Emma's Birthday

Emma turned 10 on Tuesday. She'd been looking forward to her birthday for weeks and weeks. It a fun age because it seems such a transition between little girl and pre-adolescent/young lady. The range of gifts she requested shows this as much as anything. The pair of singing Barbie dolls from "Barbie and the Diamond Castle" was on her list along with a hair straightener.

In the end, we didn't get her Alexa and Liana, the Barbie dolls because they're $48 dollars each. Paying $96 for two Barbies is something we couldn't bring ourselves to do. We did give her the hair straightener along with a DVD of her favourite movie, "Enchanted", a painting game for her Nintendo DS and a couple of T-shirts. Logan bought her a Beanie kids and she got plenty of cash given to her by relatives.

We took her ice-skating in the day. It was a very hot day up in the high 30s, so it was nice to be in the ice rink. I hadn't been skating myself so it was good to discover my skating legs again. Although I try to do a lot of walking to keep fit, I think it's a great thing to try other exercises from time to time, to use other muscles. Swimming at the beach is good, and ice-skating is definitely a good work-out for the legs. You can do several laps of the rink without getting puffed out, but at the end your legs ache as if they've run a marathon. We had the whole rink to ourselves for most of the time, as the school term hasn't finished yet.

Now for a quick update on those guinea pigs. Andrew did finally end up making a new hutch. We got those two introduced to each other with a sheet of chicken wire between separate little compartments. They started off by rubbing noses, and now they run around together on the grass down the bottom and seem to get along famously. Bamboo, the big fellow, did try to establish ground rules by making a chirruping noise deep in his chest which we discovered to be an establishing of who is boss. I'm pleased and surprised by how reasonably quickly they've taken to each other.