Nova Scotia - Day 1

I thought the best way to document our trip to Nova Scotia would be to do a posting for each day we were there because I took so many pictures!


Jason had a conference in Nova Scotia last week for his work. It is a yearly conference called SHINE - which stands for Solar Heliospheric and Interplanetary Environment. We've been to 2 conferences so far, and hope to go to more in the future, because they are always in cool places!
This year's conference was in the maritime province of Nova Scotia, which is somewhere I have wanted to visit my entire life, being Canadian and all. My Mom and sister Veronica met up with us there and while Jason worked all day, we played!

About a half an hour before we left for the airport, I discovered this:

And this.And this!

There was actually more.
While I finished giving Jason a haircut Claire found a marker. Purple.
(marker is a bad word in our house for this very reason, and they are hidden from Claire unless supervised)
She's done this before, but where she found this particular marker i don't know.... it wasn't crayola, but was supposed to be washable.
Um... nope.
In the last few minutes before we left I frantically tried to scrub it off using 3 different cleaners, including a magic eraser.... that started taking the paint off the wall, but didn't even touch the marker on the cupboard or the door.
Any suggestions for how to remove it?

Here is the budding artist on the airplane.
She was VERY excited to eat her ring pop, which she picked out especially for the airplane ride. She carried it around with her for 3 days before we left!

And she looks so innocent.

This was our last trip with Claire as a lap baby before she turns 2.
It was nice to have an empty seat beside me on the plane, especially since I don't have much of a lap right now!
She felt like a big girl with her own seat.

Josh had a ring pop too.
He was really excited to ride on a "real" jet plane, which according to him means it had a
"sharp pointy nose". He demonstrated exactly what this meant by putting his 2 hands together to make his fingertips into a pointy triangle. And he told us quite often.

He bought a new coloring book for the trip with his own money he had saved up.

It was a direct flight from Detroit to Halifax, and we checked both of the car seats.

Somehow, the airline lost the car seats in the process, so we had to borrow some from the airline.
What a pain!

Josh packed his little suitcase, which I then had to supplement with another suitcase!
At least he packed the necessities:

7 books and 6 pairs of underwear... and that's all!

Potty Time for Bunny

Here's Claire potty training her bunny. Funny girl!

And some pictures of the kids at a splash park last week....

Whoa I just realized that I am 32 weeks pregnant now!! That has gone pretty fast. I've been feeling pretty good, except that I have terrible heartburn 24/7!!! So it's hard to sleep, and I've been downing Tums like nobody's business.

Claire still seems like a baby to me, even though she will be 2 in September.
It's going to be crazy having 3! But so much fun :)

Josh is Knighted!

Fitz's 4th birthday party was a ton of fun!!! It was a knights and dragons theme, and they had really gone all out!!
We had just been to Abrea's for Danny's tea party the day before, and then Fitz's birthday party was the next day!! She has been a busy woman.
They had made a draw bridge when you entered the "castle", and the boys were given swords, axes, and chainmail to wear to go and fight the dragon!!
The kids chose a real medieval shield design and then painted it.
This is the design Josh chose:

It turned out pretty good!

After the kids went on a quest to find and slay the dragon!!! They were given money for their quest (chocolate coins) and they donned their knight gear for the quest.
They followed cardboard footprints around the yard and found the dragon - a pinata, which they then had to slay.

Claire gave it a fair shot, but then took the quest money and ran!
She was pretty excited when she found out it was CHOCOLATE money!
Jason asked her if she wanted to eat it, and she laughed at him and said "nooooooooo..." then he opened one and she was very excited!

I love how sweet Jason is looking at her.
He is the cutest daddy :)

Claire's First Little Girl Tea Party

Claire was invited to her first little girl tea party on friday at her friend Danny's house. It was a mother-daughter party, so no boys were allowed! Jason and Josh went to a pack meeting for boyscouts :)
The girls played dress up, painted nails, and ate little snacks and fancy cupcakes picnic style in my friend Abrea's house. It was a lot of fun! And I don't have any pictures of the Claire and I with my camera, but my friend Abrea says she took one of us painting nails, so hopefully I can get a copy of that from her at some point!

Claire and I took turns painting eachother's nails.

Who needs to go to a professional manicurist with a pro like this in the house?
At one point she decided it was more fun to paint the inside of my hand instead of my nails.
I'm just glad she chose light pink, because the other girls chose bright blues and grays for their moms, and it was EVERYWHERE!


Look how happy she is!!!
And only 1 shoe on! Danny was wearing the other one.

Here are the pretty tea party girls:
Danny, Ethne, and Claire (Abrea is in the background)

And this is a cute little video we shot of Claire the other night at dinnertime.
She loves to sing "winnie the pooh", and thinks it's hilarious to change the words to songs!

She cracks us up!!

Our Los Alamos Trip

I've been meaning to post about our trip to Los Alamos but never got around to it until now....

Here is a slide show of some pictures we took while we were there. It might be really boring because it's mostly scenery, but since Jason was interviewing and I was the only one with a camera, that's how it ended up!

Back in April our family travelled to Los Alamos, New Mexico so that Jason could visit the laboratories there and meet some work colleagues. We stayed 2 days, and the kids and I drove around exploring the area. There's not much there, but the kids and I hiked Bandolier National Park and it was really cool, so that is what most of our pictures are from. Los Alamos geographically is a tiny town centred around the Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) on a plateau of land - a mesa - 7000 feet above the Rio Grande. The landscape is made up of several long fingers of land that drop off on all sides in very sheer cliffs. It was strange, and unnerving to see that there weren't really any fences or anything surrounding these cliffs. Needless to say, the kids stayed in the car a LOT! It was weird to see that even the homes there backed onto these cliffs, without any fences. I don't know how people raise children here, but I suppose it's possible! Civilization is about an hour and 15 minutes away, so it's pretty remote. There was 1 grocery store in town, a library, a museum on the atomic bomb (since that is where it was invented), a mcDonalds, and.... well, that's about it. They do have a couple of restaurants, but we were surprised to see that they all close at 8pm except for a chinese restaurant that closed at 9... they didn't let us dine in, but allowed us to get takeout at 8:30. We rented a Prius, which was interesting! It took us quite awhile just to figure out how to turn the car on! We ended up liking the car quite a bit though, and saved a lot in gas (since the airport in Albequerque is 2 hours away).
We had a fun trip, but it was great to be home and see some green again!!!

4th of July

We had a lot of fun on the 4th this year. Jason's mom, Kathy, and his sister Whitney were visiting for a week and we were very excited to have them with us! We had a fun-filled day starting with a pancake breakfast at the church, flag raising ceremony (Jason's scouts were in charge), and then a primary activity that included a little kid 4th of july/pioneer parade around the parking lot. Our neighbor Ralph recently brought a training-wheel bike over for Josh that he found at a garage sale for $2, and Josh was really excited to be able to ride a "big boy bike" in the parade instead of a tricycle. He and Claire worked really hard decorating Josh's bike and our wagon in red, white, and blue for the parade. (OK, Whit and i helped a bit!) One of the cutest things was Josh's sign that he wrote himself and taped to his bike.... "Happe Amrica Day"... we think he calls it america day because we also celebrate Canada day, which is on July 1st. There were also some fun pioneer games for the kids after their little parade. All of this was before 10am! Then we headed over to the town parade - a yearly tradition :)
After that we came home and had naps, then had a yummy bbq, did a little bit of "fireworks" - snakes and gloworms, and roasted smores in our firepit. About this time there were fireworks going off all around us in the neighborhood, so we lit some sparklers and kicked back to watch the show. I made a blue and red layered jello but it took all day to make and wasn't ready until midnight, so we just ate it the next day!
It was a fun day! And Whitney has a super sweet camera and took most of these pictures in the slideshow... I just took a few :) Thanks Whit! Look how cute she is with her tiny pregnant belly!

guess what...

Yesterday Claire announced to me that she had to go poo, so I sat her down on the toilet and lo and behold, she really did have to go, and she did! She's been sitting on the toilet for "fun" for a few months now, but nothing has ever happened, and so you should have seen her face when something actually did this time! She looked pretty unnerved and wanted to get off but I encouraged her to stay and we sang some songs, and she did it!

She was pretty proud of herself after.
We figured it was time to bring out the potty chair and get going on some actual potty training. I'm tired just thinking about potty training again.
Still, she seems eager and ready to go, so who can deny that?

Aww look how sweet! She loves it.... and that is chocolate on her face.... chocolate!
Anyone seen "Baby Mama"?

and here's a pic of Josh on the potty when he was training :)

Funny how they're both wearing pants in their potty pictures :)
Not very efficient is it?

And finally, last but not least, a pregnant picture of yours truly... not a good one, but here it is...

I am 25 weeks, 1 day prego now!!