munday baby munday

on saturday i picked up kylie's brother brad at the aiport and immediately transported him to my new favourite valley: airplane creek, pictured above. our objective was to summit the north peak of baby munday, the pointy thing on the top right. as you can see, the approach involved a serious slog up steep treed slopes and then a long snowfield trek.

when we arrived the entire valley was cloaked in cloud. we hiked through fog for about 2 hours and had resigned ourselves to a cloudy day when suddenly we emerged at the treeline above the clouds. yay for sunshine!

above the clouds the peaks loomed magnificently.
also just as we cleared the treeline, we saw these crazy cloud rainbows. i have never seen these before and i have no idea what they are. brad decided that they were a good omen, and he should know.
crossing the snowfield took alot longer than expected. in the beginning we made great time, but as it got steeper we had to kick in every step, and place our ice axes for protection against sliding down down down.

at the very top of the snow we were quite exposed to a big slide onto nasty rocks. you can't actually see most of the slope in this picture as it is too steep to be in view. i heard brad humming behind me and it took me a minute to place the song: "its a long way down... a long way down... a long way down to the place where we started from".

finally we got off the ice slope and onto rock, only to realize that we had come up in the wrong spot and were in fact positioned to climb the crazy south peak, not the gentle north peak.

we contented ourselves with reaching the saddle of the southern peak of baby munday and after skirting sideways out over the exposed rock, we glissaded (read slid and ran) all the way back down to the tree line. you can see brad working his way past the rock in the top right of the below picture. those are the rocks you couldnt see in the above picture of the slope. they would not have been fun to bounce down.
the entire snowfield took us 2 hours to climb and 5 minutes to descend. it was seriously fun and we got seriously wet. good thing it was warm out!


next trip, mount stewart, accessible from the same valley. (or perhaps i will actually summit baby munday first, we were so close!)

Memo to the Sun: COME OUT!!

We have been experiencing a very rainy June here in the Fraser Valley, making it seem a bit more like February than summer. Thankfully we drove away from the Fraser Valley the last couple of days and experienced summer solstice at Sheridan Lake with our friends Kevin and Melissa.
Kevin's parents recently purchased a lot here and they have been building a cabin as a family. The cabin is coming along nicely and we certainly enjoyed their hospitality.

The location wasn't too shabby either. . .

Marc and Kevin worked on the cabin while Melissa and I made meals and looked after the kids and went for walks. Marc and Kevin took the canoe out for a spin yesterday morning. Melissa and I watched wistfully from the dock.
Don't worry, Melissa and I went out for a quick spin too!

Ty and Rhaea had a good time together!

We stopped at this great lunch spot, just outside Kamploops on Ink Lakes Road.

In other news, my mom left last week; we had a wonderful time with her!

Ty went swimming for the first time while Grandma was here!

And started sitting in his bumbo chair:

We got Niko shaved last week and while he still looks different he certainly doesn't look as bad as he did the first time we got him shaved! The night before:

After:

And in 2006: (I can barely look at this picture without cringing. Here is my post after his first shave)

The forecast is better for the next few days and my brother and his wife are here next week, then we head to Idaho!! Hope you get the memo sun!!

Tyrn's Baptism Weekend

This past weekend was party central around here. It started out on Thursday when my mom arrived from Lethbridge. Here are Ty and my mom waiting for party guests:

On Friday evening Marc's parents, sister Shareen and her husband Craig arrived. On a beautiful Saturday afternoon they set up the tent for the party in case of rain.
Marc purchased wine called Marcus James for the sangria. He was buying some other wine when the cashier asked for ID and saw his name and told him that they had wine named after him. He said if they had wine named Tyrn James he would have bought all their stock. ;)
On Saturday we started getting some of the food ready. Here we are making salads and getting the dessert ready.

Bette oh so kindly putting away my laundry.

Meeting Uncle Craig for the first time

After getting the food ready and having a picnic outside we headed to one of our favourite sunshine walks. A beaver dam on DND land. Thanks for the sunglasses Auntie Shareen and Uncle Craig!
Sunday morning we got up bright and early to get ready for Ty's big day (that is except for Ty, he slept until 9:00). Here he is in the baptism outfit my mom got for him.

Picture Fest!

Shareen did my make up for me. She is amazing.

This is our pastor Mike prepping us for the service.

We were excited to get Tyrn baptized and welcome him into the community of our church. We have been at our church for 6 years and are so happy to welcome Ty into Heartland CRC. Marc spoke about the importance of community in his life, and his hope of raising Ty in the same way his parents raised him. I spoke about my faith over the years, and my hope that Ty absorb more of the love of Christianity, and not the guilt.

After church we returned to our house for the party to start! Our friend Chad had come over earlier in the day to begin roasting a pig.




The pig was a huge hit and absolutely delicious. With all the salads and appys everyone else brought we had quite a feast! Pastor Mike is obviously a vociferous carnivore.

I love this picture!

After Marc took the above picture, he gave the camera to Clive, who then took this picture of me. I love it!

We rented a bouncy castle for all the kids to jump in. It was initially a bit rainy, which caused the bouncy castle to leak soap and become a sudsy slippery mess but soon the sun came out and the kids were jumping away.

What a beautiful location for a bouncy castle!

After the guests left, Marc's dad had great fun turning off the fan, collapsing the castle and drowning us in vinyl, then turning it on and reinflating the castle at the last minute. My mom had fun somersaulting into the crevasses.


All told we had 69 people at Ty's baptism party. 49 adults and 20 kids! A great time was had by all. Ty had better not expect this type of extravaganza for his birthdays.