It’s birthday week – which means we’ve had a lot of cake and celebrating in the last several days!
Kevin arranged a surprise birthday dinner for me at a local restaurant, Liberty Tavern, in Powell. It was a Monday night and fortunately many of our friends and their kids were able to join us. We had a nice private room which worked perfectly for our crowd of 24. Growing up my mom made a birthday cake for me each year in the shape of a bunny. The last two years Kevin has sweetly carried on the tradition, as you saw above, and had a bunny cake made for me. Love him!Later in the week it was time to gear-up for Finn’s birthday party on Saturday. How can he already be 2?! Our theme this year was Monsters and we had many of our friends and family come to play for the afternoon. It was a lovely spring day and Finn had a ton of fun playing with his friends. He seemed to really like the monster cake I made for him and he was able to blow out the candle all by himself (after a couple tries!). Here are some photos of the fun. Many thanks to my dad, sister, and Kevin for taking photos during the party!
After returning from Canada we had a really calm week, as in we just hung around the house and had low-key evenings. The highlight of the week was on Sunday when I met up with several of my girlfriends from my college days at OU. We (and most of the kiddos, though not Chase) met at COSI for an afternoon of fun! I haven’t ever been to COSI (at least since I was a little kid) and I thought it was great. I actually wish we’d gotten a membership earlier in the winter so we could have headed there with Finn on the cold harsh days of winter. We will definitely be heading back as we probably only explored 1/4 of what there is to do there, if that. We had fun in the kiddie play area, the water zone where Finn and I sat inside a submarine, and several attempts at pulling up a bowling ball using a rope that when the ball fell it launched a tennis ball as high as the top of the ceiling. The kids thought it was great. And while none of us adults had much time to chat as we were all chasing our kids around it was lovely to see everyone if only for a short while!
Friday evening and most of Saturday I was at our Women’s retreat for church. Finn and daddy had a fun guys night in which included a pizza party! Check out Finn and his stringy cheese.
Birthday week (times two!) is up next, stay tuned!
Here are the chronicles from our trip to Ottawa! It was quick trip, up on Friday and back on Monday but we packed a lot of fun in that short time! We stayed at a hotel right in downtown Ottawa with the Bethune’s. It was a convenient location to walk and drive anywhere we wanted to go. Our first morning we ventured out and walked to Parliament Hill. It was a cold morning but the sun certainly made it better! After arriving we decided to go inside for the official tour. It was a fabulous 40 minute tour that included the House of Commons and the Senate rooms as well as many other areas inside the building. Here we are kicking off our trip with a silly selfie in the car.
We also spent some time visiting with Don and Di at their home which was a convenient 10 minutes from our hotel. The kids had a lovely time playing with some new toys given to them by Don and Di. Finn certainly loves his caterpillar scooper truck. We had a nice dinner at a Bistro – and each of the kids were given two mini-canisters of play-dough to have fun with during our visit! How fun, I haven’t ever experienced a restaurant giving anything other than crayons and paper! It certainly did the trick and the kiddos had a fun time with it. We were also fortunate to celebrate Don’s birthday with pizza and cake on our last night there! Another exciting adventure was skating on the Rideau Canal! The canal was a quick walk from our hotel, less than 10 minutes. Kevin and I were able to borrow Amy and Andy’s skates and we rented a fun sleigh for Finn to ride in. It was a chilly day, in the mid-twenties with not much sunlight. The canal is about 4 miles long, though we didn’t venture nearly that far! We skated around for awhile and decided to make it down to the 1 km mark. We skated for about an hour and fifteen minutes with a mini-break toward the end to enjoy our first ever beaver tail (think elephant ear). We went with the traditional cinnamon sugar and it was delish! Finn certainly loved it. I must say I was pretty proud of myself as it was my first time on skates and I was able to carry on taking photos while skating with my hot chocolate! Neither Kevin or myself fell, which was quite nice, and we both were able to skate at a pretty fast pace, especially when pushing the sleight. By the end Finn was super tired and took an hour nap in the car on our way to MEC, a large Canadian sporting store similar to REI in the US. We enjoyed a nice lunch and our first experience of Poutine, which are french fries, topped with gravy and cheese curds. It was quite delish!
We enjoyed a tasty caramel-apple crepe at the mall near our hotel too 🙂On our return trip we decided to make a stop at Niagara Falls. We had heard they were frozen so we figured we weren’t going to be much closer than we already were so why not check it out! The sun came out during our visit so we were able to catch a couple of cool photos of a rainbow! It was quite chilly and windy and the closer we got to the falls there was a mist in the air too. Captured a couple of faces that depict how we were feeling at times.
It’s birthday week – which means we’ve had a lot of cake and celebrating in the last several days!
Later in the week it was time to gear-up for Finn’s birthday party on Saturday. How can he already be 2?! Our theme this year was Monsters and we had many of our friends and family come to play for the afternoon. It was a lovely spring day and Finn had a ton of fun playing with his friends. He seemed to really like the monster cake I made for him and he was able to blow out the candle all by himself (after a couple tries!). Here are some photos of the fun. Many thanks to my dad, sister, and Kevin for taking photos during the party!
