Popsicles and Carrots

Tonight we celebrated Friday by eating popsicles....

....and canning carrots!Yes, these are all from our garden. Anyone want any carrots?

"Cars" Underwear

Our girls, like many preschoolers, are obsessed with the characters from the movie "Cars". We were at a friend's house recently when Kate had a potty accident and had to borrow some underwear, which happened to have Lightning McQueen on the rump. Emily was immediately jealous, and they were both sad when the underwear was washed and returned to its rightful owner.

So today when Mama brought home a package of Cars "panties" the girls were absolutely thrilled. (Notice in the photo below that they also match Emily's Cars pajamas.)

Tonight after bathtime it was a struggle to get them to wear pants, because they wanted to show off their new underwear. Luckily, we weren't planning on going anywhere.Of course the Cars undies only come in boys-style, but the girls don't care (not yet anyway). Why don't they make girl-style "Cars" panties? Good question! When they do, we will be first in line to get some.

Deer Screens

Mama discovered recently that deer have been nibbling on her garden, and (even worse) on her baby apple trees! She used "deer potion" around the garden to keep them out of there, but needed a different solution for the trees.

So Mom made a Home Depot run and put together some deer screens. Emily wondered what bad thing the trees had done to make Mom have to put them in jail...

Package from Marilyn

Now that we are safely home from our trip, we found a big stack of mail to go through. It included a surprise package for the girls! They tore into it right away.

It was a present from Brenda's Aunt Marilyn back in Washington! Em and Kate opened their cards first, after some coaxing from Mom.

The cards were very sweet. Lately both girls like to pretend like they are reading aloud, even though they are just making up the words.

The got a big new coloring book and a sticker "dress up" story book. They really loved them--thank you Aunt Marilyn!

PEI Days 6 & 7

Our Day 6 adventures on Prince Edward Island included a trip to the Island end of the Confederation Bridge. This 8-mile long bridge connects PEI to New Brunswick, and was completed in 1997. It is the world's longest bridge over ice-covered water, and it is very impressive to look at. Before the bridge was built, you had to hop on a ferry to reach Canada's smallest province.

There is a neat information site, with (of course) a gift shop and a lot of other more touristy shops.

Folks involved in bridge construction will probably recognize the structure below as a "segment". When building a precast segmental bridge such as the Confederation Bridge, hundreds of these concrete segments are precast off-site and brought to the bridge, then hoisted into place and attached, one by one, until the bridge is complete. You can see by looking at Kate in this photo just how big these segments are.The kids, of course, don't really give a hoot about bridge segments or tourist shops. All of their attention was drawn to the playground nearby, which was the nicest one we have seen yet in PEI.When Emily first tried out the playground structure below, I tried to stop her because it looked like it was for bigger kids. But she jumped on and sailed to the ground, then ran up the stairs and did it over and over again. She is truly fearless.

On Day 7 we decided to try a completely new activity that Shannon had recommended. On PEI they have a "College of Piping", which is in fact a school for people to learn how to play bagpipes and do other Celtic-style performing arts (a lot of PEIslanders have an Irish/English/Scottish heritage).Every weekday they put on several shows that are only 1/2 hour long, where the students practice performing their particular specialty. Shannon thought our kids might enjoy it, and she was right!

There were bagpipers, of course....

...and Highland Dancers........and Celtic drummers too.The kids thought it was fantastic!The best performer of all was a 16-year old boy doing Irish Step Dancing. This video clip is very short, but it sort of captures his dancing and Kate's appreciation of it.

After the show we went for our obligatory ice cream.

Then we decided to drive out to the beach at the MacCallums Point lighthouse, which Chris and Brenda had visited on one of our bike rides. Nana and the kids hadn't seen it yet.

Unfortunately, it was high tide when we got there, so the access to the lighthouse was closed. It was still pretty though.Emily did some scrambling around on the rock jetty. We kind of had to stop ourselves from stopping her, because it looked dangerous even though the water was very shallow. This was one of those times as parents where you just cross your fingers and let them learn. She had a great time, gained a lot of confidence, and didn't fall off any rocks!Another (somewhat) adventurous day. Our big trip to PEI is almost over, and there are still a lot of things we haven't seen and done up here. Guess we'll have to come back next year!

PEI Days 4 & 5

Our faithful blog readers are probably aware that it is very hard for us (well, for Brenda) to give up blogging, even for a few days. So even though our camera was killed by the red beach sand, we can still take pictures with Nana's camera, and that is what we have been doing.

For Day 4 of our PEI adventure, we decided to meet up with Shannon's family at the Mill River Fun Park, on the northwest end of the Island.

It was really great to spend a little time with Shannon. Our family is on an "early to bed, early to rise" schedule, and her family is definitely on vacation time, so we haven't seen too much of each other since we got here.The park was great--it had a playground and lots of pools and waterslides.Sometimes Kate is willing to try things like this, but not on this day. She contented herself by running up and down the hill and watching Emily take on the slides. Emily, of course, is fearless.Her favorite was the super big "family slide", where she could go down side-by-side with Mom. She wanted to do it over and over and over.After we got out of the water and dried off, Emily spied the roomful of balls. This is another one of her favorite activities, so we spent a few minutes there.Then, of course, we had ice cream (we are on vacation after all).Notice the rack of waste bins behind the girls....PEIslanders are very very serious about their recycling. There are four different classifications of garbage, and you must choose the correct one, or face severe social disapproval. We have been trying our best.It was sure nice to spend the day with Jack, Lucy, and their cousin Sydney. It's nice to be around other kids who can play with our girls, because it takes the pressure off of us to entertain them.On Day 5 it poured rain, so we decided to do something different: Shopping! We drove up to the "Green Gables Coast" on the north side of the Island, which is a very touristy area with plenty of shops.The kids each got to pick something out, so Emily got a Nemo boogie board (she had seen some kids playing with them at the beach) and Kate got an Anne of Green Gables doll.We tried to forget about the rain and enjoy ourselves. We posed with a moose........and a cow........and Mama and Nana each got a new sweatshirt.Then we had pizza, which is the kids' favorite food. Emily is holding up her "Mack" croc charm in the photo below. Kate picked out the "Sally" one for her shoes (both are characters from the movie Cars--surprisingly they picked out two minor characters, even though they know the movie very well).Then it was time for more ice cream!This is the face of a girl who just wants to eat her ice cream in peace and not have her picture taken.After ice cream we hit the beach at Cabot Park. We didn't take any pictures at the beach out of fear of ruining Nana's camera also.The rain continued to come down after we got back to the cottage, so we had to come up with rainy-day activies until bedtime. Nana did some reading........the kids did some coloring........and even Mama did some coloring! She was very excited about her kitty masterpiece.We tried on silly hats........and we finally reverted to watching tv, which in this case was a DVD of Scooby-Doo classics. Zoinks!