Christmas is coming...

I LOVE the Christmas holidays! I love the sights and sounds and smells of Christmas. I love the magic of Christmas. I love just sitting by the Christmas tree in the evenings, all lit up and the fire a glow. I love all the time we spend together as a family. I don't like the cold white stuff much but the Christmas season I love! We don't have a lot of family traditions but the ones we have are important to us.

Every year daddy makes sausage rolls from scratch just like he and his dad used to do. Below Sierra helps daddy for the first time in 2008.

We love decorating our tree together. Here's some of our past trees full of many homemade and store bought ornaments but all of them have a special meaning.

Aayla helping in 2009

2009 tree all decorated

2010 tree all decorated

Everyone helping to decorate our 2010 tree

Me adding one of my favourite store bought
ornaments...I just LOVE this fairy dog :)
 I have a large one in my craft room too!
2011

Our 2011 Tree...some branches are heavy
with multiple ornaments as the girls love
to add numerous ornaments to each branch

We always make gingerbread houses. Sierra and Aayla are so excited about our house from 2010

We buy or make at least one new tree decoration every year (in all honesty we usually end up with 3 or 4 every year). Here are some of my favourite ornaments from past years. I love unwrapping each ornament as we get ready to hang them.

Notice a theme? A lot of red, a lot of Santas, and mainly handmade ornaments.

This year we started a new tradition called "the Elf on the Shelf" and we LOVE our Elfie :)

To learn about the Elf on the Shelf click HERE


Here are a couple pictures of the mischief our Elfie has been getting into

Swinging on the chandelier

Caught watching a movie

Built a pop mountain/tree and gave the
girls invitations to the north pole BC

We are having fun with this new tradition! I love his vintage feel and the book he came with is really a sweet story. It is so magical to watch the girls search for Elfie every morning and to see them talking to him throughout the day, telling him stories :)

What traditions do you have each Christmas? Are you in an RV this Christmas? How will you celebrate? decorate? I'm curious as this is our last Christmas in a typical "house" and next year we will be on the road and I would love to hear about some of your RV Christmas plans.

A weekend in Seattle

Mom and I took the girls to Seattle for a weekend get away which turned into a kids weekend :)

We visited the Seattle Children's Museum.

 Playing in this little taco restaurant was Aaylas favourite thing to do. Making smoothies just like daddy does.

 Walking through leaves my girls can't help but pick them up by the handfuls.

And the Woodland Park Zoo which we got in for FREE with our membership to the Carlsbad Living Desert Zoo and Gardens we purchased on our trip this summer.

 This elephant was so much fun to watch. He kept throwing the dirt up on his back, then rolling in it and then throwing it again.

 We bought bird food feeders for $2 each to feed the birds.

All in all we had a great girls weekend away...now home we go to continue with organizing and selling things in preparation for hitting the road again in the spring.

Oh and I bought this book (find it here)

at a thrift store for $2.99. Looks like it's full of lots of great info for travelling this Spring.

Lest We Forget

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

- John McCrae May 1915

To see how we made our own poppies this year click HERE

Fall Fun at home in BC

Back home to reality and the selling off of stuff continues...I do hope to have my living room back for Christmas.

The rain has arrived and the evenings are cooling off so painting has slowed to a minimum...everything is basically painted except for the gutters and eaves troughs. We are looking into a couple quotes to replace them...if not they might not get painted until the spring as we have almost finished the front but the other 3 sides are still blue! The door will have to be painted too but should we do it a yellow or a red???

We have managed to get out and enjoy our beautiful province a bit...

We went to Richmond Nature Park and was thrilled to find these amazing Muscaria Mushrooms. I have searched for them every fall for years and have never been lucky enough to find them. This week I scored and knocked them off my wishlist of things I want to photograph someday!

We also went to the pumpkin patch and collected some pumpkins.

Yesterday we enjoyed a wonderful roast dinner here with family as Ian's mom arrived from Toronto this week for a visit and today of course we celebrated Halloween!

Hoping you all had a safe and Happy Halloween!!!

Happy Birthday Aayla and Happy Thanksgiving to all

Happy Birthday sweet Aayla!!!

We celebrated yesterday with a tea party with family and friends.

House painting is coming a long slowly but surely (the blue trim will disappear and become a dark brown, as will the gutters)

but now we are going to be taking a bit of a break. Today we will have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with family and then Ian and I are heading to Jamaica for a week of rest and relaxation all by ourselves!

So Happy Thanksgiving everyone and we'll be back in a week or so :)

House Prep...AKA getting it ready to sell

Welcome wishes going out to The Solla-Mates of Happily Hitched: An RV Blog. Thanks for joining us as we begin this next journey :)

In order to sell our home in the new year we not only are selling off all our "stuff" left over from daycare and from the store we closed last fall, but we are finally painting our house which we have wanted to paint since we bought it in 2007. We have always hated the colours. (It's funny how when you decide to sell your home you find the motivation to deal with the issues you haven't liked about it for others to enjoy instead of you yourselves!)

While away this summer both of our neighbours painted their houses so we called to get quotes to paint ours. One company wanted close to $5000.00 and the other wanted $7800.00!!!

We decided to try our hand at painting it ourselves so now with our own time and energy and $1200.00 worth of paint and painting supplies we have begun!

In between our West Coast rain showers we have been pressure washing 4 years or more of dust and dirt off of that horrible grey and blue paint which makes the colours stand out even more!

And masking off windows and eaves and beginning the painting process.

We are gradually working our way around the house in one LoooOOOoooog slow process but little bit by little bit the house is being transformed. We have most of the main colour done, just trim and eaves troughs to do.

So we have put sunshine on order but the 5 day forcast looks like this :

Short Term ForecastUpdated: Fri, Sep 30, 2011, 21:00 PDT

	Friday OvernightOvernight: 12:00 AM - 5:59 AM	Saturday MorningMorning: 6:00 AM - 11:59 AM	Saturday AfternoonAfternoon: 12:00 PM - 5:59 PM	Saturday EveningEvening: 6:00 PM - 11:59 PM	Saturday OvernightOvernight: 12:00 AM - 5:59 AM
	Mainly cloudy	Cloudy	Cloudy with showers	Light rain	Cloudy with showers
Temp.	11°C	11°C	15°C	12°C	11°C
Wind	calm	SE 5km/h	SE 5km/h	SE 5km/h	SE 10km/h
Relative Humidity	88%	87%	88%	94%	94%
P.O.P.	30%	30%	40%	70%	40%
Rain	-	-	less than 1mm	1-3mm	close to 1mm

So it doesn't look like much painting is going to get done any time too soon :(

what have we been up to?

It is hard to believe that we have been home for almost 3 weeks now and this is the first I have sat down to update the blog!

Arriving at home after traveling for over 4 months and over 29,000km's was bitter sweet. The last days before arriving I was not excited at all. Our maiden voyage was coming to an end :(  Boo hoo I just wanted to cry!

However our trip this summer has solidified a couple things for us.

1. Our dream to build an Earthship... is destined to be more then a dream. You can read my post HERE about our time we spent in Taos at the Earthship community. We have been dreaming of building an Earthship for a couple of years but after spending time in an actual Earthship during our trip we now know for positively sure that we WILL build one. We just have to finalize if it will be built in BC or Ontario.

2. Our desire to travel...is not over. We spent just over 4 months on the road and LOVED it so much we decided before even returning home that we couldn't go back to life as we know it. We want to travel more and see more of what this world has to offer. So few of us are able to live our dreams when we are young; I feel so very fortunate that our business and hardwork creating them enables us to live our dreams now.

Building an Earthship also helps our travel goals as once built we will be able to travel in the winters and afford to leave a "home" behind while living on the road for 6 months of the year. Our Earthship home will take care of it'self and we won't have all those hydro and gas bills anymore to worry about and get the best of both worlds :)


Yes it is good to return home to something solid but home is really where you "make" it and our trailer while travelling was our home while on the road and we can't wait to live in it more permanently. We learned to adapt to living in a 35 foot trailer and didn't miss our 3600 sq ft house at all. After returning home and getting back into the swing of "normal" living there was a brief moment of "oh do I really want to sell our home?" but that lasted all of 1 day.

So now the selling begins...and in my living room which once looked like this

Our living room a couple years ago when we were considering selling
and then decided not to so the picture shows mls in corner :)

Now is full of all my supplies and equipment left over from one of our centres we closed a couple years ago and all my theme boxes I have been collecting and adding to for the last 22 years in the childcare field and looks more like this

And this doesn't even show everything...our foyer is full too!

SooOOooo as you can see I have been busy this past few weeks since we've returned home and have neglected this blog. I do plan on writing posts here to keep semi up to date on how the sale of all our stuff is going, how fixing up the house to sell is going, our decision where we want to buy land for the Earthship, then of course it will continue on with life in our RV for the next 3 or so years as we gradually build our Earthship, and then as we travel in our RV every winter after our Earthship is built...so as you can see we have a few loose ends to take care of before our next journey but we hope you stick around for the ride!