Yvonne's 5th Birthday Party was a fun day. Yvonne's Mainland friends came out to celebrate with a pool party. We started the day with Bingo with pool toy prizes for all the kids. We had a lovely sunny day, so we used the gazebo out in our playground. It is huge and has about 6 big picnic tables undercover. We let the kids play a bit in the playground while we organized food, then we had a classic kid meal of hot dogs, hamburgers, chips, and juice boxes. Yvonne was extremely antsy about waiting to open her presents, so she didn't eat much. After we all finished lunch, her less than patient wait was over. She got a Polly Pocket limosine, a Human Body model and quiz flash cards, a gift certificate to go to the movies and another to go to Chapters. She really went crazy over the limosine and later that evening realized how cool the Human Body model was. You can take it apart and put it back together again. Today, she's wanting to go shopping at Chapters, so we'll go and stop by the library too.
The cake was quite cool. Safeway has a new cake option that allows you to have a cupcake cake. It was 24 cupcakes lined up and smothered with icing and decorations. She picked the 4 Princesses one. Big Surprize!!
Her birthday party ended with about an hour long swim. We had the pool to ourselves, which was great. Mind you, ourselves was 7 kids and 7 adults. We pretty much needed the entire pool to ourselves. The facilities here are great and we're so fortunate to have been able to use them for such a fun day.

Gymnastics Day!!! We are finally organized enough to look around us and start participating in our old activities. We started out today with a drop in gymnastics session at Arenex at Queens Park. Yvonne started going there before she was 2. It was a fun time and Yvonne spent tons of time on the trampoline. We found out those pictures don't work out well.
The sun has finally come out today, but it's still cool outside. I guess it's good it doesn't warm up too quickly as then we'd be dealing with floods from all the snow pack melting. You just can't have it all.
Jim had a great week back to work. He's working for the contractor, Altech and managed to meet a fellow there that's also staying in Cariboo RV Park. Works out great for me as now I've still got wheels every day.
Having Jim back to work certainly makes me appreciate how much he does around the house to keep Yvonne busy while I'm working. It's a bit more of a challenge to deal with work when it's just her and I. We tried to get a bit of school work done this week and managed to spend a few hours on printing and learning the ABC's and 123's. She now knows about 1/2 of the alphabet by sight, so we're well on our way.

Easter Weekend on Vancouver Island

We started off the weekend spending Friday with our cousins, John and Andrea in Victoria. We had a great visit and polished off some wine together. Yvonne got to pick out a present and she picked the Mermaid Barbie called Shelley. She's wanted her for a long time, but I'm a meanie and wouldn't let her get a new Barbie unless she got rid of an old one. We'll work on that part later.

Next, we spent the weekend with Mom and Dad in Chemainus. We finally got to meet our new nephew, Christopher. He was a cutie and is extremely well behaved all the time. You hardly notice he's there. We figure he's just spoiling Tina now in return for hell on wheels later. Yvonne and Marina got to spend Sunday together and were busy playing so hard they really didn't eat much of their candy. Mom did a great treasure hunt for them and the girls got a bunch of neat gifts and a few items of candy. Some of the items were really tough to find, but we figured it all out.

It was so great to see everyone again.