So I missed a day of blogging for the first time in a while! But with good reason… for the first time in a long time I had BOTH my Grewer cousins over for a meal and gaming. Cousin David (who lives in the city not too far from us) and his older brother (though still younger than me) Cousin Robert. I actually spent quite a bit of my childhood visiting with these two and was glad to get the chance to relive some of our favourite moments… and catch up on some of the family news. After all Cousin Robert lives near his mother (Aunty Becky) who is one of the two sisters and knows EVERYTHING about EVERYONE. We got in some lovely gossip, almost a whole game of Talisman (Cousin Robert had roller derby boot-camp in the morning and a bit of a curfew to get into his temporary domicile.) as well as a lovely meal. (This is the Reinsch side of the family)

Clockwise - Ted, Cousin Robert, Ken and Cousin David

I got in a few minutes to add that final picture on the Great Grammy Birthday page so that one is now put away.

Great Grammy's Birthday

With Saturday following Friday in the gusty and wet weather we made up for it by taking the whole family out for a bit of shopping and along the way collecting Ted to join us. Superstore to hunt for pool toys with no luck, and pick up the necessary photos so I can continue my quest to catch up Trinity’s scrapbook. Coupon in hand Ken and I ran into Michaels where we grabbed 3 1.50 craft kits (the wooden ones with markers) and some adhesive (only with a coupon it is so expensive!) and a piece of scrapbooking paper to use for one of the printed out sets of pictures.

Working on their colouring craft (Zander left)

Now I am aching to get out to Babies R Us and see if I can find some of the baby products on my “to buy” list since Superstore did not produce the prices or products I wanted. It is hard to be patient when I have had to wait so long to buy things for this newest addition.

I can finally post the picture of the cross stitch we did up for Cousin David today as well! This is based on a character that came into play with Cousin David’s character while the guys were playing D&D – Bitey the un-dead dragon! It was fun to recreate something out of their imagination!

Bitey!

Speaking of patterns and stitching – I managed to get started on the long awaited June wedding sampler. I can’t show much what I can show is…. brown… though there will be some red and some gold and some… stuff! I am really hoping I can get the picture in my mind transposed onto the ecru aida cloth. This is a wedding sampler I want to put a lot of heart into.

Only picture until AFTER it is received!

Early to bed for the kids tonight, the bad weather coupled with a “testing the limits phase” left ALL of us with a sour taste in our mouths. So tonight  I will take advantage of the relative quiet to get letters traced for colouring for our animal posters, some scrapbooking accomplished, stitching progressed and all around cleaning attempted. I am banking on tomorrow being a much more productive day as well as hopefully SUNNY and WARM!

Hooded sweaters are common around here right now Brrr

If I didn’t know better I would think Alberta had a monsoon season and we were right in the middle of it! That’s right – rain AGAIN today and quite a bit… so that put period to any outside enjoyment for the family and potentially any picnic action over the May long weekend. Everything is SOPPING WET!

Ken had a no miss deadline today that meant he worked through the night dealing with a particularly nasty bug. This meant no sleep, no finishing my pattern and no completing the editing on Ada’s maternity pictures BUT the bug is fixed. And tonight is date night so a nice, quiet evening together.

To make up for the inactivity and housebound nature of the day we bundled everyone up and headed to The Mall. Mainly for the ring-tailed lemur exhibit that has relatively recently replaced a flamingo exhibit. With no baby but FIVE ring-tailed lemurs and a sloth in plain view it is the best exhibit to visit for that particular primate. Added to the adventure was a rare (for us) visit to the gift shop and the purchase of our very own ring-tailed lemur toy! (4.99) My plan is to get some sort of little toy for EACH of the animals the boys cover this year at our local zoo and put them on a shelf to show how much we have accomplished in that area! So I need to hunt down a tiger (I am rather sure there is ONE in this house somewhere) and see if we have an elephant and zebra for next week.

Lemurs at the mall

Isn't he cute?

On our way to the wall we made a stop off at Dollarama to pick up some needed supplies – poster paper for our Elephant and Zebra posters, some hairbands for me (I am still toying with cutting my hair but it grows so quickly that it is financially something  I would have to debate), a book on dinosaurs for Emanuel (he is starting his own dinosaur binder and spotted the book himself!), bubble gum for the biggest of boys (Ken does love Bubblicious) and a package of scrapbook paper and stickers (for a dollar I am horrible at resisting a bit of stash enhancing). All for just over 5.00.

Some of the Dollarama haul

I got spoiled today (on top of the Extreme Pita for supper), Ken picked me up TWO new shirts for the summer. Old Navy has some decently marked tank tops (8.00) and a marked down item (2.99). Both maternity oddly enough and a great help to a very small summer wardrobe!

Shirts

So for a soggy day we made the best of our early evening. Tomorrow I plan on doing the schoolwork no one was motivated to start and maybe make a trip to Michaels to try and get in some craft idea hunting!

Gavin and Emanuel at the fountain

I don’t know what it was, the weather (rainy), the kids (loud and rowdy), my dreams (lousy), the prep work for school (pertinent pieces that were SUPPOSED to be done and waiting for me NOT) but it all culminated in a Lisa who was NOT in a good mood. So I grounded myself and for the first time since my first trimester headed back to bed not too long after waking up in the first place.

Last night Ken and I decided to take some more pregnancy pictures, this time using something from our own backyard! We have two apple trees in the backyard, the one in the centre of it is a lovely tree with apples that are absolutely PERFECT for applesauce. But crowding the garage there is another apple tree who blossoms equally as lovely, but seems to grow absolutely horrible apples. I tried picking them off the tree at different sizes and they simple are not good. So we clipped a couple branches full of blossoms last night and utilized THOSE for some maternity shots. In fact, in the past I have used the blossoms for pictures of Trinity back in 2008. I really wanted to do something other than the stand up against the wall and take pictures of your belly image.

Using the colour choice setting

With the rainy weather we made today a completion day and finished TWO of our lapbook series – the 5 Senses is officially complete…

Inside of 5 Senses

and now the lemur and tiger books. As promised here are all my lemur links, keeping in mind we kept these super simple on purpose of course! The info card, our cover page image, our calendar image (we combined it with the right month – the tiger to mark our zoo visit date!), the lemur anatomy, lemur printable info, the matchbook pdf we used for our lemur tail (to mimic the tiger teeth), lemur images one, two, three and four, lemur paper craft, and the scroll pdf we used to make a mini fact book.

Cover

Inside A

Inside B

Back cover

and inside a bit of the Siberian Tiger book

I got a bit of scrapbooking done last night – two pages (almost) last night, though I missed printing out the final picture for my Grammy’s birthday page so there is no picture yet. Of course now I am out of pictures so I had to order some more.

2nd Birthday page

So the rain slowed us down to a crawl and frayed tempers… this just means that TOMORROW will be better. At least the plan is to head to the dollar store to get some poster supplies for NEXT week’s visit to the zoo (elephant and zebra). A trip to the dollar store is ALWAYS a pick me up for this family! Gotta love a place where you can all get a new toy and not break the bank.