Easter Weekend

This weekend we headed up to Gub and Gampoo's house for Easter. (Callie picked the names when she was about two. Carter sometimes gets caught adding an R into Gampoo so he often pronounces it Gaaaampoo just to make sure he gets it right.) They're only about 4 1/2 hours away in Oliver so it's an easy trip to do over a long weekend. They're also right near the lake and with temperatures in the high teens and low twenties it was a welcome escape from the Vancouver rains. I brought my bike and got in about 75k of riding. Day one was spent watching "Tangled" from the leather recliner on Gampoo's big screen.

Day two started with an Easter Egg hunt at the local civic centre. There were different hunts for each age group and as you can see Carter's wasn't overly complicated. It was a shot gun start and he knew exactly what to do even though the age group was 3-4 and he is only two. There was also a special "Golden Egg" but Carter ran right by it. This is actually a good thing because it just meant more chocolate and we were running short on insulin as it was.

Callie's age group was 5-6 and was a bit more complicated with smaller eggs hidden in the tall grass. She also had to find 16 eggs whereas Carter only had to find 4. Callie wasn't quite as aggressive in the hunt as Carter and ended up being the last one to find all her eggs. Several other kids had given up and I was close to calling it quits when she hit 15. We had been over the whole area twice but Callie insisted on persevering and eventually found her last egg. (I'm not sure if someone else didn't drop it there to help her out.) Still a proud moment watching her not give up.

Day three was Easter Sunday. As previously mentioned we had already hit our yearly quota for chocolate and hadn't even hit Easter Sunday yet. I think they should move Diabetes Awareness Month to April. Callie had spent Friday evening teaching Carter how to find eggs so he was quite proud of his haul.

Day three was also Game six of the Canucks playoff series. Surprisingly this picture was taken after the game. (If you look closely you'll see that Reg's smile is quite forced as Callie is never the quickest one to get ready for pictures.) The shirts were part of a fund raising effort Kerry organized at her school. The expectations for this year are very high and she sold over 250 and the supplier had difficulties filling the order. Thankfully she collected the money up front as these shirts may not be too popular come Tuesday evening.

Express Yourself - Day 1

Last Thursday was a hectic one and  I'm still recovering. Frost Road elementary applied for a $5000 grant with the intention of using it for an event called 'Express Yourself'. It was an opportunity for kids to learn skills that wouldn't ordinarily be taught in elementary skill. The idea was to have parents volunteer their time for four Thursday mornings and teach a group of kids. I volunteered to do woodworking for 6-12 kids with a couple of parent helpers. Unfortunately only about 20 parents volunteered to teach for a school with 560 kids. This left myself and another parent with 30 kids. That's a lot of bird houses.

The prep work alone was probably about 30 or 40 hours between the two of us as we had to cut parts for 30 bird houses and buy all the tools and materials. Our budget was roughly $500.00 and we managed to get quite a few tools.  30 tape measures, 30 pairs of safety glasses, 6 pairs of pliers to hold the nails, 4 nail sets, 12 glue bottles and a dozen hammers. We also bought about 150 linear feet of 1x6 pine.
When the principle called to let us know the details he promised us as many as 10 helpers.  (Our 10 helpers are shown on the left.)

When we sat down to put together a lesson plan time was our biggest worry.  We only had from 9:00a to 10:15 plus 15 minutes to cleanup. On day one we figured we would hand out the supplies, have them mark their pieces and drill the holes for the bird and the perch. We also set up a few hands on stations where they could try out a hand brace and some planes.
Amazingly we managed to get everything done that we planned.Unfortunately there was a mix up with the scheduling and we only had 15 kids. The others were at their high school orientation. Day two will have 30 kids with 15 of them being a day behind.

A Workbench for Little People

At the beginning of the year one of my resolutions was to builds a workbench. Technically I was talking about a work bench for myself but from a resolution point of view this will do. The creation of this work bench serves several purposes.
1) A potential prototype for my own workbench.
2) I've always thought it would be neat for Callie and Carter to have their own workbench.
3) I'm going to be teaching woodworking to 30 grade 6/7 kids on Thursday's in April. (More on that in a future posting.)

The construction is pretty straight forward with a few fancy bits thrown in. The base is made of 4/4 poplar glued together to form thicker boards where necessary. The legs are mortise and tenoned into the base and upper stretchers and the lower stretchers are through tenoned into the legs with wedges. The top is made from 2x6 spruce cut in half and glued together and there is a vice that I picked up at a tool show several years ago. (It's okay for a kids bench but for $20.00 I got what I paid for. Very sloppy machining.) All together I think the it cost me about $75.00 and about 12 hours to build.

Callie and I put it to use immediately to make her a small toolbox for her gardening tools.So far the toolbox has been decorated with pencil crayons and about 30 red and pink stickers. Not sure where we'll store the bench but it's going to be great for crafts and for bringing up the next generation of wood workers.

Good Night Vancouver

I titled this post after one of Carter's books. These are a series of books that I'm sure are making someone a lot of money. I got the first one when I was in Phoenix. It was called Good Night Zoo and takes you through the process of waking up all the zoo creatures and ends with saying good night to them all. Good night Vancouver is similar except rather than zoo creatures it's various sights around Vancouver. One such sight is the Point Atkinson light house which is where we headed on Sunday for a walk. It's quite a large nature park in West Vancouver and is home to one of the last stands of old growth forest in the lower mainland. With two young kids we only saw a small percentage and I'm sure you could go there regularly and see something new every time.

Carter was our guide and took his role of holding the map very seriously. The round thing behind him in the picture was a slab of Douglas fir that was several hundred years old. You see these all over the place and sometimes I wonder if they're all from the same tree. (Again someone making a lot of money with a simple idea.) Carter was an excellent hiker. He insisted on walking almost the whole way and it was only when I mentioned "safety reasons" that he would let me pick him up. I think he's on to me though so that probably won't last much longer.

The park was a great place to take your dog as almost every one there seemed to have theirs with them. Callie's job was to look after Wilson and she looked very cute in her new sneakers. She did get a bit bored though as she thought we were going to do some treasure hunting. (Geocaching) Unfortunately most of the sites were a bit out of the way so we didn't get to any. We really enjoyed our hike though and I definitely think we'll go back to let Carter show us more of the area.

Below is a short video of Carter's determined hiking.

Naomi's First Birthday Party

On Sunday we headed to Coquitlam for our friend Peter's daughter's birthday party. They rented a room at the the local Rec Centre and had food, cake and activities.The food was really great.and the cake was amazing. Two levels, one chocolate and the other vanilla with a strawberry cream icing in between. The room they had it in was the perfect size and ensures you don't have to worry about crowding so many people into your own house.

The entertainment was by their son's music teacher. He's obviously done birthday parties for a long time and he had the kids rolling in their seats. Carter's favourite part was when a puppet of a horse was singing "Twinkle, twinkle, little cat...". That's one of his favourite songs and I guess having someone singing it incorrectly was just the funniest thing on earth. He wanted Kerry to call me at work the next day so that he could tell me all about it. "Daddy! The donkey say 'Twinkle, Twinkle, little cat!'".

Callie was a bit more reserved during the music portion and decided to stick close to mommy. However when she found out there was going to be balloon animals she was front and centre. He wasn't an incredibly talent balloon artist however Callie was quite happy with her cat and Carter with his guitar.

An all around great party.

Earth Hour

On Saturday the family participated in Earth Hour. This yearly event is intended to highlight issues around sustainability by having people shut off power for one hour between 8:30p and 9:30p. I like to do it because the kids enjoy coming up with fun activities to do in the dark.. Last year we set up candles and made shadow puppets on the wall with a flashlight.

There are a couple things about Earth Hour that complicate things. One is the time.  It's kind of late for Carter to stay up till 9:30p so we start our Earth Hour a bit early at 8:00p. The other thing that's difficult is probably difficult for everyone and that's getting the house completely dark. It's amazing how many little green, yellow and red indicator lights exist in your house even when you've turned off all the lights. My solution is to shut off the breaker to the whole house. I figure it's no different then a short power outage and it ensures we're using absolutely no energy.

This year we played hide-and-go-seek. It took a while for Carter to figure out what to do.  He tended to be sitting right in front of you after you finished counting to 20. Even when he did start hiding he would just hide with someone else and either get bored and leave or give away both players position. I had the two best hiding spots of the evening. One was very simple.  I simply laid down beside our bed. No one thought to look in such an obvious spot. The other was much more difficult. We have a crawl space under our house but to get to it you have to go in the hall closer, open the plywood hatch, get in and close the hatch behind you. Very difficult to do in only 20 seconds. I eventually banged on the floor to let people know where I was. The picture to the left pretty much sums up the experience. I've never been somewhere so dark. If I wasn't claustrophobic before I may be now.

Seattle - The Aquarium and a Cruise

Our final day in Seattle started with breakfast at the hotel again. This time we had a different cook and the scrambled eggs weren't as good.  I don't think Kerry was very impressed when Callie said, "These eggs aren't as good Daddy. They taste like Mommy's."

We checked out of our hotel room first thing in the morning but we kept the key to the parking garage so that we could leave the car there while we walked over to the aquarium. Callie loved the tide pools where you can get right up close to the starfish and other creatures. Her favourite were these tiny barnacles that look like little trees and hide in their shell in about 1/100th of a second when you touch them.

Callie was so excited about the tide pools that she missed about half the aquarium including the seals and otters. Carter and I wandered around the whole place which included many aquariums of fish, jelly fish and an underwater dome.  Carter just laid down on the floor and stared at the fish for about 15 minutes.

We ended the day with a harbour cruise. The boat we went on was part of the City Pass program and the guy narrating managed to talk the entire hour. He knew all the history of the area and every pier and building had a story. I highly recommend it if you do head to Seattle. It's only an hour and gives you a great view of the city.

That was the end of our trip and we headed back across the boarder in time for dinner.