Christmas January update

January 8, 2007

We're slowly getting into the January groove and have pretty much finished the cleaning, house re-arranging, laundry and pantry restocking after my family's visit with us this Christmas. My parents came for 10 days and my brother, his wife and 3 kids were here for one week. During the 5 days that their visits overlapped we had 12 people living together in our home - fairly crazy but lots of fun. The kind of fun I remember as a child - extended holiday festivities with cousins, grandparents, aunts & uncles - only on a smaller scale. Our time together included sharing great meals & wine, playing games, a Freeport shopping trip, a couple movies, several trips to our favorite family friendly pub, an awesome dinner with just Brad & Dawna (grandparents babysitting) and more that I just can't remember right now. Not to mention the usual Christmas celebrations - caroling, Advent, Christmas Eve service, presents, stockings, Boxing Day....

An almost daily feature of our Christmas holidays was geocaching with a new GPS we were given for Christmas. What a great outdoor family activity! I can see that geocaching will replace or I should say augment our weekly Sunday afternoon hikes. Now we'll have a cache to find which will add some adventure and challenge to our outdoor, fresh air exercise. We are really looking forward to incorporating this activity into our lives - weekly hikes, finding caches on roadtrips, camping trips and just exploring our own city a bit more.

Since my family left I have been re-organizing home and personal life. Updating my personal planner and calendar - a system I designed for myself years ago and continues to serve me well. Planning the kid's (& hence my own) learning and activity schedules. Laurent started art classes this past week and has resumed his reading lessons with Daddy - at which he is exceling. Thanks to another gift we received at Christmas - skates for the kids - we'll start skating this coming week. The college has free access to the arena for staff & family and we plan to take advantage of that as was to keep fit and active with the kids. I bought new comfortable skates for myself before Christmas so I will actually enjoy skating with the kids. So, our weekly winter season activities will be dance, art, open gym and skating. In addition to life stuff, monthly farm trips and maybe a few field trips.

Another venture looming on the horizon is our health course, starting in 2 weeks. We will build on previous year's material as well as introducing some new instuctional DVD's and handouts. We're excited once again about starting, this year with help from a previous course attendant and friend.

Personally, I'm looking forward to continuing my modern dance classes, experimenting with new soap recipes and crocheting. My skill at this handiwork is slowly coming along and I was pleased to give both Dawna and Nevaeh (my niece) hats at Christmas time.

On another note, we've been enjoying, or enduring depending on how you view it, unseasonably warm weather. Is this how it's going to be now as the globe slowly warms up? Yikes. This weekend the temperature reached 20C at our house - that's unbelievable. Bulbs are poking out of my garden. This week will return to more normal temperatures but we're still wondering when winter will arrive. Having just watched An Inconvenient Truth this weekend I'm not too hopeful about our chance for a cold & snowy winter.

That's life here in a glance.

PS - Photos from yesterday's geocaching - it was a gorgeous day

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