Check out who found himself a light-saber at the local thrift store - for our boy who has recently discovered the joy of Star Wars, you can see how very thrilled he is with his find:-)

What a magical world we woke up to this morning, all covered in ice. The trees sway and sparkle like crystals, and I so wish I could record the sound of the branches tinkling in the wind. Mornings like this make it so much easy to bear the darker days of winter!

This is how you'll find the kids every day that they can - they're THRILLED to have so much snow out our front door now, and find every hill possible to try sliding down, either on their skis or their sleds. Next up, we're hoping to finish off our snow forts so we can have a big snowball fight, perhaps tomorrow I'll help them tackle that!






This weekend was a quiet one - massages on Sat by our woodstove, which was really nice, but instead of crawling right into bed afterwards as we craved, we then bundled up to head out to Jamie's winter holiday party at the Chateau Laurier. I usually find by mid-Jan I'm DONE with celebrating the holiday season, but Jamie felt it was important we go - and we enjoyed a pleasant enough evening chit chatting and eating. We ended up sleeping over at Nana Heather's house, as she was the designated babysitter and had already put the kids to sleep, and the real hassle started this morning when we couldn't get the van started. UGH. It's a diesel, and we hadn't brought our oil pan heater to plug in, and it was especially cold lastnight, meaning the fuel was gel and the van was one unhappy vehicle. We called CAA, but apparently so did EVERYONE else, because he took THREE hours to get to us, and by the time we finally got on the road again we ditched our plans of going to IKEA for more storage options, and made a quick get-away to home. A healthy dinner and early bedtime, and hopefully the start to a good week tomorrow!!!!!! Hope you all had a wonderful and slightly less stressful weekend:-)

For Anja....

FINALLY, I'm uploading a few of the photos from our day at Universal Studios! I opted to not bring my camera in order to just enjoy the day with the kids, which means we only had Kea's camera....which is not great quality AND has the wrong date set to it. How annoying! Anyways, here's a glimpse of our adventures!!!!!!

A quick trip down to NYC...

So, we decided to make a quick trip down to NYC - my mom has now moved down there for work so it was a great chance to have a visit with her, and then my good friend Anja lives there with her husband Vernon and it had been FOREVER since we'd seen them so it was about time. And then there was the added bones that her parents would be there too, and we really wanted to make it down in time to see them before they flew home to Germany. And luckily, it all worked out - despite the epic journey down and many signs showing us that we should just turn around!!!!!

The night before we were supposed to leave, a tonne of snow fell and we couldn't even get the car up the slight hill on Harding Road into our driveway. We ended up parking it at the entrance and walking in, hoping things would be different in the morning! When we woke up, it had definitely stopped snowing, so we decided to forge forward. Jamie got up first thing and brought the car up to the house (yeah!) and we decided now it was definitely time to put the winter tires on! Then we loaded up and hit the road a bit later than we'd wanted, but on the road all the same. Driving was a bit slow, but steady and we decided to stop for tea/coffee in Brockville. Where someone pointed out that we had a very flat tire. As luck would have it, there was a tire shop across the road so we hobbled over, and they fixed it and after an hour we were on the road again (and so thankful that we didn't have to deal with that on the side of the road!) Then the border took a crazy long time, there was a detour on the highway and white out conditions as we passed the lake so everyone was inching along. All of this added at least 3 hours onto our journey, so we were feeling pretty FED UP by the time we got to New York and had to deal with the traffic there. Luckily, it was relatively painless!

And then we arrived, and were fed delicious food and great conversation, and somehow that makes up for it all after the fact, doesn't it?!!!

We didn't 'do' much while we were there, a lot of walking and eating and visiting, but it was really nice to see everyone and suck up the great energy of the city, and now we're planning our next trip down there. Perhaps in the spring!!!!!! And since I've just posted a couple of photo-heavy posts, I think I won't add any photos to this one. I have, however, posted a bunch on flickr, so feel free to head on over there to check them out if you're interested!

2011 recap, part two......

July 2011 - a month full of outdoor play, ice cream cones, Kea going for two weeks of music camp, our house still being worked on, and heading up to Algonquin Park with the Taylors for a week of canoeing and camping fun! Oh, and of course, the month was FULL of berry picking here, there and everywhere!!!!






Aug. 2011 - a busy month in which we moved back into our house:-), celebrated ms. Kea's 11th birthday, welcomed our new nephew Dominic into the world, and were excited to discover that we were pregnant and started our ritual of belly photos......






Sept. 2011 - of course, in this month we celebrate the birth of Tiegan EIGHT years ago (crazy how quickly time is speeding by!) and then much of the month was filled up with a trip to Vancouver - I went ahead and had a glorious week on my own. I couldn't believe how easy it was to travel ON MY OWN, and so lovely to have time with my mom and sister, my friend Steph and with my grandparents! Then the family joined us and we fit in as much visiting as possible - as much as we're enjoying our new life out here in Ontario, we really miss so many people on the west coast xo




Oct. 2011 - this turned out to be a very pivotal month for our family, as we lost the new baby we were all so excited to meet in the spring - I was 10 1/2 weeks pregnant, and was particularly sad to be so far apart from Jamie during the whole thing. However, if there's one thing with life with young kids, it's that you must pick up and carry on. ESPECIALLY when you're single parenting. So I did, and we got Tiegan's ears pierced and we picked pumpkins, we were excited to come home to Jamie and to see everyone here, we wandered corn mazes and had a great Halloween.





Nov. 2011 - as you can imagine, Nov. was a slower month full of resting and healing. Tiegan started up horseback riding lessons, which she'd been begging us to do forever, and we also decided to mummify a chicken as the kids had been begging us to try it out forever. Then we drove down to Florida for a week of holiday in the sun, a MUCH needed break during the blah month that is often Nov.






Dec. 2011 - and then there was Dec, full of snow and ice, holiday parties, gift preparations, baking and celebrating. We got a new woodstove, which filled our home with warmth and our days with wood cutting. And we finished off the month with a trip to NYC - which I will post separately about! A good end to a pretty good year - looking forward to what 2012 brings us!

Happy New Year!

Wow, so here we are in 2012......crazy! We're taking things slow here in the McKay household, resting lots, trying to purge and organize and regroup, and are slowly finding ourselves emerging with fresh energy to start new projects. I find the only way to survive through the winter happily is to embrace all the winter sports we can, so we've been tobaggoning, building snow forts, skating, cross-country skiing and this weekend we're hoping to start some downhill skiing. Luckily we have three kids who LOVE all things active right alongside, so that makes it easier to keep active!!!!

I've seen a few people post photos from the past year as they transition into the new year, and I love seeing them. I wish I had the nifty photo designs where I could plop them in, but since I don't know how to do that, I'll just do a few small photos from each month - always amazing to look back and see just how much we've done!!!!!!!!

January, 2011 - we FINALLY got our internet, when two young men from STORM came and climbed a huge pine tree to place our satelite. We skiied a lot, dealt with sick kids, and enjoyed a visit from my mom!!!!





February, 2011 - This month was full of lots of fun crafting, with the kids sewing, card making, marshmallow making, window star folding. Lots of snow play, more sick kids, and a visit from Sky and Jean:-) And then, of course, we celebrated Ryland's 4th birthday!






March, 2011 - March was full of melting, grey, dirty snow and slush everywhere we looked, which of course means the running of the sap!!! So we tapped our trees, checked our buckets, had a few licks here and there and boiled, boiled and boiled down our maple syrup!!!! (Hoping to come up with a MUCH more efficient system this year.....)





April, 2011 - A month of flooding driveways with all the snow melt, and a month of new beginnings - celebrating Easter, dreaming of gardens, neighbours beginning their building project and us starting our interior walls. Very exciting times ahead:-)






May, 2011 - May was a very busy month for Jamie, who set up his 'workshop' out our front door and he ripped a tonne of scrap wood into pieces of lathe, then proceeded to staple them up ALL over the house, in preparation for the clay to applied later on. SOOOOOOOOO much work! I was also preparing our house so that we could move out into the camper once more, and invite various workers to come and finish the walls up once and for all:-)






June, 2011 - June found us camping once more out on the property, with very little complaints as the sun shone most days, and the fireflies came out at night and it was rather magical to sleep in the outdoors - knowing that in the meantime our house was being finished off and SOON we'd be moving back in:-)






So, that's a recap of the first half of last year, and now the kids are calling me outside to go for a ski so I'm off - more later:-)