Daddy's Home

Usually, the girls are in bed when Bob returns from a business trip to Houston. Not in the middle of July, though! Tonight, Alison has a warm welcome for Daddy.

Stampede Parade

Yes, it's that time again. The annual Calgary Stampede and Exhibition has descended upon town with all the fanfare, Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots you can shake a lasso at. Rustle is completely uninterested, and his girls are pretty much only into going to the parade. Free pancake breakfast? No, too early for Sarah and Alison doesn't like pancakes. Rides on the midway? Not big fans. Rodeo? Don't get them started on how mean those cowboys are to those teeny baby cows.

So, the parade it is.

One of the fun floats, with a genuine western theme.


Is this the cutest cowgirl you've ever seen, or what? She's her own stylist, by the way. Her consulting services are a bit pricey.

Canada Day

Alison's friend's family invited us to spend the Canada Day weekend at their home in Fairmont, B.C. We had a fabulous time swimming and boating in Columbia Lake, climbing up a mountain trail to reach a waterfall to swim below, and just having fun with good people.

Here we are at Columbia Lake. It is a glacier-fed lake, but it's really shallow, so it was nice and warm. It was especially enjoyable since the temperature was in the low 30s and we needed a good dip to cool off. We also had lots of fun tubing about the lake, until, of course, Alison had to dump Mommy off the tube...



The waterfall is an offshoot of the hot springs. We climbed a trail to reach the waterfall and then swam in the pools below, which were really warm. It was also pretty busy there, so Alison and Sam went off exploring in the stream below.




We spent Canada Day at the base of Fairmont Ski Hill. Alison and her friends made their own Canada Day t-shirts which turned out rather spectacularly, I must say.

Soccer 08

As manager for Sarah's soccer team this year, I realize that I have no pictures from Alison's games, which occurred on the the same nights (of course!). I also noticed that I took terrible video of Sarah's games which were played on full-sized fields and were pretty fast. My bias may be obvious, but this team was great. The girls learned a lot about being teammates and improved with every play they made. There were a lot of rained-out games, but they still managed to finish with a 9-1-2 record and would have been contenders in the playoffs had more than half the team been around to play in July! The big party at the end was a Dairy Queen extravaganza and a great finish to a great season! Congratulations Sarah!



And Alison, too. This is her medal from her adventures with the Black Holes Soccer team. We spent Canada Day weekend with the soccer coach's family (who is the mom of Alison's friend, Liana) and pictures from that trip will be coming soon.


So if anyone wonders where we were all June, you could always try a soccer field....