Mummy and I finished decorating my American Girl dollhouse. And I had my tryout for the Elites Gymnastics Team!

He said

So, the time finally came—way ahead of plan too! My Watch arrived at the house on Friday afternoon. The original estimated delivery had it not arriving until May 8th to 13th. But, as the 24th approached people who had pre-ordered it, were seeing their delivery and shipped times update in a hurry. By Wednesday this week, it was apparent to me that I was actually going to have my Watch on the first possible date of delivery: Friday.

Now, the tricky part was that I had to work from 12:00 to 9:00pm that day and I was at the Store when Danielle let me know it had arrived. But the good news was that Danielle needed the Pilot that night so I had an excuse to sneak home on my dinner break and grab the Watch and bring it back to the Store and use the rest of my dinner break to get it set up. And let me tell you it took all of receiving the first Digital Touch message on my wrist for me to fall in love with it. I mean there is so much more to this—plenty of reasons I think it is amazing—but at the end of the day I like the way it is going to allow me to be connected, more personally in a completely less obtrusive way. The iPhone will stay in the pocket and out of my face.

Earlier this week we also got good news in the form of a visit from my cousin Bill. His Mom/our Aunt was headed back from a trip to Toronto and with he being off work, thought it might be a good excuse to meet up in London and all go out for dinner together on Tuesday. A turn of plans precluded Aunt Bonnie from being able to join us, but we did manage to go out for a dinner at our neighbourhood local The Bungalow for a dinner and some drinks. While Emelia and Danielle snuck off for Danielle’s haircut, Bill and I retired back to the house to visit and watch some Stanley Cup hockey on the boon tube. It was a great visit and we settled on some very big plans for next year after Danielle returned home and Emelia was off to bed.

So, with the fact that both Bill’s girls and Emelia get a long fantastically and that Bill has known Danielle as long as I have, we have decided to join that all together with the fact that it has now been two years since we have been on a Disney Cruise! It didn’t take any of us much thinking about when the idea was floated out there and we moved from it maybe being a neat idea to settling on a date to go pretty fast. With Danielle as our lead researcher inside of twelve hours we had settled on May next year as it was the best pricing when looking at departures from January to May.

Once we get a more concrete idea on dates we’re going to share with our families and encourage any of them that are able to, to join us. Bill has already invited Aunt Bonnie and we’ve tried to convince Poppa and Grandma to go too. But I am hoping that among brothers, sisters and cousins and so on that we can fill this boat up with a bunch of people we know and love!

So the planning for cruise life has once again begun! The nice thing about this trip is that it’s much closer on the calendar than our last trip which we knew about for the better part of a year and half in advance. So once the deposit goes down, the countdown will begin! And the nice thing is I will have this fancy Watch to count it down with!

And as if that wasn’t enough going on this week, we also had Emelia’s tryout for the Elites for gymnastics on Sunday. She has taken so well to gymnastics and loves it so much, that she was more than encouraged by her coaches to come try out for their Elites program. Well, that tryout was this Sunday. As it turned out, I was working so Danielle had to solo parent our nervous little gymnast to the two-hour tryout. I am sure Danielle will have a lot more to share about it, but suffice it to say I am so proud of her and the talent she has honed in the last year to be even considered so shortly into it—we weren’t expecting to need to think about this until next year some time!

By the time they were done the tryout, that gave Danielle time to come pick me up from work and to meet Grandma and Poppa out for dinner at Practical Henry’s right across from Masonville Place and our Store. Emelia got to tell Poppa and Grandma all about her tryout. Or as much as she could before her tummy which had been unsettled for most of the day dictated we needed to get her home and off to bed. Which wasn’t too far off what Danielle and I needed too, as there must be some sort of stomach bug ransacking this household as both she and I have been battling some form of stomach fun over the last day too.

So with that said I am going to turn the keyboard over to Danielle and try to relax my way into the new week!

She said

It certainly was a busy and event filled week. Monday was I was able to get to the gym and get a great workout in and as our scheduled dictated that was the only day sadly I was able to get there. The rest of the week we were booked solid.

Tuesday as John mentioned we were visited by Billy and had a great night out for dinner, I snuck out to get my hair chopped off and then joined the boys back at the house for some drinks and catching up. Emelia quietly played upstairs realizing that staying out of sight means a later bedtime. Finally got our girl to bed and then the planning started. John and I have been dreaming of once again going on a Disney cruise with Emelia. Finances had never allowed it but we had really focused on debt reduction and we are now in the position to keep putting money down on our debt while at the same time moving towards payments on a big trip.

Emelia and Billy’s girls get a long so amazing and it is great for Emelia as she has cousins so close to her age. I had said to John a few times that it would be amazing if we could go back and even more so if we could time going with Bill and his daughters. Well needless to say it took no convincing on any of the adults parts and we were planning. Shhhhh we aren’t telling the girls, well at least we aren’t telling Emelia for a while about the trip.

The next day I got online and did some pricing comparison and we found that the best date to go would be in early May. Not 100% sure why the week around Mother’s Day is a much better price compared to any other week around that week but we aren’t complaining. The price savings is just too much to go that week and we are planning on that week. There is a bit more confirmation we need between the families and then we can take the first step of putting the deposit on our rooms. We cannot wait. There will be an official countdown but right now it is just more than a year away, giving us plenty of time to make monthly payments and get this vacation paid for!

Wednesday was another busy daycare day and then we were on the go pretty soon after the day was over we were off quickly with Poppa to go see Emelia’s hip-hop class performance. We love our YMCA, it has amazing programs and one was hip-hop Emelia took with her two best friends Anna and Grace. The end of the term show was Wednesday and sadly John was at work and missed it. Poppa was happy to join us and see his granddaughter show off her new moves. It was a great night all in all.

Thursday was a rare quiet night, I finally got some things caught up around here and Emelia and I took the night at a slow pace and crafted, planned out more things for her American girl house and basically had a quieter night.

Friday was a busy one for Emelia. Emelia has taken to be quite involved at school, joining a number of clubs at school. This year for the third year she is in Dance Club, each week they have practice and the big performance they put on is the annual show at the Board of Education. All of the public schools in the area over the week put on their performances. Sadly I was working and could not go but luckily John worked from 12-9 and was able to go see her dance, he recorded the show and I was able to watch our little dancer. She was amazing of course.

Friday night was a busy one for sure, with Emelia’s first advanced gymnastics class beginning and John unfortunately booked for the close shift meant that we had to do some shuffling for the car. John came home on his dinner and I brought him back to work. Emelia and I did a couple errands and then we went off to her first 2 hour class. Happily as soon as we arrived we saw one of Emelia’s former classmates and friend Abby in the lobby. The girls are in the same class time and mom and I have already started planning carpooling. YEAH! I took advantage of the two hour class to get my normal weekends errands done. I got all our grocery shopping done for the week and it felt great to be done with it all and not to have to drag Emelia around from store to store all day.

With the class wrapping up at 8:30 Emelia and I were able to go over to the Apple store a few minutes early and wait for John. Our night was finally over, John came home from work, we got a tired little girl to bed so John and I could finally unwind ourselves.

Saturday turned out to be just as busy as the rest of the week. John got up with Emelia so I could get a bit more sleep but I was up early as we had a packed day. The first was getting Emelia in for a long overdue haircut. After far too many battles I finally got her to get her hair layered and fix her bangs. I would have liked a shorter hairstyle to stop the morning battles with her hair but this new cut is a huge improvement for our thick haired little girl.

Our next plan was to go to the gardening centre and get our sod but sadly with the really cold temps for part of the week prior meant that they still had not received their deliveries so we are stuck for yet another week without the grass we have been waiting for now going on two weeks. What this allowed for us is a bit of time between appointments to get some shopping done. Old Navy had a big sale on workout wear so we made our way over to do a bit of shopping. I was able to get a couple workout outfits for me, one for Emelia and some new shorts for John. We got great deals so it made it a bit less painful at the cash register.

After Old Navy we had to bust our butts home to get some lunch and then Emelia and I needed to go to our dentist appointments. I was in for a cleaning and Emelia was going for her first appointment at our new dentist. She came out with a clean check-up with no cavities but we did have to get a consult for an orthodontist to assess if she may or may not need help in the future. Her bit isn’t set right and there are a couple other areas they want us to get an early consult. Not to say anything needs to be done soon if at all but at least we will know and we have quite some time to plan if we need to do anything for her. They said the consult was not needed asap but we could have it done. We felt getting it done early might make things less invasive in the future potentially so we are going to get it done now rather than wait.

Once we were done at the dentist we made our way over to Toys R Us with the intention of doing some shopping for an upcoming birthday party but then quickly Emelia’s attention went to the stores more economic solutions for American Girls accessories. With not a single plan on buying anything we came to the isle of Journey Girls and they had a sale of up to 50% off everything this week. We had been talking to the woman who made Emelia’s doll house about making some more furniture for the house. Her prices are very fair but still they are made from wood and homemade so it wasn’t going to be cheap. Well, with everything on up to ½ off we priced and the savings was enough that we bought her some more accessories. She came out with a kitchen table and chairs, an organizer for one of the girls rooms and a side table for her living room. All at a fraction of what custom would have cost.

We came home and she and daddy were instantly began building the furniture while I moved back to the doll house and finally finished painting the rest of the house. We are finally done the bigger parts of the house and Emelia just loves it. All we needed was to decorate it and after doing one bigger build project with John the house is done. After months of collecting items to keep costs down and crafting by Emelia and myself she is so proud of what she has done and it does look pretty amazing.

That was Saturday, this morning we had another early morning. John had to work today so Emelia and I went to bring John to work. By the time we got to his work Emelia was complaining of an upset stomach. Today was a big day for her and she was nervous, and it was effecting her tummy. I went into distraction mode, you want to distract Emelia you focus on either gymnastics or American girl. Today to keep her mind off her try-outs we went into American Girl distraction, today we focused on decoration for the doll house, mainly getting scrapbook stickers to decorate the walls. We went to a few stores to keep her mind off things and came home with the almost last pieces to put her doll house together. When we came home, painted the doll bed I had as a child, we put up the stickers on the walls, we put up the artwork she and I had printed off earlier in the week and put up other odds and ends we found over the last few weeks. That kept things moving for the morning and before we knew it we were making lunch and heading to Gymworld for Emelia’s elite tryouts.

When we arrived it was simple madness. In total over the day over 100 girls were trying out for the spaces for the teams, The ages of the children ranged from 3 all the way to pre-teen. I have not a clue how many girls will be chosen but Emelia held her own in a group of gymnasts most having WAY more training than her. I am not sure what they are assessing for but they tested them for everything, they tested their agility, balance, flexibility, speed, and a ton of other measurements. In the end they were tested for 2.5 hours and now we wait. I don’t know where things stand, she is a great gymnast but so were many of the other girls being tested today. Emelia is so nervous about the whole process and admittedly so is her mommy. We now have to wait almost a month to hear back if she makes the team. It’s going to be a long few weeks.

So that was the crazy week that was.