Christmas 2013

Victoria and the Comox Valley

Victoria

The plan was simple - on Monday head over to Victoria, celibate Christmas on Wednesday, head up to Comox on Thursday and back to Vancouver on Saturday. Turns out when you ship Christmas gifts and they say "5 to 10 days", they mean 10 days in the best of circumstances when it isn't busy. We left Vancouver late because I had to go to work to pick up two pages that were delivered days late (and glad they didn't arrive after Christmas). Our Ferry Karma must be on high because we just barely made it onto the 3pm sailing and arrived to dinner on Monday.

Thankfully we had all our Christmas shopping done so Tuesday we decided to go visit Goldstream provincial park for a walk around.

Christmas with young kids is something special. Their expectations aren't yet set so everything is full of surprise.

Nara at least knew what was going on - she knew to unwrap things, and she knew the stuff was for her. As a household, we prefer a number of reasonable sized gifts rather than a single showy gift so there are lots of unwrapping to do. For the kids it's tough though - they open something they are interested in, they want to play with it right then - delaying gratification and going onto unwrapping the next gift doesn't come naturally.

The kids got some toys they were happy with, and then we went upstairs for breakfast. Both kids had a nap and then we made pizza for my dad's birthday. In the evening, we went downstairs and opened more gifts. It seemed to work out.

Boxing day we headed up Island to visit family in the Comox valley. My uncle was kindly hosting Boxing Day dinner which is quite an ask for a crowd this size.

One of my friends says that childcare gets easier with more children - as the number of children rises, the ammount of time they spend entertaining each other increases. It's an interesting theory.

My mother got the kids playing ring around the rosie. Most of the kids are the same age so it worked out well.

Lexi And The Boys Doing Ring Around The Rosie

It's nice to see the pairing of people that don't see each other that much during the year.

The next day we went up to Mount Washington to play in the snow a little. Mount Washington is having a terrible year - they had only 30cm of snow on boxing day - usually one of the busiest days of the year. While there wasn't much snow, there was enough for some fun.

On Saturday it was time to go back to Vancouver and see the other half of the family. We had time for one last visit to the great grandparents and then we were on our way.