Trip to Arizona

Arizon is known as the land of many uses.

We started our trip visiting one of the Seven Wonders of the World...The Grand Canyon (South Rim).

Sun Set in Sedona

Sedona is south of the Grand Canyon. It is a quaint town rich in natural treasures..gem stones, vortex & forestry.

15 minutes later


Forest in Sedona


Sand Dunes 20 miles west of Yuma (in California)

Kofa Wildlife Refuge

Kofa (King of Arizona Refuge)

Silver Mine
Yuma Prison

First prison to have a library

View from Yuma Prison ...Mountains, Colorado River &Canal

Much of the winter lettus is grown in Arizon. Here workers are yielding the lettus crop from one field. Most workers are brought up from Mexico.

Off to Mexico for the day.

November

Once we returned home from our lovely trip to California and my hand was repaired we started renovations right away.

Reno #4 - Furnaces

(Reno #1-Paint exterior of house, Reno #2-Remove beams in front of house, Reno #3-replace broken kitchen appliances)

I thought I would enjoy this renovation as we paid someone to come into our house and replace our two old loud, inefficient furnaces. With in two days the job was complete.

Although the work load was minimal and reno's have made the temperature of our house much more comfortable, the experience was somewhat deflating. I feel we should put lawn chairs around the new furnaces and watch the furnaces turn on and off.

Reno #5 - Leaky Window #1

We have tried to replace a leaky window in our bedroom. We ordered a window back in Sept., however we have had to send the special order window back twice as the home improvement store has ordered the incorrect window or made errors in their paperwork. We are hoping that the third time is the charm (optimistic or foolish?).

Reno #6 - Braces

The most exciting news of this month is that Samantha, Nicole and Amanda all received their first stage of braces. They each had an expander placed in their upper mouths. They now all mumble and chew differently.

Every night for 28 nights I have to crank the center skew one turn which then gently pushes the teeth outward. This system is used now instead of removing teeth. The girls are handling this all these changes well.

This is not a picture of ours, it is from the one of the dental websites.

Travel

We are off to Arizona in December to see the Grand Canyon, hang out with Nana and Papa and complete a small volunteer project in Mexico.

School

Yes, we are happily plodding through the course work. We had our first home visit from our teacher. The children are doing great. Steve and I are not doing as well as we should, we are finding the French a little tough, but we are committed to working harder in new year.

Trip to California

The first portion of our trip was a journey unto itself.

We were not sure about heading into a fire zone as reported by CNN.

Steve ended up doing so much more than his share to get us going on our trip as I was finding it difficult to function normally with my hand immobilized.

Unfortunately our travel family was not able to join us on this trip as planned.

We ran into the Catch 22 of standby travel on our first day. The flight to Los Angeles only had room for three of us ( a small inconvenience for continued employment )

We decided that Steve, Nicole and Amanda would fly out together and Sam and I would take the flight the following day. It was a great opportunity to have a fun girls night together.

Once we all made it to San Diego the wild fires were under control , and all the parks were open for visiting, but from Highway 5 it was clear the divesting effect the fires had wrought.

We started out at Sea World.

Sea World

San Diego Wild Park

This is a picture of how close the fires came to the safari park.

Some of our favorite animals.

Disney Land



Universal Studios

October

We have had a quiet October so far, we are busy completing course work prior to heading out again.

We started up french this month. I say we as I am learning it along with our children . (I am almost ready for the game show "Are you smarter than a 5th Grader".)

We are very proud of the effort the girls are putting into their school work.

Nicole and Amanda are studying "Waste in our world" in science, so they are busy growing mold, setting up a compost unit in our back yard and studying composting. For some clean fun Steve took Amanda and Nicole to the landfill for a field trip.

Sam is busy collecting evidence and investigating crime scenes. We are taking plaster of paris on our walks and she collects plaster of paris molds of anything she finds interesting.

Sam also went on a field trip with the school were she studied Interactions and Ecosystems. This is part of the grade 7 curiculum, but she loves science and got her out interacting with others.

Sam is also is making great progress building her plane model.

This month the girls ,through Girl Guildes, helped paint play houses for Habitat for Humanities. Habitat builds these playhouses and when finished, they are raffled off as a form of fund raising. We had a great time painting with 18 girls.

This month we also found out that all three girls are needing braces. We will embark down this road in November.

This Friday we are off to California for some fun in the sun. We were planning on going to San Diego, however we will have to see how the situation is there. To add to our fun in the sun I have fractured a bone in my hand. The girls are so indepent now my limitation shouldn't limit our vaction plans.

Our Summer

Well it is about time I updated this blog site. It is not because I have gotten lazy (well maybe) but it is mainly because we have been very busy. Perhaps I shouldn’t write a novel every time I update our site.

The day after we returned from Newfoundland Sam was invited to go camping with her friend Nicole. We met Sam’s friend Nicole and her family at the Wildlife Discovery Park where the following picture was taken. The bear in the picture was used in the filming of Dr. Dolittle.

The following Monday Amanda and Nicole went to the Leighton Art day came in Southern Calgary for a week. They had such a great time creating and playing.

The next week we sent Sam away again to Pioneer Ranch camp in Sundre Alberta. Sam and a gaggle of her friends from school went away for what sounded like a great time for one week. Sam survived just fine and amazingly Steve and I did as well.



Ten days after our fantastic Newfoundland trip, and while Sam was away at camp, we moved houses. We only moved a few blocks, but I have learned a move is a move no matter how far you go.

We had some wonderful friends (Clay, Lynn, Micki, Ethan, Ferlin, Karen, Sarah, Brad and Marcia) who helped us move and because of them we completed our move on time…otherwise I think the truck would still be in the driveway.

Two days after we moved into our new fixer-upper. We decided to go camping in Kananaskis Country at Mount Kidd, with some of our friends. Crazy time to go but so wonderful once we were there. The kids had a blast riding their bikes and inventing new games.

Once we returned from our camping trip we had to face reality, the mountain of boxes we had abandoned (where the heck were my socks).

At the end of August our three not so little thespians and friend Sarah went off to drama camp for two weeks. (I know it is so hard to keep up with the children’s schedules.) The theme this year was…Journey to the Stars, Rockin’ from Earth to Mars. All the girls were very successful and it was such an honor to be a member of the audience in their final production…I really mean it… all the girls were very good.

Well you would think that was enough for one summer but no………

Steve was on holidays (I am ready to go back to work) so we also started renovating our house. We painted the entire house by hand and removed a few unwanted items. Crazy but true, we have also started to dabble on renovations on the inside of the house as well.

In between brush strokes we fit in a trip to the West coast.

Steve’s parents and our crew where invited to visit Steve’s Mom’s cousin’s and her husband’s island(located on Nelson Island up the Sunshine Coast). It was a case of planes, cars, ferries and water taxis to get there, but Lois and Geoff have definitely found a little bit of heaven on earth. The girls were up fishing in the morning and exploring the Island in the afternoon and star gazing at night. You would think that on an island the food would be simple and rustic. No way, Lois and Joan (Steve’s mother) cooked up gourmet meals, I was obviously not in charge of cooking. Bill (Steve’s Dad) even went to the seaside to get us oysters. All in all another fantastic coastal visit.

After our island visit we spent a few days in Vancouver visiting family.
My father painted us a wonderful picture for our new home. (The picture of Durham Cathedral which is one of the places I lived in England.)

Steve, Papa and Samantha also made a trip down to Seattle to the Museum of flight, as Sam is studying flight in her school curriculum this year.

Our gang made it to Fort Langley to learn about the history of British Columbia.

Nicole, Amanda, Grandma and myself made our annual trek to the Vancouver aquarium.

We had a wonderful trip and many happy memories.

Upon our return to Calgary Nana took us women to Spruce Meadows for our annual day at the horse jumping.

This finally leads us to our day to day life of home schooling, house renovations and working.

Home schooling is lending itself to many field trips such as our last outing to “Smashed in Head Buffalo Jump”. Close to Fort Macleod Alberta there is a Interpretation Center which documents the buffalo hunting cultures of the Plains Indians. Steve and I learned a great deal,the kids knew most of it already. Well at least we are learning new things.

Up to now home schooling as been fun and going well. We have a few more trips planned for the next couple of months.

Today we woke up early and headed for the Bay Bulls to the O’Brian’s Boat tour.

We headed out at 11:00am and had the hat trick. We started with a sighting of a couple humpback whales (a mother and calf) we then saw a Minke whale. After watching the whales for a little while we then sailed over to Bird Island where we saw many, many birds. We saw thousand of puffins many of the puffins that where on the water were so full on Capelin (a small fish) that they couldn’t fly and had to scoot across the water on their bellies to get out of the way of the boat.
We finished off our tour with a close up few of an iceberg.

After our boat tour we drove around the Southern tip of Newfoundland the Irish loop in the car. We stopped at a couple of great beaches. One of the beaches we stopped at is called St Vincent’s.

St Vincent’s is special because it is a bay with a beachfront but the ledge drops down quickly after the beach. The beachfront is what the Capelin likes for spawning. The birds and whales follow the Capelin into the bay for feeding. Because the ledge drops down so quickly after the beach the whales are able to swim very close to the land. When we where there the Bay was filled with at least 50 whales feeding and playing and 100’s of gulls diving into the ocean getting their fill of fish. Some of the whales were only 50 yds from the shoreline.
We ended our day introducing Daddy to Ches’s fish and chips