Straub boys: Oh! Canada!

Happy Canada Day! We've had a great long weekend, doing nothing in particular but enjoying everything we've done. We all went to the "red and white people parade" on Canada Day - everyone who wants to be in the parade meets downtown and they're welcome to join. We happily joined in behind a fabulous marching band so we had a good beat for our part of the parade. We were also conveniently ahead of the horses, so there was no shoe-cleaning required after the parade!

Here's a picture of my gooney kids and me - they're not great at posing for pictures!

And here we all are, right before the parade. My mom makes the boys their Canada Day outfits each year - they love that they have original Canada pants and I love that they look so darned cute!

Here are a couple of pictures of the kids on their bikes. They love biking around Grandma and Grandpa's neighbourhood!

Today was a good day. The kids were a little bored but it was worth the wait - their dad assembled another rocket for us to launch. We decided to head to the school to launch since we have so many trees at our place. This rocket has an added feature: a clear section where an iPod can be stored to take a video going up and coming back down! Now, you may be saying to yourself, "didn't you have rockets at Tom's birthday? And at Straub's birthday? And now you have MORE rockets?" Yes, I believe we are rocket-obsessed. It's cheap entertainment!

Here's Tom and Will, getting ready to go to the school field to launch! (please excuse how dirty my kids are - they're boys and they play outside a lot. You should see the ring of dirt around my bathtub each night...)

And here's Straub, with the necessary supplies (rocket in right hand, 6 pack of Sunny D in left hand. Yeah, that's how we do it in the country.)

Now, preparing to launch rockets takes a bit of time, and I get bored. So I convince the kids to take pictures with me. They're not always willing, but it's usually funny!

Here are the kids helping get ready for launch. We sent the rocket up once without the iPod to make sure it would work. It dove to the ground without the chute opening. We decided that was good enough so we put the iPod in the second time! Thankfully the chute engaged the second (and third) time and the iPod survived quite nicely.