Christmas 2018

Love those traditions

It's tricky finding care for your kids over the whole holidays. I'm lucky, I get a week off, whereas Helen only gets a few days off. This year the way the dates worked out, I was able to take the kids to the Island while Helen was working in Vancouver and she joined us Christmas eve. The kids have fond memories of the playground near my parents house, even if it's so cold that they can't hold onto the metal.

They really wanted a visit, but it turned out to be short trip to Playgound.

We knew we were going up Island for Boxing day and the kids wanted to contribute to the big party. My mom had the idea of making cookies and letting the kids help cut out shapes and decorate them. This cookie dough is a bit tricky (it's the butter/sugar combination) so you don't want to rework the dough too many times. The kids did a good job with the cutters and getting their shapes onto pans.

Of course, when you ask a kid to decorate a cookie, they are mostly going to maximize the toppings they can fit on. We had to ask Nara to clean up the tray so that the sugar didn't burn around the cookies and spoil the taste.

The cookies turned out really well!

In the last few years, I've been poking around the west coast of Vancouver Island past Sooke. There is a lot of wild beaches and trails out here and I quite enjoy a little trip out of the city. In July 2016, My Dad and I drove out to China Beach to see the Milky Way. In December 2016, Helen and I walked to Sombrio Beach. In November of 2018, Helen and I hiked out to Mystic Beach. I did some research - I found there is a publicly available lighthouse at Sheringham Point so that is where we started our day!

Claira Running To Sheringham Point Lighthouse

Sheringham Point Lighthouse Grandma And Kids

Sometimes it's hard to get a sense of a beach from google maps. Fishboat Bay is a "municipal" beach at the end of a small road. Google maps suggested it was good for kids, but I didn't take into account the high tide. Unfortunately, in a high tide there is almost no beach at all!

The kids wanted to throw some rocks at the water so we drove down to the much larger China Beach Provincial Park.

There was a wind storm a few days ago and the waves were still coming in pretty rough. The kids wanted to do the usual run in when the waves retreat and then run back up the beach when the waves crash.

In hindsight, this isn't the beach to chase waves at. The water drops off quickly and the waves crash hard - if the kids got caught out, they could quite easily get swept away. My bad. We went back to the car and got snacks and drove back to Victoria.

One year the kids got fancy dresses for Christmas and imediatly put them on. Fancy dresses is now a tradition - we bring over dresses to wear when opening gifts.

I have a tough time taking photos of people opening gifts. In the afternoon we celebrate my Dad's birthday who happens to have been born on Christmas day.

We then traveled up Island to Comox for a Boxing Day party. My aunt kindly hosts a party every year and relatives from near and far gather for dinner, drinks and family. Most years I take photos of the kids but this year someone decided to ask for formal portraits so we did some of those too. The adults are a little hard to convince to come up, but they are generally easy to take nice photos of.

Kids are trickier. My usual strategy is to "spray and pray" - take lots of photos and try to assemble a good photo out of good parts later. This is hard if the kids move a lot because you can't combine two parts of two photos if people change position a lot.