Dear blog,

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to abandon you. Really, I want to write about all the things we did while we were in Nova Scotia. Visiting family (mostly) and friends (briefly). Driving down dirt roads somewhere between Truro and Amherst…. more or less intentionally. Geocaching in PEI. Watching Aidan fall four feet off a trampoline. Flying back to Vancouver, with Aidan getting airsick again.

And then we’ve been back for a little over a week. Partying it up with the Girl Guides and parents on Saturday, riding the miniature train in Stanley Park followed by partying it up with the hippies on Main Street for the Car Free Festival on Sunday.

Plus, driving like crazy through Paradise City and trying to escape the crime of Liberty City.

Oh my.

Well, I still hope to cover all those things. We have pictures!

But for now, I’ll leave you with this… We were taking some pictures of Gwen for a project that she’s working on and this was the runner-up photo to the one she chose.

After a full day’s worth of geocaching, we returned home with an extra string of 50 mini-lights. Gwen strung them up, and then Gwen and Aidan decorated the tree. Well, part of the tree…

So, we decided to give our Charlie Brown fake tree another year (and try to pick up a replacement during the after-Christmas sales). Unfortunately, lighting the tree is only a one person job. Gwen did it last year (for some reason) and seemed gung-ho to do it again this year.

I supervised. And uttered such helpful things as “Oh … that’s not good” (when she reached the end of a branch with the end-to-end string).

At this moment it looks like we won’t need to go buy any more lights for the tree. This year. Update: Um, she ran out about a foot from the top. Now the question is: unstring and restring the lights, or buy another short string. It’s much too late tonight to be making that decision.

I’ll post an after picture after Gwen’s finished lighting it, and we put the decorations on it.

We rock.

And, oh boy, does he like it when he gets to play too.

Gwen gets her groove on too.

We need a few more kids (um, and guitars) to be like the von Trapps, but Gwen and Aidan try their best at dueling guitars…

Check out the grin below. Clearly an unhappy little boy.

He already tells us what he thinks of our “guitar” playing (“You ROCK mommy!”). Now we just need to teach him how to throw the goat.  Who knew that Guitar Hero would be a family game?!?