Birthday's, Christmas, New Year's

In my blogging absence I have forgotten how to upload photos in the correct order :) Sorry! You could always scroll down to the bottom and work your way back up if it bothers you.

The kids all received snowshoes for Christmas. Here is Greta trying them out in all the snow that fell recently. She wasn't too please with how they hampered her movement.

Greta is really trying to be potty trained. She is great at saying she needs to "go" once she has already "gone".

The kids and I spent New Year's at my parents in Langley. Ryan flew out to Saskatoon to visit his family.

We met up with Maria, Bud and family, James and family and my parents. After a huge dinner the kids put on a talent show, then we played games, had dessert, enjoyed a pinata and had balloons and confetti drop while we watch the ball drop in New York. (Brilliant). Once the kids were down, the adults played some games and gorged on more treats. ( I also forgot to bring my camera so thanks to Dad and Bud for these photos.)

This is my niece Tori basking in the messy confetti. I think my parents will remember that night for a long time. They are still finding bits of confetti in their house.

The count down!

Edwin showing how he taught himself how to do a somersault.

Joseph recited some of Shel Silverstein's poems.

Greta sang us some songs.

Christmas was so nice. It was just our little family. We were able to start some new traditions, like Winter Solstice. The kids had a great time opening up all their presents.

Christmas Eve we had Indian food then read Christmas Stories by the fire. Edwin really was enjoying it. :)

Unfortunately this is the only photo I have of Ryan's b-day. He came down with a bug that weekend and a slight concussion. So, rather than post a pic of him in bed here he is with some cake.

Edwin was given a foosball table and air hockey table for his birthday. Gotta love Kijiji... we paid $10 for the foosball table. (Thanks Kings for picking it up for us.)

Well, I will try to be better at posting correctly and more frequently. Hope your Christmas and New Year's was magical.

Books, Books, Books

A friend of mine posted this on her facebook page. I thought it was pretty cool. I also wanted to prove that I have surpassed BBC's view of me :)

BBC Book Challenge

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES.

• Bold those books you've read in their entirety.

• Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.

• Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! (Or not, after all reading is not a competition!)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 Lord of the Rings - Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5.To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens*

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger*

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens*

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams*

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll*

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame *

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens*

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden*

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan*

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons*

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold *

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding*

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens*

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray*

80 Possession - A S Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro*

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I asterisked the books that I saw the movie instead. I think it should count if it was a BBC production. :) Dickens is great but so much better or should I say more concise in movie form. If my counting is correct I've read 39 of the books listed here in their entirety.

Playing Catch Up

Fall has flown by and we are already days away from Christmas. Our camera ran out of battery and we lost our charger so I don't have many pictures over the past couple months.

Here are two from my cell phone:

Greta was able to help out with me in Edwin's class the last week of school. We spent 3 days there making crafts, building "gingerbread" houses and enjoying a movie/popcorn party. Greta was very pleased with her house.

Joseph did so well in basketball this fall. His technique and skills are really improving.

The first weekend in October we headed out to the fishery to see the Salmon Run. It was really fun. The kids enjoyed poking the dead fish and watching those still living in their struggle upstream.

Months ago I posted a masterpiece created by my sister, Sarah. (See post entitled "AMAZING") and failed to properly display my own creation. This carrot was homegrown by me! It's astounding the shapes you can create when you don't thin your carrots :) My duck face is for my darling husband who loves such poses!

My carrot can-can, can yours?

The kids and I enjoyed Thanksgiving weekend in Langley with portions of my family. We had an untraditional feast and sauntered over to the temple grounds.

Joseph is "photo-phobic" like his mom and opted to capture this moment rather than be in it.

On our way home we stopped in Abbotsford at this amazing corn maze wonderland. We could have spent the whole day there.

Greta posed this way in every picture in the maze.
They also had an indoor hay bale maze that you could leap on top of or traverse through.

Greta still enjoys pretending she's an animal. She put herself in the dog kennel.

In November we celebrated Edwin's 6th Birthday. It was a fun family affair at H20, Red Robin and Harry Potter.
Ryan's 32nd birthday came in went in November as well. He spent it up at the ski hill then recuperating from a mild concussion. Don't worry he now skis with a helmet.

I was able to collect 20 bags of leaves before the snow arrived. Unfortunately that means I will have to deal with the remaining 40 bags of leaves that weren't raked up in the spring. It's a good thing I have such good helpers.
I'm sure there are a thousand things I am missing but at least I hit a few. We'll try to get our camera up and running or be more diligent capturing Christmas on our cell phones for future posts.

Merry Christmas!

4 things.... i was tagged

Four shows I watch:
1 - modern family
2 - the office
3 - the event
4 - survivor

Four things I'm passionate about:
1 - family
2 - reading
3 - running
4 - good food

Four phrases I say a lot:
1 - that's awesome!
2 - go do, go get, stop __________!!!!
3 - i love you
4 - what do you want for dinner?

Four things I have learned from the past:
1 - life is happier when i let things go
2 - i've never regretted a good choice
3 - these moments with my children pass too quickly
4 - too err is human to forgive is divine

Places I'd like to go:
1 - France (again)
2 - England
3 - Norway
4 - Thailand

Four things I did yesterday:
1 - went to the gym
2 - returned some unneeded purchases
3 - wrote my christmas letter and prepared the cards
4 - watched inception - dreamt about it all night

Four things I'm looking forward to:
1 - christmas break
2 -maui in february
3 - our 10th anniversary
4 - paying off all our student and buying into the practice DEBT

Four things I love about winter:
1 - when it's over... ha ha
2 - singing christmas carols
3 - snowshoeing
4 - sitting by the fire reading a book

Four things on my wish list:
1 -health and happiness for all our friends and family
2 - a mediterranean cruise
3 - no debt
4 - our own home

Four people I tag:

1. Jen Davis

2. Amy Ledding (this is an attempt to get you blogging)

3. all my sisters

4. all my sisters in law