Workin' Mama

Well the other craziness around our house, is that I have picked up a part time job at the children's hospital, 2 shifts a week, so that I do not lose my physiotherapy license. It is only temporary, but still stressful. I have lost a lot of sleep over it and struggled, but feel that I am doing what is best for our family at this time. I enjoy being back at the children's with lots of familiar faces and an opportunity to challenge my brain a little more. It is hard though now that I have children, to see some of these very sick children, that are the same age as my children. It reminds me of the blessings in my life. I'm positive that I will learn important things in this short little phase of my life and hopefully help a few people along the way.

Kitchen Saga

Well, we've taken a break from working on the kitchen so that we can focus on Christmas, but we have come a long way since our last posting. We have ripped out almost all the cabinets and put in the new sink. We installed the floor in the kitchen and then decided a month later the floor was not level enough, so we pulled it all up, got someone to come in and level the floor and then put the floor all back in. It's not perfect, but it's close enough and things are really starting to come together. We have all the bottom cabinets in place and functional, but have to wait for an electrition before we officially install them, so we're still a few months off, but it's close and we can function fairly normally now. Aah!

Enjoying Christmas

Last weekend we put up the tree and pulled out all of our Christmas decorations. It took a while to find a place for all of our nativities. The girls are really enjoying playing with the kid friendly nativities and of course love to carry around baby Jesus. Eliza is excited for Christmas, although I don't think she really understands what it is, but knows she will be getting pink chapstick that she saw Daddy buying. We've also been trying to help Eliza understand service and have been adding straw to Baby Jesus' manger every time we help someone. She loves that. Hope all your preparations for Christmas are going well.

The kitchen awaits

Our other big summer project has been our kitchen. We have slowly been ripping out flooring and cupbourds and are down to just a sink and appliances. We're just extending our camping experience into our home. Our plan for the long weekend is to put in the new flooring and at least get in the new sink and then slowly add the rest of the cupbourds. Every job takes way longer than we think it should, but we are having fun and enjoying the adventure and learning lots.

Chasing Sandy Beaches

This summer we took off to BC with the tent trailer and no reservations or specific plans. We ended up at Shuswap Lake, Okanagan Lake and then Nakusp. We got very good at setting the tent trailer up and down and learned how important it is to not bring too much stuff. (You never know when you're going to need a 3 axes and a full size shovel). But in all our adventures we had lots of fun and enjoyed our last camp ground right off the Lake and an amazing sandy beach. Unfortunately the water was ice cold, but it didn't stop us from taking a plunge to test it out. Because our plans changed so many times, our original plans for church didn't work out and we ended up waking up at 5:30 to try to make chhurch in Golden, forgetting that there was a time change and arrived an hour late. So we kept on going into Calgary and managed to hit church at 2:30. It was a long day.

Our First Triathlon

Patrick and I have been wanting to do a triathlon for a few years now and finally found one that we could do on Saturday. So last weekend we did our first sprint triathlon in Fort Macleod. It was lots of fun and we had a whole fan club cheering us on and I was only 10 minutes behind Patrick, which I was proud of. We enjoyed our training leading up to the event and hope to do another one next year. It was a fun way ot keep ourselves active and challenge ourselves.