Fun With Family

Today is a couch day for our family. It is far too cold outside to be gallivanting. and I have a lot of neglected holiday tidying up to do. I should put the tree away, but then the gifts under it would need to be dealt with as well. I also need to make soup from the bones of my duck and ham bones... Later.

Gabriella is two months old. She has been trying to stand on hr own two feet for about a month and a half. Her balance has been getting better and better, and at times she manages to stand for a few seconds. I am so proud of my little girl. But she has lazy arms. He back is strong and during tummy time she bends it back for extended periods of time so that it looks like her arms are doing the work, but it is her back. So today I out her on her tummy on her play mat with a few bath toys. I amused she would fuss and end up whacking the toys across the mat. She did, and for a while I would catch them and put them back in front of her in the hopes that she would see the fun in the game. To my surprise she eventually lay contently on her tummy and did nothing. I thought she was asleep. After a while I checked to find that she was watching Star Wars with Daddy! It doesn't seem to matter what I do, this child LOVES television! Perhaps she knows she is not allowed to watch it and is exploring her inner rebel.

The holidays were great to us this year! My mother had a great time bonding with Gabriella. My Little girls did an awful lot of smiling over the Holidays and most of it was at "Grammy". We celebrated New Year's for the first time. It was so nice to get dolled up, eat good food and dance our shoes off! Getting home after 2am was a different story! I don't even know how late we woke up the next day. But January 2nd we woke up at an ungodly hour to take mom to see the Rocky Mountains. We drove to Jasper, down through Lake Louise and Banff to Calgary and back up to Edmonton.

Mom loved the excursion, but not even half way through the trip we ran into a snow storm that

blotted out the mountains entirely and stuck with us almost all the way home! The last two hours of the drive I drove through wind so strong and snow so heavy that the road was indistinguishable from the ditches and you could not see two meters ahead of the car! Thank God for the 18 wheeler that I was able to find and follow until we got toward the edge of the storm! Once the road could be seen again it was sobering to see the amount of vehicles lining the ditches along the way.


We wanted mom to see the West Edmonton mall before she left. We arrived home from the Mountain trip at 2:30am so we didn't take her until the afternoon. Going to the mall  was the perfect opportunity for me to use my new stroller again! While Doug was waiting for mom and me outside of a perfume store, another dad passed him with his child against his chest and a burp cloth over his shoulder. He saw Doug with Gabriella and a pink burp cloth and said, "the cape of fathers!".

Doug took mom to a bead store in the mall where she found a copper chain to hang the Amber pendant she bought me in Lake Louise. Now I have another beautiful piece of jewelry with history with my family.

Mom had a great visit with lots of pictures to take home to show her friends. We had a great time with her and look forward to seeing her again in the summer.