june, 2004

congratulations to heather, bruce and justin on the arrival of annika on june 7th :-)
happy BIG birthday peter

june 29

we've been very busy lately - between intensive potty training, a trip to victoria for the weekend and the family place 25th anniversary celebrations.

potty training - dare i say it - is going remarkably well and he's pretty fond on his big boy 'unnawear'. i thought for a moment that he was completely potty trained over the weekend - turns out there were just more people around to run off to the bathroom with him by the minute i think. still - it's not going too badly at all. he's already got enough stickers for a trip to chuck e cheese. i'm about to up the ante with a trip to the driving range next!

we spent the weekend in victoria so that sascha could see his dad who's recovering from heart surgery [he's now the proud owner of a titanium heart valve] and to help take care of helga - take her mind off the whole thing etc. colin seems to be doing very well and is back on form as far as joking around goes and his heart's not doing too badly either. aly and toby got to have a ride on breezy the horse and we also went for a nice walk to spot butterflies, rabbits and peacocks[?!] all of which are in high abundance there.

the family place 25th anniversary celebrations have been going very well. yesterday we went to a charlotte diamond [children's singer] concert which the children loved. we also appeared on a dvd about the family place which was showing on the movie screen beforehand much to the children's delight [i, on the other hand was trying to hide under my seat cringing!]. in the afternoon we called in on the family place itself for a more formal celebration - aly and toby were the only children and got to cut the cake with a local MLA. unfortunately this meant we were right in the middle of the room for the speeches before the cutting of the cake. the speeches were very short for most people but a little long for aly and toby. aly delighted the audience by flipping upside down and flashing her underwear at them. fortunately, they're a very family-oriented bunch so i don't think they minded too much :-)

today was the family place's penny carnival which we all loved. the children each had their own bag of pennies. toby loved playing with the bubbles and playing hockey with fin [the canucks mascot] and aly was very proud of her red and yellow braids.

tomorrow we're off to go bananas for lots of fun and lots of chaos!

june 28

did you know that in north america they talk about digging through to china? CHINA?! mad. everyone knows you dig to australia. of course it makes sense i suppose. anyway, back to life....

my mum's just booked her tickets to come and visit on july 9th which i'm very happy about :-) i'm hoping to catch up on some scrapbooking while she's here but things [children etc.!] always seem to get in the way.

toby, as always, is obsessed with cars, but right now he's particularly obsessed with bmws. i suppose he has good taste, but it's very inconvenient when he wants to visit each one in a parking lot. he especially likes to spot blue ones like uncle peter's. aly likes to call them 'amw's just to wind toby up :-)

june 20

breaking news: the williams family have bodies!
wednesday, thursday, friday.. still just heads sprouting arms and legs [with the occasional experimentation with solid eyes - one even had eye tattoos] and then saturday. BAM.. for the first time we had bodies. very exciting

no bodies?

bodies! [complete with belly buttons]

don't ask how potty training is going. it's a pain in the neck. remembering to make sure 2 children go to the bathroom every half an hour is probably more taxing than the cleaning up [especially since the expensive training underwear was well worth the investment].

sascha left for a week in LA in the early hours of this morning. his taxi was booked for just before 5am and toby quite helpful decided to get up at 5.30am aaarrrgggh. i did suspect it would be before the usual 8-8.30am because he'd had an unusual nap and then got sent to bed early for being naughty but 5.30am was quite a shock to the system.

silly songs are the children's latest hobby. such renditions as "twinkle twinkle little banana" has them both in hysterics for half an hour [and of course singing it over and over and over again as loud as possible the whole time]. it occurred to me in the car the other day [after about 20 minutes of this] that adults really can't handle hearing a joke more than just once, where it just doesn't seem to matter to a child how many times they hear one. it must be nice to be entertained that easily!

[you can also find out about their other latest likes, dislikes and tricks]

june 16

goodbye preschool (aly), hello potty training (toby). we've just got home from aly's graduation via discount diapers to loading up on training underwear for toby. her graduation was very good - they did a little performance which she was much better behaved for than the mother's day one, but she did yawn all the way through!

aly's school year...

the zoo walk last weekend went great. it wasn't a very big zoo which was quite handy :-) and our team [of about 35 people] decided to take a bus tour of the african section before even reaching the first checkpoint which was great! thanks to everyone who sponsored us.

monday night was aly's last soccer session and included a tournament(!!) the tournament was very entertaining. as they were about to start, the coach asked 'which way are we going?' - all the kids pointed in different directions. she actually played really well for the first 10 minutes - kicking the ball in the right direction and everything but her focus when in goal was a little lacking - she spent the majority of her time facing the opposite direction, but she loved being able to run after the ball once someone had scored on her! halfway through the 3rd match [by which time aly was sitting in the middle of the pitch with 2 friends picking flowers] they gathered all the kids together and asked who was too tired to play any more [show of hands from 70% of the kids]. this was a good idea because it meant the 8-10 kids left actually got to play 10 minutes of some semblance of a match. afterwards, they all shook hand and got medals [sorry "meTals"] and then went for some pizza. aly doesn't like pizza so she ate an entire bowl of cheezies instead. very nutritious.

june 8

this weekend we're off to the greater vancouver zoo to participate in the walk to cure diabetes. dani has diabetes, so it's a cause very close to our hearts. we're walking with some of aly's school friends. one of them has diabetes (as does her brother and father).

aly and toby had their first trip to the dentist yesterday. as i was brushing toby's teeth in the morning, i was persuading him to stand still by saying we had to brush really well because we were going to the dentist. aly said
"yeah, or you'll get gravity."
"gravity?"
"yeah, he'll get gravities."
"OH, Cavities."
anyway they got to have their photos taken since they were cavity-free. i'd prepped them a little too well though. we'd been practising keeping their mouth open wide for the dentist and as soon as they got in the chair, while the dentist was trying to explain what all the instruments were for, they both sat there, mouths gaping, and refused to close them!

our apparent bid to be the most famous family in the whole of.. well, in the whole of this little part of british columbia is going well. i was in the province newspaper over the weekend, the children are due to appear on a DVD being made for the family place and in photos for the paper at the end of the month i think. all this after the 3 of us appeared in the local newspaper in april. i think the stardom might go to my head. it's not very me at all. having a blog is stepping outside my comfort zone. i like to remain anonymous at all times. it's just not going well at the moment.

oh yeah, and we gave permission for a photographer to use/sell photos of the kids which he took at the vancouver children's festival. it's really depressing how much better his photos are than ours. i would love to be a great photographer. lara always makes me jealous with her photos too. anyway, here [with his permission] are some of the photos he took...

the rest of the photos he took, and we took, are on the children's festival page [you'll be able to tell who's are who's!]

i'm having the perfect stay-at-home mom day today. we stayed in bed watching tv/dozing until 10.30 [don't tell sascha, he'll be bitter], had some breakfast, tickled a lot, played junior scrabble and then i've abandoned them while they do some colouring nicely together so i can update the unblog. aaaah. it's a beautiful day, so i guess we'll make it out of the front door to the playground at some point this afternoon.

june 1

we spent the weekend in victoria. i'm not sure if it was only because we only stayed one night but it all seemed a lot less hectic than normal!

yesterday was preschool, a scrapbook store sale, supply purchasing for the children's group i help out with and soccer for aly. today i'm having my photo taken for the vancouver sun for a volunteering article and then the 3 of us are going to the family place this evening while i do another parent connections course. thank goodness i can take the children with me, otherwise that would have been 3-4 evenings a week when i needed sascha to babysit which wouldn't have gone over well.

speaking of scrapbooking. i'm desperate to do some. i think the fact, i've just run a 4 week course about scrapbooking and not managed to get a single bit done myself is just rubbing it in.

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