Warm Weather is Here!

Weekend in Victoria

Jess has spent almost as much time in Victoria these past few months as he has in Edmonton so we decided that one of these times, I would go with him as a little getaway for the two of us.  (Thanks Mom for watching the kids!)

We stayed in a great hotel in downtown Victoria, at at yummy restaurants, did a little shopping and exploring and had a lovely time. 

The houses are beautiful and there are SO MANY flowers!  Everywhere, there are these giant tropical looking blooms - it looks like it may be a requirement to be into gardening in order to own a home in Victoria.

I really love being by the ocean, I really really love it.  If I could pick anywhere in the world to live, it would definitely be right beside the ocean. We visited a few beaches (though it was WAY to cold to even think about going in) but I was happy as could be reading and knitting in the driftwood, a few feet from the surf.  Awesome way to spend a morning.

 I also enjoyed visiting a yarn shop while we were there - if we'd had more time, I would have tried to visit all of them but Jess was understandably only willing to spend so much of our time shopping for yarn. 

We rented bikes for the day and saw a lot of downtown Victoria that way, which was absolutely perfect.  We mostly just biked around and stopped when we saw something interesting.

We had delicious fish n' chips on Fisherman's Wharf (very touristy but the fish was as fresh as could be - and as expensive as could be!)

There are seals at Fisherman's Wharf who are so tame, they wait around by the docks waiting for people to feed them.

We had a great time, Victoria is as beautiful as I expected, I can't wait to go back!

Muskrat Pond

On Sunday, we took the kids for a walk after supper to a nearby park.  The park is actually called Guinevere Park but before we knew its real name, we decided to call it Muskrat Pond since we've seen muskrats swimming there.

The pond was full of noisy geese and a few ducks as well.  We also saw robins and could hear all sorts of other birds in the trees.

We saw interesting stuff like frog eggs.

I think Maira's favourite part about visiting Muskrat Pond is riding on the deer statues.

Connor was pretty excited when Jess let him borrow one of the cameras to take some pictures of his own.

He took this picture of us relaxing while the kids explored for a bit.

Before long, Connor discovered that if he took an old cattail and rubbed it on the sidewalk and then waved it around, it made a lot of fun fluff.  And Jess liked how it looked in the light so he kept encouraging them to "make more fluff!"

Swimming at the Waterpark

A couple of weeks ago, I took the kids to the waterpark at West Edmonton Mall.  Shae insisted on bringing along the waterproof camera and I'm glad she did because we had a lot of fun taking pictures in the wave pool.