Just got this from the National Arts Centre and it sounds like a great way to spend Family Day – we’ll even be downtown already!
(You can see a clickable and bilingual version of this poster here.)
Category: Ottawa Family Fun
Weekend winter family fun: Shiverfest 2014
The forecast for the weekend looks wintry without being bone-numbingly, cheek-searingly cold – perfect weather to come out and celebrate the season at Manotick’s annual Shiverfest Winter Carnival!
There’s a full schedule of events for indoor and outdoor activities. Here’s the full list of what’s going on where and when:
Friday, January 31 at Manotick Arena and Centennial Park6:00 – 6:50 pm: Rideau Skating Club Exhibition
Beginning at 6:30 pm: Outdoor Bonfire (Hot Chocolate, Timbits)
7:00 – 8:00 pm:Family Skate Night
8:00 – 9:00 pm:Magic Dave & Circus Chris – a new novelty and magic show. Free drinks. Cotton candy, popcorn – $1
Saturday, February 1 at Manotick Arena & Centennial Park
7:30 – 11:00 am: Kiwanis Pancake Breakfast ($5 ea)
9:30 – 11:15 am: Children’s Fun Time (Ages 2-6)
10:00 am – noon:Horse-Drawn Sleigh Rides
3:00 – 4:00 pm:Winter Wonders Show. Free drinks. Cotton candy, popcorn – $1
4:00 – 5:00 pm Free Public Skate in arena
6:00 – 9:00 pm: Bands that Amp it Up. Free admission. Pop & pizza slice $3.
All day: Tobogganing and skating at Manotick Mountain and Outdoor Rink
Saturday February 1 at Manotick Legion
Noon – 2:30 pm: Chili Cook Off ($5 per person)
9:00 pm – closing:”Open Mic” Night, hosted by Tom & Tim
Sunday, February 2 at Mill Tavern Restaurant
1:00 – 4:00 pm: Trivia Contest. Tickets are $15 each. Limited numbers are available from Manotick Office Pro or by contacting trivia@manotickvca.org . Bragging rights for winners!
Raffle prizes courtesy of Sushi Sun, Khao Yum, Babbos, Black Dog Bistro, Mothership Photography and others.
For more information, or for details on the Shiverfest Winter Magic photography contest, visit the Manotick Village and Community Association website.
It’s also the first of our seasonal birthday weekends this weekend, and Winterlude starts this weekend, too, so we’ll have no shortage of things to keep us busy. Will we see you in Manotick?
Quirky Ottawa family fun – a visit to the Diefenbunker
So, the Diefenbunker. You’ve quite likely heard of it if you live in Ottawa – but have you ever made the trek out to Carp to check it out? You absolutely should! It’s been on my vague list of things to do with the kids for years, but it was only when my friend Kirsten (*waves*) came back from her recent visit with a favourable review and terrific photos that it shot to the top of my list of potential adventures. Add yet another day of bone-chilling winter temperatures and the whole family was happy just to get out of the house for an outing that didn’t involve the risk of frostbite.
For those of you who don’t know it, the Diefenbunker is a decommissioned military base. Back during the cold war, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker had a complex built deep under some pastoral meadows in Carp, on the very western edge of Ottawa, to house Canada’s top government officials in the case of a nuclear attack. It was the biggest of a series of such complexes built at the time, known as the Continuity of Government plan. From the Diefenbunker website:
The Diefenbunker is a four-story, 300 room, 100,000 square foot underground bunker, and was meant to house 535 Canadian government officials and military officers in the event of a nuclear war. Shrouded in mystery, the Diefenbunker, nicknamed after then Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, was designed and built in secrecy during the crest of Cold War fear, between 1959 and 1961. The name of the facility was given by a Toronto Star journalist who exposed a story of its development.
The entrance to the complex was originally just a big door that lead under a berm of soil, but the tour guide told us a small outbuilding had to be built because the spy satellites would have been suspicious of all the supplies and building materials being hauled into a random field out in the boondocks. That outbuilding is the only sign of the giant warren under the ground. You follow this blast tunnel and then make a right turn and enter through one-tonne steel doors to get in – so in the case of a nuclear detonation, the wind would basically blow straight through the tunnel and not into the facility. It’s sobering and fascinating at the same time, which is pretty much evocative of how the entire facility felt to me.
We opted for a guided tour (free with the price of admission) but you can do a self-guided tour if you prefer. I highly recommend the guided tour, though – our tour guide Louis was excellent. He was very personable, enthusiastic about the topic and spoke in a way that was engaging for all three boys and us as well. We lucked out with a private tour – nobody else was foolish enough to be out early enough for the first tour on a frigid Sunday morning, I guess. And for all but the last 10 minutes we were there, we had the whole place to ourselves! The tour lasted just over an hour, and then we were free to wander through most of the complex to explore at our leisure.
This is what elevated the Diefenbunker from interesting to a great family activity for me – the fact that we were free to walk into the offices and sit in the chairs, dial the rotary phones, lay on the beds and inspect everything up close. Which we did – a lot!
The Diefenbunker was built between 1959 and 1961, and was decommissioned in 1994. I find it both evocative and a little depressing how familiar the mid-1980s bureacratic look is – when I started working for the government in 1990, this was still a functioning Canadian Forces station. Considering it’s only been a couple of decades, some of the anachronisms are jarring. We had to explain to the boys what ashtrays were, and how to dial a rotary phone – which they did, over and over and over again.
The room full of eight-foot by six-foot banks of mainframe computers was fascinating, too. The value of these computers at the time was in excess of $8M, but I have more computing power and RAM in my iPhone.
This room was Tristan’s favourite part of the tour. The tour guide paused before we entered and told us that when it was functional, the security clearance required to enter was so high that the Prime Minister himself was two levels of clearance shy. When it was an active military station, the commander on site did not have a high enough clearance to enter. So when we finally got to go in and see what was denied to Prime Ministers, the boys were wowed. They were underwhelmed by the computing power of the old magnetic tape reels, though! 😉
And later, Tristan took a bit of a rest in the rather, ahem, austere living quarters in the Prime Minister’s suite.
If you think that’s austere, you should see the dorms that the lowly cabinet ministers and high-ranking military members would have shared – nine beds to a room, sleeping in eight hour rotations three times every 24 hours, so 27 people to a room. Lap of luxury, yes?
You see the lovely green quality of the light? That’s why so many of these photos are in black and white. Clearly nobody thought to outfit the place with soft white daylight bulbs! While I found the recycled air and the idea of being in a windowless bunker 80 feet under the ground more than a little disturbing, it was the light that would have done me in if I were to spend more than an hour or two in the Diefenbunker!
Other cool things we saw:
(Props to Kirsten, from whom I stole the idea for the shot above!)
I’m not sure what this is, but there are intriguing machines just like it all over the place in the Diefenbunker, and you can poke at them all you want as long as you are careful. I still can’t believe how open everything is and how much they trust the patrons moving through the museum to be respectful.
And deep underground, behind a door 15 times heavier than the blast door at the entrance, lies the vault where the Bank of Canada would keep the nation’s supply of gold (and thus, the entire value of the Canadian economy at the time) free from contamination in the event of a nuclear strike. (Having not seen Goldfinger, I had no idea that gold is immediately rendered valueless when it comes in contact with nuclear fallout. I’m still a little sketchy on that one – maybe because the gold becomes radioactive? So many cool lessons learned today!)
Apparently they started building the bank vault somewhere near Pakenham, but the site kept filling in with water. They eventually gave up and built the vault adjacent to the Diefenbunker – and you can still see a perfectly square lake somewhere out in Mississippi Mills. Must check the Google satellite maps for that one someday!
I think this sign in the cafeteria perfectly sums up the quirky gallows-humour experience of visiting the Diefenbunker. “You’re lucky to be alive, so just eat it.” Bwhahahaha – I really, really need one of these for my kitchen!
I was completely charmed by our Diefenbunker adventure. It’s a little bit of a history lesson, a little bit of a time capsule, and the polar opposite of a stuffy museum visit. I didn’t expect the kids to be as engaged as they were, and we ended up spending far more of our day there than I had anticipated. I’m also madly impressed with the Diefenbunker admin for offering not only a family admission price, but one that is not limited to just two adults and two children.
I’m not sure that we’d revisit this one on an annual basis, but I will go out of the way to take my family and friends for a visit – it’s definitely worth checking out at least once. Just remind me never to get talked into doing any professional photography under that dizzying cocktail of fluorescent and tungsten lights!
If you go:
The Diefenbunker Museum is located beside the Carp branch of the Ottawa Public Library at 3911 Carp Road. The museum is open seven days per week from 11:00am – 4:00pm, and closed on Christmas and New Years Day. A family admission is well worth $40 + HST. More details on the Diefenbunker site.
Have you been? What did you think?
Ho! Ho! Ho!-ray for Holiday Parades: the 2013 edition!
Edited to add: Click this link for the 2018 Santa Claus and holiday parade info!
Welcome to one of my favourite holiday traditions, the 8th (!!) annual round-up of Christmas, Holiday and Santa Claus parades for Ottawa and Eastern Ontario! Wheeee!
It’s another busy year for holiday parades – apparently it’s not just on Christmas Eve that Santa needs his magical reindeer power to zip his way around to meet all the excited girls and boys! The parades seem to have inched back a week closer to Christmas, but the only significant jump in date is the Barrhaven parade. Here’s the 2013 Santa Claus parade line-up, in chronological order:
Continue reading “Ho! Ho! Ho!-ray for Holiday Parades: the 2013 edition!”
This week in pictures: In which summer abruptly gives way to autumn
Hey, hi! Remember how I used to write posts for this blog? Ya, those were good days, eh? Two blog posts in two weeks – oy, the transition from summer to fall has been brutal, both from a weather perspective and from an activities one. I feel like I’ve run headlong through the last two weeks with barely time to breathe, let alone write blog posts. But, ahem, there’s ALWAYS time for photographs!
My last photo post documented our delightful last week of summer, so it only seems right I lead off with this, the boys’ first day of school. Sigh, so grown up! This is the last year they’ll all be at the same school together.
It’s still officially summer on the calendar, but even nature seems to think it’s fall. Doesn’t this have a distinctly autumn feel?
Nothing says autumn like an afternoon in the orchard! This year, for our annual apple picking trek we opted for the path of least resistance, with the closest and least busy orchard we know, which also happens to be a perfectly lovely place to pick apples: the Log Cabin Orchard outside of Osgoode.
They stopped long enough to let me get a few quick portraits. Because, yanno, I hardly have *any* photos of my lovelies! 😉
And then I milked the orchard shots for a few days of “photos of the day,” playing with photoshop and textures.
And what else does September bring? Activities, of course. Each spring I enroll the boys in swim lessons, and each boy also gets at least one year of skating lessons. I’ve had just enough of a buffer from Tristan and Simon’s lessons a few years back to actually be looking forward to Lucas’s first lesson. He was a trooper – up on his feet and gliding during his first lesson. And falling, of course. There was a cringe-worthy amount of falling, but the smile on his face never faltered.
Amidst the craziness of early September, I managed to slip out to Toronto and back for a very quick but wonderful visit with my friends at Fisher-Price and Mom Central Canada. I’ll have more about that grand adventure soon, but for now here’s one of my favourite photos from the trip, the view of the Toronto skyline from the ferry between Toronto’s island airport and the mainland.
And finally, one of my very favourite parts of autumn is that it is a SPECTACULAR time for family portraits. Saturday, I was honoured to take a second year of portraits for this lovely family. We had a little wander through some gardens, across a bridge, and around an old barn, stopping for a wee picnic snack along the way. My favourite kind of photography session – just watching and photographing a happy family at play. I’ll have lots more from this fun session soon, but here’s the sneak peek:
Aren’t they adorable?
I have just a few openings for autumn family portrait sessions this fall in Ottawa, as life is pretty darn busy and I try not to schedule more than one session each week. If you’re interested in either a porch portraits mini-session out here in Manotick or maybe a full portrait session with the colourful leaves and delicious autumn light (can you tell I love autumn portraits?), please get in touch soon! I’d love to work with you and your family to capture these moments – they’ll be gone as quick as the apples disappear from the orchard!
Family movie night under the stars
The very same week we were having our new treehouse built, the fine folks at Epson sent an e-mail out of the blue wondering if I’d like to test drive a neat new home theatre projector. I immediately imagined a big white bedsheet tacked to the treehouse, friends and neighbours gathered ’round on lawnchairs on a warm summer night, crickets chirping and kids sitting on blankets munching popcorn under the stars. It was the vision of a perfect summer night – and for once in my life, that’s exactly how it played out!
A backyard movie night and tree-house-warming party for just our family and my visiting brother’s family would have been awesome on its own, but I thought it would be a great way for us to get to know our neighbours a little better. Although there are quite a few kids similar in age to the boys on our street, they go to a different school and it drives me a little crazy that even though I know the adults well enough to say hi and chat, the kids on the street don’t know each other like they did when we were kids. Movie night seemed like a great icebreaker. To round out the crowd, we invited a few of the families of the boys’ friends from school and a few family friends, too. I’d say we had probably a dozen or 15 adults and maybe 20 kids. Way too many people for the inside of my house, but perfect for the sprawling yard!
We had room for kids to run and play, for a picnic dinner for some early arrivals, space to set up the projector, and more than enough space for a campfire and marshmallows. And, as it turned out, roasted gummy spiders. (Not part of my original vision, I must admit.)
The projector itself is way cool and dead easy to use. It’s the Epson PowerLite Home Cinema 750HD and it is truly plug and play. We could have plugged it in to our BluRay player, or even the Wii console, to watch the movie that way, but we decided to plug it in to my Macbook so we’d also have access to iTunes while we were waiting for it to get dark. An HDMI cable and an extension cord and we were good to go! Here’s how Epson describes this fun home theatre projector on their site:
Get ready for a standing ovation from family and friends when you share brilliant 2D and 3D entertainment using the Home Cinema 750HD projector. Transform the game room, garage or even your backyard into an incredible big-screen experience — all at an affordable price. 3000 lumens of colour brightness and 3000 lumens of white brightness1 and 720p resolution ensure images are bright, sharp and clear. Quick and easy HDMI connectivity lets you jump into the middle of any 2D or 3D adventure, from movies to live sporting events and even video games. Get the total package with rechargeable RF 3D glasses and an internal speaker — all included, so you’re ready for larger-than-life, immersive, 3D adventures — anytime. Epson’s exclusive 3LCD technology delivers rich, vivid images up to 300 inches — perfect for projecting on a blank wall or portable screen.
(imagine a photo of the projector plugged in to my computer sitting on our old diaper table out in the middle of the yard here. I forgot to take that photo!)
The forecast for Friday had been perfect, then sketchy with a 40% chance of thunderstorms, but if there’s anything the summer of 2013 has taught me, it’s to ignore the forecast entirely. As it turned out, the night was clear and perfect and the only real problem was the skeeters.
I was worried we’d have to wait until full dark to be able to see anything. (We saw the original Batman at the drive-in back in 1989 or so, and I remember not being able to see anything for the first half of the movie because it’s such a dim movie to begin with, and in the ambient light of the setting sun, we couldn’t make out any of the details.) I was really impressed at the power and clarity of the Epson projector, though. It was just as the sun was setting that we started up the movie, and it was crystal clear.
Of course, the effect was better as we approached full dark. Look how crisp the image on the screen is! I was so impressed!
We didn’t get the chance to try out the 3D mode yet, but we’ll still have the projector for a few days before we have to return it, so we may have to try that out tonight. Beloved is completely in love with it. He leaned over to me half way through the movie and said, “We so need one of these. I want to watch all my favourite TV shows like this!” I laughed imagining Survivor and Survivorman projected on the treehouse, but I think what he had in mind was setting it up on a shelf over the bed and projecting the full size of the bedroom wall!
(I was seriously tempted to look into purchasing one when we turned off the movie — remember, we were using my Macbook to play the DVD — and the photo I’d been editing earlier in Photoshop appeared on the projection screen. Photo editing on a four foot by six foot screen? Hells yes!!)
Thanks to the kind folks at Epson for letting us borrow this amazing projector. Thanks, too, to MediaProfile, who arranged the loan of the projector and threw in a complimentary copy of Hotel Transylvania courtesy of Sony Entertainment as well. It’s a charming movie and the kids seemed to enjoy it almost as much as the grownups did! (Yes I’m looking at you, Julie!)
Everyone agreed it was a great night. Huh, lookit that — some of my crazy schemes actually play out exactly as I imagined them. Who would have guessed it?
Summer staycation: Choose a direction for a fun family day trip from Ottawa
No big vacation plans for you this summer? No problem! Whether you want to go north, south, east or west, here’s four suggestions for great little family-friendly day trips that you can take from Ottawa. A change is as good as a rest, right?
1. North to Wakefield, Quebec
We discovered Wakefield on my birthday last summer. It’s about an hour’s drive from our place, but probably less than half an hour from downtown. The scenic drive up Autoroute 5 is straight off the King Edward bridge and easy to find, and the drive is lovely! The red covered bridge for which Wakefield is known is a wee drive outside the village core and a bit too far to walk, but worth the extra effort.
If you go, don’t miss the covered bridge, the bakery, the candy store, the eclectic little shops, the great little restaurants (we liked Kaffe 1870) and the old-fashioned round-about for the old steam train (which I hear will be running again in 2014!)
2. West to Almonte, Ontario
Our trip to Almonte last year was a Mother’s Day present to me. (Do you sense a theme here? Oh yes, I will totally play the mom card to coerce the kids into tolerating a road trip on my behalf!) Almonte is a picturesque little town maybe 45 minutes due west of here. You can get there off the 417, but I prefer the back roads that march through farm and forest as the Canadian Shield fights the Ottawa Valley for dominance.
We were antiquing in Almonte and found lots of cute little shops in which to browse. My favourite by far, though, was my main reason for wanting to go: the Tin Barn Market. It’s a good thing this little shop is a two-hour round-trip drive from Manotick or I swear I would have no money left for groceries each week. They have the most amazing selection of eclectic used, repurposed and vintage things you could ever imagine. We also checked out the Almonte Flea Market, looking for a replacement for our old favourite the Antrim Flea Market, which ceased operations in 2011. It was still early in the season when we visited, but there were a good number of vendors with interesting items there.
If vintage and repurposed isn’t your thing, you’ll still likely enjoy a walk along Almonte’s river walk, where you can see some of the textile mills that contributed to the founding of the town. It’s a lovely walk in any season! And if you’re in the mood for a truly gorgeous scene, just zip another 15 minutes along the Mississippi River to Pakenham, where you can see the old five-arch stone bridge.
3. East to Lachute, Quebec
You might have sensed a theme here. We love flea markets. LOVE them. I don’t even need to buy a lot of stuff, I am just completely fascinated by the browsing. But the buying is fun, too, and the boys like the treasure-hunting aspect of perusing a good flea market. It’s a bit of a surprise, then, that before this year we’d never made the two-hour trek out to Lachute, Quebec for the Lachute Farmers Market, the “largest flea market in Western Quebec.†(We knew we had to go when we saw it featured on Canadian Pickers last year!)
It was a zoo, the biggest, craziest, busiest flea market we’ve ever seen. We had to wait in traffic for 10 minutes just to get near enough to park, and people were parking *everywhere*. It turns out that the day we went (it runs Sunday and Tuesday, but Tuesday is the bigger day) was during Quebec’s annual construction holiday, so that may have been a bit of a tactical error on our part. But crowds aside, I have never seen a flea market like this – they had the usual grey-market knock-off stuff, but rows and rows of it, so much that we couldn’t at first find the vintage stuff we were looking for. (You know it’s a big flea market when you can’t get oriented and wish you had a map!) They had live music, a little restaurant, stupidly long lineups for the washrooms, pony rides and even livestock among the trash and treasures for sale.
I seriously regret not buying the old wooden spindles I saw ($4 each) and the vintage tin spinning top ($20). And I wish we’d had more time to take in this advice I got in reply to my tweet about the madness of the flea market, but it was just too crowded to linger and we didn’t want to leave Bella in her crate too late.
@DaniGirl. That's the small town I grew up in! Don't forget ice cream at Lowe's Dairy on Main street!
— Jim Watson (@JimWatsonOttawa) July 30, 2013
Next time we go, we will head out much earlier. By noon many of the vintage and antiques sellers were already packing up their tables. If you love flea markets with a festival flavour, you’ll love Lachute!
4. South to Morrisburg and Upper Canada Village
At least once a year, we make our way down Highway 31 (otherwise known as Bank Street) past Metcalfe, through Vernon and Williamsburg (be sure to admire the crumbling beauty of the Picadilly Theatre on your way by!) and then down Highway 2 to Upper Canada Village. Just before you get to the 401, if you’re out on a Sunday it’s well worth a gander to poke around McHaffie’s flea market since you’re out there. (Big, but not as crazy as Lachute, and well worth the drive!)
Here’s our trip to Upper Canada Village back in 2010, which conveniently coincided with a civil war re-enactment. (Taken through the viewfinder of an old Duaflex twin-lens reflex camera. Remember when I was obsessed with TtV?)
Aside from Upper Canada Village, which is always an adventure in itself, you can hop on the wee train out front and extend your trip to Crysler Beach. And one of these days we’ll get around to checking out Prehistoric World, now that Lucas is in a dinosaur phase.
So there’s a day trip worth of adventure on every point of the compass from Ottawa. Stay tuned, I have a new one to share with you soon!
What’s your favourite day trip?
Ottawa family fun GIVEAWAY! Hidden Life of Ants at the Nature Museum
Can you tell it’s summer? The blog is all family fun all the time these days. And today, I get the opportunity to share the fun with YOU!
Have you been to the Museum of Nature lately? I’ve always been fond of it, but it’s been a good couple of years since we dropped by. I have to say, we have never loved it more! It was the epitome of “something for everyone.”
Lucas is newly enamoured with dinosaurs, so I knew he’d enjoy the dinosaur exhibit. Even though I’ve seen it several times, there’s something magical about watching your five-year-old light up like a Christmas tree, eyes wide with wonder and literally jumping up and down with excitement over every single skeleton. You can imagine how cute it was when we made it to the actual dinosaurs – in fact, you don’t have to imagine it at all. How cute is this?
So I knew that would go over well. What I didn’t expect was how utterly engaged all five of us would be by the Earth Gallery. Tristan and Simon are Minecraft junkies (if you have a boy of a certain age, you know what I mean) and they’re fascinated by rocks, gems and mining. I had never been in this gallery before and even though I don’t play Minecraft, I’ve always been intrigued by geology and I found it really interesting. And I always love the Mammal Gallery with its realistic dioramas of Canadian wildlife.
We were creeping up on lunchtime by the time we’d carefully inspected each exhibit in each of those three galleries, so we decided to forgo the RBC Blue Water Gallery and head straight to the main event, the special Hidden Life of Ants exhibit.
Ants are everywhere. Though small in size, they form complex societies and dominate their ecosystems as much as humans do. Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Ants is an exhibition of 39 large-scale photos by award-winning photographer Mark W. Moffet. Visitors will also see two live colonies of harvester ants and honeypot ants, a three-dimensional aluminum cast of an ant nest and a touchable oversized ant model. You will have a whole new appreciation for ants after seeing this impressive show! This travelling exhibition is organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and circulated by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.
I’m mildly bug phobic, but that has never really extended to ants, maybe because they’re so ubiquitous. (Unless they have wings. The ones with wings freak me out.) I found this exhibit engaging on a couple of levels – first, because the ants themselves are interesting. Second, because the photos really are spectacular. I mean, who wouldn’t love ants blown up to over a meter in size?
(“Hey boys! Stand over here and pretend the giant ants are attacking you!”)(They’re so patient with me. I love them so!)
I found out from the exhibit curator on Twitter that although the photography part of the Hidden Life of Ants exhibit is only temporary, the ants belong to the museum and will be a permanent feature. I don’t know whether I’m more tickled by the serendipitous connections I make through Twitter or how clearly excited the curator was to share this news. I tell ya, I now know way more than I ever expected to know about ants. And dinosaurs.
Ahem, anyway, this was a terrific half day out and we followed it up with lunch in the Byward Market to round out a full day downtown. And now I get to share the joy! Would you like to attend the exhibit? The Hidden Life of Ants runs until January 5, 2014 at the Canadian Museum of Nature, and I have a family pass to give away! If you would like to enter this giveaway, just leave a comment on this post telling me whether you think ants are creepy or cool.
Here’s the fine print:
- This is a giveaway for a family pass comprising two adult and two child admissions to the Canadian Museum of Nature. The pass includes the Hidden Life of Ants exhibit and regular exhibits but some special exhibits and movies may have additional fees.
- To enter the giveaway, simply leave a comment on this post telling me whether you think ants are creepy or cool.
- Everyone who “likes” Postcards from the Mothership on Facebook will get a bonus entry. (This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.) If you already like Postcards from the Mothership on FB, just say so in your comment.
- This giveaway is open only to Canadian residents, excluding residents of Quebec. (sorry!)
- This giveaway will run until 11:59 pm EDT on Wednesday July 31, 2013.
- One winner will be chosen at random from all comments posted.
- If you win, you must be willing to provide your full name and contact information to me to share with the agent of the Canadian Museum of Nature that is organizing the giveaway.
Special thanks to the Museum of Nature for the great morning of fun, for the free family pass they gave to us and for the free family pass to give away!
Edited to add: Thanks and congratulations to Suze, winner of the family pass. Enjoy the museum!! 🙂
Ottawa Family Fun: Peddle Boats on Dow’s Lake
For years I’ve been meaning to check out the boat rentals at Dow’s Lake. I rented a canoe once a million years ago, maybe before Beloved and I even met, but ever since we’ve had kids I’ve been thinking about going back and renting a peddle boat or two and splashing around the Canal. I had visions of happy, smiling kids burning off their excess energy, of close-up encounters with ducks and whatever creatures live in the lake, of sunshine and water and summertime joy.
Uh huh.
So my advice to you is that this is a really fun and relatively inexpensive excursion, with a couple of caveats. First, do not go on the hottest day of the summer, and do not delude yourself that going early in the day will make a difference. We went a week ago last Sunday, and it was sweltering even at 10 o’clock in the morning. You may also want to avoid 11-year-olds who get surly over wearing a lifejacket, and 9-year-olds who decide they’re too tired to pedal after the first 10 minutes. And be aware that despite what the people at the rental desk are calling to you from the deck, the rudder may be so finicky that you get stuck turning in counterclockwise circles about every 10 minutes, thus impeding your egress from the harbour, elevating your already elevated body temperature and perhaps adding to the overall surliness in your pedal boat.
Once you master the finicky rudder, however, you may be rewarded by close encounters with ducks after all.
And playing a gentle game of bumper boats will go a long way to restoring everyone’s equilibrium.
And if you stop pedalling and just put your feet up for a few minutes, it’s not so infernally hot after all.
Despite the heat and the elevated risk of crankiness, we all ended up having a good — but short — time. We’d rented two boats for an hour and I don’t think we lasted 45 minutes — but we also barely made it around to the edge of the arboretum and back. (Given the number of circles we turned trying to master the rudder, had we simply pedaled straight I’m pretty sure we could have made it most of the way to the NAC. And back.) It was an affordable little adventure at $15 per boat per hour, and $3.50 for parking across the street. Now that I know Lucas is old enough to sit still, I think next time we’ll go for a canoe instead of a peddle boat. And maybe choose a day where the mercury tops out under 35C.
If you go:
Dow’s Lake summer rentals:
- Canoe, kayak and peddle boat rentals, starting at $15 per hour
- A $20 deposit and government-issued ID required
- Open 7 days a week (WEATHER PERMITTING), beginning after the water reaches navigation levels in May, until the Thanksgiving weekend in October. The hours vary with the seasons and also with the weather.
- See website for additional details
In which the boys launch their movie careers at the Apple Store (alternate title: more free family fun this summer!)
This is a shameless but absolutely unsponsored plug for a great summer activity for kids aged 8 to 12. It was Beloved who noticed the ad for free kids’ camp on the Apple.ca website a few weeks ago. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call it “camp” as the sessions are only 90 minutes over three days, but if you are looking for an amazing free (did I mention free?!) summer activity for your preteen kids, check this out!
At Apple Camp, kids ages 8-12 learn how to shoot their own footage, create an original song in GarageBand on an iPad, and put it all together in iMovie on a Mac. This free workshop, held at Apple Retail Stores, spans three days and ends with campers debuting their masterpieces at the Apple Camp Film Festival.
Tristan and Simon attended the one in the Rideau Centre this past week and they had a blast. I was highly impressed with both the idea and the execution. (Those Apple people are pretty clever – offer free and excellent workshops for kids, using Apple products natch, and require the parents to remain onsite throughout the workshop. But they were content to let me work away on my Blackberry and iPhone and stack of paperwork I’d brought along while the kids attended the camp.)
The kids learned to conceptualize and lay out a storyboard, and then use the Garage Band app to lay out a soundtrack. They were on their own to film up to a minute of footage overnight, and then they used iMovie to put it all together during the second session. (The third session, a “film festival” of all participants, is this Saturday, and we’re just skipping that part.)
They didn’t need to bring any equipment of their own, although they both brought their own iPods and used them to capture the raw footage. You don’t need any Apple devices to attend the workshop, but be prepared to covet one if you don’t have one. We had iMovie for the iPods already (annoyingly not the same as the iPad version Tristan had used with a friend to make movie trailers a few weeks ago) and although I have Garage Band for my Macbook it is apparently not the same Garage Band as the one for the iPad. (Which we had to download because it is a wicked cool app, so we were in for $5 by the time the dust settled.) That’s my only complaint about the whole process – the difference in apps across devices confused the heck out of me. But that’s an Apple problem, not a workshop problem.
The toughest part was actually coming up with the concept. (Isn’t it always?) The final footage bore little to no resemblance to the storyboards, and the soundtrack Simon created on day one was with an action movie in mind, although his final product was a commercial. (More about the product featured in his commercial in my next post – and stand by for an awesome giveaway!)
Curious? Here’s the final cut!
First up, Agent Meow: score, direction, inspiration, filming and editing done by Tristan with props (and apologies) to Henry Mancini:
And this is Simon’s masterpiece, featuring the Zoku shake and slushie maker from Mastermind Toys (watch for a blogger cameo!):
Not bad for a couple of hours, eh? I think they did a great job and I know they had a great time. In addition to the experience, they got free t-shirts, USB wrist bands and iron-on patches. For FREE! Mad props to the Apple store for this program.
It looks like they’re offering more workshops at the Rideau Centre and Bayshore Apple stores the last week of July – check with Apple.ca for a location and date near you!