Ottawa

To take advantage of the new Family Day we headed up to Ottawa for the weekend. Anna had a PD day on Friday so we left early in the morning to make the most of our time there. Our trip started out a little shaky as Bethany threw up four or five times in the van. She must have had a stomach bug as she didn't have a fever or any cold symptoms. By the evening she was fine again and we had a very enjoyable weekend. We stayed at a fully furnished three bedroom apartment right in downtown Ottawa. This was courtesy of a client of Colin's who has weekly business in town. Since he's not there on the weekends we were able to stay there "on the house", what a generous offer! This makes it so much more cozy as we could make ourselves at home and also cook our own food.
Here's how our weekend shaped up. On Friday, after we arrived, we went skating on the canal. The kids thought it was great skating on the world's longest skating rink. It's so neat seeing the food booths and warm up huts right on the ice; you can just skate up to the concession to get a hot chocolate! Saturday was mostly spent at the Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec. What an impressive museum! It had a great children's museum and the other displays and exhibits were equally impressive. After leaving the museum we went for a little drive to check out Prime Minister Harper's house and some of the other giant homes along the Rideau River. During this time Bethany could have a nap and get some energy for sliding on the ice slides at Jacques Cartier Park, part of the Winterlude activities. Here are two videos of Anna and Naomi speeding down the ice slides on their bums. It was a very tiring day but so fun as well.





On Sunday we experienced fantastic hospitality from our brothers and sisters at the Ottawa Can. Ref. church. We got invited out for both lunch and supper and found out that we have a lot in common with our hosts. It is such a blessing to experience the communion of saints so far from home and have an up-building day of fellowship.
It was our plan on Monday to go skating yet before we left but the previous day's rain had closed down the canal. We then decided to check out the parliament buildings. It had been a long time since Colin or I had been there and this was noticed by the fact of increased security. Gone are the days of wandering down the halls of the parliament, you now have to go through security like at an airport. There were security guards everywhere and so we took a short tour to see the insides of the House of Commons, Senate and Library. The girls quite enjoyed it even though they don't understand too much about government yet.
We left Ottawa at twelve noon and arrived home at a little after seven. It seemed like a long trip with four little kids because we had to stop regularly for bathroom and nursing breaks. We both noted how it would have been handy to have a portable DVD player along but then Colin remarked that when he was young they did long trips like this all the time. I asked him how he and his siblings kept busy and the answer was, "Archie comics, car games i.e. alphabet game, and fighting". We didn't have Archie comics but we had the other two; which kept this road trip quite interesting. But hey, what are memories made of?

I'm trying to post more pictures using Flickr, but I can't seem to get it right now.