staff cooking

August 14-16 we helped to cook for the staff at Red Rock.  The Pries family was cooking and the people who they were supposed to do it with couldn't - so they asked us.  We were pretty happy to do it.  Mostly you just cook/reheat the leftovers from the week and serve that, but we did a little of our own thing too.  Maddy had said that all they ever have for salads was a plain iceberg type salad with basic dressings, so we made a Asian coleslaw type salad.  I also baked cupcakes and cake ahead of time and brought that.  Then there was lots of leftover rice, so with the kids' encouragement, I made rice pudding.

On Saturday the kids got to have a run behind the boat.  It was great especially because Lucy's friend Piper was there as well.  Piper's mom, Shannon (also our friend), was the camp speaker and they stayed an extra day.  We were very thankful for that.  The girls had a great time bouncing around.

They also went with two littler girls to keep them company.  The four of them were pretty cute.

Lucy got a little extra time to hang out with one of her counsellors as well.

The Pries' brought a wood fire pizza oven from his work and we made pizzas on Sunday night.  It was pretty fantastic.

I'm not sure what Cade is doing here - I don't remember, but I do remember trying to get pictures of him and him trying to avoid me.  I managed to get a picture of Maddy's boyfriend (ACK!) instead (they weren't dating at the time but mutual interest was expressed!).

Other than preparing food, we swam, hiked, and all that kind of fun stuff.  Being there for church was quite fabulous as well, although I did have to leave early to get food ready.... but that is a better church track record than we've had all summer.  And church is so good there.

It has been such a huge blessing to be back connected to Red Rock.  Great place, great camp, great people.

cyclathon 2015

The cyclathon happened and I pretty much missed it.  Thankfully I have a few pictures - none of them action, however.  

Cade, Mia and Eric all cycled while Lucy and I were in Winnipeg, taking Maddy to write her SATs.  Lucy really wanted to cycle this year, but it just wasn't going to happen without me doing it along side her, and I committed to taking Maddy.  She wasn't very happy about it but it ended up being a good thing.

It was much tougher than last year.  The conditions were much less favourable than last year so it was a little more gruelling.  And it ended in rain so the kids were soaked through with no dry clothes to change into.....  Their change of clothes was with the van in Winnipeg.  Not the best or most happy ending!

After the SATs, the three of us headed to Red Rock to join the others.  Cade was quite relieved to have some dry, warm clothes, although he was probably more happy to see his mom (okay, I admit that I live in a dream world....).  We made it in time for the program.  No big prizes for the Ackermans this year, but Cade still did come away with a great sweatshirt and Eric got a rose to plant in our yard (it is pretty much dead already.... we are no gardeners).

We all spent the night again (well, okay, again for all of them.... I didn't last year).  The next morning a friend pointed out a beautiful, dew-covered spider's web that I needed to photograph.

The day was filled with swimming, hiking, talking and eating.  It was a great weekend.  And I think Red Rock liked it too.... they raised a whole lot of cash (for kids to attend camp).

Next year, I'm riding!!!

cleaning up and caching in

First, just a few pictures of the neighbour kids all in our back yard, jumping on the trampoline.  Fun.  Love it that there are all these kids!

A week ago (and two days) was the town's annual "Pick up and walk" event.  Churches recruit volunteers and put teams together to clean up the town - all the public areas.  We did it last year and it was freezing!!! - but fun.  This year was significantly better as it was pretty much a perfect day for it. We did it with one other family from our life group at church - everyone else was gone or busy.  We did the south side of town, right by the dump road.  Considering we were right by the dump road, we didn't get a whole lot of interesting items!

Shortly into our morning Eric exclaimed "I have to pee":

About half an hour later, he "had two pee":

Lucy also found a "4", but there wasn't anything very clever that we came up with that.

Eric cleverly thought of using some old ski poles as pick-up sticks.  They worked quite fabulously.  After we were done the highway area, we moved on to the A.D. Penner park.

After about two and a half to three hours of cleaning up, everyone headed back to the hockey rink (where we all started from) for a hot dog feast.  It really is quite an enjoyable time and it is pretty amazing how much better the town looks when we are all done.  It's a good thing.

The next day, Sunday, we did a little geocaching in the area.  We did five different ones.  And even the tough one we did quite quickly.  Spoiler alert:  if you plan to do some geocaching in the Steinbach area, you may not want to see these pictures.  We don't want to spoil your fun!

The first two were by this cool little creek area just outside of town.... right beside a car dealership.  But it feels like you are pretty far away while you are in the middle of it - pretty cool area.

Mia found that one pretty quickly.

The next one was further down just off of a path.  It took us a minute or two but Eric found the next one.  It took about a minute or two to open it as well....here's a little tip: lefty-loosy, righty-tighty...don't try to pull the lid off.

We forgot all about bringing along some little treasures to exchange in the caches but Lucy, not surprisingly, had a few little items in her pocket.  She left a shell and took a quarter.

On to cache number three.  It was in a different area and also just took a minute or so to find, once we were in the right area.  Cade found that one.

It was pretty breezy that day and Lucy, the sweatshirtless girl, was freezing.  Dad the hero finally sacrificed his sweatshirt for her.

Cache number four was found before I even crossed the little creek on the lovely somewhat stable 2x4 laid across it.

And on to cache five.  This one had a high level of difficulty but had a hint: 24.  Right away Cade had the right idea of adding up the numbers together that he saw on some electric/hydro/what-have-you box.  Surprisingly he mis-calculated.  I recalculated and discovered that it did, indeed, add up to 24.  So then we figured we were at the right place.  We looked around for a few seconds and that was all the time it took for Mia to find the cache.

It was just a tiny folded up paper in a little zip-lock bag behind the magnetized numbers.  Pretty clever!  And our family was pretty clever too - it took mere minutes for us to work together and find the difficult cache.

On the way home I challenged Cade to come up with a clever cache.  He said that he wanted to hide one so I thought we should do something cool instead of just a regular one.  I suggested that we have two different coordinates - one to locate a ball or spear or something and one to locate a target.  They you had to hit the target with the ball or spear to release the cache.... or it could even release the new coordinates to where the cache is!  It probably won't ever happen, but it'd be cool if it did!