Seeing The Fingerprints

Sunshine, sun tans, yummy food, fresh fruit, growing veggies, boating, fireworks, beach days, relaxing, dreaming.  *sigh* can't summertime last forever?  I always suggest to my dear husband that we should really move to Hawaii one day.  Than we could have summer year round.  I guess you wouldn't appreciate it as much, but it sure would be fun heading to the beach regularly, boogie boarding, snorkeling and maybe actually learning to surf.  Yes, its a dream of mine that probably would never come true, but if we ever did move there you would come visit no? Anyways on to blessings....... Thanks to a dear friend who got me such a good deal on strawberries. don't they just look plump and delicious???  We put most of them in our freezer, ate a few and made the rest into jam.  My precious oldest daughter more than eager to help out with this project.  Who wouldn't have fun when they are 3 smashing berries, stirring in sugar and pectin wearing the apron...

To Who do these adorable little feet belong too? Nothing beats that newborn freshness and beauty of a miracle. Welcome to the world Little B or not so little as he was a good 10lbs and 55cm. Born on July 23 Well not only to adore his charming little toes but how about his cute little button nose. (Oh and the rest of his handsome little face). For some reason the little guy was extremely calm with his "big" cousin. She was so proud to hold him. Now he wasn't so impressed at first with this cousin........but he warmed up to her and eventually relaxed and they both had a good visit :) Looking forward to many more cuddles with the gaffer.  Congrats Q + J!

She's such a beautiful little niece, but is extremely camera shy!  She wasn't impressed when I attempted to move her.  And if she was sleeping in her mom's arms as soon as she was put down would promptly be awake anyways.  I guess it was a good challenge and hopefully I'll one day learn a few better tricks with what to do.  Just because I'm a mom doesn't mean I always know what to do!

Nothing gets better than riding on the motorbike in the nice summer heat watching the sunset by the lake. Thanks P for loaning us your bike for a date night and Mom and Dad for watching the girls while we got to enjoy a nice ride to Harrison.  We pretty much had the whole beach to ourselves and drove the bike right up to the beach edge.  Later we drove back into town and sat and had some Gelato.  I do have to confess it wasn't at all as good as Italy, but I'm not sure if it was a atmosphere thing or if the Gelato just really wasn't as good.

Its been 1 month since we've returned from our Italy/London journey.  An appropriate day to finish blogging about it. Sorry about not rotating this......might do it later. This is in front of........you guess correct if you said Buckingham Palace.  Of course the Queen wasn't there, but the guards were. Do you also see J with her beautiful new umbrella.  The first thing we did when we landed in London was put on pants, dig out our coats and headed on the train.  Once we got off the train we purchased 2 cute umbrella's to keep ourselves as dry as possible.  What a contrast from the 32 degree Celsius weather we were just experiencing. This was a beautiful path we walked along to get to Hyde Park. Once again we didn't think we had enough walking since the beginning of our journey.  So we walked from one side of London to the other.  Not sure how many km's that was.........but at the end of it I was pretty exhausted and insisted we take the metro bac...

Doesn't this just look pleasant?  I know its summer now here in BC but in June when we were here we knew the rain was pouring down back at home.  This is a private beach on Lido.  We  read that you could probably get away with sitting on these private beaches without being disturbed.  Well within 5 minutes of sitting on this beautiful beach we were told to go or rent a chair/hut.  These come at a pretty penny so we opted out to find the "public" beach. This is the beach we ended up on.......no cleaned out sand here! D and I are headed to the private beach to swim in the water in hopes that not as much garbage is in the Mediterranean Sea.  Well there was a lot less garbage, but swimming with chocolate wrappers and who knows what else.......good things the water felt good against the heat otherwise I wouldn't have been in their. I love taking photo's of the places we've been.  Just a traditional type picture for me. After spending time on the ...

It's Monday morning......and well lets just say the motivation to get things done around the house are at a  low.  Typical for a Monday morning around here.  So I thought well I could be a "little" productive and work on this blog.  It's Day 7 of our trip and we are still in Venice.  Here are some photo's. If you live in Venice you of course do not own a garage.....well maybe one for your boat, but not the greatest for a garage sale as everything would be...well...wet!  So this is how they do "garage" sales in Venice.  In their little Campo's (Square).  I would've thought it'd be kind of neat to go check it out, but we just kept on walking. Here is our apartment from the outside in Venice. You can see J and I on the third floor looking out.  The first 4 windows from the left until Julia was the size of it.  Not bad huh! On day 7 we ventured into the St. Marks Basillica.  Technically photo's weren't allowed inside, but he...

Can you believe that I'm back blogging again another day of our trip.  I guess this summer sunshine gets the girls up and me going and finish my chores early in the am leaving me with time to blog :)  Plus I just want to get this done now. So what happened in Venice?  After a good night sleep in our big bed and big apartment D and I set out to find some breakfast as we had only dried mangoes on site.  J said we could go for breakfast just the 2 of us, but we decided we didn't really want her to starve.  And nothing was really open around us expect for the little market (corner store) and bakery.  Well when a pregnant women smells baked goods.......watch out.  We got some really yummy treats for breakfast.  The interesting thing was how the weighed some of our food to get the cost.  I guess the heavier your bun is the more you pay.  We came back to a happy J as well who was glad we brought over some food. Later that day we were to hea...

So the sunshine here in BC is just making me drag my feet to finish any blogging right now, but I thought I better get this done before its September and I won't remember a whole lot else.  I also am trying to sneak in some time while the kids are playing outdoors for a little while and not interrupting me. So our final Day in Rome had arrived.  J and I decided we better go and see the famous Pantheon yet before we leave and never return.  Even if we threw a coin in the Trevi Fountain, I don't think I really want my wish of coming back to Rome one day to be true.  There are so many more adventures in the world and this is now off the checklist :)  NOT that I didn't enjoy my journey over........just one of those things. So yes, we made it to the Pantheon, a building that used to be to worship all Roman gods.  Today it has been converted into a Roman Catholic church.  It was too bad half of it was under scaffolding, but what can ya do?  And so w...

Well J and I started our day before noon this time.  We were determined to get going.  We had our first attempt at taking the bus by ourselves.  Now this may seem simpler than it is.......we first took the metro to the place where we needed to get onto Bus 271 (or something).  We managed to find the right intersection for the metro.......but now to find the bus stop we needed.  Well we walked around the intersection and up this road and that road etc.  We finally found one street with the bus # on the sign.  Well it had this huge Italian warning on it, but we can't read Italian so we sort of ignored it.  When the first bus that should've stopped at the stop didn't stop, we thought the signed must've meant this spot was closed.  So we walked up the street to the next stop.  We than are reading the sign trying to figure out if were gonna go the right way, which we weren't thankfully we found this out by running into an American couple who ...