This Party Aint Big Enough for the Two of Us

As far as birthdays go we've gone pretty hard and full-on at them this year. Jasmines was probably the least effort with most of it coming in a box (Nancy Drew game) but we still managed to put together a detective game down the trail and decorate the many 'scenes' through-out the house appropriately. The study still has signs saying 'leet haxors' and 'Join the World of Warcraft ladder' on the walls from being the setting for a CyberCafe. Abbies was more involved as she wanted a mystery party like Jazz, but obviously we couldn't just recycle Nancy. So Jo and I put together a kidnapping, Jazz went to Lara's house and we set up email clues and SMS messages for the kids to sort through. It's a lot of work but the kids do love it and we've had a few invites for the kids to go to 'Survivor' parties and other fairly involved affairs. That didn't happen much the first year. Mostly the kids got invited to attraction-style do's, like skating, laser-tag or play-centers. We suspect that the kids are really enjoying the home-made themes and are pestering their parents for more of the same... If that's thsa case then we're really sorry. We really didn't intend to make your lives the living hell that we signed up for by doing our own parties.

With the girls out of the way we rolled up our sleeves and set about executing our sons vision for a cowboy party. The three main games were a round-up, shoot-out and a scavenger hunt. If you saw the last post on the Blog then you saw the shot of the shooting range that we made. A huge piece of cardboard used as packing for our recent sofa purchase was turned into a western scene complete with over 20 drop-down targets. It was a decent hit but the problem with 6-yo's... they don't line up, they don't take turns, they don't wait around for their turn, they don't stand still for more than 5 seconds. So my read on the party was that it was a partial success, the games just didn't go how I expected. I think, however, that my opinion is irrelevant, to the dozen or so 6-yo's it appeared to be great fun. They went crazy, all had guns and shot each other, ate handfuls of zero-nutrition crap (the best kind) and went home with cowboy hats and sheriff's badges. Jo made a chocolate-ice cream-jelly cake shaped like a cactus that was almost completely demolished. And Cam scored pretty big in the pressie stakes with Lego, superheros, Bionicals and cars. Good times, our boy is officially 6.
So what else is up? It's pretty busy here actually. Jo is still playing heaps of tennis and I'm still loving looking at her in those little skirts [nice!]. The kids are enjoying school and getting lots of homework. Jasmine just completed a book report that was delivered as a video. She interviewed herself on camera and I editted the result together for her, she's hoping for a great mark. I'm driving down the QEW (Queen Elizabeth Way freeway) to Buffalo on the weekend with a local mate to see my first live NFL game, the Buffalo Bills vs the Baltimore Ravens. In two weeks I'm off to Las Vegas with three buddies to party hard, shoot some guns and gamble in my typical low-key way (ie. not much). Halloween is not far off, Oct 31st, and the kids have their costumes almost together. We've thought about dressing up the house a bit more this year as it might be our last, so expect photos of a bizarre front-door in the next few weeks.

On the subject of coming home... well as usual we're just not sure. My current gig will be up by end of January and then it's one of two outcomes - we come home for good, or I get another engagement and we stay a bit longer. At this stage there is another project brewing that IBM Canada appear to want me to run. Only snag is that it's in Montreal so we'd have to move. But the deal isn't finalised so we haven't considered it any further and these things have a way of taking time to resolve (remember when we waited for 4 months before coming over here in the first place? I expect more of the same). If the project does start then we're inclined to stay which might be another year. Hopefully if that happens we can come home for another flying visit in the New Year. Anyway, nothing locked in yet so no plans.

The weather is much cooler, it's nearly lunchtime and the fog is still at ground level. Temps in the mid-to-high teens and lots of leaves on the ground, hockey has started, baseball is well into the play offs... here's hoping we get a white Christmas this year.

Andy, out.