2013
2013 has been a year of many unique and exciting adventures for our family. We enjoyed wintering in PEI, which was complete with our fair share of snow storms. They are particularly exciting if it means school or church is cancelled. Cancelling Gems or Cadets (programs that Ella and Peter attend) makes them not nearly as exciting.
In February, Willem asked if I would consider moving to California for 2.5 months and then in April we did. Which to some of you would seem like very short notice, but really if you knew Willem and his brothers, 2 months is actually quite generous. : )
Really, what could be better then going from snow storms to eating Saturday pancakes outside, just after you finished swimming? While Willem was busy working, the kids and I occupied ourselves with getting to know Willem's relatives, "trying" to homeschool, swimming and unfortunately shopping. I like to term this time as the year of the eternal summer holidays. Instead of trying to figure out how to get groceries with 4 kids in July, this year I got to start doing it in April. It was very exciting :p We did really enjoy shopping at Trader Joes. They have stuffed animals hidden around the store, so the kids would race around like wild animals trying to find them while I casually tried to pretend they weren't mine. Somehow they always came back to me. Ella also got to take horse riding lessons while we were there, which was quite exciting for her. Horse lessons had to begin early though, as in 7am due to the extreme heat. Which was interesting too. We are not used to being that hot. : )
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| Some of the fun People we met in Bakersfield It was really nice to connect with some of Willem's relatives in Bakersfield. It helped it to not feel so lonely. That being said, we did all really miss our friends back home, especially towards to the end of our time in Bakersfield. One nice thing about living on the west coast for a while, was that it was substantially closer to our BC relatives. We enjoyed a few visitors while we were there, which was really fun. My parents came to visit us in June with my aunt and Uncle and they left us their camper and truck. We were able to drive to BC and see and experience some really neat things. |
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| We do not have anything like this in PEI. We were all amazed. |
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| Unfortunately this helicopter could only take 3 people up for a ride, so maybe don't mention this picture to Jack. It's a bit of a contentious area. The 3 who went for the ride had an awesome time checking out the Oregon coast line. |
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| Oregon sand is almost a black colour. It was fun to play in and soak up the warmth of it, mostly we enjoyed playing in the sand because the water was way too cold to go swimming in. |
Eventually we made it to BC. Where we were able to see all of our cousins, even Max and Lily, who came from Georgia (on their way back to PEI). We enjoyed hanging out at my parent's cottage and had a lot of fun trying to get a picture of all the grandkids together, but when there are 10 children under the age of 5 and a couple bigger apes thrown in, it gets a little hard.
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| can't you just see the happiness on everyone's face? We did manage to get a couple of really nice pictures of the kids themselves: |
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| Mr. Charming himself, Jack age 5 |
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| Miss I might share my life story with you, you just never know, Ella age 8
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| Miss I can do it myself, thank you very much Mieke age 2 |
Jack and his cousin Sam on their first day of Kindergarten. Please don't look to closely at Jack's outfit. I wasn't home to help pick it out and Willem is colour blind. Poor kid.
Jack got to finish out the year with one final adventure. He and Willem, along with Rit and Sam and Phillip drove trucks down to Georgia in November. They hung out for a few days picking fields to plant potatoes in in January and then all flew to Edmonton the following week for a day and then finally flew home. There were many hot dogs consumed, so I've been told and many hours of Ipad playing on the drive down.
All in all we have enjoyed this year filled with adventure and feel blessed to be able to have these opportunities. We pray your New Year is filled with many wonderful blessing.
Willem, Angela, Peter, Ella, Jack and Mieke
