A weekend in Canmore

The kids and I had the chance to go visit Sean in Canmore this weekend. He's currently doing a 2 week Emergency rotation at the hospital there. He's staying in a cozy little one room bachelor pad, and we decided to crash there for a couple of nights. I was a bit nervous to drive the 3.5 hours by myself with the kids and being only 3 weeks away from my due date. Kaden didn't have school on Friday, so we left that morning after a somewhat decent sleep, instead of leaving Thursday evening after a long day alone with the kids. Besides Anise losing the keys right before we were about to leave, setting us back about an hour, things went fairly smooth.

We were all so excited to see Sean! He's been working out of town this entire month, 2 weeks in Edmonton, 2 weeks in Canmore. He has been able to come home on the weekends for the most part, but it's still been really hard to be 9 months pregnant and 'single parenting' it all month. I'm really looking forward to Thursday night when he gets to come home!!

As soon as we got to the apartment Anise skipped through exclaiming how cute Daddy's house was. It has now been dubbed "Daddy's little house" So, since it's a one room place and the couch/futon also doubles as the bed you may wonder what we did with the kids at night. We stuck them in the closet:

We didn't mention to them that it was the closet, we just called it the little room and they liked it just fine!

We spent the afternoon exploring the many many paths and walkways that Canmore has.

We stuck close to the river, and both the kids loved throwing rocks in to see how far they could throw them, and how big a splash they could make.

We found a fun playground so the kids could play, and I could sit

And we also made some friends along the way

The next day was a bit cloudy and over cast, but we headed out for another walk - this time to Quarry lake.

It still had ice on most of it, and the kids once again enjoyed throwing rocks - this time to try and break through the ice. *you may be able to see in this picture that Anise is wearing pants!! She still has a skirt on over top, but she is actually wearing honest to goodness pants. It has seriously been at least 7 months since she wore pants in any form. Miracles do happen*

I decided that it was time for another pregnant picture of me - 37 weeks! It was shortly after this that we noticed the clouds rolling over the mountain didn't look quite so friendly any more.

Minutes later we were being pelted by snow/hail and wind. We walked the rest of the way around the lake and back to the van as fast was we could. Sean and Kaden probably could have done it in a quarter of the time, but they has us girls slowing them down, and they were nice enough to wait for us :-) When we got back in the van we were all pretty wet and chilly

We spent the rest of the afternoon watching movies on the laptop at the "little house" until Sean had to go to work. The 'little house' is literally across the parking lot from the hospital. The kids thought it was so cool that they could watch Daddy go all the way to work, and were tickled pink when he waved to them from the doors of the hospital.

The next day was once again fairly cloudy, but the kids wanted to find the bunnies again and give them a snack, so we headed out once again. This time we walked to this really cool pedestrian bridge that was once used to transport coal by rail

The kids and Sean had fun climbing on the rocks underneath and around the bridge, and I sat and acted as mamma-razzi. One of my favorite shots:

We then set off to look for some bunnies and we were successful!

The kids had a ton of fun sharing their carrots with the bunny, and were disappointed when it was full and didn't want any more. We headed back to the 'little house' for some lunch, I had a quick nap, and then we headed home. Before leaving the kids had to say goodbye to the house - giving everything in it a hug or kiss (including the toilet, yuck!) I'm not totally sure why they were so enthralled by the house, but I'm glad we were able to spend some time with Sean and his 'little house' this weekend!