EQAO and More Sewing

This is a quick email as I am very excited.  Today I drove to Mount Brydges to try out a sewing machine and after weeks of dithering and driving Tom round the bend I have ordered one.  (Now I am clapping my hands together very fast in a camp manner but I can't help it).  I also visited a shop that had 3 whole rooms full of really, really lovely fabrics, I had to excercise a great deal of restraint to only buy 3 fat quarters.

This week Jacob is doing EQAO assessments.  This is like the Canadian version of SATs except that Jacob insists that it stands for Evil Questions About Ontario.  They last for two weeks and don't count towards anything later on in the kids schooling, I think they are mainly for league table purposes.  The school's attitude is quite different from my experience when Jacob did SATs in the UK, this is a paragraph from an information letter we received.

"EQAO assessment questions are directly based on the expectations set out in The Ontario Curriculum, which is what teachers teach in the classroom every day.  Therefore, your child does not need to prepare in any special way."

Needless to say, Jacob is enjoying being tested and if there is any sort of fun activity to celebrate being finished he will probably come home and say he'd rather be doing EQAO like he did at the end of SATs party when he was 6.  Honestly, if he didn't look so much like me I might suspect that he's a changeling.

Nature Walks etc

Today we went on a walk to Rock Glen to look at fossils and water falls.  Old readers may remember Jacob's rather scathing report of his class trip there last year.  The falls are about 10 feet tall so not quite Niagara but very pretty and the river bubbled along through a stony bed that invited you to take off your shoes and scramble about on the stones, it reminded me of a limestone Eskdale.  It would have been truly lovely had we been able to amble slowly along the banks taking in the scenery and listening to the birds but Rose decided that today was a running day so we had to boot camp it at high speed along the trails periodically bellowing 'Rose Wait' and scaring off any but the deafest/stupidest wildlife.

Wednesday was the last swimming lesson of this course.  Rose has to do a 5m distance swim and roll over from a front to back glide to complete the 'Salamander' section so she didn't get a badge but Jacob finally built up the endurance to do enough front crawl to get his stage 4 badge.  Hurray, it has taken a year to get there but he did it, well done J.

I didn't sew it there but it's tempting

Bicycle, Recycle or Recital?

Today was Rose's last dance class and families were invited to stay for a short recital, although in the run up it has been referred to by several names (see above).  Rose was magnificent, I shall not write much about it as she woke up at 5.30 am this morning, probably in order to have time to decide what to wear, so I am even more tired than usual.  Here are a few photos...

warm up solo

skipping while admiring yourself in the mirror is a useful skill

the final curtsey

Tom took a couple of movies so here they are.  A little free form warm up

Some skipping and stuff, and an argument about who's going first!

Jacob also had a big day, 2 of his friends came over and they built a den in the back yard.  It is quite elaborate with beds and sitting areas etc and some remarkably well constructed wattle walls that you can't see.

Weekend Break

We spent the weekend in Barrie again, just to double check that we might want to live there.  I have taken lots of photos so please be patient.

As usual we visited lots of playgrounds, I never saw these crazy excavators in the UK, the kids find them really frustrating as they require strength and coordination and are quite hard.  We are pretty much in the city centre here, in the background you can see Kempenfelt Bay, an inlet of Lake Simcoe on which Barrie sits.  Also some of you may notice that Jacob and Rose's new clothes arrived on Friday, just in time for our trip.

Sorry Gary, didn't mean to behead you

We went for a walk on part of the Trans-Canadian Trail where I saw Trilliums in the wild for the first time.  It was fabulously lush in the woods and we saw a garter snake and what looked like relatively fresh bear poo, Tom says this proves that 'bears don't' in the woods, they do it on trails but he is very rude.

Trillium is the provincial flower of Ontario

The highlight of our trip was a visit to the Simcoe County Museum.  We rode a penny farthing, saw lots of large, old vehicles and put the kids in a prison cell that formerly sat on a railway station for conveniently depositing felons while waiting to change trains.  They should consider one in Lancaster.

Don't they look good behind bars

While we were there we also accidentally gate crashed the opening of an exhibition about the War of 1812.  During some rather boring speeches Rose chose to sit next to a very nice lady in a pink dress and engage her in intense conversation about hair clips and sandals.  It turned out that she was the Mayor and later she jokingly (I think) invited Rose to cut the opening ribbon with her.

It was all filmed for local TV but I'm sad to say that my children were not deemed photogenic enough and we were not on the news broadcast.  Or perhaps our English accents reminded them that we didn't show up in time in 1812 and the Canadian peoples had to see off America without our help.  Oh well, Rose got to do some shmoozing, we all got in for free and there was cake, what more can you want from a trip to the museum.  Finally, here are the kids being 19th century Canadian soldiers.

Barbie, Quilting, Hair and Chris Hadfield

I'm not sure where to start today, I guess chronological order would be most sensible.  This morning I got bored of all the quilting projects I have on the go and made Barbie a new dress, she has shed her leggings for summer and I can't cope with the amount of leg and plastic under-crackers on show.

After lunch I went for my machine quilting lesson.  I covered one of my place-mats in quilted waves and it is now ready for binding.  I had a lot of fun and am going to start looking for my own machine so that I can really get into it.

The final photo covers 2 topics.  Jacob had a much needed hair cut and Rose was leader of the day at Kindergarten.  I don't think that you will be able to read it properly but on her leader's poster underneath 'It is a cloudy and rainy day' it says 'Chris Hadfield is back on Earth safe and sound'.  It is nice that they are studying space exploration so young and I'm glad she got to be leader on such an auspicious occasion.

A Week Away

Fancy that, no blogging all week.  This lapse is partly because the kids were in school all week so nothing much to report or photograph, but mostly due to Rose induced fatigue, she's either been up in the night or up and ready to go at 6am for about the last 4 months and I'm starting to flag.  Once a bad sleeper always a bad sleeper I suppose, it's playing havoc with my skin.

There were one or two highlights to the week.  Rose and I went shoe shopping, here are her new acquisitions (mine are, wait for it, grey).

The weather was glorious for the first half of the week so more summer clothes were also purchased.  Jacob got some too but his are currently screwed up in a heap of dirty socks and pants on his bedroom floor so no photos I'm afraid.

Now it feels like -1 but is supposed to be back up to 23 by Wednesday, I really can't get used to all these crazy extremes.

Also I knocked up a mini project and booked my machine quilting lesson for next Tuesday.  I made beach scene place-mats, yes I know that's odd but I needed something small made out of scraps.   I fear that no matter how lovely I make them, in no time at all they will be spattered in ketchup and spaghetti sauce and the serenity of the scene will be lost giving way to imaginary shark attacks and other gory beach tales at dinner time.  Never mind.  I'll blog them when they're fully finished.

Arts and Sports

What a busy weekend we have had.  On Saturday I managed to leave the kids and Tom with Gary while I popped off to a quilt studio that was open as part of the Grand Bend Open Arts weekend.  I spent half an hour looking at fabric creations and organizing a machine quilting lesson for myself next week and when I got back Rose had learnt to ride a bike without training wheels/stabilizers.  Here she is, she was practically stunt riding by the time she'd been out for half an hour.

On Sunday we went to some galleries in the centre of Grand Bend.  Jacob decorated a chalk board door.

And they both participated in the 'I wish I could...' public art (which should be on line but I can't find) and Rose and I both got new earrings from Betty Jo at Sunset Arts Gallery.  Then we visited Fran Roelands's exhibition because I really love the purple barn.

Today Rose spent hours filling the watering can with the hose then watering the lawn and pretending to be a gas station attendant.

And I tried to take a picture of the turtles in the Old Ausable River.

Hello May

Spring seemed to drag it's heels a bit this year but now it's made it's mind up it really seems to be going for it.  On Sunday we went to feed the rabbits at Westland Greenhouses and it was cool enough for coats, the rabbits didn't have appropriate clothing and didn't want to come out, not even to see Rose the bunny so I will no doubt be going there with her again soon.

We had a tour of the whole 3 acre facility and even Jacob was impressed.  They have a computerized watering system which mixes in the correct level of fertilizer, windows that open and shut on on a sensor system and the roof is white washed and then cleaned once a year with a helicopter.  Here are the kids in one of the public greenhouses, they had the doors through to the wholesale area open at the back,  I don't know if you can really tell but it was huge.

Anyway, I digress, today it is about 20 degrees and I'm thinking about suntan lotion and going on to the Capri phase of trouser reduction for this year (prior to long shorts, then short shorts).  The kids are fully into shorts mode and have both gone from woolly hat to sun hat with no gap in between.

Jacob didn't want his summer outfit photographed