Gold Medal!

Both girls played soccer this year. Alison played in the Under 10 recreational group and improved tremendously. Go Mookie!

Sarah played in the Under 12 Girls Competitive league on our community team. Her team, Hamptons Roma, had a ton of success this year. There are a few really skilled players, but mostly, they had a lot of success because they played as a team. Sarah played "sweeper" which is a defensive position - the last player before the goalie.

Today, Hamptons Roma beat the Okotoks Strikers 6-0 in an exciting game. This win gave them the gold medal in the Tier IV U-12 girls division and they are going to Provincials next weekend. Yippee!

I have video, but as I'm still having issues uploading it (I am also waiting to post Alison's skating and Sarah's grade 6 ceremony video...), here are a few screencaps of Sarah making a huge play in today's game.

Running to get the ball

Setting up for a big kick

Big wind up

Follow through

The ball sent flying away

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day

Neighbourhood Fun

We are basking in some lovely weather right now, and since it could possibly be the best weather we get all summer, we are taking advantage. After dinner tonight, this is how the neighbourhood families (ok, us and our neighbours) spent their time...

Rustle gets a haircut

It's nearing summer time, and poor Rustle in his big fur coat has been sweating up a storm. We thought it would be kindest to get the boy a trim.

Here's the before picture:


Here he is now, in all his head-to-big-for-his-bald-body, resembling-a-lab glory:

Aladdin

I just loaded footage from the fabulous production of Aladdin presented by Banff Trail Elementary School. I am totally overwhelmed by how hard these kids and teachers worked. It was amazing.

Here are some quick screencaps from my video, still in the early editing stages!

Sarah in the chorus

Her friend Samantha played Princess Jasmine. Boy, can she sing!

This girl can act. She was fabulous as the parrot, Iago.


The genie
The ham

Filler post

I've tried a few times to upload some videos of Alison's last day of skating with no success. While I try to figure out why these videos are being such a pain to load, here are a couple of random shots from the last couple of weeks to let you all know that we are continuing with our busy, busy life.

Here is the best dog in the world trying on a lei to amuse his girls.


Here is one of the cute little koalas at the Calgary zoo, doing what he does best - sleeping off a self-inflicted drug-induced stupor from a diet of toxic plant.

Mooke

Another post from Alison in which she sings a soon-to-be-classic, "I'm awesome" is up on her blog today.

The Sound of Music

For Gramma and Auntie Daphie's latest milestone birthday, we all flew to Toronto for a whirlwind weekend to see "The Sound of Music" at the Princess of Wales theater. It was all very exciting, but time just flew by.

The show was pretty amazing. Half the fun for the kids was in getting there.

We saw Nancy Greene's star on the Walk of Fame, posed here with a real life Nancy Greener:


The little girls wore matching outfits:

Emily, Caitlin, Alison and Mackenzie.


The grand entrance:





And if all that wasn't fun enough, Mary and Ed and the boys came down for a visit....

Whirlwind weekend

I've got lots of photos I wanted to post about our weekend in Toronto.




Happy Birthday, Di and Daph! We love you!

Ski Season Banquet

It was almost a month ago, but we did wrap up the ski season with a fabulous banquet at the Chateau Lake Louise. After some head to head racing with teammate against teammate and kids against parents (that image in the paper may just be from the race where Sarah beat her Dad...) we all headed to the beautiful hotel for a silent auction, a feast, and presentations from the coaches.

Some photos from the evening:


Some of the silent auction items that caught Sarah's eye. She took several pictures of these, but didn't bid on them.

This is Cleodie, one of Sarah's teammates, with Brody, Sarah's coach's son. The next day, Cleodie hit a bump funny on Easy Street and fractured her T-6 and T-8. She is recovering well and has kept in good spirits, but it was a tough way to end the ski season.

Coach Higgy, joked freely with (and about) each of the kids on the K1 team.

Alison joined her coach and this group half way through the season, and improved significantly.