Some autum colours and Highland games

Photos of Heather's 7th Birthday

This year Heather had her Birthday at the Banff Springs Bowling Centre. There was disco music  and disco lights to entertain them while they waited for their turn, trophies, pizza and cake.Not clean up required !!
Then it was home for a bar-b-que with some special friends.

Fairy Houses

When we go camping Heather has a tradition that she builds a fairy house every trip we go on. Her and Finlay collect supplies from the surrounding forest and set to work building the little house and developing it over a few days. They enjoy leaving gifts and drawings, food and often bugs and caterpillars that Finlay finds as pets but don't survive, so he leaves them with the fairies and elves. Surprisingly they seem to get  good, encouraging response from the local forest fairies who often leave them little notes tied in grass!!! Honestly I don't know who has more fun!!!

This particular camping trip, Finlay found a caterpillar, which must have been on its last legs! Anyway he looked after it for the evening, but it became evident that it was not surviving, so he put it in the fairy house, pulled his camping chair up beside it and then sat and talked to it. The fairies then took it away to fairy land!!

There was also an emergency one morning. Finlay had put a blueberry in the house for the fairies after breakfast. On the way back from the washroom,Heather and I were met by Finlay running through the woods shouting that there was and emergency and that a Whiskey Jack had swooped in and stole the berry!!!

Their fairy houses have been healing places for rescued dragonflies, resting places for dead creatures and places for their imagination and creativity to run wild.

Updating

So with now having two children in school, one would think that a mother would have more time to organize the home, be on top of the washing, cleaning, shopping, cooking, blogging and have time for some recreation. But it seems that for some reason, my day full of catching up with chores remaining at the end of everyday. Blogging has been neglected and I find that I am not capturing and remembering those fleeting special moments that are forgotten unless they have been written down. Perhaps it is because the kids are in school from 8.30-3pm 5 days a week for Heather and 4 days a week for Finlay, with home work and activities we live for the short weekends to capture family time. So I am attempting to get back on track and find some inspiration to talk about the simple day to day things that crop up.

I will just start by posting some pictures of our tail end of summer and fall.

SAND POINT  IDAHO CAMPING TRIP

A few family fishin' shots