We had a good day. We had considered going out and doing something, like we did for Meredith’s first, but the weather wasn’t very nice and Fiona seemed very content to play outside, so we stayed home and did some gardening and worked on our future chicken coop. We didn’t end up getting back inside until almost 5pm, at which point I realized I hadn’t even started on the cake I was going to make for her. So I just went to Thrifty’s and bought one there, which none of us really ate. Funny how different those things taste now that we’re all so used to homemade! It did make for some good pictures though. Here are some highlights from our day.

An impromptu hug after Fiona unwrapped the ball Meredith picked out for her.

Swinging outside

A newt we found in the garden.

The chicks checking out their future coop.

Cake! Originally I was on the other side to take pictures, hence the backward candle.

Nom nom nom.

Homemade coconut milk vanilla bean ice cream

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Moving went off pretty uneventfully. We got everything into the truck, to the new place, and unloaded in about 5 hours. Meredith had no problem watching all her stuff being packed up and moved into the truck. In fact, she was even helping.

Now that we’re here, everyone seems to be adjusting well. The cats took a day or two to get comfortable, with Sebastian taking a little longer than Casper. He’s spent the last week or so exploring to see just how high up he can get. The kitchen cupboards seem to have won out. We are watching a friend’s dog for the holidays, and she is obsessed with Casper for some reason, but is pretty good about stopping when we catch her.

So far, Meredith is taking everything pretty well. She asks about her friends back at the co-op a lot, but so far hasn’t been upset when we’ve told her we can’t just go and see them whenever we want anymore. She has asked when they will come visit us. She really seems to love this new house though. She loves that her room has a little play area, and she loves the trampoline.

We went to a Solstice celebration with some local home schoolers. It was neat to meet them and put faces to names that I so far have only chatted with online. Part of the celebration was singing songs and adding lanterns to a spiral nearby.

Celebrating the Solstice is something I want to spend more effort doing with the kids in the future. In fact, I’d like to make some changes to the way we celebrate the holidays in general. I’d rather it not be so much about one day of presents that’s over faster than it came. I love ideas I’ve read on other blogs this year about stretching it out (either 12 days of Christmas or advent), starting some new traditions, inviting the kids to participate more in choosing and making gifts for others, etc. This Christmas I made Amazon wish lists for the girls, and most of our family did follow it. Meaning we got a lot of useful things we will actually use (an art easel, books, some indoor physical play toys, etc.) We also got some beautiful handmade gifts which I always love.

Christmas morning Fiona started taking a lot more steps. Still only one at a time but she was doing it frequently. Yesterday she started taking more than one at a time.

Here are some more holiday pictures:

Decorating the tree. All the ornaments Meredith put up ended up in the same spot.

Christmas Eve presents

Opening stockings Christmas morning

Some Christmas day shots:

Playing Pretty Pretty Princess, a game we used to love as kids. It was a bit of an inside joke in my family because my dad often won (and we have pictures to prove it!). He bought it for us and addressed it to Kris and I with a note to “have fun”.

Our main gift to Meredith was supposed to be a puppet theatre with puppets (inspired by Sarah). Meredith loves puppets, so when I saw Sarah’s post I knew it was perfect for her. Unfortunately, the cloth I bought for the actual theatre is packed and we don’t know where. We found all the puppets we had bought (some nice soft ones for Fiona and some wooden ones for Meredith), so we had fun anyway. Here is Kris showing Meredith how they work.

We also did lots of house maintenance, exploring, swinging, gardening, walking, driving, planning, and so much more. I hope everyone reading had as good a time as we did.

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Then I heard about a craft event nearby, where you pay $1 for tickets and go around to booths where volunteers help you make crafts. We waited until Fiona was tired, Kris put her in the Beco, and Meredith and I headed out to see what kind of crafts there were.

I forgot to bring my camera with us, but it was actually a great little event. There were tables set up and basically we walked around and chose crafts to try. I let Meredith pick what she was interested in, meaning we ended up with a bit of an eclectic mix.

I let her do most of the work that she could do, so she chose colours, painted, picked beads, etc. I basically just put things together. One of the stations was a cookie making station, where she got chocolate chips, silver balls, and other assorted things to stick into shaped cookie dough and then they baked it for us. But that got eaten before this picture was taken. (And you can probably see that most of the gingerbread house candy has already been worked on too!)

I really like the salt dough ornaments, and we have since started more to give out as gifts to grandparents and aunts and uncles. It seems like a good snowy day activity.

My favourite though (and Meredith’s favourite as well) is this reindeer. The line for it was long, but she waited very patiently for her turn and was very particular in picking out the perfect head, body, antlers, eyes, nose, etc. She wants to keep him, so I think he’ll go on our mantle in the new house.

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Luminara began in 2000, when the City of Victoria asked the Inter-Cultural Association of Greater Victoria (ICA), to produce a community celebration in Victoria.

Luminara has elements of both worldwide celebrations of light and local community connections. It is a celebration of light that has taken root here in Victoria, like other traditions that have come here from around the world, and become part of our local identity.

We met up here to start out with. One of the moms brought homemade candied apples, which were delicious.

For some reason Meredith decided she didn’t want hers. She told me she doesn’t like chocolate. More for me. We made their lanterns from glass jars, coating them with tissue paper, glitter, and feathers, and using pipe cleaners for the handles. (Notice the big bowl of chocolate chips next to my daughter, who had just told me she doesn’t like chocolate? I guess those don’t count.) Meredith was able to do a lot of it herself.

Fiona ate her pants, which is about her favourite thing in the world to do right now. That and her shoes.

Then we put candles in the jars and walked around our co-op with them. It was pitch black out, and I think pretty neat for the kids to wander around with their lanterns. Meredith found holding her jar by the pipe cleaner too hot so her and Kris improvised.

A few of the houses were decorated with tissue paper on the windows and windows all lit up for the kids. I took pictures but because of how dark it was and I didn’t have my tripod, I didn’t get any really nice ones. One of the neighbours had put out some of her own lanterns around her walkway for the kids though, which was neat and I did get a decent picture of that.

I think it was a pretty fun time for the kids. Next year I think it might be fun to also go to one of the communities that celebrates it. Apparently this year some of them had stilt-walking, a barn dance, music, shadow puppets, and more.

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Every year so far for Meredith’s birthday, Kris has taken the day off and we’ve gone and done something fun. The first two years were mostly for us, and we chose to go to Salt Spring Island as we thought the boat ride and subsequent wandering would be fun for her even while young.

This year, we asked her what she wanted to do, and she chose a boat ride. We thought we’d do something different this year and go out to Sidney Spit. However, the morning of I thought to check prices, and we realized that the cost was almost $20 for each of us, including Fiona! It occurred to us that we could go over to one of the Gulf Islands again for cheaper than that, even with a vehicle, and that there would probably be more to do. We decided to pick a different one, and so Mayne Island it was. Click on thumbnails to see larger pictures.

So of course, a boat ride started off the day. Meredith was really excited to be on a big boat. We met a neat family from Quebec who had a daughter around Meredith’s age. The girls played most of the ride while we chatted with the parents. The mom kept commenting on how nicely Meredith played and what a great sharer she was, and asked if she was in daycare.

Once on Mayne Island, we stopped by a local grocer for a couple of things we’d forgotten to bring, then drove to a park area the family we’d met had recommended for a picnic. Meredith had a blast on the nearby playground and we sat and enjoyed the quiet and ate our lunch.

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Then Meredith discovered the zipline, which brought a whole new level of fun to the day in her eyes. It’s not obvious from these pictures, but this thing went FAST. And she didn’t want Kris to actually hold on to her, so he just had his hands hovering around her. He had to run to keep up. At the end it kind of jerked to a stop and he’d catch her if she fell, but for the most part she was just fine on her own. She wanted Kris and I to each try too, and I’m impressed how well she held on. I found it difficult myself.

Near where we had our picnic was a huge Japanese garden that we decided to visit afterwards. The garden was planted and maintained as a way of commemorating the Japanese families who had settled on the island and been interned during World War II.

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Afterwards, we headed back to the ferry and home. It was a long and busy day, and Fiona was tuckered out.

I had baked Meredith a dairy-free chocolate-orange crumb cake. We served it to her when we got home but she was more interested in cutting paper. I asked her to take just one bite, for the camera, and so she took a tiny little bite and stuck it in her mouth, then asked for some peaches and went right back to cutting her paper. So Kris and I enjoyed the cake instead.

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Pregnancy is still going so smoothly, I often forget I’m pregnant. I can’t believe I’m in the third trimester already. It’s night and day from last time, when I spent most of the pregnancy nauseous, puking, or with terrible heartburn. I have gotten a little bit of heartburn, but so far nothing major. I also spent a lot more time thinking about being pregnant last time, whereas this time I have a two year old to distract me and life goes on as normal. The baby does move a lot now though, and I definitely love that part. Meredith loves when the baby kicks her while she’s nursing, and will often pop off and talk about how the baby is going to nurse too on whichever breast she’s not on. (I find this really cute, because I’d never mentioned that the baby would need to nurse too. She figured it out on her own.) She’s also started bringing me little bits of food and putting it on my belly and telling me it’s for the baby. I’m really curious how much she’s really internalizing about me being pregnant. Obviously she at least partly gets it, if she’s figuring out things like that the baby will need to nurse. She loves to look at and hold other people’s babies and nurses/potties her own dolls. I guess we’ll see in a few months!

Her room is mostly finished now. She chose blue, and was pretty insistent from the first day I asked her what colour she wanted that it would be blue. Occasionally she would mention purple, but that was rare. I got some blue paint and some purple paint to try out in the room, and was doing the purple paint first and she said “No Mama! No purple. Blue room.” So, blue it was. I’m quite happy with the colours. There’s a little more that needs to be done in there, but it’s coming along. I want to either paint all the trim white, or replace the baseboards with white ones, but the white paint I have is oil-based which isn’t recommended for pregnancy. I have a good friend who’s offered to paint them as a Christmas present, but she’s really busy too so not sure if it will end up happening.

Meredith adores the room. She talks about it all the time and likes to go in and touch the walls. A couple of weeks ago she wanted to nurse in her bed and I wondered if she was going to fall asleep there. She didn’t, but I wonder what I would have done if she had. Likely brought her back into our bed with me. She still rarely sleeps through the night so I prefer her to be with me where it’s easy to just nurse or cuddle her back to sleep. Plus she still wakes up and looks for me, even if it’s just to wake up briefly to put her hand on me. If I’m not there she will wake up the whole way and call for me. I think I may start putting her down in her room for naps though if she seems interested.

Speaking of sleep, I’m pretty comfortable where we are at as far as night nursing. In the beginning of the pregnancy she always had to nurse back to sleep; sometimes it would take her 45 minutes or longer each time. I worried that with a newborn who would likely wake her up each time he/she woke up, both would want to be nursed back to sleep every single time. I really didn’t want to night wean her though. I opted to try for plain old honesty. When she is settling in for a long nursing session in the night and I am really tired or the nursing is uncomfortable or painful (which luckily for me hasn’t happened often), I will ask her to please keep it short this time and then we can cuddle instead. Most of the time, she’s quite happy to just have a quick nurse and then roll over and we’ll cuddle until she’s asleep. The times she nurses longer there’s almost always a reason, such as illness. Prior to pregnancy, she really had never fallen asleep on her own without nursing, now she does quite often. In fact there were a couple of nights where she didn’t ask to nurse at all, and just cuddled into me when she woke up. I think that was the few days my milk dried up and she wasn’t nursing much during the day either. Then my colostrum came in and she’s loving that lol. Back to nursing frequently during the day and usually at least two to three times overnight too.

Anyway, so much for this being a short update post. I do have more to post in the next little while, if I get a chance. I’m still reading lots of blogs. They’re in my RSS feed on my e-mail though and I haven’t commented much lately. But I’m really enjoying reading all the posts and seeing the Christmas baking and crafts being done, and hope to share some of our own holiday activities too.

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Things are still moving right along. I occasionally get mild heart burn, but other than that this has still been an extremely uneventful pregnancy. I’m not complaining at all lol. A few more weeks to the third trimester. We’ve pretty much decided on two girl’s names, though we won’t decide which one for sure until the baby’s born probably. Funnily, neither of them were on our list before I got pregnant this time. Boy’s names are once again harder. We have about ten on the “short” list still. That’s better than with Meredith’s pregnancy though, where we could barely get a short list at all that we were both happy with.

I guess I’m nesting. I’m still doing some major decluttering and reorganizing, especially upstairs though over the weekend we reorganized our living room too. It feels much more spacious the way we have it and Meredith’s toys don’t feel so cramped. Her room is starting to actually look fairly empty. I have the change table set up so I can start putting some baby stuff away on it. I need to sand and paint her bed and finish getting rid of the stuff that’s left, but compared to how it looked when I started it’s looking great. I’m not going to post any pictures until it’s done though, the before pictures will be too embarrassing without seeing that I really did get it done. I’m excited about it. We plan to use it as a space where Meredith can keep things she doesn’t want the baby to get into. She can nap/sleep there if she wants but I don’t plan to push her into that at all, I just want her to have the option because she’s such a light sleeper and I’ve read some kids actually prefer their own room with a cosleeping new baby. I may set our crib up there too and if this baby will actually sleep out of arms I have a feeling he/she may end up being put down more often for naps, so that I can spend some one-on-one time with Meredith and won’t have to be constantly asking her to keep her voice down. I haven’t decided about that though, as it would mean when the baby is sleeping she wouldn’t be able to go up there, and I also really loved having Meredith nap in the mei tei on us and didn’t find it too disruptive. But I didn’t have a two year old at the time either. I’m not really a fan of cribs though (we only have it because my mom bought it for us after I told her we didn’t want one), so more likely if baby goes down for naps it will be in our bed like Meredith does now.

I’ll end with a picture from Halloween. My talented friend Kyre made the shirt and it turned out perfectly. (Check out her site to see the gorgeous cake she recently made for a birthday party.) I got a lot of comments on it when we were trick-or-treating and I’m sad I only get to wear it once. Meredith was Nemo, which was perfect for her as she loves the colour orange and she adores fish (it’s her favorite part of the zoo when we go). She loved Halloween and still talks about the candy and balloon she got that day, even though she really doesn’t eat much candy besides Smarties. Kris and I ended up eating most of hers while she chose to eat healthy things like eggs, bananas, and avocadoes, even though we left the candy bucket out. She would open a bag, sometimes have one or two, and then give the rest of it to one of us. I think just the excitement of everything was really neat to her though.

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We had a busy Thanksgiving weekend here. My twin sisters came to visit from Calgary. One of them has only visited once, and it was four or five years ago. The other has never been out here. So it was really neat to see them. I really haven’t spent much time alone with them in a long time. When I moved away from home, they were only thirteen. They are twenty-one now. Even though intellectually I know that they’re older and more mature, they’re still my baby sisters. It was neat to see just how mature and, well, adult, they are. We had a ton of fun. Meredith called them Bob or Baba (Melissa) and Kaw-wee (Kayley). She can be a bit shy and quiet around people she doesn’t know well, but she adored them from about two minutes after they got here.

My sisters have a friend who was in town just for the weekend who is spending the semester in Bamfield. She brought someone with her from Bamfield, and one of their friends flew up from Calgary to visit her. Since they had no where to go for Thanksgiving dinner, we invited them over, along with a good friend of ours who moved out here with me eight years ago and has no family here. All in all, we had eight people for Thanksgiving. I’ve never really cooked for more than four or five. (I grew up in a family of six, but I made one mistake once while cooking for them and after that my mom decided I was a terrible cook and I never had to cook for the whole family again, besides helping out with stuff they were doing.)

I was a bit nervous, but did a lot of prep work Saturday and made what I could ahead of time. So Saturday I made stock, mushroom gravy, cranberry sauce, and cranberry relish. I also cut up what veggies I wasn’t worried about going brown overnight and prepped a few other dishes.

Sunday morning my sisters arrived, and they were a huge help in tidying, prepping, and cooking. Everything ended up working out really well and was timed almost perfectly. The turkey ended up being done early, but we just turned the oven down and continued basting it a lot and it was fine. I forgot about the buns while they were rising, so they rose a little too long but still tasted delicious. My two crockpots came in really handy.

In the end, we had buns, green salad, avocado and asparagus salad, garlic herb turkey, stuffing, ham, apple sauce, mushroom gravy, cranberry sauce, cranberry relish, broccoli and cauliflower in cheese sauce, scalloped potatoes, and yam and apple casserole. There weren’t as many left overs as I’d expected there might be. Most of the side dishes were gone that night or the next day for lunch. I actually had a lot of fun, and can definitely see myself doing something like that again in the future.

Unfortunately, though I got pictures of some of the prep and the centerpiece my sister put together out of stuff from my garden, I forgot to take pictures of us actually enjoying the food! Oh well, I did remember to get pictures of everyone afterwards.

For supper the next day, we mashed up the rest of the scalloped potatoes, made some glazed carrots, and used the rest of the stuffing, some turkey, cranberry sauce, and gravy to make a Thanksgiving shepherd’s pie. That was really delicious too and something we’ll keep in mind for next time too.

I’ll likely post some of these recipes in the next little while, as some were from a magazine borrowed from a friend, and others were found on the internet, and I want to be able to find them again later.

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She wanted to fill in all her own ballots.

Trying on hats

The male peacock opened his feathers as we walked by. We thought he was showing off to us until we realized there was a female behind us. Regardless, he was beautiful, and very tame. We could walk right up to him, though of course I was careful not to let Meredith too close to his head.

These yoyo balloons were the hit of the fair I think. They cost a toonie, and most kids we saw were wandering around with them. We didn't have any cash when we first saw them, but Meredith was intrigued. Kris told her we'd buy her one later. We had a toonie a little later, and she started shouting "Ball!" and waving her arms around like she was bouncing the yoyo balloon. She was so excited when she noticed Kris coming back with one!

Best toonie we've ever spent!

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I don’t know where I got the recipe from originally, but if you google the name it’s all over the internet. They’re also a really great cookie to make and give away with gifts. Enjoy!

English Toffee Shortbread

These cookies are crumbly with a nutty crunch and a hint of buttery toffee. Perfect to serve with tea.

• 1 cup flour
• 3 tablespoons cornstarch
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter
• 2 ounces (1/2 c.) almonds
• 2 ounces (1/2 c.) English toffee (I’ve used Skor bits too)
• sugar for cookie tops

Mix the flour, cornstarch, salt, and brown sugar in a food processor. Add the butter and mix until it resembles a fine meal. Add the almonds and toffee and process until finely ground. Roll out between 2 sheets of waxed paper to 1/4″ thick and cut into decorative shapes with cookie cutter or pastry roller.

Pour sugar on a plate, press cookies in the sugar on one side only. Bake cookies sugar-side up on baking sheet at 350 degrees for 18-20 minutes or until slightly browned. Makes 4 dozen cookies. Cool thoroughly before packaging.

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