Williams Christmas!

Our Christmas was really relaxed in 2008. We enjoyed Christmas morning together as a small family and then met up with other branches of our family later.


Just about every Christmas picture has Evan with a giant smile or surprised look.


Isaac chases his new tractor around the room in his cute new pj's.


Evan enjoys his new Backyardigans pj's.


I get the impression that the Christmas tree ornaments were a little more exciting than the actual presents.


Evan and his Kinder Gate sunday school class wowing the church with cuteness!






We stayed at the Holiday Inn in Medicine Hat when we went to visit great-grandma. The boys treated it like an adventure and split up to sleep with mom or dad.


This picture looks to me like Isaac was about to say something like, "Mommy you've got stuff up your nose."


One of the best things at granda's house is looking at all the singing Christmas decorations.

Update - Nov 21

We're here in Victoria, we fly back to Lethbridge tomorrow. Sorry there are no pics, I forgot to bring the cable to download them to my laptop. The flights here were a little crazy. Calgary was fogged in, which made landing a really neat experience - and delayed our flights hours on end. Air Canada cancelled Scott and Evan's direct flight from Calgary to Victoria, so they had to wait around 5 hours while no one would explain what they were to do. Fortunately they got flights that departed each airport at the same time we arrived so we never "had" to spend time together in the airport... We leap frogged each other all the way there...

The craziness, of course, led to AC losing our luggage (what else is new) and generally made everyone pretty grumpy. It's been a nice few days here though, fairly decent weather (especially considering it's winter). Green parks, beautiful ocean. It's been great. Esther turned 20 on Wed so she and I took in some Korean BBQ for lunch and we enjoyed steak and cake at the condo for supper.

There's not much else to tell. I'm getting lots of work done while we're here so I should get back to it. I am totally excited about going home and starting Christmas prep (my last week before work). There's a tree to decorate, candy to make, maybe cookies if I get ambitious enough and probably Christmas shopping to do. I hate the shopping, but I'm tired of putting it off until Christmas Eve, cause that's the worst possible day to shop ever!

Banff Holiday for 2

Scott and I were gifted with the use of a condo near Banff and some cash from the amazing people. Members of the Gate and River of Life gave us the money to go out for dinner, have a pedicure, take a ride up the mountain and just relax together. It was our first holiday together, just the two of us, since Evan was born. It was really lovely! Scott even got an extra day to just soak in the Bible and commune with the Holy Spirit. It was refreshing for us both and gave us some badly needed alone time.

I find it really difficult to schedule alone time with Scott with the demands we have (children, church, work). I suppose it's my fault for not making it a priority sometimes, but other times it really is because there aren't enough hours in the day. I think that feeling that way, may be a really bad thing. I've got this mentally of work, work, work but I don't think that's right at all. It's quite possible that my work, work, work busyness is directed at the wrong things entirely.

It looks like it's time to examine my life and see where I'm striving where I shouldn't be... and chuck in some better use of time management and things may clear up a little. I do manage to multitask a lot right now. But I'm very unorganized. I could use some help.

When I talked about budgeting at the Gate a few weeks ago, I somehow lost an entire hour. I thought I was finishing 10 minutes early when, in fact, I was 50 minutes over. To paraphrase Scott Tucker, "money management... good, time management... bad."

Isaac's One Year Old!

The eating of the birthday cake was the funniest experience ever. I don't think anyone has ever seen such a calm and seriously methodical eating of birthday cake by a one year old ever. He was obviously a little surprised by all the attention and watched everyone else watching him while he solemnly sucked the icing off his cupcake.

Evan enjoyed opening presents for Isaac and playing with them of course. Just a few family members were there (Isaac is not going remember this party so we were pretty laid back about it all - hotdogs and cake.)

This is a bittersweet time, I'm going back to work in two weeks, the countdown has begun. Evan's going to handle the transition really well, it'll be harder on Isaac to go to daycare though. He's already suffering extreme clinginess to me right now. Separation anxiety and all that.

We are taking one last holiday before I go to work. The only place we could get tickets for with Aeroplan points was Victoria. I got so frustrated trying to get flights without using triple or more points per flight that I've cancelled our Aeroplan point collecting visa and started a new program with TD. They'll give us cash for flights, we just have to start collecting from scratch again. In the meantime, we're spending our points wherever we can to get rid of them and be done with that program.

The only way we could get to Victoria was by splitting up so Scott and Evan are flying together and Esther, Isaac and I are flying a few hours later... Ridiculous, but if we didn't split it would have been 47,500 points per person instead of 15,000. What a rip off! The boys "helped" us pack tonight - here are the pics of their contributions.



Evan packed toys in his carry on and made sure he could still fit his rubber boots while Isaac made sure he can fit in a suitcase - in case Air Canada messes up our flight and we have to check him with the baggage of course. We're looking forward to our time away. Keep posted, more pictures coming soon!

My Boys

Does not lack for enthusiasm... and check out that full set of chompers!


Don't ask me how... I just turned around and there he was!


A rare moment of brotherly bliss, they are more likely to fight over toys and push each other around...

Fall Fest/Halloween

Thank you grandma and grampa for the great costumes! I'm beginning to think that army dudes are going to be the theme for many a Halloween to come. I even gave Evan a few other choices but he wanted to be an "army guy." Fly boy didn't have a choice but doesn't he look handsome?

Random shots

Evan shows off his monkey climbing skills.


Isaac in his favorite spot in the house, next to the stereo.


Evan's getting better with his shots, here's a clear one of dad!


Did you ever forget to upload photos for so long that you'd accumulated several hundred? Some of which are over 7 months old? Here's a older shot of the boys, back with Isaac was four/five months old.


Evan loves stickers, especially planet stickers.

Our new home

Here are a few shots of our new home for those who might be interested in a peek. It's got four bedrooms upstairs, a full bathroom and a half bath ensuite in the master. I have some ideas for developing the master bath into a full bathroom and walk in closet, it'll only take me a few years to save up enough :) But I'm happy this house will be a gradual project, to stave off boredom... if we ever get the time to be bored..


This is the view when you walk in directly in front, to the left is the living room and stairs to the upstairs.


This is what sold the house to Scott, one look at the cedar vaulted ceiling and I don't think there's anything I could have done to convince him that this wasn't the perfect house. Not that I wanted to, I love a house with character!


Our dining room is looking a little plain right now. I eventually plan to asianify (not actually a word btw) it sometime. I plan on painting at least one wall a deep, rich red, changing the floor to bamboo and changing the extremely boring light fixture to some kind of Asian chandelier or lantern. I've also put an actual hutch on my wish list (for Scott's present buying options) so that I can display some of my beautiful Asian things.


You can see that our living room is directly off the dining room. Thanks to a generous gift from grampa Roy for the downpayment, we were able to use some of our tax return to buy furniture. When we finally moved in, we realized we had no furniture for the main floor rooms, so one furniture liquidation store and a hard bargain later (never pay full price :) and voila! Furniture that looks good! We still need some things to finish the room and eventually I'll want to paint it, with the help of a very tall ladder. The rooms are all a pinky beige with green walls as accents; kind of not great... okay to live with, but not nearly the best possible color combination.


I'm writing too much. Stairs, good wood banister, next...


Dining area in kitchen next to french doors leading to awesome two level deck... We had to buy the pantry cupboards, there just wasn't enough storage, but they seem to fit nicely, as if they were meant to be there.


Decent kitchen, great appliances but needs some updates, especially to the lighting.

The bedrooms are great, the basement (which has a 3-piece bath, bedroom, family room and storage) is great for Esther to live in right now. Outside we have a play structure for the kids, a slide off the deck to the backyard and a gazebo - all left by the previous owners. The front has a big driveway (fits 3 cars) and there's a single attached garage.

Overall we feel really blessed, mostly because we needed the extra room for the kids. Hope you enjoyed the tour!

Isaac loves to pull himself up to standing. He's crawling like crazy, but he refuses to try walking, I guess he's just not interested yet.


Evan washed the car with dad.


Evan is super cool of course with his sunglasses. He's fairly intolerant of being subjected to the bright sun, so sunglasses are a must for him.


Isaac is sick again and having trouble sleeping. He wouldn't go down until his dad joined him, it's been a rough couple of nights though.

It's amazing to me that Evan has become a preschooler aged boy. He is so not a baby any more. He's done a great job potty training, now I just have to train him to remind daddy that he doesn't wear diapers anymore... He's decided to take up photography as a hobby. I laughed so hard when I downloaded this roll of photos, see some of his better work below. More than half the shots are "self-photos" and his fingers over the lens. The amazing chronological progression of his journey up the stairs to find daddy in his office set of photos is impressive - but I didn't post them, I'm not sure anyone else is that interested in what the stairs look like. (I've saved them to show him sometime though :)


He did several nice shots of me - sometimes of body parts, a knee, an arm, my jean-clan behind...



Evan has gotten really good with the apple tv, spends lots of his tv time watching movie previews. He's so independent, wants to do almost everything by himself. It's great to have at least one child that you can talk and listen to. He has some really neat things to say sometimes - I wish I had the time and memory to write some of those things down. He loves to dance - has his own unique breaker moves. If I can find a hip hop dance class for him, I'll sign him up right away.

Isaac's Accomplishments

Isaac is now a fast crawler. He can pull himself to standing and has found the exciting experience of playing with electric and phone cords. He is also going through an very painful episode of teething that has resulted in three days of fever and general unhappiness.


He's a little better tonight, but last night he kept me up, no kidding, until 6:00 a.m. Although the advil's helping, the combination of teething and bad gas/stomach ache just didn't go over well.


He's starting to eat finger foods and drink from sippy cups. The last photo was taken two hours ago after we got back from a walk to the Mac's (where Auntie Esther works). Evan got a sugar high and Isaac had a nap...