family life

O, Canada: Our Trip out of the Country {Part 1}

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O Canada

If you follow me on Instagram, you might remember that our family recently got passports. If you’ve been reading my blog for very long at all, you’ll also know that we’re studying French (the language). These two items go together because we’re hoping to take a month next winter and spend it in France. We have to have passports and know the French language to accomplish that goal, so we’ve been studiously working toward making that a reality.

But going to France is a huge goal, both in the time commitment to learn the language and to save up the money to get over there (and still pay the bills at home while we’re gone). And it’s not really very fun to have passports and not use them. So we took a weekend recently and drove up to Vancouver, British Columbia (about an 8-hour drive from our home) for a few days. It was the first time any of the children had been out of the country, the first time I’d been to Canada, and the first time Will had driven in a foreign country. So a lot of new experiences all around.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to take pictures while we were there – we forgot the point-and-shoot camera at home, my phone was broken at the time, and Will’s has a cracked camera lens. So we just have our souvenirs and memories of the trip. But that’s okay; we still had a wonderful time.

We left on Friday morning, a little earlier than we normally wake up. We didn’t leave early enough to avoid rush hour traffic through Portland, though, and that was a mistake we’ll hopefully not make again! We stopped for breakfast just over the border in Vancouver, WA, and then pressed on from there. We had lunch outside of Seattle, and made it to the Canadian border just a couple of hours after that.

Getting through customs was a breeze; we didn’t even have to leave our car. When the border agent passed our passports back to Will, Will asked him where we could go to get them stamped. The agent just kind of sighed and held his hand out. Will gave the passports back, and the agent stamped them for us. (With the new passports being fairly high-tech and having electronic components even though they’re still paper, customs agents can just scan the barcode and the computer stores the information. You have to specifically request a stamp. This might be different in other countries, but from the U.S. to Canada, a stamp wasn’t automatically given.)

Once we made it over the border, the gas light came on in our car. This was unfortunate for a couple of reasons. First of all, gas in Canada is much more expensive than it is in the U.S. Even though the Canadian dollar was worth roughly 75 American cents during the time we were there, the gas still ended up being more (about $1.15-1.20 Canadian, per LITER, not per gallon). The other reason this was poor timing for us was because we (Will and I) didn’t have any Canadian money yet. About a month before our trip, we’d gone to the bank and traded the kids’ allowance money into Canadian currency, so they had some, but the grownups didn’t. So we had to “borrow” from the children for gas and repay them after we hit the ATM.

So, through customs and gassed up. Now we were ready to continue our trip!

***To be continued***

Blessings,

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Picture of the Week: An Announcement

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You might have noticed that things have slowed down here on the blog in the past couple of weeks. Here’s why:

preg announcement copy(1)

Yes, we found out two weeks ago that we’re expecting our fourth child this fall. And I got a nasty cold right on the heels of the positive test, so I’ve had virtually no energy recently. It’s about all I can do to get through the day without letting things like housework and homeschooling fall by the wayside. So for the next few weeks, things might continue to be quiet on these pages. I’ve got another Tales on Tuesday story all set to start next week, and when I think of something I really want to write about, that’ll go up here. And a few reviews, of course. But for the next month or so, until I get out of the first trimester and regain some of my energy, I’m not going to stress about blogging. I fully intend to get back up to a 3 posts a week schedule, but now’s not the time for that.

Blessings,

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Simplicity: Potty Training with a (Truly) Minimalist Wardrobe

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potty training

It’s no secret that our family has fewer clothes than an average family. Much fewer. It’s not because we can’t afford more; we just choose not to have as many. This has its benefits and drawbacks. A benefit is that we have fewer clothes to wash, and therefore less laundry to do. A drawback is that we have to wash our clothes more often, so there’s more laundry. I know, I know, completely contradictory. We have more loads of laundry to do, but each one is smaller. It’s a trade off. Since putting the laundry away is the part of the chore that I hate the most, I’ll take more loads with fewer items in them.

But that’s not the point of today’s post. Today I want to address something that was asked of me during my last wardrobe post: How do you potty train a toddler if you don’t have a lot of clothes to change him into? The answer is very simple. During toilet training sessions, I don’t put any clothes on him at all. This doesn’t work when you go out, obviously, but at home, it works swimmingly. And honestly, I’ve found that it’s too stressful for the child to go more than a few hours at a time when they’re learning anyway. [Read more…]

Picture of the Week: The Audubon Society

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audubon trip collage

These pictures, in case you can’t tell by looking at my children in them, are quite old. Way back before Small Fry was born, we took the boys to the Audubon Society in Portland and enjoyed a couple of hours of walking the trails and viewing some of the natural wildlife. It was really neat, and the kids loved it. I think they’d actually forgotten about it (even though they loved it at the time), but when I was pulling photos off of the camera this week, I found these. They’d somehow ended up on the actual camera rather than on the memory card, so they didn’t get moved during the multiple times I’ve moved pictures in the intervening years. It’s always fun to see what they looked like so long ago :).

Have a great weekend!

Blessings,

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Picture of the Week: Football!

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PITW football

 

In honor of the Super Bowl this week, the kids decided to dress up in football “uniforms” and play outside for a little while. I have no doubt that Seahawk was the mastermind behind this, since he’s the biggest football fan in the family. He had some birthday money a few months ago, and he used it to buy the Seahawks jersey and helmet (which he then wore for Halloween). Munchkin’s helmet is technically a softball helmet that we bought from Goodwill for Halloween 2013 – Seahawk went as a football player that year, too. When he bought his official helmet, he passed the other one down. Munchkin is actually a Baltimore Ravens fan (no idea where that came from considering we don’t live near – or have ever traveled to – Baltimore), so to make the softball helmet “his,” he drew his interpretation of the Ravens logo on paper and taped it onto the helmet. (He’s currently saving his allowance for a Ravens version of the set Seahawk has.) Small Fry’s helmet is a knight helmet that my dad bought him from the Dollar Tree. [Read more…]

Super Bowl XLIX

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Super Bowl XLIX

Image Credit

 

Let me preface this post by saying that I am not a football fan. I barely understand the rules of the game. (Outside of “each team gets four downs – or tries – to make it ten yards at which point they get another four downs, and a touchdown is worth six points” I don’t really know anything.) That said, I was kind of excited to learn that the Seattle Seahawks were going to the Bowl again (they won in 2014). Because we don’t have a pro football team here in Portland, the Seahawks are are our “local” team. Combine that with the fact that they, until recently, have been notoriously bad, and now things are pretty exciting in the NFL around here. [Read more…]

Speech Therapy

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small fry

I don’t have a picture specific to speech therapy, so forgive me for recycling this picture of Small Fry from our Wildlife Safari trip 🙂

 

I’ve mentioned a few times about how Small Fry is a late talker. Most kids, by their 2-year well child checkup, are speaking fairly clearly in 2-3 word sentences. When Small Fry had his appointment back in July, he was barely saying “yes,” “no,” “mama,” and “dada.” He’s a bright kid – it’s clear in the way he does communicate (he picked up the signs I taught him lightning fast – as in, less than a day) and how he obeys and reacts to us. He’s not a dummy. He’s just not all that interested in talking. (With two older brothers who were always ready to jump at his every whim, there was no motivation to learn to talk.) So our doctor suggested we start him on speech therapy. [Read more…]

Picture of the Week: A Black Eye

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A photo posted by Wendy (@ladybugdaydreams) on

Instagram followers will probably recognize this picture (which looks better on the small screen of my phone, lol)…

Last week (9 days ago, to be exact), Seahawk and Small Fry were playing while I worked on something with Munchkin. Suddenly I hear crying (Small Fry) and frantic apologizing (Seahawk), and they come out to see me. Turns out that while they were horsing around, Small Fry came tumbling down and crashed his face right into Seahawk’s knee. (Don’t ask me how that happened…) Within just an hour or so, he had a definite black eye. This picture was taken two days later, and you can see that it’s still quite bruised. Well, today, it’s been a week since this photo, and his poor eye is still all black and blue. He is starting to get some of the green tinge that tells me he’s healing, but it’s still rather surprising how long this black eye is lasting.

Have a great weekend!

Blessings,

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A Photo Scavenger Hunt in French

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A Photo Scavenger Hunt in French | Ladybug Daydreams

If you follow me on Instagram (my new favorite social media platform!), you got a sneak peak into today’s post over the weekend.

For Christmas, Will got me all 5 levels of Rosetta Stone French. (This gift came with a new laptop two weeks later since RS only works on Windows 7 or higher; our desktop has XP. I’m loving the new computer [which has 8.1] and the language program!) If you’ve read my blog for very long at all, you’ll know that we’re teaching our children French for their foreign language. You’ll also know that I’ve tried numerous things over the past year in my quest to find something that will work for our family. I’ve explored (and done reviews of) French Essentials on SchoolhouseTeachers.com, Mango Languages, and Middlebury Interactive Languages. While all of these programs had their strengths and weaknesses, none of them were quite right for us in the long term. [Read more…]

Our Visit to Wildlife Safari

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Our Visit to Wildlife Safari ~ Ladybug Daydreams

We spent New Year’s Day doing something we’d never done before: going to a drive-through animal park called Wildlife Safari, which is located about 150 miles south of where we live. To be fair, Will actually had been there before, but not since he was a child. In fact, one of his relatives (we’re not sure what the exact relation to him is) used to work there as a trainer for the big cats. There’s a photograph floating around somewhere of him as a kid playing with a Cheetah cub. How cool is that?

But back to our trip. [Read more…]