august 2010

august 30

the maritime museum

egg-yolk [?] jellyfish

another weekend.. another sailing trip. besides many many seals, this time we got to see bio-luminescence [amazing watching little fluorescent fish and a million sparkling fish deeper in the water. as toby said, it looked like the stars were in the water]. we also saw what we think were egg-yolk jellyfish - about 3 feet in diameter. very weird looking things. we sailed to cowichan bay and i was very pleased to find another bakery with lots of wheat-free goodies and a cute maritime museum where the children made wooden boats.

aly and toby with their wooden boats

SO many seals SO good at looking like rocks!

relaxing on the foredeck

colin enjoying the sail

a nice relaxing weekend and great to see toby, face dripping with salt water with a huge grin on his face on the sail back where there was much spraying of salt water! a few more days, and then hopefully we'll be back at the weekend for one last sail before school starts.

august 15

zoe holding toby's hand at the dentist

i feel cheated; how have we started the terrible twos already? i should have another 4 months of adorable left. she’s currently refusing to put on any clothes except shoes and we’ve launched into the car seat argument which results in me having to pin her to the seat while i wrestle the seat belt on her. she hasn’t really got a hope since i have many years of practice in this maneuver! ironically she then won’t get out of the car when we get home and has a sit-in protest. fortunately, i have my iphone and sudoko to keep me entertained until she’s had enough of being in the car. it’s a very big car and she’s usually happy to wander around in it for a good 20-30 minutes. diaper changes are an ongoing battle, but conveniently she shouts ‘NO POOP’ or ‘NO DIAPER’ if there is a clean diaper required [and ‘NO NAP’ if she’s tired].

i’ll stop complaining now because the flip side is that she’s a fascinating little person who can string a couple of 3 word sentences together to give us an insight into the interesting things a 1.5 year old thinks about! she’s also playing tricks on people and starting to understand sarcasm, which I guess you need to figure out pretty quickly in this family!

golf at the cordova bay ridge course last weekend

august 4

wow - quite the eventful weekend. we left for the 9am ferry on saturday morning but ended up in the standby line as they were pretty much full. fortunately they let 30 more people on at the last minute and we made the cut. once we got to our boat we left for south pender island [about a 2 hour sail]. aly and i were not feeling so great because we had spent the first [bumpy] bit of the journey down below but we felt much better when half way through the journey we started to see pacific white dolphins around the boat. this pod of beautiful dolphins ended up following us and diving back and forth under our bow for 45 minutes or so. they are very cute little dolphins - just like mini-orcas. what a breathtaking trip. of course none of the photos do justice to the experience.

glimpse of dolphin

we moored for the long weekend at bedwell harbor - a lovely resort marina. sascha and i didn't manage to make it to the spa, but aly and toby enjoyed the pool. pender itself was great, and a lot quieter than we expected. we rented a car to play disc golf and apparently ended up seeing the town centre [although didn't realize we had until talking to one of the locals later on!]

the deer wondering what this strange creature is [photo by aly]

the neighbours [photo by aly]

on the sail home we noticed one of the whale watching boat heading for us and started to speculate about where they were headed. apparently, they were headed right for us, because a huge orca whale suddenly appeared about 50ft from our boat! we gave chase but the whale won and we eventually turned back and made do with a dozen or so seals instead. after leaving aly in victoria for the month of august, we headed back on the ferry to the mainland and were halfway there where the captain announced that we needed to detour to help a boat in distress. sure enough, the people on the motor boat were starting to get their feet wet. the ferry sent a tender out to help them until the coast guard arrived. i'm sure they were glad to have the help but it would kind of suck to have 2000 people watching you get bailed out!

anyway, it's now back to a more normal pace of life. zoe is at a new daycare this week and it seems to be going ok - she's not screaming the place down, although she IS refusing to sleep or eat while there. it's a good thing i only work 5 hours a day!

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