L' Etoile De Semaine

At Sophia's preschool, every child has the opportunity to be the "Etoile de Semaine" (translation: the Star of the Week). Each Etoile gets to be first in line, to help the teachers out, and to bring a show and tell item to share. They also get to create a "my family" page with a picture of said family, and "favorite things" sheet to share with their classmates.

But the most exciting thing is that being an Etoile means bringing home a Dora the Explorer or Deigo backpack. Sophia, true to form, brought home the Dora bag. In it were a couple of books, a DVD, a Dora doll and a photo album. In the album were pictures of some of the other kids with the Dora doll. It was a photo journal of Dora's travels. Sophia loved having the bag. It's a great way to make each kid special.

Here's Sophia's contribution to the Dora photo album...



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Winter Vacation 2011

The usual MO around here is to flee to somewhere warm sometime during January and February. They are darn cold months around here and the warmth of tropical sun and sandy beaches are a nice alternative to frozen eyelashes and possible skin freezing. But not us. Nope, we headed East. Well, okay we went to Winnipeg and to the cottage at Lake of the Woods. Definitely not tropical sun, and the sandy beach was covered by two feet of snow. We did have a good time though.

We spent two nights, one on each leg of the trip, in the new family home in Winnipeg. David's parents sold their house of 38 years and are moving into a home which they will share with Adam, Kristine and Matthew. They will have their own living space in the house, but for the moment, they have it all to themselves. That is until construction for their part of the house starts. But that is another blog.

Then we made the trek to the cottage. The whole family spent two and a half days together. It was great. It even warmed up enough to play outside. The kids had a great time. Sophia tobogganed, skating, played and rolled around in the snow. Jacob even got into the action. He got to accompany cousin Matthew in his nifty Chariot which has go-go gadget skis. I wrapped his cast in a plastic bag and lots of packing tape, and the little guy got to spend time walking in the snow. He quite loved it, even if he had no traction.

The adults got the chance to be together, enjoying good food and card games. And we got to enjoy being a family together, watching the kids play and be kids. It was fun.




Matthew and Jacob hanging out together in the Chariot. About two minutes later, Jacob passed out and spent the entire ride sleeping. Silly boy.




Out cold. No, I didn't mean "out in the cold". The poor kid is fast asleep.



The snow is REALLY deep. Really, really deep.





Trying to get unstuck. Until there were paths of packed snow, getting around was tricky,



Some indoor robot building. David spent a little time working on his Makerbot Thing-O-Matic




See "go-go gadget" skis. And a people harness for toddlers who want to get around in winter style.




Peg leg waling with Grandpa




Skating in the boat house (because it is protected from the wind and shifting ice, it is the smoothest place to skate)



A daddy and Sophia moment.




Snowshoe queen! I hadn't snowshoed since I was in Girl Guides. I loved it, and now I want my own pair.




Why Yes, Jacob was having a great time. Can't you tell?




Heading out over Blueberry Island.




Kids and entourage. Out on the middle of the lake.




Family time!



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A date with Daddy

David has had a crazy schedule in the last little while, and hasn't had a whole heck of a lot of time with the kids. So on Saturday, I suggested that he take them to the Science center to check out the new Mazes display they have right now. So he packed them up and headed out just after nap time.




They had all these big blocks for building with. In essence, the kids were to build their own mazes, however Sophia decided to build a house.

Jacob spent a long time at the marble maze table, just dropping the marbles in the maze and watching them go.

And they did wander one of the mazes there. In different places there were musical instruments that the kids could bang so that others knew they weren't alone. I think they had fun...

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Snow Fort

Well, it warmed up to +1 late last week. It felt like summer around here. It was warm enough that the snow started to melt and turn icky dirty brown. Gotta love it. Anyway, not wanting to get peoples' hopes up, the next day was cool again (-10) and snowy. Had to replace all the snow that melted, don't you know. Anyway, Sophia had been wanting to go out for a couple of days, but with Jacob in the cast we had to wait until Daddy was home.

Oh the joy when she was finally able to go out. The snow that was falling was a little wetter than usual, so the two of them decided to build a snow fort and throw snowballs at each other. I am not sure who had more fun.







The snow fort had chairs in it, of course. So this is a picture of them sitting in their chairs. That is what they were for. Sitting.




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Daddy's Girl

Every once and while you catch the perfect moment between parent and child...









(what would we do if we didn't have technology to bring families together? I am a little embarrassed to say that this moment was created by the iPhone and some home movies. At least they were home movies and not Angry Birds. It's been known to happen.)


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Go, go action Cast

Nothing really ever seems to phase Jacob for very long, unless it's food. But that's another story. We seem to be past the crazy making pain and achy of the broken leg...how do we know? Well, you tell us:

Jacob has mastered the regular, every day walk. Added to that is the step and swing (the length difference between the cast leg and regular leg allows for some free movement of the non-casted appendage). He can also roll around, bang the wall, bear walk, and our favorite...somersault. Check these out:












Somersault king...




Bear walking.




Standing up from sitting, without any help. Doesn't Haley just look so impressed by all the action?








Action man...

Yup, seriously on the road to healing.



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Snow play

So, we've had quite a lot of snow fall out here on the prairies. Almost record breaking amounts but not yet. Just wait though, it's only February.

On a relatively warm day (read: -10 and above), David and the kids went out for some play. I joined them for a change, and we had lots of fun. One of Sophia's goals was to build a snowman. Unfortunately, the snow here is not wet enough to compact in to snowman shaped balls. So we had to make do...


It has the requisite parts, just not the proper shape. She was happy enough.









There is enough snow in the playhouse that the kids could climb out the side window without climbing. Actually, they channeled their inner otter and slid out the window. Yup, the snow actually comes up to Sophia's head ---mind you some of that came from shoveling the deck.












It's that deep!!!




The snow is so deep at Jake can't really walk in it, so he spends a lot of time lying down. Why it has to be face first, I really don't know.



Really very happy about being a human depth measure. Can you see the joy???








My snow angels. Jacob was NOT impressed with sitting still. (these pictures, btw, we taken pre-cast. He can't go play in the snow now.)

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Following in Mama's Footsteps

um, yikes....








I might be a little worried about how I am preaching....she seems to have my mannerisms down pat.

Sigh.



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Is it too late for Christmas???

We got bogged down this year, and our annual Christmas posts got forgotten, so now I get to do a little back tracking and finally blog our two celebrations.

CHRISTMAS 1
This is with Nana and Papa, early in December. It was nice to have them here, and everyone had a great time. We celebrated, gifted, ate, did tea, went to church, visited, and hung out. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.







To get ready, we made gingerbread cookies. We all had a great time, and really the kids didn't eat too many of the candies. Several were tasted before they got on the cookies, but we kept track of those.








For some reason, we are missing other pictures of the festivities. I will have to bug Nana for some of her "film!" pictures and scan them in. Nana and Papa did get the joy of attending Sophia's preschool concert.

CHRISTMAS 2
The Gerhard clan made their way out "west" from Winnipeg. Grandma and Grandpa came just before Christmas and did Christmas Eve with us, and then Adam, Kristine and Matthew joined us on Boxing day...then we did Christmas morning all over again!








Grandma, Grandpa, and all of us, went out for the Christmas Eve buffet at the Hotel Saskatchewan-- we weren't doing Christmas the next day as we were waiting for the rest of the family, so we decided to do something special. It was quite nice and the kids made a new friend.

















I ROCK! I totally got wife points this year for the big Lego score for David. And I hid it well enough by disguising the recognizable brick sound with loose cutlery in the box. He didn't even suspect at thing.




Matthew got Lego too.







Yup, those would be the littlest ones tobogganing with Uncle Adam.

















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