Happy Birthday Paige!

Beautiful, fun, funny, caring, tiny little Paige celebrated her 4th birthday yesterday.

She got what she wanted..."Triceratops and Baby". Her favourite things are still dragons and dinosaurs.

To Paige's extreme surprise, we had hired Tinker Bell to come to the party through a company called Fantasy Fables. They have all the Princesses too. I think it's the same 1 or 2 people that do the characters. We had heard great things, and she definitely delivered. She sang songs, played games (Follow the leader, hot potato, Fairy freeze), read a story, gave them bracelets, and played with them for an hour. There were also photo ops at the end. She had a beautiful singing voice, and was "Disney quality" as Mike said.

Paige was super shocked and barely spoke or smiled at all. She really didn't know what to make of it all. She was having fun for sure, just really shy and very surprised. It was so great to have the hour of organized fun, then go straight into lunch, presents, and cupcakes outside.


After the party we let her wind down and play with some gifts while we packed for our Edmonton trip (leaving this morning). We ate an outdoor dinner of all-you-can-eat leftovers from the fridge, and then watched some of her new movie "Tangled".

Love you Paige! Happy Birthday!

Backyard before and after

Before:

After:

You may notice that the new sod is a bit patchy. It rained and rained in May and early June. Then, we got our backyard landscaped and the rain stopped. The grass looked a lot worse, but with frequent watering it is coming back slowly. A couple of other plants are also dry, and some have been found by bunnies, but everything should be ok over time.

Extra long cottage weekend

We spent 5 days at the cottage for an extended long weekend and *gasp* the weather was actually nice. We were outside every day kayaking, boating, swimming in decently warm water, eating yummy food, and getting bitten by mosquitos!

The drive up was horiffic, but we managed to pick up a pack of fireworks for the holiday on the way and stop to play at a playground outside the store. This added a small element of excitement to the otherwise brutal drive. Grandma and Grandpa were there for the first few days joining us for the Turcsanyi Fireworks Spectacular, and cooking a completely blackened turkey in the deepfryer (black on outside, juicy on inside--wish we had a picture).

And then Mary Jo, Robin and Evan came up, joining us for my birthday on the 4th. It was so nice to see everyone, wish we could have visited longer.

Rose's first boat ride:

They love wagon rides, but the bugs were so bad and annoying:


She was super dirty and needed to be stripped and chucked in the lake:
Mommy's birthday morning. Waffles and then presents.:
Pictures are a bit out of order...this is Paige catching fish off the dock on the first day.

Grandpa fishes alone with the Dora rod: I tried numerous times to take a photo for the Cottage Life Magazine contest. I tried to submit one last year, but was too late.
Paige's first tubing ride. It was a bit uncomfortable to hold Paige and look where we were going. My neck was going to snap off:

Daddy and Paige had a bit more fun as they were heavier and could go faster:

Paige and my Dad picked mini strawberries at the road. They were soooo sour like a sour candy, but juicy.

Rose can fully eat a corn on the cob with her massive amounts of teeth: