Jude's first beach day! As you can see, he had his beach bod in very good form. What with all his sand eating and water drinking, he's done an excellent job prepping his immune system. Sitting on the beach is tiring, but don't be fooled by his cat nap - it only lasted 20 min. max. 

We love to spend at least one or two days every summer at nearby Greenwater Lake Provincial Park. It is true to its name - the water is greenish and weedy - but the beach and the shallow water are sandy and weed-free. When the weather hits a minimum of 25 degrees - Dan's rules - we pack the van to near capacity with kids, food, toys, and all the many things we seem to think we need for a day trip. We bring copious amounts of iced tea and chips and bum around eating, building sand castles, and floating. After hours in the sun, we realize no one has been drinking enough water and we all probably have heat stroke. Then we rinse all the sand and greenish stuff off, pack up, and enjoy a blissfully silent 1 hr ride home as the kids fall into exhausted sleep. Classic beach day. 

August Photo Dump

We are enjoying a thoroughly lovely summer. For the first time since owning our home, we didn't have a huge project to take on, grad school courses ongoing, or a new baby. The result has been a much more relaxed, easy-going summer. We feel spoiled, actually, to be able to do what we want whether it's small, fun projects, trips, or visiting with friends. 

Truth be told, we are ready to hit the grind of "real" life. Life that involves putting money in the bank and returning to more of a routine of school and work. But we feel really refreshed and joyful. 

But a little peak at some things that kept us busy and on the road during August...

Our now-Annual Park Picnic. We started a few years ago taking a picnic to a local park. Dan wrote a tour Tisdale blog post as a result of it. Well, we've been going back every year since. It's a tradition, of course.

We took a couple trips to Greenwater Lake this summer. Our favourite was a last-minute invite and decision to meet up with the Humboldt Millettes on the long weekend. We were the last ones on the beach that beautiful evening and our 8 kids took water guns and gunned down all the sand castles all along the beach. It was a touch scary as they took so much joy in destroying the hard work of everyone else. Haha!

Mid-August brought us to Regina. And a super cool stop at a WWII air training site. 

Our garden has been producing abundantly and we can't be happier. The carrots are so sweet and the zucchinis are huge and plentiful. We can't wait to dig into the potatoes.

It bears mentioning that one of our kids in particular has really been growing up the past few weeks. Miss Emilie now sports a signature pony-tail on top of her head and walks everywhere. One evening after supper around mid-August, she suddenly took off walking from the kitchen table all the way to the sink. We were stunned. Up until that point, she would tentatively, teasingly take 6-8 steps, but preferred crawling. But from then on, it was walk, walk, walk. She now gets pretty upset when we force her to sit in the stroller for walks.

Emilie's other new favourite pastime is reading books. She has finally hit the age where she loves to just sit and read. A few of our favourites have had repairs made to flaps or now have new bite marks... but that's the price you pay to instill good reading habits. You might just pick up on a theme here in her love for books (or one in particular!). 

August brought a number of visitors our way. A long-overdue trip from my brother Jim (the sole remaining family member to visit our home) and his Saskatchewan! girlfriend, Nicole. As always, we had to figure out what to do in small-town Tisdale with company, especially as Jim is on crutches currently. We kept them busy with reading books...

Backyard bonfire and picnicking...

A tour of Tisdale and a short little hike...

And mini-golfing, where the kids had more fun crawling through tunnels than hitting balls...

Jim and Nicole's visit also overlapped with my cousin Katie stopping by for a couple days. Katie was moving back to the east-coast U.S. from California and decided to make it a giant Canadian road-trip visiting all our family. The kids loved going to the pool two days in a row and having another adult to read them books.

And when we thought we were done with trips for the summer, Dan discovered early this week that he wouldn't be able to be at school due to power outages, so we took a very impromptu two day trip to Saskatoon. We have been so grateful to Dan's parents who have let us walk in and out of their new apartment in Saskatoon, just as we please. We caught up with Dan's siblings, Stephen and Lynda, staying there and did some fun little outings and a bit of shopping.

A beautiful evening walk in a new-to-us section of the river...

Hanging out with cousins, seeing who could run the fastest...

One stop was the Western Development Museum. The museum is a reconstruction of Main St. Saskatoon in 1910. So many cool things to see... we will definitely be going back. Unfortunately, in our hurried departure from home we forgot the "real" camera, but it's obvious to see how much fun we had.

We returned from Saskatoon to more overnight visitors from Ontario. Friends Joe and Paul Platt stopped by on route to Flin Flon for a wedding. It was the third time this summer and the second to our home that we saw Joe this summer. Joseph was pretty impressed that now Daddy got to see his friend so often.

We have one more weekend of fun planned for this upcoming weekend in Nipawin with some golf for the guys, a trip to the new pool, and enjoying life on Grandpa and Grandma's acreage. Maybe, if you're lucky, we might post a few of those pictures...

July Photo Dump

We've been enjoying a mostly hot and sunny July. And some fun to go with it.

This is our first summer since buying our house that we (read: Dan) haven't tackled a huge reno. It's been a bit freeing. And so nice not to have major areas of our living space unusable.

We still don't have all the pictures from our Ontario trip, yet, but here's some fun we've been up to since then.

Lots of pool fun, in our backyard and at the outdoor pool in town. The kids are really taking to the water this summer. Joseph is swimming up to 5 metres, John Paul dunks his head, and Emilie squeals in delight.

We spent two days in Nipawin last week. Tended our garden, had a great hotdog roast, and homemade ice cream from Grandpa Millette (FYI, it's way better than DQ). Grandpa and Grandma also took us to the Nipawin parade and fair.

Our favourite part of the parade: a team of eight horses.

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the fair, but the boys went on rides and we watched chuckwagon races and a display by that beautiful 8-horse team above. The boys were so inspired by the horses, that they ran alongside the fence as all the teams were warming up causing the loud-speaker announcer to compliment Joseph on his speed for everyone to hear. We returned home and they continued to pretend they were chuckwagons racing around our house for the next few days.

Back at home, we pretend we live on an acreage. We dig, plant, cut lumber, and generally make our yard a mess every day.

With our beautiful weather, we took a day trip to the lake last week. We bring stuff for a picnic hotdog roast and plenty of food to snack all day long.

It was Emilie's best day ever. No exaggeration. She was in her heavenly glory surrounded by wet sand and water. She never made it into her bathing suit, but she was much better off protected by her shorts and shirt from the sand.

In expert fashion, Dan erected a beautiful sand castle, complete with turrets, a moat, etc.

And Emilie flattened it...

With a bit of help from John Paul... and proudly sat atop her mud mountain.

We did wash her a bit, don't worry.

Unfortunately, we never made it to the lake last summer, so this was our first time trying out a tube we bought at the end of the season two years ago. It was a hit. All in all, a fabulous day.

   

Beach Bums

Pretty sweet view, don't you think?

As a young kid, the allure of sitting on a beach blanket or chair for hours on end -- sun-tanning or even napping, leisurely reading a novel, gazing out at the beautiful water -- was never my thing. I didn't understand the allure of the beach bum life at all. Me, I had to be moving and changing activities all the time: a few minutes sitting, take a swim, play some pickle (a tag-type beach game), pick some berries, discover standing stones way out from shore, build a castle. 

But never just sit there, like my boring older cousins and all the adults. 

The extent of our beach life growing up included spending days every summer on a beautiful little beach just a short walk from my cousins' house in New Hampshire or during out week at the lake Madonna House's Cana Colony family camp was situated on outside Combermere, ON. Both are gorgeous little lakes with, thankfully, lots to keep kids busy. As I got older, I would always take on a distance swim to test my strengths: swim with Dad around to the beach around a large peninsula from my cousins' small beach; swim to The Rock at Cana where we could jump from the cliffs of the Canadian Shield jutting out from the water. The life that included a sandy bathing-suit bottom was a good life.

Fast forward ten to fifteen years (!) and I'm taking my own two kids to the beach. We have spent two glorious days hanging out at a little lake, Greenwater by name (and true to its name), about an hour's drive from our house. It is a provincial park and the camping/cabin/day-trip destination for the Tisdale resident. 

Our first day there, part of our 24 hr (I'm not even joking!) camping trip found Dan and I slightly bored, wondering how people did this every day, all summer. Time stood still. But our second trip, which we just came back from this evening, found us enjoying ourselves immensely. Perfect weather, sand-castles, a fire-roasting picnic lunch and loads of snacks... it was glorious!

And for the first time, I understood the allure of just sitting on the beach, doing nothing.

Maybe it was nothing more than a little parental sleep-deprivation I needed to appreciate such a life. The joy of having no responsibilities, nothing to do, except make sure my kids don't drown and throw them a snack every 10 min. because they're starving. On the other hand, it's a joy to relax while watching my own kids play in the sun. 

Joseph was happy to sit on his floaty for pretty well our entire beach time on our first trip, bobbing around and watching the motor boats. This second trip, we made a sand-castles surrounding a "lake" with a stream out to sea, we buried Joseph up to his chin (at his request), we watched John Paul fully dunk himself trying to wash his hands (then laughed and saved his life!), and returned sand toys he stole from other beachers. I also took a couple of very small (like, 75m small) swim strength tests that proved it's been (quite) a few years since my lifeguard days. Once again, I discovered that the life that includes a sandy bathing-suit bottom (and hair and swim diaper and towels and blankets) is a good life. 

I have no funny quips or words of wisdom to conclude this revere of a blog, just sand to rinse out of my washing-machine and clean towels to pull from the dyer. And, of course, beach bums to wash in the tub.