Ashe Road Trip 2011

My sister and her family came to visit us spontaneously this month. Leigh had one month left of maternity leave and Kev didn't have any work in April since the election was called and he works on Parliament Hill, so they decided to hop in their car and drive out to Calgary - from Ottawa - with 2 kids under 3 - woohoo! We had the best time and made so many memories. It will forever be known as the Ashe Road Trip 2011. I will let the slew of pictures tell their own story! Grandma and Grandpa Chilvers outiftted all the kids for Easter!

Many of the pictures to follow were taken at the zoo, which we went to twice since it was so fun.

I absolutely loved hosting my whole family at my house - I've never had the chance to do that yet since we live so far away.

More pressies from Grandma and Grandpa

I love my sister!

McD's lunch!

Everyone together. xxoo

I have so many more things to post but I never seem to find the time to upload all the pictures I want to so I am trying to be better at updating. Much of my free time in the evenings this week is devoted to all the specials on the royals though - I am so excited for Friday's wedding!!!

Skirts!

Elizabeth modeling her new skirt - made by Mom. The pictures are kind of terrible again, we need to stop taking every picture on Morgan's iphone.....

Last fall I decided to learn some sewing. I really wanted to make Elizabeth some original summer skirts and dresses. I bought a nice second hand sewing machine and decided to show up to sewing class that was offered at church. I unfortunately was only able to attend the fisrt two lessons since the rest of the fall Morgan always seemed to work on sewing night. I was still able to learn how to make a basic little girl's skirt and I've been having so much fun making them. I already have a couple of orders to make some for my friend's little girls!

As much as I don't really enjoy these post-Christmas winter months, it really does seem to consistantly be the time of year that I get the most done, creatively. So for that reason, I can appreciate this hybernation time!

Here is Elizabeth modeling her new skirts. The BEST part about sewing for a little girl is how excited she gets when you make her a new skirt.

A small sample of my work!:

This one makes me laugh - it was her idea to put on dress-up glasses and try to look serious.

Our Month of December

Most families are usually pretty busy over the month of December, and ours was no exception. It is hands down my favorite time of year and we usually try to hit every traditional Christmas event. Warning: picture overload coming up. Here is a little of what the Kyle's have been up to: Elizabeth was a star in our church nativity play. She was pretty excited to hold that star up. She definately likes the stage already... First successful Santa visit. Elizabeth loved this and told him how she really wished for slippers for Christmas. I may have planted the idea that she wanted slippers in her head, since I had already bought them. I love how she still has no idea that she could have tried asking for something WAY cooler.

Some of these aren't in chronological order. Here the kids are showing off what they got from Great Grandma Chilvers. A new winter coat and boots for Elizabeth, and new big boy bed sheets and summer leather sandals for Mason.

This is also out of order, and also a terrible picture since we seem to take too many on Morg's phone. Morg came home on boxing day from work for a stop-in, so we had a small second Christmas morning where the kids openend gifts from Grandma and Grandpa Chilvers and Uncle Kev and Auntie Leigh.

This was on or around December 1st or so. We went with our neighbors to go see the festival of lights in our city. We thought it was a warm night to go but we all still froze. The best part was the warm shelter where the kids lined up a couple times to decorate cookies. Mason is going straight for the sugar.

We had a Christmas Party at our house on December 4th with some good friends to kick off the Christmas season. The food table was amazing - and our bellies hurt from too much eating and laughing.

Then it was time for Linda and Sam to get hitched. We spent a late night setting up the reception room. I remember feeling a little overtired though by the end of the night, and a few of us were finding everything a little too funny.

Here is the beautiful bride and handsom groom. Here they are posing with almost all of the nieces and nefews, minus little Harper. How does 11 kids feel you guys?

After Linda and Sam were secretly on their way to Hawaii, we decided to try our hand at curling.

The kids loved having turns launching the huge rock down the ice.

I think Mason took one step on the ice and wiped out so he really prefered to stay on the carpeted sidewalk and sweep there.

We spent an afternoon just playing in the church gym. The boys mostly played baksetball and the girls enjoyed performing made up skits on the stage.

On Chritmas Eve we went to the church to use one of the larger meeting rooms as the stage for our family nativity play. The kids love getting their roles and acting them out. Elizabeth was the star again so she knew what to do there, but she also got a second role as angel with Brooklyn, and was in her element. Later that evening we had traditional homemade pizza and celebrated Lorna's birthday as well.

Christmas morning came and went too quickly!

This is our second Christmas morning on boxing day when we returned to our house.

Here we are in Salt Lake City for the rest of our holidays, starting the 28th of December to the 4th of January. We spent the first two whole days shopping. Morgan snapped this picture and said this must be my biggest dream. I was surrounded by Christmas wreaths that were all on clearance.

This was our first experience at In-and-Out-Burger. It was delicious!

Then Linda's New Year's Eve Reception in Salt Lake City was another party. The kids busted their moves until the wee hours of the morning. We weren't sure how long we'de stay and just use the kids moods as our guide, but they danced all night long. It sure made some great memories for us.

This is us at midnight. There were sparklers and poppers everywhere.

The next day was a beautiful brunch and gift opening at the Yamamoto residence.

Second cate cutting.

Then we visited the Bee? Bean? Been? Bees? seriously I still don't know the real name of the Museum but it was full of stuffed animals and was really fun for the kids. This was one of the coolest navity scenes - baby Jesus surrounded by kangaroos, zebras and penguins etc.

Katie assumed her usual museum position.

I think this was December 27th, a Flames game. Shea and Carson drove up to our place to see a game and stay the night. They however didn't have tickets and after driving up here and an afternoon of no luck finding tickets anywhere online, they decided to go find some scalpers outside the arena. You can usually get nosebleed section tickets for really cheap, but instead they wound up paying over $102.00 each for their tickets. I was expecting him to pay $20 for a ticket. And the worst part was that WAS the nosebleed section. So it took me overnight to get over this when he came home and told me how much he had spent. Morgan assured me it was well worth it. Of course if anyone deserves to go to sporting event it's Morgan, and so in the end I'm glad they went and had a great time! Good thing he knew the police officer guarding the lowest level section and he let them slip by and find some empty seats right by the net.

Here we are back in Utah at a Jazz game. These seats were acutually IN the nosebleed section.

The game was really exciting and we knew the kids would love all the loud sounds and lights. Mason's favorite part of the night was clapping after each basket, no matter what team scored. There was much more to our trip, including a tour of the firehall, a strep throat outbreak among various family members (was better than the vomitting outbreak of Christmas 2009), and our frist experience at Chuckarama buffet. We truly had a BLAST partying our way of 2010.