As promised, here is the second of three back to back updates. This one features a variety of family stuff from March through June. First up, a new baby! Above we have Tyson Edward McAllister, born to my friends Wendy and Trevor on March 17th. Here he's four days old. Below we have a few more pictures of the new family:

 

So the two of them are over the moon, as you can see. Murphy has not met little Tyson yet, for a couple reasons. First of all he's not a big fan of kids under the age of about 10, and secondly Tyson seems to have had an allergic reaction to Trevor's parents' dogs. So that's just going to have to wait. But he's not going to be able to escape babies forever, as now my sister is pregnant!

Speaking of my sister, she and her husband Jason were up here last weekend to visit with his parents and aunt and uncle before they left on a cruise with my parents. Allie and Jason stayed with me, in my tiny little second bedroom (which I usually use as an office). You can't tell in the picture above, but she's 13 weeks pregnant in the photo, and is just starting to show. Luckily Murphy's fear of babies doesn't seem to extend to fetuses as he climbed all over Allie, much to her delight!

While they were up visiting Lynn Valley Days were taking place. Lynn Valley is the community within North Vancouver in which I live. Apparently we have an annual celebration, or so I found out, complete with parade. I figured it would be a couple of floats featuring Girl Guides, and maybe a kid's karate class would walk by doing their thing. Well Jason and I found out it was much more than that at 10:30am! Allie had already gotten up and headed down to visit with my parents, but Jason and I had slept in. Jason was up eating cereal, but I was dead asleep when I heard thunderous bagpipes wailing outside my window. I leapt out of bed and tore outside to see:

A full blown parade! The picture above is of the Renaissance Fair group, which walked by about halfway through the parade. Clearly I wasn't sleeping with my camera, so I missed the bagpipers. So after checking out the first few groups through my gate - the parade was literally in my front yard, just on the other side of my sidewalk - Jason and I ran back inside, grabbed sweaters and a camera, and watched the whole thing go by for about 45 minutes. Of course Murphy had to join us:

Check out the Shriners in the background! Jason and I were killing ourselves watching this go by. Shriners on their bikes! I have no idea if we have a local Shriners group, or if they were brought in specifically for this parade...but really a parade isn't a parade without Shriners! Note the slightly uncomfortable look on Jason's face. He's really not a dog person, and I just threw Murphy's leash at him and demanded that he pose. Such a good brother in law.

Murphy even snuck in a kiss. See the balloons? As the groups walked by they handed out balloons, gum, candy...and business cards. It was quite funny as we were alternately getting handfuls of lollipops and invitations to various clubs and businesses.

So what were the groups that walked by? Well as I'd jokingly suggested the previous day, there were the Girl Guides (Sparks, which are the 5 year olds) singing their songs as they drove by, and a karate school doing their kicks. But additionally there were kids from various preschools and day cares singing/laughing/crying, a church group complete with Christian band, two school marching bands, teenage cheerleaders, a couple of dance schools, a couple of private schools, an adults with developmental disabilities group, a hair salon's stylists all done up with crazy do's, BC Hydro (our provincial energy consortium), the mayor and our MP (representative in federal government) riding in convertibles, and so many others. Below we have the only band that could really march and play at the same time:

Freddy Fuddpucker. I remember the name from childhood, so they must be some sort of institution around here. It's hard to tell in the photo, but they're all dressed up in crazy outfits, such as animals (I saw a cow complete with udders). So we watched all this for quite some time, and Murphy behaved himself very well. Until the dancers came out. That got him all excited, and he started barking at the kid next to us who was punching her balloon. So in Murphy went to the condo:

Where he continued to bark! So he came back out to ride out the last few groups. This whole thing was extemely entertaining, and next year I plan to have friends and family over to enjoy the show!

So that's it for this update. I'll be back shortly with the new park Murphy and I discovered.

Email me!

Meghan

Here's the link to the next update: June 2006
Here's the link to the previous update: March & April 2006

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