Happy Belated Canada Day

Our Canada Day weekend was spent camping :)

Hubby packed up our trailer along with the two boys and headed out to the lake to meet his parents while L and I stayed home so that we could attend my sister's baby shower on Saturday and then join them the following day. When we arrived at the lake on Sunday they had everything set up.

The boat had been carried down to the waters edge and they had been enjoying rowing it around when the water was calm enough. It got quite windy at times creating to many waves so in between the rain showers and windy bouts they would jump into their life jackets and dash in and out :)

The kids had fun hunting for old train rails and spikes that they played with while we were there. In the past the logging companies used to bring their logs right down to the lake where they were dumped into the water. In fact quite often when we travel this way we will see the loaded trains full of logs being shuttled in and out of the forest as they still move them by train today.

Of course we couldn't have a Canada Day without any sort of fireworks! To our delight the neighbors let off a few...

and the kids had fun waving gigantic sparklers around in the dark :)

I hope you all had a great Canada Day and to all my lovely American friends I wish you a wonderful Independence Day tomorrow!

Hugs,

Rosina

Happy Halloween

Today was party day around here as we celebrated Hubby's birthday and had our Halloween party full of ghoulish foods :) There was monster mouths, rotten cheese logs and pumpkin vomit (homemade guacamole flowing out of my mini pumpkins mouth).

The Zombie intestines which were a huge hit! I love how these turned out and they are just puff pastry filled with sausage meat, a little pizza sauce and then some fake blood to really make them fun :) I found the recipe here.

And my grand finale of brains *grin*.
These were so easy to make with icing, cake and raspberry jam. I found the recipe here and the great labels for the top to with little sayings like 'Brains... they do a body good' and 'Brains... never hurts to have extra'. So fun!

Every year I treat the kids to special Halloween candy apples and we go to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate factory in the city where they have a giant display case full of candy apples with funny faces :)

They have giant granny smith apples in the centers and are so good. All that apple must counteract the sugar, right? LOL

After dinner we headed outside to let off some fireworks...

and then have cake to celebrate Hubby's birthday.
I hope you all had a great Halloween to and celebrated it your special way :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Happy Birthday Halloween Style

It was all about Halloween today :)
We started our day with a hunt for fireworks which we successfully located at the nearby corner store and then headed home to tackle our pumpkins. I had been waiting until the last day to carve them as we have a bear around our property right now and I didn't want to draw him close to the house with the smell of fresh pumpkin *grin*.

All three of the children had their very own pumpkin and as they plucked out innards I sifted through the bits for seeds to roast for munching on later. I just love roasted pumpkin seeds :) It was great to watch them carve and the scary faces take shape. My little guy insisted on trying to carve his with a butter knife because mama isn't quite ready to let him wield a sharper knife just yet but in the end he had to enlist the help of daddy because his knife just wasn't getting the job done LOL.

Halloween happens to by Hubby's birthday as well but he has to leave for work tomorrow so we decided to celebrate his birthday today so that he wouldn't miss out on some of the Halloween fun :) I had quite a few different plans for ghouly food and waaay to much for just one meal so we decided to keep it a little tamer for daddy as he's not so crazy about 'eye of newt' juice and some of the other things I like to make for the kids *grin*. So tomorrow we are going to have a second party with eye ball soup, rotten cheese spread and more! Oh do I love halloween meals :)

So we kept it tame for daddy and had roast zombie leg (pork roast), mashed brain with bat blood (mashed potato & cranberry sauce) , vegetables and eye of newt juice (lemonade with tapioca pearls). I just couldn't help myself but call everything crazy names and the kids loved it :) Of course that led in to some, um, very interesting dinner conversation as my oldest wanted to discuss just how do you kill a zombie *grin*.

Hubby loves ice cream cake so much that he had the kids quite convinced that he wasn't going to share. You can see from the photo that he was doing a pretty good job as he attacked the cake with his fork!

To end our birthday celebrations we shot off all of our fireworks and I think startled the neighbors LOL. After the first couple of ear shattering bangs we could see a spotlight pop on down the road as they checked out just what was happening up our neck of the woods *grin*. The kids didn't want daddy to miss out on any of the fun so who could say no!

He's another year older and even more loved than the year before :)
Happy Birthday Hub-a-licious *grin*.

Hugs,
Rosina

2010 Olympic Torch Relay

With all of the excitement that has been building on the news about the 2010 Olympic Torch Relay starting in Victoria and making its way up Vancouver Island, I just had to take the kids to see it in real life :) Plus I have to admit that I really wanted to see it myself *grin*. So we made the trip to Campbell River and found ourselves a nice little spot to hang out near the 50th parallel to wait for the runners.

As it neared there were tons of police vehicles monitoring the traffic and then the big red Coca Cola truck was the first thing to come into view :)

As the Coca Cola truck was passing by us they started hopping off of it and gave all 3 kids flags & these really cool coke bottles that have fibre optics in them so they randomly change colors from green to blue to red. They were a BIG hit in the car on the way home in the dark *grin*.

Next vehicle in the relay entourage was the RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) truck pumping out the tunes while they danced around on it. It was like being at a parade *grin*.

Once the sponsors had gone by we could finally see the flame! At first all we could see was fire floating above the heads of others watching ahead of us and then it finally came into full view. That baby was really burning! I think the fact that it was starting to get dark really made it look even more impressive than what we had seen on tv :)

And there it goes. It was only seconds from the time it came into view to the time it went past us but it was so worth it to see the excitement on the kids faces as it burned right in front of them :) We never made it to the new Spirit Square downtown Campbell River where the torch finally ended by lighting the cauldron on stage because the crowds were so fierce but we found a nice little spot right in front of the fireworks display *grin*. It'll be great memories for all of us as we may never get the chance to see it again :)

~ Rosina