Wickett Christmas Party

Due to being away, Lynne and Ian had their annual Christmas party when they returned from Calgary.

Lantern Ski

It was another lovely lantern ski.  This year we had the Karns out (the Hyndmans were still on their way).  The newly expanded chalet was awesome for having a hot beverage out of the cold.

Christmas!

This year we had the De Rosa's, Martha and Westlee, and the neighbors over for Christmas dinner.

Christmas Eve!

With Lynne and Ian in Calgary as well as Claire/Ali's families it was a pretty quiet Christmas eve.  We hung the stockings, read Twas the Night Before Christmas and the kids were off to bed, with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads!

Ian is 8!

Ian turned 8, and is finally old enough to be on the Junior Race Team at Larch Hills!  We went bowling after school with a few of his friends and then headed home for a giant burger cake.

First ski at Larch Hills

We have enough snow to hit our local hills this week, so today was the first practice up at Larch Hills.  We were welcomed by the new sign and the new (extended) chalet!  Nice to be on snow, but it sure gets dark quickly on weeknights...

Snow Camp

 This weekend was snow camp for the Larch Hills Junior Racers.  We now have all four kids on the race team, with Ian turning 8 this month.  I am coaching Max's Bantam group (10/11 year olds) two days a week.  The weekend was a lot of fun, with our group skiing over 30km on Saturday and Sunday morning!  We also had a change to ride the new gondola at Silver Star to the summit, before skiing down.  On our last day, 3 of the coaches (including me) raced the kids on the Silver Queen lift up the hill, and won!

Sam did great and has a really good group of kids, so we just kind of said goodbye on Friday night and waved in passing a few times over the weekend!  Ian was in Darcy and my room, so we helped him with meals, sleeping and getting ready, but otherwise didn't have to manage kids much over the weekend.  Lots of fun!

9 Cousins

I did a similar group of shots in 2013, so here is an update from Thanksgiving of the 9 cousins!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Bard on the beach

Following the concert, we headed down to Vancouver and met up with Lynne and Ian for an evening on Granville Island and then a Beatles themed version of As You Like It.  It was really good!

Back to school

For some reason this felt like a really fast summer, but the kids are now back to school!  Ian is in grade 3, Katy 4, Max 6 and Sam 8.  Both Max and Sam now take a bus to the middle school (it stops a block from our house this year!), and I walk the other two to school each day.

Stairs to the back yard

We looked into hiring someone to build a path to our back yard, but it was super pricey, they wanted access over the rear neighbours' yard, and had low availability. At some point this summer Max and Sam were bored and asked what they could do.  Darcy armed them with clippers and sent them into the bush.  That kind of kickstarted a DIY project, that ended this weekend in a fine path and stairs to the back yard.  Now we don't have to scramble up the other side and hit our heads on the low hanging rafter!