to her pages so she can continue to get creative when she is inspired....and she had modpodged plenty of pages to keep her going for a while :)

Stay and Play - at Broadmoor Lake!!!

Come and join us!! My kids aged up to 12 loved it last time!!!! :) The slip and slide is GREAT fun :) Bring a picnic and join us around lunchtime!!!

Broadmoor Lake Park
Tuesday August 25, 2009
9:30 a.m. - 3 p.m.

It's a day of free play for all ages! Activities include:

building forts & space ships out of cardboard boxes
playing with coloured water
run through a sprinkler
dash down the slip "n" slide
blowing bubbles
digging for treasures in the sand
It's a day of free play and its all up to you!

Additional information
780-464-8470
recreation@strathcona.ab.ca

Beach Bash!!! Come and join us!!!

Join the Kinsmen Leisure Centre (Sherwood Park) for our annual Beach Bash!

Monday, August 24
1 p.m. - 4 p.m.

DJ, food and beverages, games, door prizes and more!

Tickets are $5.00 in advance or $5.75 at the door (you buy them at Kinsmen pool in Sherwood Park and sometimes they sell out so drop by and get them soon if you can!!!!)
(Millennium Card Not Valid)

Additional information
780-464-2112
recreation@strathcon.ab.ca

We are heading to a birthday party in the park straight afterwards, but would love to have some friends hang out with us in the pool!!!! We have our tickets for this already!!!

A few more snapshots.....

Pictures in the park.....

Just snapped with my iphone...

Val - ignore the apartments etc in the background - I just snapped these fast and obviously with my camera we will pose the kids in better places with nothing ugly in the background!!! Hope this gives you an idea of how pretty the park is though....

Woodbridge Farms Spray Deck....

Christie's Daughter D is staying with us a for a few days while Christie is away travelling and visiting family. We've been having a blast...we seem to have been very busy anyway!! Yesterday the girls had a library class that focused on gaming - of the electronic kind as well as board games - they got to spend time on various game systems, laptops AND time playing games such as Operation! They also got snacks like chips, Twizzlers and pop....sounded like they had a lot of fun and Susie was Emailing friends from the class too :)

After the class we headed to Woodbridge Farms, to the spray deck and park and had a picnic. The weather was lovely, and we had thrown some spare clothes into the bag so it was ok if they wanted to play in the water! D and Sam chose to!!

After the water, we went for a walk and I snapped a few pictures with my iphone to show Val what the park was like and to give her an idea of where we could take some nice Fall pictures in a few weeks!

Saying goodbye to Cairo......

Our cat Cairo died on Thursday. We 'adopted' Cairo when we bought our house, and he had become a much loved family member. Such a loving cat - he would never hurt anyone and always accepted any animal we brought into his life - cuddling up with Amber and Rosie on the porch - accepting Jasper and Grayson into his life and sharing his home and beds with them....and even cuddling up with Charlie the pig or in the chicken house at times over the years!!! He loved nothing better than to snuggle with you on the porch!!!

We buried Cairo on Thursday evening, down by the pond - one of Cairo's favourite places to spend time on a Summer evening.

I have only just been able to post about Cairo, because the children had friends staying here and I didn't want to upset them while their friends were here staying - and then Laurence went to stay at his friends house and I planned to tell him when he came home - but he has been there three nights now so we eventually had to tell them all and I ended up having to tell him over the phone :( so at least he now knows.....I just didn't want to wait any longer in case he heard another way....with the children chatting with their friends over the computer these days I wanted to be sure he heard from me and not someone else....and the children here were bound to notice they hadn't seen Cairo...so we had to tell them.

Anyway - they all now know. We have lost two cats this Summer :( At least with cairo we know what happened and we have been able to say goodbye. We will never know what happened to Jasper....

Raspberry picking...

Our fields are filled with wild raspberry bushes and last night we went for a walk and the children picked a load of them as we walked.....the berries are only little compared to the kind you can grow or buy, but they still love to pick and eat them :) YUM!!!! :)
This Summer will be known as the summer of the thumbs up sign I think - Susie does it in almost every picture this Summer :) it's her thang lol!!! ;) funny girl :) so dorky ;)

Berries...

Beautiful summer colour....

Sams friends...

Sam's little buddies are just EVERYWHERE this year....you can't walk without a sea of them jumping out of your way...it is just sooooo DRY here. The bugs are destroying all the crops for the farmers :(

There is now barely any water in our pond at all. Alberta is cattle country and that is being cut by a third at least because farmers are getting rid of their cattle because they can't afford to feed them now because the hay has not grown. Hay will now be sooooo expensive this year that they can't afford to feed their cattle. The government are stepping in with financial aid for cattle farmers but they say by the end of September they are going to have to help the agricultural sector too because nothing grew!!!

We had a frost two nights ago and all our peas got hit - our potato tops look hard hit too - not sure if it will have effected the actual potatoes but the tops are all damaged :( So the only two things that grew anyway are now ruined probably. It was really a bad year - and last year we did soooooooo well! We finally have some tomatoes growing but they are still green. No more frosts for a while please!!!

What a crappy year for growing!!!

Slip and Slide fun....

Laurence had a friend sleep over on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Then another friend came over on Thursday for the day. His Mom is my friend Samantha!!! Val came over on Thursday too, as she knows Samantha!! Val brought her 3 too and we had great fun outside on the slip and slide!!!! I even went down the slip and slide too - it is soooo much fun and I went down several times even head first on my tummy!!! (I'm paying for that now though lol as I ache a LOT)!!!!

The boys did several science experiments up on the workshop roof and were also up climbing trees - not sure Samantha could quite believe her eyes ;) I think her boys have lead rather sheltered city lives ;)

Vals Daughter J stayed here and slept over as she was coming to a workshop with Susannah on Friday anyway - so Thursday evening we stayed outside until dark and had S'mores and snakes on a stick and played charades by the fire......it was a fun day but very tiring :) and yes I STILL ache sooo much from the slip and slide and have grass burns but even the kids were complaining that they ached and had grass burns too so I am not the only one hahahahaha - but it was worth it as it is sooooo much FUN!!! :)

I am hoping to get some more pictures from Thursday from Val as she took more pictures than I did!

What's on my kitchen island today????

On Thursday Lloyd went to help Laurence feed the turkeys and chickens and came back with 4 in one of my hive boxes because they were being trampled and attacked by the larger chickens. They were not looking good and couldn't access the water at all because of the bigger chickens.

We had them on the island and gave them food and water and within and hour or two they were doing much better. We put them in the garage over night and made sure they had plenty of food and water and then Friday night they went back over and rejoined the other chickens.

Christie phoned while they were on the island and Lloyd was cooking dinner at the time and she could hear the chickens and was making jokes about how the chickens were supposed to be dead before you cook them ;)

Many Offerings....

I planted sunflower seeds everywhere this year - and NONE of them grew!!!

However - our wonderful, clever little birds also happily 'planted' sunflower seeds for us, and they have sprouted all over the place! Amongst them, this BEAUTY popped up way down where the workmen put all the earth that they dug up from the basement last year!! It has 19 flower heads on it - some aren't flowering yet! The main top flower head has already finished flowering!! Isn't it GORGEOUS?????

I named it 'Many Offerings' after my wonderful friend Val - as Sunflowers always remind me of her, and that is the Native name she was given. I think it's actually the perfect name for this flower as with all those flower heads it will have soooo many seeds and offerings for the birds and squirrels AND for us to plant for next year!!! :)

A bit of a zoo.......

We've been looking after a friends collection of animals and plants for them and it's been quite the adventure.....the small chickens are smaller than the holes in the chicken wire and can get out easily...and the turkeys keep getting out too! We aren't sure how!!! It has been a bit of a turkey chase at times!!! I must admit it reminds me why we no longer keep chickens - they STINK!!!!! ;)

About a boy....

Lloyd played golf this afternoon and the plan was that when he was finished, he would call me and I would head round there and meet him in the bar and we would have dinner there.

It was sooooo funny waiting for him to call...like a teenaged girl waiting on a phone call from a boy. I was excited to hear from him and couldn't wait to get the call! It is so nice to have Northern Bear just around the corner - such a nice restaurant and bar so close yet for us to still be in the middle of the countryside and not even know it is there.

We had a lovely dinner there - amazing steak!! And the dessert was DELICIOUS!!! Yes I snapped a picture lol much to Lloyds dismay hahahaha but isn't it soooooo PRETTY????? ;) Then afterwards we walked back to our cars which were parked next to each other, and of course we were driving home separately and then it struck me that it all felt kind of surreal and 'naughty' - like we were a couple having an affair or something!!! Here we were at a restaurant in the middle of nowhere, leaving in separate cars.....

Hahahaha.....I liked it ;) it was funny!! But exciting hahahahaha :) Lloyd thought that was funny!!! :)

Anyway we both kind of like this new habit of going to our new 'local'.....it was lovely just sitting there chatting in such beautiful surroundings!! It really isn't any more expensive than anywhere else - there are two menus - the casual bar/ patio type menu with sandwiches/ pastas, quesadillas etc etc that we had last week and then the more formal dining room menu that we had tonight - both are wonderful!!! :) Try it!!! :)