My favourite gingerbread house...

I have a ton of pictures to add of the gingerbread house and cake competition but I am off for a bath now and will do them tomorrow! But here is a taster for you....this is my favourite house...a Western themed house with Santa in a bathtub of bubbles, Mrs Claus singing karaoke in the bar with the cancan dancers, and all kinds of things happening! FABULOUS!!!

Goodnight everyone - have a great evening! I'm off to soak in the tub for an hour!!!

Candle dipping and Tree decorating....

The tree decorating was great! Although they limited the children to 10 beads each and they weren't great beads either! (Although the lady said she spent $315. on them!!) Anyway, we brought the trees home and the children will finish decorating them from our beads here at home :) They are cute little trees complete with stands!!!

Cookie decorating.....

Almost every big event here in Canada has cookie decorating for the children to do :) It's always a big hit!

Entertainment....

The Entertainment on the stage didn't stop - little children from dance schools across the city danced and sang for us.....Sam loved watching them....

We sat for a while and listened to some singers while chatting to a friends I know from Parentlink.....Sarah and her family were at the Festival for the very first time, so we sat and chatted about how lucky Canadians are to have so many events and activities offered for families with small children throughout the year.....and at such low cost.....everything back home was always so crowded or so expensive and very few cities back home put on many events for families.....

I asked where Sarah was from and she mentioned she had grown up near London and had lived in Bath, Bristol, Southampton and Guildford...I mentioned I lived in Epsom for a few years and she said she grew up in West Ewell! I said my Aunt had lived there and then moved to Guildford...I did my nurse training in Epsom and we all used to go over to Ewell to TGI Fridays for dinner :) My Aunt used to live just off the Kingston Bypass (I think the road was called anyway......long time ago!!!

Spiral painting....

The children enjoyed this craft last year and again this year.....they drop dots of coloured ink on spinning papaer and it throws out pretty patterns :) Even Sam had a go at this :)

Working in the hospital.....

The children had fun listening to heartbeats, operating on Rudolph, setting up IV's and having plaster casts put on their fingers :)

Pretty City.......

Wintry skies over Edmonton.....sundogs around the sun.....the pyramids and ski hills......

The Festival of trees was in the building shaped like a ski hill in front of the pink building.......The pink building is Canada Place - passport office etc etc and Federal offices.....and the ski hill shaped building is the Shaw Conference Centre (Shaw being a cable tv/ phone company.......)

The boat in the river is the Edmonton Queen - you can take rides down the river in the summer months and have dinner I think.......as you can see, it doesn't go very far during the Winter months ;)

Christmas Elves.......

Super bubbles!!!!

The children loved standing inside a monster bubble and then blowing to pop it! Although Sam just stood inside looking cute and waited for it to pop in on him ;)

The Festival of Trees...

Wonderful :) Really puts you in the Festive mood.....we had a lovely morning wandering the hall today....I think we spent 3 hours there. LOTS of pictures to bore you with but not many are very good.....I charged my flash but I think I need new rechargables as these don't seem to charge much any more....so the pictures are either really dark or too bright and I was enjoying myself far too much to stand around faffing with the camera :)