Puerto Vallarta

On Sunday afternoon, the day after the wedding, Mike, Viva, Shelby and I went on a short flight to Puerto Vallarta, after having brunch with the family. When we were in Guadalajara the weather was nice in the upper 20's with low humidity, once the got off the plane in Puerto Vallarta it was in the 30's with high humidity!

We stayed at the same hotel we have stayed in the past.

Once we arrived and got checked in, we all hit the pool and made our way to the pool bar. Mike and Viva were staying the week, but Shelby and I had 2 and a half days to spend in Vallarta. We spent a lot of time cooling off in the pool.

We took a couple trips into town to walk along the boardwalk(Malecon) and to see the various markets around.

Can you spot the tourist?

We watched some kids in the market have a birthday party with a pinata.

A few morings after our room was cleaned we would find these creatures left in our room.

These next 2 pictures fall into the attempts a creative shot.

We had a great vacation although it went by quickly. It was nice to have a kid-free vacation and we had a good time with Mike and Viva there. On our way back home we had a 3 hour lay over in LA so we decided to call the kids, it was the first time we called them on our trip. Seems we were interrupting their playtime with Aidan and Michael, so it was a quick call! Basically we weren't missed, I'll take that as a good thing!:-)


In the market in Guadalajara we found a Spiderman and Batman costumes for Kyle and Aaron, they seemed quite happy with them.

Mexican Wedding

Shelby and I were in in Guadalajara for my cousin Chino's wedding to Marifer. Chino and Marifer are their nicknames, their real names are Alejandro and Maria Fernanda. We arrived in Guadalajara early on Friday the day before the wedding. My uncle Pablo picked us up, but felt bad for him as it took us over an hour and a half to get through customs. 5 planes had arrived at once and there were only 2 officers to process us and at times only 1 person!
We had basically taken a red -eye flight and I only slept about an hour and Shelby less, so we were quite tired. Since we were so early our hotel room wasn't ready yet. We went to Pablo's house, had breakfast and then crashed for a few hours. In the afternoon we were taken to the art district of Guadalajara where we bought a few art items for our house.
Later in the evening Mike and Viva arrived as well as my parents who flew to Mexico City and drove from there with my aunt and cousin. We had a nice family dinner at a Mexican restaurant called La Tequila.

On Saturday we tried to sleep in a bit as we knew we had a long day ahead. The ceremony started at 1pm and we arrived shortly before. It was a traditional Catholic wedding in Spanish. We didn't understand much at all and tried to follow when people stood up and sat down. I pretended to be one of the official photographers, so I went up and took a few pictures of them from time to time.

Here is our group at the wedding.

The beautiful sister-in-laws

Here we are cleaned up a bit

The bridal couple on the way to the wedding.

As a side note the posts all had Baby's Breath stapled to them, must have been a lot of work.

Us with the wedding couple.

Mike and Viva

The first dance.

They had lots of different favours with their names on them, like this water bottle, they also had pens, candles and slippers.

Even before the sun was setting the dancing began.

Then the wild wigs, crazy hats, wacky glasses, plastic leis, blow up shoes and guitars and so on came out and the party continued on late into the night. Here are some pictures of the evening.

The wedding was a long time in making and now it finally came and went. We had a great time, it was also good to catch up with family and meet some new people as well. We wish Chino and Marifer all the best in their life together. Right now they are roughing in on their honeymoon in SouthEast Asia.

The day after the wedding we headed to Puerto Vallarta for a few days with Mike and Viva, I'll continue that on the next post.

We have to give a big thanks to all the various people that looked after our kids while we were away, muchos gracias!

Thanksgiving weekend

On Saturday we headed to the Cranberry Festival in Fort Langley. The festival is getting quite big as I remember years ago it being quite small. The weather was great, which brought a lot of people to the festival. The boys wanted to get their faces painted and they both wanted to be Spiderman! We tried to convince someone to be something different as to avoid twin Spidermans, but they were not to be dissuaded! So here they are and they received a lot of atttention because of it. Aaron didn't really know what to do with the attention from strangers, but what was he expecting?

Here are the Spiderboys trying out the fire hose.

Trying to look mean...

After the carnival we went to a pumpkin patch from people from our church, the pictures at the pumkin patch look a little different this year with their faces painted.

On Sunday afternoon we headed to Victoria as foot passengers to Mark and Sylvie's place for Thanksgiving. We were lucky to find a parking spot as it was very busy. It was a beautiful afternoon, so the boys and I hung out on the ferry deck for a while and took a few pictures.

Dinner was really good, but this dish caught my eye. It's a lemon jelly salad, something I'd never had before, besides the olives it tasted pretty good.

Luckily we had finished cooking when the power went out, as all of Southern Vancouver Island's power went out between 5-7pm, great timing for all the rest of the turkeys in the ovens. So we had dinner by candlelight.

Mark and Sylvie had both their sides of their family's together for Thanksgiving. We stayed overnight and my parents did as well and headed back on the ferry in the morning. Thanks to Mark and Sylive for hosting and cooking for us, it was great. Also to Mark for picking us up and dropping us back to the ferry.

It was a nice weekend overall, and we also have to thank Jamie and Sara for taking Keisha overnight while we were in Victoria.

We have much to be thankful for and feel very blessed.

It's good to know I have at least 4 readers to this blog, the next challenge is for a guy to comment on our blog! Do guys read blogs about families?