Sam's winter poem

Here's a poem that Sam learned at school.

Sam the gardner, and hula-hooper

A few weeks ago, to celebrate Earth Day I believe, Sam planted some seeds in cups with his playgroup. Last week they started to sprout up out of the dirt and he was astonished and elated.

And look at them today! As much as I complain about this being the cold, dark side of the house, there appears to be adequate lighting to cajole seeds to come out, and flourish!


The really fun part is that they had a variety of different flower and vegetable seeds, and Sam chose them all. So he tells me that the cup pictured on the left are all flowers and the one in the middle are various vegetables. The vegetables appear to include (based on what Sam can remember and what our neighbor could identify) a corn plant, a few carrots, a pea shoot, some type of bean, and one mystery plant. Pretty soon we'll have to put them in bigger, separate pots, because they're growing like crazy. There is also a cup with just grass, which is rather peaceful to look at. Maybe I'll keep that one in the window.

And the plant at the very right is a magic message bean plant that I think my mom gave Andy for his birthday last year (or was it Christmas?). Anyway, I thought it would be a good time to pull it out and water it since we had the other cups going. Once the bean sprouts there is a message on it; I'll let you know what it says once it presents itself.

And lastly, a clip of Sam hula-hooping. He was getting a little frustrated that he couldn't hula as well as Andy. But before we took Andy to school this morning he showed Sam how to whip it around his body with his hands so that it circled around several times before falling to the floor. That made him feel a little better; a little more accomplished. (Oh, I didn't think about not being able to rotate the video image, so I guess you'll have to turn your head - sorry!)

Andy is SEVEN

Wow - Andy turned seven today. I rolled over as Otto and I were going to sleep last night, right about midnight, and reminded him that seven years earlier we were heading to the hospital so that I could be induced. What an exciting time that was - and what a great day when we had him! He was pretty cute. And I knew instantly, and was completely shocked, that he looked like my side of the family. We didn't have a digital camera yet when he was first born, but here's a shot from when he was 2 or 3 months old.


The birthday party went off without a hitch yesterday.


Eight boys running around turned out to be manageable.


Pizza.

Cake.



Presents.
After everyone left we all crashed on the sofa for a group nap. No picture available. He did tell me after the party "Mommy, that was a really fun birthday party." Mission accomplished!

This morning he opened his gifts from us. Here he is sporting his new wristwatch AND swingin' his new hula hoop, while Sam squirts a still-filled water gun from the party yesterday. And yes, it was reasonably warm outside this morning! :o)




What a duo - we should take them on the road.

And the two of them with the soccer cake toppers and candles, as arranged by Andy, on the leftover cake so that we could sing to him again on his actual birthday.

Happy Birthday, Andy!

Andy sings with his class

Sam and I went to Andy's K-Grade 5 assembly at school this morning, where his class sang a song for the other students and parents.

Waiting patiently for assembly to begin.


Handing out the puppets that accompany the song.


Andy's partner for the song was the skunk; his name is Oreo.


Madame explaining something before they sang. I was busy taking pictures and didn't hear what she said. I do know she was not explaining the song, because it was in English.


Does everyone have their puppets?


Okay, here we go....

Sam and the amazing talking string cheese....

Sam started entertaining himself (and me!) with his string cheese a moment ago.




I also forgot to post this picture the other day when we went sledding. It was before they got their snow bibs on. We went to church that morning, and they were still wearing their nicer shirts. (Too cold to change when you get home up here, at least in my opinion. Once I get dressed, or them dressed, it's for the entire day in most cases!) If they only had one of those newsboy caps on they would look even cuter.



And for anyone who knows Jennifer Becker from high school, she just had a beautiful new baby girl last week to add to her two adorable boys. You can see some pictures on Derek's blog here. Hopefully he'll be adding some new ones soon! (Hint, hint.)

More skiing, sledding, and losing teeth.

We checked out a new ski spot on Friday - Nakiska. It's between Calgary and Banff on HWY 1, and one of the great things about it is that it's close enough that we can drive over for the day. It was very nice, and back when Calgary hosted the Olympics, apparently a few of the events were held at this location. I still prefer Marmot Basin in Jasper where we went a few weekends ago, but that's several more hours away.

Here I am watching Andy and Sam on their magic carpet ride to the top of the bunny hill for a few warm-up runs before we hit the chair lift (there aren't any T-bars at Nakiska).


Here's Andy on the Bronze chair lift as we went up on our second run.

And here are Sam and Otto on the chair behind us.

And we all took the Silver high-speed quad chair up a few times. This one is nice because it goes really slowly when you're getting on and off, but zooms up the mountain once it gets going.

After a few runs down the mountain, Sam decided he wanted to head back to the bunny hill, so while I watched him I took a picture of my snazzy new snowboard pants for your viewing pleasure.
We made it home around 9pm after stopping in Calgary for dinner. Our first time eating at Swiss Chalet. Kind of like Denny's.

In other news, Andy lost his second tooth!

This tooth was was hardly loose at all. Apparently there was some type of run-in with the wall that precipitated the early loss. I'm still not real clear on the details, and he wasn't talking much. I think it was one of those, "Hmmm, let's see what happens if I do this" moments. He was fairly shaken when he came down and handed me the tooth with a huge wad of toilet paper in his mouth and tears streaming down his face. I asked if it hurt, and he said no. I think the tears were from fear that the tooth that he just knocked out was to act as a guide for the adult tooth coming in next to it. Once I assured him that it didn't matter that the tooth fell out, he felt much better. But I don't think he'll be banging his teeth against the wall again (or whatever it was that happened)!

And I took the boys sledding today while Otto worked on some tax stuff. I'm still not clear if I'm supposed to call it tobogganing or not. I hear it both ways, so I think I'll stick with sledding. We went to our neighborhood pond where there is a decent hill to sled down. Here the boys are going down over a jump someone made in the snow.

Ice Skating with Grade 1ers

Sam and I accompanied Andy's class to the outdoor ice rink that's near the school last Friday. It was a sunny day with relatively mild temperatures. Perfect skating conditions!
Here comes Sam!


Here comes Andy...


and there he goes.


Skating is fun!

Canadian police chase

I was able to put this clip on my Facebook page a while back from YouTube, but couldn't figure out how to put it here. It's from a Midas ad, and every time I see it it makes me laugh.

Canadian police chase.

Does anyone know how to embed the actual clip into the blog, and not just a link?

And here's another that a friend emailed.



It's a chilly -20 degrees C this morning, with a couple inches of snow fall from yesterday, but it's supposed to warm up to -1 degree C in the next couple days. WOHOO - a heat wave's a comin'!


Addendum: Here's the actual clip of the car chase. Thank you, Derek!

Happy New Year, 2009!

To celebrate the new year, we went ice skating and tobogganing at Bower Ponds. We need to fine tune the logistics of going skating, because by the time we got Andy and Sam's skates on, our fingers were freezing, and Otto and I hadn't gotten our skates on yet.


Andy was skating around with great speed, and I was more comfortable on skates than I remember being 15 years ago. Otto had decided to watch first, but Sam started getting very cold after a while, and I took him back to the car to warm up while Otto stayed to let Andy skate a while more. And then Andy started getting cold, so poor Otto never did get to put his skates on!


After we all warmed up in the car for ten minutes, we headed out again with toboggans (sleds) in tow. Luckily, towards the end, I remembered my camera has a video feature, so here is some live-action footage!


Otto and Sam tandem-tobogganing.




Andy catching some air.




Sam spinning down the hill.




View from the top.

All had a great time. Every time Andy and Sam got to the bottom of the hill, you'd hear, "THAT WAS AWESOME!!"