Nova Scotia Show-and-Tell

Today was my daughter Lulu’s first show-and-tell day of the year. She’s in kindergarten. A note came home in her backpack a few days ago and it said she could bring in anything that fit in her book bag and wasn’t a toy. I know, the possibilities are endless! Well in typical procrastination mode, I completely ignored it until we were running out the door this morning. Darn good thing I think fast on my toes! I grabbed an ornament off the Christmas tree.

It was a hand-me-down ornament from my dad last year. It’s a lobster/crab cage and I’m pretty sure he got it when he went to Nova Scotia a million years ago. I came to this insightful conclusion because I found another Nova Scotia ornament when I was decorating the tree this year. It’s a moose holding a lobster that has ‘Halifax’ written on the back.

None of this would be very funny, except for the fact that hubby and I had never been to Nova Scotia at that point. We took the kids for the first time this summer. (I wrote about it here.) So I have to wonder, was I planning ahead when I was sorting through the hand-me-down ornaments, in anticipation of having keepsakes from our yet-to-go-on vacation? I must have, right? I mean who hangs ornaments on their tree from someone else’s vacation?!? And I must not have even put them on the tree last year, because they seemed brand new to all of us. Who knows. But it sure made me laugh as I hung them.

When I picked Lulu up from school she was so excited to tell me all about how she shared the ornament and told the class all about “Ovascotia, in Canada, and how we went camping and ate lobster.” Everyone asked her if the crab was real and she passed it around so each child could touch it. So cute. She kept it with her all day until I had to put my foot down and insist she leave it in the car when we went into the mall for our Santa picture.

Her, her brother, and I reminisced all day about our trip, so I thought I’d share a few more pictures that I didn’t include in the first post.

The kids can’t wait to go back again. They want to go this summer, which isn’t going to happen, but we’re planning to go back in 2015. And here’s the reason they loved it so much… we did some house crashing. We stayed with the extended family of our friends whose wedding we went up there for. Except it wasn’t one house, it was like a compound. Multiple generations of a few close families bought up every house on one side of this lake and it was just about the funnest thing you could imagine. Motor boats, floating docks, a DIY seesaw on what felt like Tom Sawyer’s island. This place was awesome! We were invited back and can’t wait to go again!