It’s been a while, I know. Perhaps you’ve been following along at LeftCoastMama. Perhaps you’d given up on ever seeing anything new here and are surprised to see this pop up in your feed reader. At any rate, sorry about that. I’m going to dust off the cobwebs and start posting more to this blog again.
But first, a bit of a photo essay showing what we’ve been up to over the past umpteen months.
We had some professional photos taken. This photo was taken by Bopomo Pictures:
After getting back from my mother’s funeral, Gwen left for the East Coast again to attend the BlogHer conference in New York City!
Later in August my grandmother Muriel Forwood passed and I returned to Nova Scotia for another funeral. My grandmother lived with us from 1986 until she moved into a long term care facility in the early 2000s.
Back in Vancouver, Aidan went on longer and longer bike rides with me on the Trail-A-Bike. This was taken down near the Olympic Oval, halfway through a 50km ride.
We don’t get out for as many hikes as we used to, but I did manage to get up to Joffre Lakes again this year. This time, I went with a bunch of people I met on Twitter!
Aidan started school this year! He’s in a half-day French-immersion kindergarten at Lord Tennyson Elementary.
Aidan got a bigger bike for his birthday, but was having trouble with it. One of the best things I’ve done was to remove the pedals from his old Tigger bike so that it became a push bike. We lowered the seat and let him push it around. This was a great way for him to learn to balance the bike. Training wheels were too much of a crutch. By February 2011 he was riding his two wheeler, no problems at all.
Of course, at the end of October Quinlan turned 2! We went to a pumpkin patch with some friends for his birthday “party”.
Hallowe’en was fun this year. Quinlan wore a monkey costume, and Aidan had a great fire fighter’s costume (with an authentic Delta Fire Services patch given to him by an authentic fireman.)
We had quite an early snowfall in November, and the boys had a great time playing in it.
Aidan looks sharp, and loves wearing his hat and tie.
We did lots of Christmassy things this year.
Gwen and the boys had the very special opportunity to join other kids and Air Transat on the Flight in Search of Santa.
Gwen took the kids to Oakridge Centre for their annual photo with the best Santa in Vancouver:
Bright Nights in Stanley Park is an annual fundraiser in which the Vancouver Fire and Rescue Service decorates a portion of Stanley Park. The kids love it.
And then there was the Santa Claus parade.
Aidan and Gwen took skiing lessons this year at Mount Seymour. I don’t have any action shots of them, but while they were learning to ski, Quinlan and I played on the toboggan hill.
In the midst of all this, we discovered that Aidan needed glasses. He looks pretty sharp in them and doesn’t mind them in the least.
Grandpa came to join us for Christmas. This was wonderful, and we did lots of things.
Gwen, the boys, and Grandpa went to the VanDusen Festival of Lights on the first day he was here.
Christmas Day and the days that followed were awesome.
On New Year’s Eve Day, we all went snowshoeing at Mount Seymour.
Since the Olympics, the plaza in front of UBC Robson Square has been turned into an “outdoor” skating rink, open to the public. We took the kids there in January. The zamboni was as exciting as the skating, I suspect.
Even in the depths of winter, we keep up with the geocaching. :) 2010 was our best year yet in terms of our number of finds, and we hope to eclipse it this year!
We did some geocaching with grandpa while he was here.
And we continue to do some winter geocaching.
So that’s been our past 6 months in a nutshell. It won’t been 6 months until the next update.