Kidding Around Vancouver Island

You’ve heard of catch and release, but what about read and release?  That’s the idea behind a fun website called Book Crossing – you read a book and instead of putting it in a garage sale, you release it into the wild.  You attach a note to the book with a special code from the [...]

Thanks to Shanghai City in Nanaimo for staging a Dragon Dance to celebrate Chinese New Year.  The girls had a blast watching the big yellow dragon dancing around the restaurant, to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals.  Those are the kind of fun memorable moments that keep a town lively!

Six young kids, bags of flour, mounds of sugar, and shakers full of sprinkles – recipe for disaster?  Not if you’re having a baking party, which is what we did this past weekend.   We called in Kelli Burton who runs Baking Bandits and she arrived with all the ingredients, showed the kids how to [...]

Looking back over all the years, wouldn’t it be nice to keep those memories alive in a scrapbook? Yes, I said slowly, wondering what prompted a seven year old to ask that, why don’t I look into it. And so it was that we met Jennifer at Scrapbookin’ Adventures in Parksville.
She started Grace [...]

Well, the snow may be fading away (at least til April), but it’s still the rainy season, and for our family that means one thing: indoor gardening. I’m referring of course to raising couch potatoes. With frequent channel-changing and plenty of snacking, you’ll soon have prize-winning potatoes all over your couch.
Or… You can [...]

I can’t count the number of times we’ve driven along Departure Bay Road in back of Brooks Landing heading to the ferry in Nanaimo. Did we ever notice that there was a park at that corner? Not that it’s easy to spot. The day we visited Beach Estates Park, we encountered two [...]