a week of performances

This past week was a busy with several performances. 

First we had Leah's dance recital.  She has been taking a preschool dance class through the local parks and rec program called "Twinkling Toes".  Every week she's been learning some ballet and jazz dance moves.  On the last day the parents were invited in for a little recital.  It had a Peter Pan theme so the girls were all dressed in adorable Tinkerbell costumes.  Here's some pics of Leah in her costume and performing, with her teacher, and of course with baby who came along to watch.  After seeing this I have decided, there truly is nothing cuter than a group of 3 year old girls dancing in Tinkerbell costumes.

Then we had Jillian's choir performance at school.  This was the music night at our school so we had the 2 choirs and the band performing, along with some other very talented kids (4 of them did a great job with American Pie).  Jillian loves being in choir.  Of course I can't understand any of the songs she sings (because they are all in french) but they all sound beautiful!

And the week ended with another concert at the school, this time with the classes performing.  Jillian's class did a funky version of "The 3 Little Pigs".  Kyle's class joined with another class and they did an absolutely amazing job dancing to Fireworks by Katy Perry.  I thought the performance was fantastic, the dance teacher put together some fun choreography and the kids all did so well.  In the video, Kyle is in a blue shirt on the stage on the left.

free comic book day

Kyle enjoys reading comic books.  He has a collection from Jeff's childhood, and now is starting to collect some of his own.  I found out about something called Free Comic Book Day (from one of my favourite webpages http://www.smartcanucks.ca/).  We headed to a local participating store with Kyle in his batman shirt.  There was quite a collection of comic books offered for free, and we bought one as well since everything in the store was on sale.  I loved that a good chunk of the free comics offered were kid-friendly and rated for younger kids.

Overall it was a fun little experience, and I'm sure we'll keep an eye out for it next year.

spring showers

I am not a gardener by any stretch of the imagination.  However I do finally have a decent garden of perennials which come up every spring and I do love seeing the bright flowers.

But even they aren't as pretty as what we saw when we stepped out onto the porch last night after dinner

The puddles on the sidewalk were calling Jillian and Leah's names, they couldn't resist jumping around.  Nothing quite captures childhood joy like laughing children jumping in puddles.

 

cottage

Some big news for this summer is we bought a cottage!  It's located just over an hour away from us near a very nice beach.  The cottage itself is very small cozy, it will be a perfect family getaway.  It's a very short 2 minute walk to the beach, and on plenty of land for the kids to play and for campfires in the evening.  Mmmm, s'mores, I can taste them already!!

There's some work needed which we can do gradually over the next few years to make it our own.  For now we are just excited to get up there this summer and enjoy the beach!

lego

For the past few months at school Kyle has been a part of the lego mindstorm club.  They were placed into smaller groups of 5 in order to build and program robots for the school region wide competition.  There were 2 challenges and each school was given instructions and a board for the challenges.  This was a great program for the kids and I'm grateful our parent council was able to purchase all the kits and supplies required to run this, and for the librarian and parents who dedicated a lot of time to this program.  I was able to volunteer one night a week and it was a lot of fun to learn about the lego mindstorm program myself, and see how fast the kids were able to learn and problem solve with their robots.

The competition involved many schools from our region and more than 50 teams competing in the challenges.  Here's Kyle at the competition.  His group came first place in one of the two challenges with this robot!  

Leah came along with me for the day and loved sitting beside her big brother and watching the robots.

open for business

A big sign summer is here...the pool is open for business.  We cranked up the heater last week and got in for our first swim of the season.  And with the beautiful weather this long weekend we had some lovely friends over for a BBQ and the kids all had a blast in the pool.  We had a total of 11 kids in our backyard, and between the pool and other backyard activities (playhouse, sandbox) everyone was very happily occupied most of the time...definately a perk of warm weather.  If all those kids had been inside my house I surely would have ended up with a massive headache ;-)

The girls picked up with swimming right where they left off last year, Jillian can easily get across the pool by herself and is able to touch the bottom this year which is exciting.  We put Leah's float on and she started paddling around no problem.  And yes, I did get into the pool and there are pictures, but no they won't be on here.  Maybe later in the summer ;-)