Baby Big Eyes enjoys her first trip on the ferry as we traveled to Vancouver Island.

Carriage House B&B: We really enjoyed staying here; it’s clean, quiet and close to everything, our hosts were friendly, and they made us wonderful breakfasts!

Darth Vader Violinist, just one of the many interesting buskers we saw while walking around the city in the evening.

Expensive? Well, just a tad. Eating out, museum admissions, and reserved ferry trips can add up, don’cha know. Plus, there’s all those fantastic buskers you gotta tip…

Fisgard Lighthouse: We drove out to see the famous lighthouse, but ran out of time, so we just waved at it in the distance as we passed by. Oh well.

Gourmet burgers at the Pink Bicycle Burger Joint – oh, what I wouldn’t give for gourmet, organic, local, creative burgers like these a little closer to home!

High tea at the Empress Hotel: No, we didn’t partake, but great news, Grandma Gail; they now allow people to wear jeans inside as long as they are not holey, frayed, or cutoff. It’s still expensive, though: $60 per person. Someday, someday, I’ll have to go.

IMAX at the museum was “To the Arctic“, an extremely gorgeous and incredibly sad movie about life on the bleeding edge of climate change. We all loved it; it was an incredibly moving and beautiful film.

Jump up, jump up, and jump down!

Koto Sushi: an enigma, since the restaurant seemed really new, only about a month old. It appears to be in the same location (510 Fort St.) as an older, well-reviewed Koto Sushi that closed earlier this year? I don’t know, just give it a try, especially if your child will only eat avocado rolls when she goes out to dinner.

Loft bed: Aurora’s favourite thing in Victoria. Everywhere we went, she kept begging to go back “home” (to our B&B).

Music on the street; good and loud. We enjoyed the bands playing at the Dragonboat festival at the harbour Friday and Saturday evenings (see “J” for Jump photo).

Nighttime at the harbour: is it the Legislature? Or is it Disneyland? You decide…

Octopus Alert! This Giant Pacific Octopus, which slid past our viewing window at the Undersea Gardens, was one of the highlights of our trip.

Polo: Our B&B’s host, Dan, invited us to watch him play polo Sunday afternoon at the Victoria Polo Club. That’s right – on real horses! Kid wrangling took precedence over actually watching the game, but at least we got to see a little of what real polo looks like.

Qu’est-ce c’est joli! Ooh La La Cupcakes has a very appealing window display. Too bad they closed so early on Saturday night. : (

Royal BC Museum: boring, according to A&B, but L really enjoyed it – I guess I’m just a hard-core museum person!

Squid, crab, lobster, you name it – looking for restaurants in Victoria which DON’T feature shellfish prominently on the menu was something of a challenge. Poor Daddy.

Tom, the 3 1/2 year old son of our B&B’s hosts, was Aurora’s second-favourite part of the trip. He’s really into bears and greek mythology, but mostly he seems to speak in bear growls.

Ugly: Grandma Gail asked about the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of our trip. Well, here’s the Ugly: a Wolf Eel from the Undersea Gardens.

Victoria is the home of Island Farms Ice Cream, which we love. We tried out some of the more unusual flavours available on the Island while we were there: Salted Caramel, Nanaimo Bar, and Aurora’s favourite, Cotton Candy.

Walking, walking, walking. Since our accommodations were just two blocks from the Legislature buildings, we could walk almost everywhere!

Xtinction: we learned heaps about extinct animals, like dinos and mammoths, as well as soon-to-be extinct, like Polar Bears, and a lot of other arctic animals.

Yes, I’m glad we went – it’s always good to have a little change of scenery once in a while!

Zoo of Bugs! Or, the Victoria Bug Zoo. Daddy was really excited about it, but I tried not to look as closely as Big Eyes the Unicorn did.

But wait!

That’s MY kid! What a change, eh?

So here’s how it really came about: On Thursday night, after much procrastinating, I finally cut Aurora’s overly long bangs, and I did a pretty neat job of it, for a change. She looked at herself in the mirror, with short bangs and the rest of her hair pulled back, and said, “I want all of my hair to be this short.” We had a careful discussion, to make sure she really meant it, and when she agreed over and over (and again the next morning), I agreed to take her to the hair salon Friday after lunch.

The stylist at the kids’ salon had a big book of hairstyles with hundreds of photos of girls with medium-to-long hair, but only one pixie cut. Aurora and I both pointed to it and agreed that that was the one we wanted. The stylist did such a good job, and finished it off with a spray of orange sparkle hair spray – nice touch. Aurora was absolutely satisfied, especially since everyone in the shop went gaga over her haircut, and the stylist asked if she could take several pictures for herself. Aurora and I had fun taking pictures when we got home, too.

I call this the “Uncle David” face.

Aurora’s feeling a bit lighter now, almost like she could fly! I don’t think she’s going to miss that long hair one bit, and neither of us will miss the daily battle with tangles, that’s for sure!

I wasn’t raised in the Christian tradition, so perhaps I’m overcompensating a bit now that I have a kid to spoil, but after the relative austerity of Passover (”Here, kid, chew on this dry matzah bread as a treat!”) there’s something terribly unsettling about the sugary abundance of secular Easter celebrations. I only remember two occasions in my childhood when the Easter Bunny included me in the bounty of the season; once, when I was fairly young, my brother and I found a humongous basket of treats on our Lake Arrowhead cabin’s front porch, along with a mass of deep gashes on the front door, which led me to believe that the famous “bunny” was more of a frighteningly large clawed beast; and once, as a teen, when my good friend Stephanie included me in her family’s egg hunt, at which I was introduced to some of the more disgusting candy-foam-and-chunky-bits-type treats hidden within seemingly innocent-looking chocolate eggs.

I’ve admitted before that the lovely, cheerful pastels of Easter and spring make me unreasonably happy, and that I tend to fall carelessly in love with all the pretty treats and decorations on display at the beginning of March. Maybe next year I’ll be a bit more cautious about it, for Aurora’s sake. Between the neighbourhood Easter hunt at Cambie Village, the egg hunt in our backyard, and the later egg hunt at Grandma’s house, Aurora got more candy in one weekend than a kid should get in a whole year. After a few days of chocolate, jellybeans, and more chocolate, who’s to wonder that the child is fluctuating every 20 minutes between sobbing anguish and bouncing off the walls?

The “I can’t quite believe it’s true” face when she discovered that the Easter Bunny really came to our own backyard this year. I love the outfit she picked out – Halloween’s spiderweb leggings and her current favourite dress.

What is that huge gold thing behind the wisteria?

The Easter Bunny must have ordered this confection from Williams-Sonoma. I hope he got it at the just-before-Easter sale price!

Aurora also found hidden the twelve hollow eggs she dyed before Easter.

Not a bad haul, kiddo!

Grandma Shaun’s new backyard doesn’t have a lot of hiding places, but the Easter Bunny did a pretty good job here, too.

Ah! The joy of discovery!

Cousin Livvie shows off a pink egg to Mommy and me.

Opening the eggs takes some serious concentration, you know.

Cousin Kayden was very dilligent – most of his candy was gone before dinner.

I just want to squeeze this girl!

I just want to squeeze this girl, too. Here she is on the front porch with me, on Good Friday afternoon, having mint chocolate rooibos tea in a special blue mug.

The weather was so beautiful Friday afternoon that a photographer was roaming around our neighborhood taking actors’ head shots. Aurora wondered what the big silver circle they carried was for, so I demonstrated how to bounce light onto her face with a big red chair cushion.

I think I got some rather nice portraits, too, but of course I have the most adorable model!

Eventually it became clear that what she really wanted was to learn to read Time. Ah! Okay, we’ve been meaning to get her a clock for a while, so we headed down to London Drugs and let her pick out a cute magenta digital clock radio that is iPod-compatible. When Aurora and I hooked it all up, and plugged in the iPod, she was thrilled. After a few random songs, she made a request for a particular one. Then again. And again. My heart filled with a warm glow of pride as she learned how to use the clock’s buttons to play “I Want to Tell You”, on the Beatles’ superb album Revolver, a total of five times in one afternoon.

When Daddy came in to see how things were going, Aurora shouted, “Daddy! We plugged in my new radio! And it plays songs from the iPod!! And it even has a clock on it, too!!!”

I love this girl. Even when she’s not gold & sparkly.

Today was a great day. The sun was shining, we all felt mostly human again after our prolonged “colds”, and it was time to awaken Aurora to one of the great joys of life: going to the movies. After a lazy pancake and pretend play morning, we headed downtown, still dressed in our Wild Kratts creature power suits. Mommy, Daddy and Aurora spent a quality hour in the children’s section of Central Library (which is as big as our entire local library) in search of more advanced literary fare (Roald Dahl’s The Twits was a big hit this past week). Then we headed over to International Village, or as we like to call it, Tinseltown.

The movie we were all so excited about seeing? The Lorax; one of our favourite books, and now a terrific movie. We were not disappointed at all – the extra parts that were added to “flesh out” the rather short book were quite entertaining, and the few liberties taken with the original (the Once-ler is a more sympathetic character than in the book) didn’t detract from our enjoyment, either. We laughed, we cried (or at least Daddy & I did), and we ate candy & popcorn. Yes, indeed, it was a great day.

Today while having lunch I felt like listening to the soundtrack of “Fiddler on the Roof” but I knew Aurora would have trouble enjoying it if she couldn’t “see” the story. Luckily, the whole movie is on YouTube, so we sat back and started watching it. I knew that we’d never make it as far as the progrom scene, so I wasn’t worried about the violence. I stopped the show every once in a while to explain to her what was going on. She understandably had a lot of questions, for example, why do the sons go to school, but the daughters do housework? I used the phrase “a long time ago, people used to…” a lot in my explanations. I was surprised that after each 10-minute clip, she kept asking for more (usually live action films are “too boring”). She made it to the song “L’Chaim” before she gave up and went to go colouring.

Later, as we were walking to the store, I asked her what she thought about the movie. She pondered the question for a while before saying, “I thought it was good, but I had a lot of trouble understanding what they were saying.” She went on, “Maybe that’s because it took place back in medieval times and their accents were different then.”  : )

Knitting (for me) and celebrating Halloween in the mouse house (an all-year-round activity for Aurora);

Painting;

Dancing (with or without unicorn);

Graduating to “tiny” Legos;

And in between colds and flus, we even got a small chance to embrace the winter weather, and go snowshoeing at Mt. Seymour. Well, two-thirds of us were on snowshoes, anyways:

That evening was Special Persons’ Day at our preschool, so Aurora got to show Grandma, Grandpa and Daddy some of her favourite stuff,

like the costume corner and housekeeping area,

making humongous valentine hearts in the art room,

and fun things to do with coloured masking tape.

Aurora came down with a cold that week, but that didn’t stop us from going on the SeaBus ferry, to Lonsdale Quay, in North Vancouver.

We enjoyed our lunch at Lonsdale Quay market because we each got to choose exactly what we wanted. I hadn’t been there since 1992 or so, and I was relieved that it was as easy to get to from the ferry terminal as I remembered.

Grandma Gail brought a plethora of dress-up clothes for Aurora, so now she can be a “princess fairy” any time she likes. Nice dancing, kiddo.

We also drove out to visit Grandma Shaun and Grandpa Bill, and celebrate the two Granddads’ birthdays at the same time, which was a very nice opportunity.

After we dropped off G&G at the airport, we were too bummed to go straight home, so we drove around Sea Island to Iona Beach Park. The sun had dipped below the edge of the dark clouds that we’d had most of the week, and warmed us up a little as we walked in the fresh air.

Bye-bye Grandma & Grandpa! Thanks for the visit!