Lots of Stuff

Well, it's been a while since the last post. Partially due to being busy with my new job and partially because the whole family was really sick.

Let's start off with the first week of December... actually, let's start off with cute pics, and then December....

So, I started work on Monday the first and Monday evening they had me heading to Vancouver for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The nice part was that Brynn and Mike were able to join me for this first foray, which was great. I'm not sure how it would have gone otherwise, particularly since I am still breastfeeding, for a bit longer anyways.

We stayed right in downtown Vancouver and were lucky because the hotel room was huge and they brought up a fridge and a crib, which I never new you could request. So that worked out well, although I think Mike and I are going back to travelling with our own pillows. The really nice thing about a big room is that there was lots of space for Brynn to crawl around and play in, which made travelling so much easier. Mike also had a chance to meet up with his friend Cara, who also recently had a baby.

The down side was, we took the ferries, and I'm pretty sure that is where we caught whatever it was we caught that knocked us on our butts. It may have been Brynn playing on (and licking) the toys, but she sure had fun!

So, Sunday morning we felt a little off and by Sunday afternoon I had called my mom in Duncan to get her to come down and help us take care of ourselves and the baby, then by Sunday night we were at the hospital. By the wee hours of Monday I had to get two litres of fluid put in me via IV and Brynn and Mike were on a re-hydrating schedule. I was really worried about Brynn since she is so little and they get dehydrated so fast, as she started the throwing up and diarrhia before both Mike and I. I had called the nurses line earlier in the day to find out the best thing to do for her, so she was on a pretty tight feeding schedule even before we went to the hospital, so she was doing pretty good. In the end she got better faster than both Mike and I. Apparently we had Norwalk or a Norwalk-like virus. I have to say it's been a long time since the doctors used masks and faceshields while around me.

Oh well, in between travel and getting sick we did manage to get outside our place on Saturday night for the lighted truck festival and I managed to snap a few shots. I've never seen it before and it was quite impressive. I forgot to change the camera speed at first, but I thought that looked kind of neat too.

After our week on our butts from that cold, we still managed to head out on Friday for our weekend in Tofino. Unfortunately in my desire to leave early we ended up "first of the line" so to speak when the snow started to fall. Which meant we were out in it before the ploughs, while everyone was ending up backwards and in the ditches, so we took a break just outside of Ladysmith to mull over what we were going to do. Unfortunately I couldn't find the camera before we left, which really sucks because in amongst the highly amusing photos (picture a little VW Golf with whitewater kayaks strapped to the roof, fully loaded up with a baby in the back inching it's way through the snow), there were some spectacular shots I would have loved of our snowcovered trip. I'm STILL kicking myself.

In any case, it was a beautiful weekend. I wasn't strong enough yet to go do any kayaking... yes, kayaking in December was our purpose... but everyone else managed to get some in. Brynn and I had the tough job of hanging out in the cabin and wandering down to the beach just to watch. Our cabin was pretty close to the beach, but right on the beach would have been great. It was a toss-up, hot tub, beach, hot tub, beach. In the end the hot tub won out and it was only a short walk to the beach.

All in all it was a pretty nice trip. The roads on the way back were pretty scary though. Entertainingly the best roads were the windy mountain roads out of Tofino and around Port Alberni and as soon as we hit the main highway they were really nasty. Mike drove the whole way and I don't think it was the funnest drive ever. It took about 8 hours with our couple little breaks... normally it takes 5. I was definitely thankful to make it home safely, we saw more than a few accidents, cars in ditches, overturned semis and even one that had flipped on its roof not too long before we got there. We both had to laugh at the big flashing construction sign that we came across after 7 hours of driving. It had been changed to read "Ice and Snow... Take it Slow."

:)

Oh, and I received the digital negatives of the baby photo shoot we had, as you can probably tell from the first couple of photos, but here are some other ones.