Summer... so far!

You know, I would never complain about the holidays that teachers get.  Two months in the summer is amazing.  And even more amazing is the fact that this year I get to holiday along with Mark and Avery!!!  This is the first time that we are all off for the entire summer.  The uncertainty of my position in the fall aside, I am absolutely loving it!!!!  So in a way I feel a bit timid in saying: it is all slipping away too fast!  We are at the halfway mark and I don't know if there is enough time to get it all done!!!!  Last summer we embarked on a crazy reno train that saw a total overhaul of our house.  Kitchen, bathrooms, flooring, fireplace, painting... everything!  In the end there was not enough time and we have been without baseboards and backsplashes for the past year.  Soooo... the great renovation of 2010 has been carried forward to 2011.  Starting with tiling in the bathrooms and kitchens.  We still need to grout and find mirrors:

We took a little break from all that fun and headed out to Kelowna for a week.  We started off with a family reunion.  We enjoyed perfect weather that weekend and had a great time reconnecting with the Beutler branch of Mark's family.  

We took in some winery tours.  The small family owned wineries rocked!  The crowds were somewhere else, the staff at the tasting bars were actually enjoying themselves and the wine was delicious.  Of course we brought home a few bottles of our favourites.

Avery was naturally not all that interested in the wine, but she did love taking photos!  We have reams of her pictures and it was fascinating to see what captured her attention.

 She totally was playing director for this photo:

After the weekend, the weather was not Kelowna's best, but that didn't deter Avery from splashing about.  We were not brave enough to join her in the water, but we did enjoy a lovely bike ride along Lake Okanagan.

We went to downtown Kelowna for a walkabout, which included ice cream at Moolick's and wandering through an art gallery.  One man's laundry pile is another man's art:

The cooler weather was perfect for bike rides and we had a lovely time biking along Mission creek to Mission park where we stopped for a while.

And an evening stroll along the water's edge.  It was so calm and beautiful.

Lucky for us, cherries ripened the day before we were to head home, so we got to harvest our own cherries from Grandma and Grandpa's tree.  We made a backyard party of the day:

On our way back to Alberta we stopped for a few adventures and had fun posting pictures on facebook along the way titled "where in the world are we now?"  Just to change things up we took a new route home through the Icefield's parkway and the cowboy trail:

We have spent the last few weeks at home with Avery in swim lessons and us busy putting up baseboards and capping on the stairs.  You know, baseboards are a slow-moving pain to install but they sure do make a difference!  The stairs are starting to look like real stairs again!!  And I have to say how proud we are of Avery.  Although she loves swimming and playing in the water, she very much wants it to be on her own terms.  She does not like putting her face in the water, freaks out when she can't feel the bottom and is very tense about floating etc and so usually needs a few takes to make it through a level.  Something blossomed this time around, and she made it through on one try.  Her excitement over her progress made my heart sing. Summer is abundant here.  Life is a happy hum!