Our Trip To Barcelona

Barcelona is unlike any place we have been before. It is a beautiful small seaside city. It was very easy to learn the city, mike and I quickly learned our way around and got most places on foot. Beautiful carving in stone decorate many of the buildings. Mike Landed in 26th place for top Sales representatives in 2012 and was awarded with this trip. It was an incredible trip not only because of the location but how well they treated us. The put us up in a super expensive hotel, showered us with expensive gifts daily. Hosted extravagant dinners and parties every night. They just fed us and fed us and fed us beautiful multi-course meals with entertainment. The Highlight of our trip was a Gaudi tour. Words can't really describe his amazing work so we will let the pictures do the talking:

 

I went on a tour of the gothic quarters while Mike was in a business meeting and then after I took him back there to show him some things. Here are some things that we saw:

 

 

The two columns are the remains of the city wall. The rounded top on the right is from the Romans and the flat top is from the 13th-14th century.

We also went on a tour an hour and a half outside of Barcelona, about 1/2 hour from the French border to a small town called Girona that had lots of well preserved buildings from the medieval times and earlier. 









And a few more photos of things we saw walking around the city by ourselves:



A New Family Pet

This is our third bird since we have been married. We almost got a different kind of pet (a bearded dragon) but again went back to birds. This is my seventh pet bird starting from when I was about 10 years old. I have so many good memories with my birds as a little girl. They were wonderful, affectionate and playful companions, we went everywhere together. Jada and Kayla are animal lovers too and I want them to have wonderful experiences with a pet too. Bird live a long time too so this bird is likely to see them into young adulthood. This bird lives up to 20 years, some larger parrots live up to 90 years!!

My favourite kind of bird that I ever owned was a cockatiel, I have never gone any bigger because bigger beaks intimidate me!!! I hand tamed all my birds myself (parakeets, cockatiels and a lovebird) and have some painful memories!!! Taming also takes a lot of patience. Taming any kind of bird is not something to attempt with very young children. We learned that with the first cockatiel we bought, and had to turn around and sell him shortly after.

We looked on Kijiji again and found one that was advertised as being really good with kids and fully tamed. Bonus! The kids just love him and he is very patient and tolerant with them. We named him Gandalf The White because of his very tall, long stature and wide stance and his white color. He can  Imitate kissing sounds, laughing and does a Wolfe call. We are working on teaching him the Andy Griffith tune and Kalhonaho. We have just started dancing lessons with him and look forward to teaching him many other fun tricks.

He has already bonded with our family. When we are gone a lot he acts really melancholy. Sometimes when we all leave the room and he can't see us he starts calling. One day when we came home from church we found him sitting by our family picture.

Here are some really cute short video's that we have of our three girls with their new pet bird:

 

 

 

 

 

Kayla turned 2 on Saturday! She wanted an ice cream birthday party so that is what we did. We just had a small party with family. The girls and I made a piñata  with paper mache but after drying 24 hour, it was still not even close to dry so we had the brilliant idea of drying it in the oven and......the balloon popped. Luckily my visiting teachers came over that day and one of them had lots of experience with making piñatas for her kids and she told me that a great in a pinch piñata was a cereal box taped closed. So the girls helped me fill a cereal box with candy and then we taped it closed covered it in tissue paper and the girls covered it in, I think, three packs of stickers. Then we put some craft ice cream cones on it, made a rope handle and it was done in under an hour!

We did the piñata in the morning before mike had to go to work. It was a really fun family activity.



 

 After mike got home from work Kayla blew out her candles and opened her presents. We forgot to get birthday candles, hence the tea lights, haha.

 I found these papers lying on the floor the other day with kayla's drawings all over it. How many capital B's can you find. I counted 6! I was totally surprised. We have been focusing on a letter of the alphabet each week, learning to write it and recognized words that start with that letter and anything eles fun and interesting that has to do with that letter. We cook food starting with that letter and learn about animals, bugs, things and places that start with that letter and jada keeps a list of all the words she learns about. This week the girls choose the letter B and I found this really cool tutorial on youtube that taught them how to write upper and lower case Bb and then showed them how to turn the letter B into a butterfly and a flower. Kayla was there with her paper and pencil too but I didn't expect her to have the dexterity in her hands yet for forming letters but I was wrong. I have been finding B's upper and lower case all over her drawings. I think it is so neat how she can do that.
Her speaking has been rapidly improving lately too! She is such a beautiful , bright, and sweet little girl and brings a lot of joy to our home. Happy Birthday Kayla!

now I know my abcs...

Jada has always loved books. Once she knows a story, she can 'read' it by looking at the pictures and telling you the basic story. So we decided to help her to learn to read all the words.

Chelsey has been working a lot with Jada (and Kayla is learning too!) to learn the ABC's, and the letter sounds. After about two or three weeks, Jada went from knowing ABC song to being able to recognize all the letters, the sounds that they make, and can even write some of them! We told her that when she could say all the letters and their sounds, we would take her for Ice Cream and the play place at McDonald's. We made this little sticker book with the alphabet, and we would quiz her a few times a day. Chelsey found lots of free online printable games that made it easier to help teach and learn the ABC's.
Now we are doing a lot of reinforcement of it, and Jada is also learning how to sound out some simple words. Before long, she will know sight words (such as: the, it, he, look, she, etc) and some family words ("At" family includes bat, cat, hat, mat...). She already is able to read one early reader book about a ballerina princess. It is exciting to help our family learn about the magic of books!

Beef... It's What I made for dinner

So we have had a couple sirloin tip roasts from Costco sitting in our freezer for a little while and its made me want to have roast beef. I was also wanting BBQ (why not in January - it was fairly nice weather here in Lethbridge). So I decided to BBQ one of the roasts (the other got thinly sliced to use in Chinese food another day). It turned out really well!

 

I used a rub of sea salt, black pepper, garlic powder, paprika and rosemary. Don't ask me how much of each, as I didn't measure. But go easy on the rosemary, as it has a strong flavour. I let that sit on the roast for a couple of hours as it warmed up to room temperature - everything I had read recommend that. I lightly browned each side on the grill, then using indirect heat (outside two burners on with the inside two burners off, roast over the off burners) and a mix of hickory and apple wood chips for smoke, I let it cook for a little over an hour for 2.25 lb roast. It cooked to between medium rare and medium, and it was nice and tender.  We caught some of the drippings and made a gravy and baked some potatoes in the oven. Jada and Kayla really only ate potatoes with a couple of pieces of meat. They kept asking for more potatoes.

Lessons learned from this:
- One side of my bbq gets a little warmer then the other, so I need to play around with that so it is a little more even.
- I'd cook it closer to 25 min/lb instead of 30.
- I'd definitely do this again!

Christmas

As promised, I'm doing our Christmas post. Only a week after Christmas, not too bad eh?
We had a lot of fun this Christmas. We spent time with both sides of the family - it's fairly easy to do when the two sides live only an hour apart. We spent most of the time with the Innes side, as my Sister Amy and her family were up, and we wanted our girls to have a chance to play with their cousins. So there ended up being 8 grandkids at my parents, with the oldest being 12. Only one grandson too! So our girls had a lot of fun with their cousins.

We spent part of Christmas eve with Chelsey's family. Ate their traditional meal of appetizers (the Parks really really like doing appetizer meals! Its a lot of fun as you get to eat a bunch of different things). When we first got there, Chelsey helped Jada and Kayla put out some "Reindeer Food" - Oatmeal and sugar and sparkles - in the snow. They were excited to leave some food for Rudolf and his friends.

We also opened up a present each. The girls got to open their present from Grandma. They got some small cloth diaper bags and homemade diapers and bibs for their baby dolls. They loved it.

After a short time with Chelsey's Family, we went off to Cardston. As I said, Amy was up, so we decided to go into to Cardston and sleep at my parents house so the girls could sleep with their Cousins. We left some cookies out for Santa, and finally got them in bed about 9ish. It was late for our girls and Amy's girls, but it was Christmas!

Claire, Jada and Jane

 

The next morning, my dad said that they all got up at 530am! Way to early! But they opened up their stockings, and played downstairs. We ate breakfast first, as we knew that once we started opening presents, our girls wouldn't want to do anything else.

 Jada helping pass out presents

 

Christmas morning fun

 

its a little bird

 

Looking at the new toys

 Alayna slept most of that time, so we had Jada and Kayla help open hers later. Everyone had a good time with Christmas. Jada because she went to bed late and got up way too early was out of sorts a bit. Every so oft she would start crying "I want to go home". After a few minutes, her cousins would say, "Jada come play' and happily she went to play again. She got some new colouring things, and had a great time talking and colouring with her cousins. I a new game - Munchkin (I've played before, and have some of the other sets, but never got the original till now) - and I surprised Chelsey with some new baking pans. Kayla's favorite present was a play shopping cart, that could fit her baby dolls in. In fact, once she had that, she didn't care about opening other presents for a little bit.
Chelsey and I had fun playing board games with Amy and Mike and catching up with everyone.

All in all, we had a good time. Can't wait till next year's Christmas when Alayna is more into it!