School is all done for the summer. Toby has opted out of regular school next year. He’s doing a combination of two different online schools (one here in Richmond which involves weekly meetings after school hours) and the one he’s already been using which is based in the Prince George school district. Hopefully, it’s not a year filled with me whining “do your schoolwork”! He’s hoping to join Aly on her trip to Europe once she’s finished her grade 12 year next year.

 

 

We headed to Victoria (the capital of British Columbia) to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday. The 5 of us went for a lovely sail (repositioning Dani and Toryn’s boat from a marina in Oak Bay to one in Sidney). There was a little bit of a taxi issue at the other end with it being Canada Day, but we made it in the end.

Skipper Zoe

We then spent 90 minutes trying to get into downtown Victoria for the celebrations, parked 30 minutes away, hiked in just in time for the tail-end of the concert and for the fireworks (which were great). It then took 2 hours to escape! I usually avoid the Canada Day crowds but I was all-in for the 150th anniversary (despite the fact 150 does seem laughably young for a country!)

 

Our summer road trip has been a little postponed due to Sascha’s work but hopefully, we’ll get there at some point. Despite that, summer appears to be quite busy – I seemed to have jammed lots of activities into the first 3 weeks of July. Zoe is doing 2 weeks of skating, 1 week of full-day camp at Kidtropolis (where Aly works) and a week of gymnastics lessons. I’m having some difficulty squeezing work in between her activities!

Mid-May we got ourselves a shiny new car – actually the same car that we already had (an Acura MDX) but we’ve been waiting for a 7-seater SUV hybrid with a decent hybrid engine so we were very happy that one finally arrived.

Thank goodness for some sun at last.

On my quest to get some exercise everyday, and the arrival of a folding bike for my birthday last year, I’ve been attempting to get out on my bike and explore the corners of Richmond I don’t usually see from the car.

My resolution to post a photo a day on Instagram is also going well and is a great incentive to make sure I leave the house (not always a given for someone who usually works from home).

I finished up a year of work with Richmond Food Security at the end of last month. I’ve been able to implement some great new systems for them and look forward to seeing them to continue to grow.

Quick update on what the kids are up to…

Zoe has been remarkably consistent with wanting to take ice skating lessons and her backwards skating is coming along nicely. She’s also become great on her bike and wants to take riding lessons again this summer.

Toby’s soccer season finished, but is in the middle of a session of goalie clinics. He’s also in the table tennis club at school (all that table tennis practice should come in handy when he’s a programmer in a tech company and that’s the only reason to come out of the basement!)

Aly is still on a quest to save the world – she MC’d the REaDY summit – a Richmond environmental conference. She also become a Butterflyway Ranger – helping to save pollinators. Now if only she could remember which way to turn out of the driveway to get to work every week, she’d be ready to leave home!

Aly just turned 17. She had a lovely tea party at home. I can’t remember the last time she was actually at home for a birthday party. There won’t be many more of them :,-(

Aly went on a trip to the Juan de Fuca trail on Vancouver Island a couple of weeks ago. They waded through mud and slept under a tarp for 3 nights. Sounds like hell to me but it looked very pretty

She’s also still obsessed with comic books and all things Marvel. Rather that than drinking and boys!

I guess I also haven’t blogged since Easter. Zoe had a very successful egg hunt..

My blogging performance has been atrocious as usual over the past month or so. Can it make it through 2017? I guess we’ll find out!

We had our first sailing trip of the year (thanks to Dani and Toryn letting us borrow their boat). We did a quick trip to Sidney Spit for a BBQ. The kids and I were all a little rusty, but everyone soon got into the swing of things again. Hopefully, we’ll have a chance to explore some of the local islands this summer.

So Zoe had this mysterious full body rash last weekend, but not really any other symptoms except for being a little bit achy the day before it appeared. Three days in, I started trying to get some answers but one nurse, one doctor and one natropath could only conclude that it seemed like an allergy to something – perhaps to the naturopathic remedies she’d been taking for three weeks to try and shake her One-A-Day migraines.

The consensus was, that whatever it was, probably wasn’t contagious so I sent her back to school the next day. After school that day she came home with a notice saying “Fifth Disease is going around the school”.

This was a new one on me. I thought I’d seen everything after 17 years of parenting, but apparently not. The symptoms fit what she had perfectly. Helpfully, by the time the rash arrives, it’s no longer contagious. Naturally, it’s spreading like wildfire around the school. In fact, you can spot the kids who are just getting it by their red cheeks.

Fortunately, it seems to be a very mild illness and nothing to worry about.

I did something new last week – I had my first session with an executive coach to work on direction for my business(es).

As you can tell I haven’t done very much blogging on here, however, I’ve been more diligently blogging on rethink9to5 which is a website exploring alternatives to the traditional 9-to-5 working life. My most recent posts include:

• What to Do If You’re Not as Productive as You Promised
• Women In The Workforce: Why There’s More to the Glass Ceiling Problem
• Shipping Breast Milk Is Not a Win-Win!
• What Does Flexible Working Mean?

I’m starting to wonder if I’m a feminist.

We spent this weekend beginning to plan our road trip to the US. Last year we did the East Coast and we’ve driven up and down the West Coast quite a few times. This time we’re aiming somewhere in between. We’re thinking of making a loop from Calgary down through Yellowstone all the way down to Arizona, then West to the Grand Canyon/Vegas and back up via Reno. Who doesn’t love 70 hours of driving?! Maybe we’ll find a way to get Aly insured on the SUV so we can split the drive between the 3 of us (too bad it’s not a couple of months later or we could have roped Toby in too!).

It should take us about three weeks. After that Aly is headed 13 hours north for a week-long rangers camp in Smithers, BC (wow, this province is big – Smithers is only about halfway up!).

We had a lovely end to the weekend at Garry Point Park in Steveston where we were surrounded by blossom and the calmest waters we’d ever seen there.

 

On our last night in Ft McMurray, after 2 hours of shivering in the car at minus 25, we were rewarded with an amazing light show for around 20-30 minutes. There was dancing, there was colour. Soooo happy!

What a winter..I’ve never seen close to this amount of snow in Vancouver before. I’m not really complaining – I’ll take snow over rain any day.

We’ve really embraced it this year – Aly went on a school ski trip to Whistler. I’d show you some photos except she didn’t take a single one (I think she’s doing teenagerdom wrong – shouldn’t there be hundreds of selfies of her on the slopes?). I asked if she was going to call while she was there and she pointed out she didn’t call when she went to India for 3 weeks so “the chances are not high”. She was right.

Sascha bought me a trip to see the Northern Lights for Christmas which we finally got around to taking this weekend. We’d had to reschedule once or twice due to the weather. I was a little worried when our flight was canceled and we had to route through Calgary (which got us into Fort McMurray for 2am), but it doesn’t seem to have been due to weather.

The aurora forecast is an interesting thing. There is a Kp Index (the scale of geomagnetic activity which ranges from 0-9) and then you need to factor in location, visibility and even the brightness of the moon. You also get a colour forecast (it was always green when we were looking). It’s by no means an exact science. We had missed the peak of the geomagnetic activity earlier in the week and the forecast was a little overcast so we weren’t overly optimistic.

Kellie and I had bought mum and dad a trip to Iceland to see the Northern Lights which they had gone on last week and, although they saw them, it was more grey with a hint of green. This was great to know because the first night we were looking, that’s pretty much what we saw.  For the second night, we drove further out of town to Willow Lake and got lucky with a gap in the clouds and geomagnetic activity and had about 30 minutes of green streaks overhead. I was VERY happy and Sascha was very relieved (since he’d promised to take me further North to Yellowknife in the Yukon next year if the edge of the arctic circle in Fort McMurray, Alberta, wasn’t sufficient!)

It was certainly VERY chilly (-27 degrees with wind chill). We came pretty wrapped up, although Sascha had forgotten to bring a scarf – only to discover that scarves don’t seem to exist here. Instead, balaclavas are all the rage!  The temperature would feel fine for a few minutes, but then suddenly an almost imperceptible breeze would blow through which had us both instantly running for the car!

We found a great ice sculpture park and playground made of ice. I’d be jealous of the kids here except that Sascha mentioned how little of the year it was actually realistic to go to a playground!

Sunday evening we headed down to the river, only to find that on Sunday evening in Fort McMurray, the thing to do seems to be to drive across the river. We’d obviously learned everything we could possibly need to know from watching Ice Road Truckers so we headed out there too.  We decided to opt out of trying to climb up the bank on the other side since there had been several trucks sliding around before finally making it up the other side!

Other interesting things of note – we were starving when we finally got in at 2am on Friday so we headed straight to a drive-through – only to discover the windows had all frozen shut!  There were also some issues with the turn signal freezing. At least we’d been able to get a car – the rental company kindly agreed to leave the keys in the car for us!

• We were starving when we finally got in at 2am on Friday so we headed straight to a drive-through – only to discover the windows had all frozen shut!  There were also some issues with the turn signal freezing. At least we’d been able to get a car – the rental company kindly agreed to leave the keys in the car for us.
• Bus stops are completely enclosed which seems like an excellent plan
• Bologna was offered on all the menus we came into contact with. Interesting.
• Parking lots come with power outlets so you can plug you car in to keep it warm.

It’s a pretty small town, but it was a lot of fun to revisit where Sascha used to live and go to elementary school. It was the only place he’d lived growing up that he’d never been back to.

 

Fort McMurray is an oil town and also the site of huge wildfire this past summer. Weirdly this meant that little had changed since he was here. The oil industry has had it’s ups and downs since, but he had been here pretty much at the peak of the boom so there hadn’t been that much development. There was a huge amount of fire damage, but mostly in the new areas. Entire developments had, sadly, been wiped out, leaving just a few scattered homes with the sidings melted off them.

 

It must be very strange to still live in your home when the majority of your neighbours’ homes are completely gone. There are definitely a lot of new homes going up but it made me wonder where all these people have gone in the meantime.

Last week wasn’t the best week, especially after having to have Merlin the rabbit put down. So it was really nice to get away from it all and spend the weekend together. Dani and Toryn kindly came over the hang out with the kids while we were gone – thanks guys!

The thing I’ve noticed in the past couple of years is that I’ve needed to step up my game when it comes to parenting. I feel like we were able to wing it there for a few years without thinking too much.

Now, instead of teaching things like, how to feed yourself, ride a bike, pack your own lunch etc, there’s a whole new curriculum and I never got the memo so I could prep before term started.

Topics have included:

• learning to drive
• writing a resume
• checking with people that you can use them as a reference before using them as a reference
• cooking food with nutritional content
• saving money while grocery shopping
• how to answer a phone (Toby’s technique was to wait until the person on the other end of the phone said something when they called him)
• how to keep an eye on the time so you’re not late for work
• remembering to put your work shifts into your calendar
• planning ahead so you can request time off from work when you need it
• using public transit
• being able to budget what you earn/spend (this whole earning-thing is fantastic – I can see Aly translating every possible purchase into hours spent working – yay!)
• how to use an ATM
• how to do online banking (and avoid getting dinged $25 for going overdrawn – I can’t really take credit for that one, that lesson kinda taught itself!)
• how to communicate professionally with an employer
• naming files something useful/professional (sigh)

It’s a minefield. It really takes me back to the days of toddlerhood when you suddenly realize how much actually goes into walking or learning the English language.

As Aly said “Time’s a black hole just sucking you in. I wish I could go back to being a kid”. Don’t we all.

Ugh, January sucks. Sascha had to go to Europe for a couple of weeks on New Year’s Day and I found it really hard to get back into everyday life after the blissful winter break. The pretty snow all turned to grey skies and drizzle and life returned to normal. Anyway, enough moaning about me, onto moaning about pets! For a family that never usually has any pets, it’s been a very pet-intensive few months!

You might recall that we finally got Merlin the rabbit back after his escapades around the neighbourhood for 18 months. Unfortunately, it seems like we might have been able to catch him because he’d either had a stroke or eaten something poisonous which means we’re not sure if he can see and he has a lot of balance/mobility issues – poor guy. The 2 rabbits were not happy to be reunited so we kept Houdini on the covered balcony and put Merlin inside in a cage (door open – but he generally refuses to come out).

Sadly, Zoe had the misfortune of finding Houdini on the balcony one morning after, what we assume was, a raccoon attack. Although we felt as though he was safe from eagles because it was a covered balcony, we hadn’t factored in racoons being able to climb up and get him. He had a wonderful life on the balcony surrounded by lettuce and herbs to nibble at whenever he fancied and a big pot of dirt to dig in when he got bored.

A couple of weeks ago, Merlin started to scratch a lot. Unfortunately, when he scratches, he loses balance and falls over and ends up with dust in his eye and ears. The vet thought he might have an inner ear infection. So ensued the task of trying to persuade Merlin that he wanted to drink antibiotics twice a day for a week. After day one Merlin was definitely onto us and Toby had the scars to prove it. After talking to the vet, we all agreed on spiking a slice of banana twice a day which is going MUCH better!

In the meantime we needed some fish for the aquaponic system the kids got me for Christmas (the plants purify the water for the fish, the fish water gets pumped back up to fertilize the plants and everyone is happy (or so we hope). Buying fish that will stay small enough for the smallish tank, can cope without heat and won’t eat one another proved trickier than we thought. We ended up with a male and female beta – James Pond and Branston Pickle. Now we just have to cross our fingers that they don’t get too stressed out by the water pump or we don’t end up with a tank full of baby bettas that start eating each other. The fish world is apparently a very violent one.

 

Time really does fly when you’re having fun. My last blog post seems to have been Nov 26, although I have written and or published a few for unblog.com in the meantime.

Zoe had a (very-easy-for-me) birthday party at Kidtropolis (where Aly works). They all had a great time. For an 8-year old, she was incredibly difficult to buy for this year – not helped by the fact her birthday and Christmas are only a week apart. I remember the days when kids used to like toys. sigh! The big hit was the nerf gun (Aly bought her and Toby matching nerf guns). Between that and the indoor snowball kit the kids bought Sascha there was a lot of mayhem in the house!

It was our turn the host Christmas this year so 11 of us snuggled into our house for a week or so. I am VERY happy to announce that I don’t think I’ve ever played so many board games in my life. When I was a child I used to beg people to play games with me. I’m not sure why, when I have children of my own, I still have to beg them to play games with me! Anyway, Christmas seems to bring out the best in them (that, or they are resigned to the fact they need to play!). Toby got Ticket to Ride from us for Christmas and it’s become the new family favourite.

We did a great family trampolining/bubble football/dodgeball session courtesy of Nikki and Fabio. Nikki and I managed to fit in a quick climbing session where I managed to scrape through my belaying test after a year of forgetting everything I knew about climbing! We also did a murder mysterious night (cousin Dani is apparently the one to watch out for!) and paper-crafted a very cute Christmas village.

Sascha got a 360-degree camera so you might soon be able to completely relive every moment of our Christmas from every possible angle if you have a good 20 hours to spare one day!

There’s been plenty of snow this winter so far (very unusual for Vancouver). In fact, the only days where the snow had completely (temporarily) melted were Christmas Eve to Boxing Day – typical!

I’m wondering if this year might have marked the official death of the Christmas card. I only really received one or 2 outside of close family (which I have not taken an offense to – I quite understand) and the whole process started to feel a little pointless.  The people I was sending cards to had probably already seen the photo I was including about an hour after it was taken on social media. Aly and Toby are planning to leave home in the summer of 2018 so perhaps I’ll hang out one more year and send the last family card in 2017.

I’m struggling to come to terms with going back to work officially tomorrow. I have worked here and there throughout the break but completely on my own terms whenever, and wherever I felt like it. That’s what I would love ‘retirement’ to be for me.

As for new year’s resolutions. Last year I had got into a really great routine for most of the year – but things started to slide after our summer road trip.

Here are last year’s resolutions:

1. Exercise every day for at least 5 minutes – I’m starting small and manageable in the hope I’ll become one of those addicted-to-exercise people that are rumoured to exist!
2. Hide Facebook posts by friends of friends to try and improve my Facebook feed (no offense – I’m sure they’re all lovely people, but I don’t know any of them and they’re taking up about 80% of my feed at the moment).
3. Do an exclusion diet (and in doing so, try not to introduce too much sugar back into my diet when I’m allowed to add it back in)

1. I did get as far as 7-10 minutes of exercise every day but then when we got back from our road trip in the summer the exercise started to get a little spotty
2. Total success – this worked really well but will always be a work in progress (unless you people could kindly all stop adding new friends 🙂 I highly recommend doing this (click the arrow to the right of the post, click ‘more’, select ‘hide all from [person x]’ – it’s a little time consuming initially)
3. Did the exclusion diet and got to add eggs back into my diet – yay!. I definitely cut back on sugar but there’s still plenty of room for improvement [she says while eating a bowl of frosted flakes – oops!]

…so resolutions for 2017:

1. Get back into flossing every single day (no excuses) – Unfortunately, after I had surgery for a deviated septum in November it only took a week of not being able to floss for that ‘habit’ to become a little lackadaisical.
2. Exercise for at least 5 minutes every day – again.
3. Instagram a photo a day. I’ve never bothered with Instagram. Maybe because I have a long standing protest against hashtags but I’ve resigned to the fact that they might not become obsolete for another few years yet and I figure I don’t need to hashtag if I’m really only using it to record a photo a day. peta_unblog #hatehashtags

 

Sascha and I realized we hadn’t been on an airplane together, just the two of us, since I was pregnant with Aly – almost 17 years! We decided a trip was long overdue so headed off to Split in Croatia, Berlin (where Sascha had a conference) and back home to Liverpool for a long weekend for me.

After flying into a storm and expecting a few days of rain we were very surprised to be greeted by a couple of beautiful sunny Mediterranean day in Split. We spent a good portion of our days poking around on sailboats (the purpose of this portion of the trip) and looking around the spectacular roman cities/ towns of Split, Trogir, Sibenik, and Skradin.

The roman palace in Split is the most intact in the world. It’s amazing how much has survived. They have built other buildings into many of the existing roman structures throughout the ages making for a fascinating mix of architecture. There were breathtaking views around ever corner and under every arch.

Our hotel was part of one of the roman palaces. The old town is completely pedestrianized so we needed to call ahead for the hotel golf cart to come and pick us up from a parking lot and drive us precariously through the tiny alleys back to the hotel. The rooms were through an iron gate and up a flight of stone steps in a courtyard. The room had much of the old roman brick showing through and we looked out through wooden shutters onto a lovely little alley.

We definitely need to come back one day.

Next was Berlin. Sascha and I took a long and VERY chilly walk to Checkpoint Charlie and the museum there. Next day, Sascha headed off the work and I explored Potsdamer Platz before settling down to a morning of work in a lovely Starbucks there.

It was then time for me to head home to England for a long weekend. I had a lovely time.

Cole was just learning to walk and close to saying his first words so it was a great time to be there.

Kellie, Flynn and I went to an awesome trampoline park where we could recreate all of our childhood competitiveness hitting each other with batons on the gladiator beam (she’s an easy target – hopefully she’ll undertake some training before our rematch)! That evening, we did a lovely family meal at Las Iguanas with the gang.

Saturday I headed to Wales with my mum and Sara to spend the day scrapbooking with the “moldy scrappers”.

Sadly, it was time to leave on Sunday. Sascha and I were staying in Berlin for another couple of days and when I landed we headed straight to the Spy Museum (where we got to play in the lasers), the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag Building.

The next day I sat on a hop on hop off bus for a tour of the whole city while checking my email and doing some work along the way.

Much as I am definitely NOT a shopper, I had a lovely stop for a nice cup of tea in the beautiful KaDeWe department store which was very reminiscent of Harrods in the 1980s.

I had a mysterious but delicious meal in the Christmas Market (someone asked me “was ist das” and I really couldn’t help them).

In the evening we had a meal with the rest of the Unbounce team (who were in Berlin for the conference) and managed to squeeze in a Gluhwein (mulled wine) and one last Currywurst.

Coming home was lovely. It was great to see the kids again and I vowed to leave it a full 24 hours before starting to nag them! We’re eternally grateful to Dani for coming to hang out with them (and drive them to a million different activities) while we were gone.

On the other hand, coming home was hard. Not having to think about anyone but myself for a whole 12 days was incredibly relaxing. It had freed up so much space in my brain! The first week back was definitely a shock to the system. I think I might have forgotten how hard being a parent is for a little while there!

So, Aly managed to successfully get herself a job at Kidtropolis in Richmond. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look so tired in my life as she did after her first shift, but she’s got into the swing of things now and is busy banking some money for university and for a year in Europe that she’s planning for the end of grade 12 month (a little over 18 months from now).

We had a wonderful visit from Kellie, Mike, Flynn and Cole. Aly, Toby and Zoe got a chance to meet their new cousin for the first time. They took Zoe to Science World one day and we spent a lot of the time at escape rooms (5 in 12 days) because apparently my sister is even more addicted that I am! It was great to hang out with the little ones – even at 6am when they were all jet lagged for the first few days.

Mum and Dad then arrived and we had a lovely time as always (although they worked hard – mum took care of us and Dad fixed everything in sight!) They were also only here for 12 days so the visit went very fast.

While everyone was together, we decided to get some photos taken, and our friend Jon Snow, did a great job…

Saying goodbye to everyone was a little less sad than normal because Sascha and I are planning a quick trip to Europe next month – Croatia, Berlin (and then for me a weekend in the UK – hooray!)