a peek inside the fishbowl

The canal is closed! There’ll be no more skating this year. We’re a little sad about that, but looking back on Winterlude we are happy that this was the year we decided to do something new (for us) and check out the action at Jacques Cartier park in Gatineau.
We went on Family Day. This was [...]

Dogsledding: winter fun at the Fairmont Chateau Montebello!

Until today, we’ve never been the kind of people who make an effort to escape winter. There’s too much going on in Ottawa: skating on the Rideau Canal, building snowmen, going on winter walks … but this year we decided to take the plunge and trade a week of the white stuff for something a little [...]

A quick follow up to the last time I posted…
On December 31st I took Sarah to the emergency dentist (there’s apparently always one on call somewhere in the city). He took some x-rays and took a long look at her bruised gums. It looks like won’t lose any teeth or need a root canal. Thank [...]

We had the first the first big snowfall of the winter last week. It finally feels more like Christmas! Snow certainly helps, doesn’t it?
Day 7 (Monday): Did I mention that I’m stuffing the envelopes the night before? I find this works better for me because I’m able to plan it a little more. I kept it simple for [...]

An easy way to do Winterlude.

Making easy winter snacks for the birds and squirrels.

A couple of weeks ago I decided we should revisit the idea of making snow jewels again. We did this last year and it proved to quite fun.
There’s nothing to it: water, food colouring, containers for freezing.
We don’t have a big deep freezer, nor a lot of tupperware, so we have had to be happy [...]

Despite what you may have thought after reading out our lack of plans in that rather desperate-sounding post, our New Year’s actually turned out pretty good. We postponed our trip to Alight at Night because of the weather. Instead we elected to have an easy dinner and hunker down to watch a few Nature shows [...]

Here’s my list of family fun things to do outdoors, in Ottawa, over the colder months.