Relay For Life

This past Saturday, we had our 12th annual neighbourhood garage sale. The event is named “Garagellennium” and it is the ultimate garage sale - imagine tons of houses in one area having garage sales all at the same time. The community becomes one big open market for a day.

Our children decided that this year, we would have our own garage sale in front of our house and all of the proceeds would be donated to the Canadian Cancer Society for the Relay For Life this upcoming weekend. They worked extremely hard for 6 hours and raised over $200!

The kids sold a variety of items ranging from lemonade and cookies to organic zucchini plants and toys.

Naimah even donated her princess bicycle and playhouse to raise money.

The customers had a difficult time resisting the hard sell on the lemonade and cookies.

Naimah was so dedicated that she practically didn’t leave the cash register for the entire day.

Our three children put all their hearts into the project. Léah was the banker, Gabriel organized the inventory, and Naimah was the captain and anchor of the team.

Aruba

Aruba is a 33 km-long island of the Lesser Antilles in the southern Caribbean Sea, located 27 km north of the coast of Venezuela. Together with Bonaire and Curaçao, it forms a group referred to as the ABC islands.

Aruba is one of the four constituent countries that form the Kingdom of the Netherlands, together with the Netherlands, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten whose citizens share a single nationality: Dutch citizen. Unlike much of the Caribbean region, Aruba has a dry climate and an arid, cactus-strewn landscape. This climate has helped tourism as visitors to the island can reliably expect warm, sunny weather.

The joy of burying one’s brother in the sand.

Saint Vincent

Saint Vincent is a volcanic island in the Caribbean. It is the largest island of the chain called Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. It is located in the Caribbean Sea, between Saint Lucia and Grenada. It is composed of partially submerged volcanic mountains.

Mainland St Vincent is one of the few places on Earth that can boast about having black-sand beaches and white-sand in the same country. The majority of the beaches on the mainland have black sand (more than 95%), while all of the beaches in the Grenadines have white sand.

Saint Vincent remains so pristine that its coastline provided an authentic colonial backdrop for filming the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean”.

The kids enjoyed exploring the beaches and playing with the locals.

Barbies are truly international.

Sharing the love of discovering marine life.

Just be careful not to step on this.

And Mélanie didn’t like the slimy, snakelike creatures.

Seuss Landing

Dr. Seuss never drew straight lines in his illustrations. Everything was curved, slanted or "wonky." Thus, there are no straight lines in “Seuss Landing” at Universal's Islands of Adventure theme park.

“The Cat in the Hat” ride takes you through the pages of Dr. Seuss's best-loved children's book. The kids were crazy about this ride and wanted to do it over and over again.

Gabriel enjoyed splashing me on “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish”. As you fly low and fly high, spinning and swooping around and around, you pass an array of fountains that squirt in time to a musical rhyme. You need to pay attention to the words and do what they say if you don't want to get wet. Gabriel made sure that his timing was right to get me wet.

Photos with famous characters.

Saint Lucia

Saint Lucia is an island country in the eastern Caribbean Sea on the boundary with the Atlantic Ocean. The volcanic island is more mountainous than many other Caribbean islands. Two volcanic plugs, the Pitons, form the island's most famous landmark.

We took a water taxi down to a beach between the two Pitons, south of Soufrière.

On the way back up to Castries, we stopped at a site that was used to film a scene in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean.

Chatham Island

On Sunday, we went crab fishing. After dropping the crab traps, we spent some time on Chatham Island and a big highlight for the kids was finding two nests with eggs.

 

We had a phenomenal day until Léah took a bad spill on the rocks and fractured her arm.

Expelliarmus! Stupefy!

If you knew that the title of this post referred to magic spells from the fictional world of Harry Potter, you are likely one of the millions of fans of the series of books and movies.

Léah has been completely engrossed in the world of Harry Potter for the last few months. In order for our Muggle-brains to comprehend what she is talking about, we have even had to start reading the books and watching the movies.

Less than a week after Léah finished reading the last book in the Harry Potter series, we had the honour of entering that fictional universe with her at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park in Orlando, Florida.

The passageways and corridors of the reproduction of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry contains Dumbledore’s office, the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom, the Gryffindor common room, the Room of Requirement and more. It also contains an amazing ride that literally transports you inside the movies. The ride is scary and not for small children; Gabriel found it to be a bit too much. This attraction has proven to be so popular that people spend hours waiting in line for it.

Walking through the park feels like you are really on the High Street of Hogsmeade, the only all-wizarding village in Britain. All of the wizarding world’s best-known establishments are there including Ollivanders, Zonko’s, and Honeydukes.

We enjoyed Butterbeer at the Hog's Head inn and pub which (like in the books and movies) comprises one small, very dirty, and dingy room that has bay windows that are so encrusted with filth that you can barely see through them.

For lunch, we had fish and chips at The Three Broomsticks Inn.

Spell limits are the maximum spell-casting intensity allowed by law in certain all-wizard locations.

Our underage wizard and witches (less than 17-years old), adhered to the rules of not performing magic outside of school, especially in front of Muggles.