Well, so much for gloating over Felice for being punctual with my articles. Here it is a week AFTER I was supposed to get my blurb out. Oh well. Humility is a good thing. Felice, I promise not to tease you about being late anymore!!!
I think I’ll write about a mini vacation Jeff, the kids, and I took a couple weeks ago. We decided to head up to Edmonton to drop off a business photocopier/printer for the priests Fraternity House in Edmonton, stay at hotel with a pool and take the kids swimming, take in the latin mass in Town the next day and then head back to Calgary.
We made it there in good time, however, we ended up having to wait quite a bit before being able to drop the printer off at the house. So in the meantime, we went to the hotel we planned to stay at, and get our room. Alas, they were completely full. There wasn’t any room at the next hotel either. Or the next one. Or the next 3 we tried. Apparently it was Rodeo Days in Edmonton. I have never heard of it before, but I guess it’s quite the ordeal and every hotel was pretty much booked solid. So we were faced with the prospect of driving back to Calgary that night. After driving around Edmonton for a few hours we got a call from Father letting us know he was back at the Fraternity house and we could drop off the printer. Once there, he was very kind to offer us the basement of the house, but we opted to keep looking for a place. We had promised the kids we would find somewhere with a pool and take them swimming, thus Jeff’s determination to find just that. We figured since there was nothing in Edmonton, that we would head back towards Calgary and try along the way.
We reached Nisku and checked the first Hotel there……once again, there was no room. We checked one more place, The Hampton, that seemed to have an empty parking lot, so our hopes were up a little. Turns out, that they did in fact have a room….butonly one of the King rooms that would end up being a little pricier than we liked. But…they gave us a deal on the room because they had 20+ rooms that were empty, including standard Queen rooms, that just weren’t cleaned. So they let us have the King room for the price of the Queen!!! We checked in and Jeff picked up dinner. We finished eating around 8:30 and then heading down to the pool! (a little late but we all wanted to go for a swim!) We had a blast. The kids, after some initial distrust in their floater suits, began to relax and really have fun! Evelyn slept the whole time in her carseat, allowing both Jeff and I to get right into playing with the kids. It was so much fun and so rejuvenating to splash around in the water, swim with our children, and relax in the hottub. There were beach balls and swim boards for the kids to play with and play with them they did. For the most part we had the pool to ourselves, until a boys hockey team showed up and took over the pool for about a 1/2 hour. Around 11:00 we decided to call it a night and headed back to our room. With the four big kids squished into the pull out couch, Jeff and I settled into the King sized bed, tired and happy after a fun evening as a family.
We were up bright and early the next day to take in our complimentary continental breakfast in time to attend Mass at 9:00. I have to say that our children were so completely well behaved at breakfast that a few of the other patrons expressed their amazement at how good they were. As did the hotel staff! There are times when our children can make us sooo proud of them!! I just beamed!
So we finished off our day, with Mass, a quick visit to the folks in Devon (I’ll elaborate on that next time) and headed back to Calgary.
While our trip cost a bit more than I would have liked, it was definitely worth it. I think it was just what we needed as a family. A little get away from Calgary and the usual scene, and good quality time spent with our kids. I love being a mom and I just loved the time I got to spend with my wonderful husband and terrific kids!! We plan to do it again sometime!
On that note, I will end with a couple of quotes from the kids during the trip:
Maia to Kalilah during the drive up - “Guess what? Underneath my sweater, I’m sweating!”
Tegan was chewing the last of his apple strudel when Magnus saw it and asked if there was one for him. I picked up the one I had for him saved, and turned to pass it to him. Tegan had however, in a moment of kind generosity spit out the bite he had been masticating and offered it to Magnus. Magnus, for obvious reason grabbed the full strudel I offered instead of the soggy pre-chewed mess offered by Tegan. Our baby boy, on seeing this, burst into tears and wailed, “I SHARING!”He was so hurt that his morsel wasn’t accepted! I hope this event didn’t put Tegan off of sharing for the fear of begin turned down.
Ah kids!
