A Birthday to Celebrate

July 1st is the date of 2 birthdays to be celebrated for us.
First, it's my Mom's birthday! (did you see that Mom? I listed your first?)
Secondly, it's Canada's birthday.

This year, my parents are out at their timeshare the week of July 1st. We still wanted to spend the day with my Mom and get in some kind of Canada Day celebrations, so we decided to do something new and meet my parents and go spend the day in Banff.

There was a free pancake breakfast in Banff. We were actually surprised at how ridiculously long the line was. We talked about whether we should just go and buy some breakfast, but in the end, we decided to just wait out the line and get our free pancakes.

While waiting, we took the kids for a walk and look around. There were several stilt walkers, animals and we caught photos with some of them.

Then we came across a spot where you can dress up. We had a lot of fun with that. We even convinced my grandma to dress up. ha ha.


What was annoying, was after waiting in line for 30+ minutes, they came and stopped the line just a couple people in front of us and said that was the end and the food will be all gone. I thought it was poor planning to come and tell us that now, and I told them so. My Mom doesn't like me to be so verbal when I told them they planned that poorly. Anyways, we decided to wait anyways and when we got there, there was still lots of food left. Pancakes, sausages, muffins and bottled juice. It was a good breakfast.

Afterwards, we took a walk through the gardens. Last time we walked through these gardens, the twins were only 1 year old. So, that was 8 years ago! Nice gardens. We enjoyed the walk. I was impressed that even Grandma walked up and down the stairs there. I fell a few days ago and am still in a lot of pain (either I broke my tailbone or I just really bruised it, but regardless, it HURTS) anyways, I couldn't let Grandma make me look bad. If being 98, she could walk all those stairs and stuff, then I certainly could get my butt going! It was good. Had some good laughs... which I'll make a seperate blog post about (yes, Mom, I'm going to blog about it!).

What's this?? Grandpa standing on poor Matthew's foot and pushing him over??

We walked down the street and watched some performances on stage and let the kids play on the numerous bouncy "houses".


After walking through the Whyte Museum and down main street, we headed back to the timeshare for dinner. We forgot candles for Mom's birthday cake, so we just had to pretend. The kids thought it was funny. I decided to keep the cake simple and made one of my favorite cakes... a jello cake with coolwhip and fresh strawberries. Yum!

The evening ended off with swimming and some of the best fireworks I've seen! We watched the fireworks in Canmore and they were big, closeup and fantastic! Unfortunately, I forgot my camera for those.

Happy Birthday Mom!
Happy Birthday Canada!