teamluguy

Not really, just the blogging of Estelle's 7th birthday last month. Just like her big sis, she invited 3 girls to order pizza, play games, and sleep over. We even made a second attempt at a Pinata with real candy in it this time! Oh, by the way, Estelle totally reads in English and in French now. No biggie... (!!!!!!) Alice helping to organize the little ones. The BFF, Emma Peace, Love and Princesses Chocolate cake and milk. Birthday Bliss.

It was a late start getting ready for Christmas this year, but we're back on track with lights, tree, and advent calendars. No Christmas baking yet, but we do have 3 naughty elves!!

Lucy initiated the first annual Shoebox Project collection at her office. It was slow to get started, but we amassed a total of 19 boxes to be distributed to women in shelters across the Montreal region. Here are the girls proving we dropped off the gear at the YMCA (not all our boxes behind them!)

Lucy has had wonderful opportunities through work to travel to some pretty incredible places - Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Australia... all in the blink of an eye. If you think it sounds exciting and exotic, well it is... sort of... Many, many hours are spent getting there, many more spent in conference rooms for meetings, and a few in restaurants for long, awkward dinners. Just a few special minutes are reserved for getting out and seeing local people, scenery and, hopefully, wallabies! La Paz, Bolivia, as seen from a conference room Big, big plane with free jammies to change into during the 13 hour flight! Sydney Opera house sending up fireworks to announce the end of our travel season! Mosque in Kazakhstan as seen from hotel room. Snow in Kazakhstan - wish we had some of that.

Grandad came in this year to give us a hand. It was a beautiful saturday so we had a little more traffic than usual. The Pirate Ship and smoke cannon still drawing them in. After the kids stopped coming to the door, mom and dad went into the city to a bar and had a blast. More detail on dad's crazy costume on the next post and even more on the Instructable link (below too). The girls were not sure that Mom got the makeup right, but they haven't seen the Batman movies yet. She really nailed it, with the attitude to boot.  See the video below, otherwise it's hard to explain.

Dad has been busy again putting together a series of projects with the help of the kids and Brodero! My costume won me 1000$ at a local bar as well as special prize from instructables. I'm already thinking about what to do next year (some people do heroine, others are affected by other more complicated disorders...) Again you can check out all the projects at: http://www.instructables.com/member/Renard_Bleu/?show=INSTRUCTABLES My over the top costume. The cane for the Lady Joker in the Family The tree monster And the leaf monster with following eye.

                       princess Alice                       Pretty Estelle                         Vampire Estelle                        Vampire Alice                             Miss Estelle                        Miss Alice

We've been busy at work getting our software to play nice with Virtual Reality. This is an attempt at explaining how this works. You can't really get it without putting the headset on, but I can tell you it is totally immersive.

Here is Alice ready to set off on a birthday party sleepover - not to worry... her friend lives only about 8 houses down the street! (Update: she came back home completely zonked - not sure what time they got to sleep)

So far Estelle is a real star in grade 1 since she is a nearly independent reader and her fine motor skills are excellent. Spelling not perfect yet, but it's nice to see her blossoming confidence and interest in school and learning. Translation: Here is a bird that could have reached the sky.

Alice celebrated her 9th birthday with an intimate (only 3 invites - yahoo!) sleepover party, pinata and projection mapping cake (bet you never hear that before - click on over to Guy's instructables page to see ) The biggest event however was that we went 50-50 with Alice on an ipad mini for her (big, big big) gift. Of course it comes with strings attached, like time limits and a net-nanny, but all in all she felt she was ready for it.