Year in Review - Christmas Letter

Hello everyone,

Time has come to start preparing for the holidays, which are almost upon us.

Last year, we had a nice start to the holidays by having our friends Rod and Josée over for dinner and Christmas carols played by Rod on the guitar. My girlfriend Donna came from Toronto to visit her mom and spent a day with us before heading to the Eastern Townships to spend the holidays.

We had dinner on Christmas Eve with my mom and saw the Santa who goes around Greenfield Park every year. Christmas morning was filled with the usual madness and we went for dinner at Mark’s brother Randy’s house. My sister in law Marie Claude puts on quite a feast.

Christmas was great, but the New Year had a bad start for us. The kids had been looking forward to the Christmas holidays with a passion. Unfortunately right after Christmas was done, illness struck and Ariel came down with strep throat. We had decided to drive out to the farm at Cap St Jacques. Ariel seemed a little tired and by the time we got home she was burning a fever of 102. We fought the fever off and on for a few days, but on New Year’s Eve, I rang in the New Year driving on the Champlain Bridge on my way to the Children’s Hospital. Thank goodness Mark gave me a 10-hour Scooby Doo DVD for Christmas. It sure came in handy for those long days resting on the sofa, especially when the boys started getting sick as well.

My friend Donna came back and we did manage to get out of the house and see the Montreal Science Centre. It was a very fun day, especially playing the 3D game of trying to avoid being eaten by a shark!

My camera got broken right after Christmas. As you may imagine, this was a little hard for me. Luckily it happened after Christmas so I was able to get all my shots of the kids opening their gifts.

Once the kids got back in school, I was set to have a minor surgery. I had been tested for strep bacteria when the kids were sick and the results had come back negative, so I decided to go ahead with the procedure. BIG MISTAKE since I ended up getting a serious infection after the surgery and was back in the hospital for a week. Mark took the week off and stayed with the boys, who by then were sick and on medication. He ran the house amazingly while I was in hospital and many of our family and friends prepared meals for him and the kids so he didn’t have to worry about that aspect of being a house husband.

Well we survived all that, but I must confess that the balance of January is a bit of a blur and with out my camera I have no photographic evidence to help jar my memory.
February was quiet as usual and more so after the month we’d had before. Mark and the kids built a snow fort on the island across the road from our house and did lots of sliding down the hill.

In March, the kids get a week off for March break. We were supposed to spend part of the week in Kingston as witnesses in a court case for an accident we had seen the year before. However, the accused pleaded guilty and we were not needed in the end. So we ended up renovating our living room. Mark and his dad put down a new floating floor. Then since we had the room empty, we decided to paint. The colour changed from blue to brown, yellow and orange, to match our sofa. We moved the sofa to the other side of the room and created a little play corner for the kids. I love the change and it is much easier to keep the toys under control.

By Easter, the lack of a camera was giving me high levels of stress. We had debated whether we should fix the old camera, but it had had a bad fall and the internal mechanism was broken so it really wasn’t worth fixing. We talked of going digital, but I, being addicted to my SLR lenses and the control they give, really hated the idea of going to a camera where I would lose control of composing the shot. I did some research and found that Nikon had a digital SLR camera, which would use my lenses from my old Nikon. So I bought my Nikon D70 (6.1 mega pixel for those who care about such things). It is a pretty cool camera.

We do our egg hunt on the Saturday morning to keep Sunday for the real reason we celebrate Easter. The chocolate the kids get goes into a fondue pot for some yummy dessert. Mark’s brother Neil and his family plus Mom and Dad Thompson came over for an Easter dinner.

April, spring is drawing near. My aunt Cathryn came for a visit from Toronto and we enjoyed having her staying with us for a few days. We caught up on some socialising and spent some time with friends Julie and Claude and Susan and Scott. On a sad note, our pastor announced at church that he had his family were moving to another church in Ontario after being with us for almost nine years. It was a bittersweet time since we wish them well for their future, but at the same time we miss them terribly. I was very involved in helping with the farewell evening which took place while Mark was on a business trip to Washington DC. In April, we also went sugaring off and ate lots and lots and lots.

In May, my MomTime group went on a retreat to a lovely cottage in Sutton, Quebec. Lots of fun, with just enough of a break from the kids. I had the chance to play with my new camera and shot some lovely pictures of the resident horses. We opened up the tent trailer to start getting ready for the coming season of camping!!! Mr. Jarad turns two and we had a birthday party with some of his friends from church and MomTime group.

In June we have Daddy’s birthday. I bought him an outdoor fireplace, which he got quite a bit of use from this year. Once the weather gets warmer, the usual trips to the frog hunting spot begin again. Ariel and Morgan both signed up to play soccer this summer. Morgan had fun, but Ariel really got into the game and is a fierce defensive player. Ariel’s kindergarten class took a field trip to St. Bruno to spend the day with a park naturalist and capture creatures from the pond. I was lucky enough to go along and it was a great day. Morgan bid farewell to pre-school with a year-end concert and party. We also bid farewell to another season of Sunday school at church with the annual picnic at St. Bruno Park.

June was a busy month! We started our camping season with a weekend at Holiday Travel Park with our friends Jack, Joann and JF from church. They loved the place and we had a wonderful weekend showing them all our favourite haunts. Once school was all done, Mark started his vacation. But we didn’t hit the road right away. More renovations in store as we switched Jarad into Morgan’s room and prepared a room for Ariel all to herself. She got to choose the colours (Tickle Me Pink) and wallpaper (Horses, much to everyone’s great shock).

July finally arrived and after enjoying the local Canada Day parade and festivities it is time to go away. Our first week we spent with our friends Julie and Claude and their children at a campground called Lac Simon in the Outais region here in Quebec. Beautiful well preserved lake. Highlights of the trip were: lazy days on the beach, swimming, swimming, swimming, campfires with friends every night, mad racoons trying to steal peanuts from the storage bin (the biggest racoon actually pulled the bin out from under the trailer kitchen tent and up the road), Mark staying up all night to photograph mad racoons, and renting a pontoon boat to tour the lake (and jump into the lake and swim); and getting Claude’s car out of the mud, after it got stuck when he took if off road along a quad trail.

We came home long enough to do some laundry, re-pack and then we were off again for a week in Stowe, Vermont. We camped at a place called Gold Brook campground, which had a brook running right behind the trailer (you can imagine my family caught many of the local salamanders and minnows). The campground had an in-ground pool, so basically our days were spent getting up, going on an adventure, coming back for a swim, maybe another adventure then campfire and bed. Highlights of the trip: picnics by the brook, ghost hunting at Emily’s bridge, swimming in the water hole when no ghosts turned up, biking the 5 mile recreational path with Ariel (she biked the whole way twice, once with me and once with Mark. Morgan, whose legs are littler would bike with the other parent started from the other end of the path and we would meet up somewhere in the middle.), walking in the Wiessner woods, swimming in the water hole at the top of the Moss Glen falls (not near the falls themselves, but in the brook that leads to the falls), giant (and I mean GIANT) moths at the campfire, scrambling in caves and over giant boulders in Smugglers notch, the hike to Bingham Falls and the many amazing swimming holes along the way and finally the trip to the Cider Mill.

Home from our lovely trip to Stowe, Mark was back to work and the kids and went to the park, swam at the neighbours’ pool and got ready for Morgan’s 5th birthday party. It was held on a hot day and the kids were able to splash in our wading pool and have water balloon fights. Ariel and I were lucky enough to get to go see Cavalia; a show put on by the Cirque du Soleil. It is a show using horses in many of the acts and I do not think Ariel breathed at all during the first part of the show. It was amazing. Mark’s boss gave him some tickets to the FINA diving competition held in Montreal this year and he and Morgan went to that together for a special treat.

August arrived and Mark is back on vacation. We headed west this time to Seeley’s Bay just north of Kingston, Ontario to visit with Mark’s great uncle Russ. We camped near their cottage at a place called Cranberry Lake, which had a fun beach to swim at. It was lovely seeing Russ, Muriel and the family since it had been a while since we had been to visit. Highlights of the trip: seeing family, rides on the golf cart with Uncle Russ, fishing, pontoon boats rides, fishing, swimming, taking a haunted walk with Ariel in Kingston, fishing, trip to the chocolate factory in Smiths Falls, eating Russel’s pickles, finally catching the giant 3’ rat snake, did I mention fishing, and dinner with Caroline and her family. Really the best part of the whole week was just spending time with Russ and Muriel.

Home again and daddy still has some time off so we spend a day at La Ronde (the local amusement park). Ariel and Morgan are tall enough for most of the big rides now, except for the roller coasters. Jarad got his first real taste of rides. He liked things that stayed on the ground much better than things that went up in the air, but after a while he started asking to “Do it again” on the high flying rides. We had a really fun day. We also spent a day at Parc Safari, which is a park where you can drive through and feed the animals. We have been before and took 15 pounds of carrots and 4 pounds of peanuts to give to the creatures we encountered. After the drive through, we walked through the deer forest to feed the deer our peanuts then had a swim in the magic creek. The big kids and I took a tube ride while Mark took photographs. Jarad really loved the pool with the big fountain and shower like sprinkler you could run through. Another great day.

Summer is drawing to a close now, but Mark and the kids still managed to get in some fishing and frogging time, plus a bike ride along the Lachine Canal. One weekend we went to the Eco Museum with Julie and her kids to see the animals there.

School starts right at the end of August and Morgan heads off to kindergarten and Ariel goes into grade 1. Both like their teachers and have been enjoying the year. It is a bit strange to be home with just Jarad, but I am sure he enjoys the one on one time.

With September comes Labour Day weekend and we went camping again with our friends Rose and Brian and son Michael, back to our tried and true campground Holiday Travel Park. Weather was nice, but starting to get colder at night. On our way home from the US, we stopped at a place called L'arche des Papillions. Basically a greenhouse were butterflies from around the world are loose for all to see. Jarad in particular would get very excited seeing the butterflies go by.

Mark took a dinner cruise with his office, which he enjoyed very much. Friends Paul and Isabelle and their kids joined us one night for a picnic supper on St Helen’s Island. The Governing Board at school started up again in September and I found myself elected chair for this year. It had been interesting to get to know the inner workings of the school system. My MomTime group started up again as well and this year I have taken on the role of co-ordinator, so my time is well occupied.

The last weekend of September, we snuck off for a last camping trip of the season. Back to Holiday Travel Park again. We had a wonderful weekend. We have been hiking down there for years and usually take the same trail each time, but this time we decided to explore some of the other trails and have a really great hike which lasted almost 3 hours. Morgan, a future member of the polar bear club, actually took a swim in the freezing waters of Lake Champlain. Once we got home, Mark emptied out the garage and parked the tent trailer in there for the winter.

At the start of school, Ariel joined the Sparks program, run by Girl Guides Canada. In October they had an outing to the Walk for a Cure. She had a great time climbing the rock wall. I was thrilled to find my wedding rings, which had gone missing earlier in the year. Thanksgiving weekend we went to Neil and Karen’s for a lovely supper and chance to see some of the family. The kids had a pedagogical day towards the end of October so we decided to go to the Great Pumpkin Ball at the Montreal Botanical Gardens. Every year people decorate pumpkins and put them on display. Some people are very creative and it is always fun to see what ideas they come up with. We used our tickets to go back again during the evening to see the Chinese lantern display that was amazing.

Ariel’s birthday is in November, but this year she wanted a Halloween party so we held it just before Halloween. She is a big 7-year-old girl now. She had a fun party with our house all decorated for the spooky event.

In November, we took a drive up to Rawdon, Quebec to visit our nephew Kenny and see his new house. Nice place he and his Fiancée Natalie bought. They are getting married next July. During our visit, we discovered that Kenny’s cat had kittens a couple of months before. The kittens were ready to leave their mom and Ariel fell head over heels with a little grey and white male. So “Kitty” made his way into our lives. Now we have 3 kids, 3 cats, 1 dog and who knows how many creatures living out in the pond.

Ariel’s Sparks group marched in the Remembrance Day parade on November 11th. My birthday is also in November and we celebrated by going out for a nice supper at a favourite restaurant in Old Montreal. Afterwards we visited the Oligvy’s window and the giant decorated tree at Place Montreal Trust.

Now in December instead of putting up the tree and doing the things NORMAL people do to get ready to celebrate the holiday’s, we are renovating again. Our waterbed mattress broke and Mark and I decided that it was time to invest in a new bedroom set. It has been madness around here trying to get a room emptied, painted and new flooring put down in a 5-day time span, but Mark’s Dad helped a lot on the floor and mouldings and we managed to get it done. The job is pretty much finished up now, so we plan to get the tree up, presents wrapped, cookies baked and settle in for a long winters nap (yeah, right!!)

Happy Christmas to all. Remember Jesus is the reason for the season!

Love,

Sherri, Mark, Ariel, Morgan & Jarad

Email: SherriNMark@juno.com