Category: Life in Ottawa

Friday Family Fun: Five places to meet the animals

As I mentioned yesterday, this summer I’m launching a new bloggy series: Friday Family Fun! I thought I’d get us started with one of my favourite summertime activities: meeting the animals. Here’s five great places to visit if you’d like to get to know our furry friends in and around the Ottawa area.

1. Valley View Little Animal Farm

Valley View is the perfect place for the toddler to early school age set. There’s fun stuff to climb on at the front of the park, and a small barn with goats, chickens, rabbits and the usual petting zoo type creatures that you can feed by hand. My boys have always been fans of the dozens of metal yellow Tonka trucks strewn around near the entrance… when they were toddlers, I think we could’ve just paid our admission fee, play with the trucks for three hours and then leave again without actually looking at the rest of the farm! If you do that, though, you’ll miss the wonderful animal barns (pigs, ponies, peacocks, geese and chickens, bunnies, ostrich and deer and so much more), the most amazing playgrounds and climbers, and a fantastic agricultural museum. You can read my blog post about Valleyview from 2009 or visit the Valley View website for more details. Valley View is open every day except Monday, and admission is $8 per person.

Tristan airplane

2. Papanack Park Zoo

It’s been quite a few years since we’ve been out to the far east end of town to visit the Papanack Park Zoo, but I’m surprised that I’ve never blogged about it. At this zoo off Highway 174 near Wendover, you’ll find an assortment of animals from lions and tigers to gibbons and squirrel monkeys to arctic wolves and black bears and much, much more. Admission is $17.50 for adults, $10 for kids 6 – 18, and $8.00 for kids 2 – 5 years old (kiddies under 2 are free!)

3. Parc Omega

Parc Omega is on our list of places to visit again this summer! Parc Omega is a kind of African Lion Safari with native Canadian animals like wapiti and wolves and bears instead of lions and baboons. It’s the same concept, though. You drive a 10 km loop through gorgeous forests and plains amidst the (mostly) free-roaming animals. Instead of baboons crawling on your car, you can feed carrots (and, in our case, soda crackers) to wapiti and red deer. There are also hiking trails and an interpretive centre.

Big ol' black bear

Parc Omega is about an hour from Ottawa, down Hwy 148 to Route 323 near Montebello. Rates are as follows: adults $18; children 6 to 15, $13; and 2 to 5, $7. I blogged about our visit in 2008.

4. The Canada Agriculture Museum

We! Love! The! Farm! I’ve had the joint membership to the Canada Agriculture Museum, the Aviation Museum and the Science and Technology Museum for years, and they have paid for themselves over and over again. It just wouldn’t be summer without a morning at the Farm, visiting the smelly cow barns, petting the baby calves, admiring the muscular horses and the chubby pigs, and taking a ride in the tractor simulator. And have you checked out their relatively new (2009, I think?) play structure? It’s awesome! The Agriculture Museum is definitely one of the best places in Ottawa to visit with kids.

189:365 At the farm

Admission is an affordable $16 per family (oh how I love family-pack admissions!) but there are excellent membership and day-pass combo prices as well. Check out their website for details!

5. Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo

Let’s face it, summer is not all sunshine and clear skies. If you’re looking for a rainy day activity or need to get out of the blazing sun for a while, consider a trip to Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo in the city’s south end.

DSC_0636

You may have encountered Little Ray’s traveling show at a summer event or a birthday party, but if you’ve never made the trek out to see them on the south end of Bank Street, you should! They have an amazing array of slithering, swimming, creeping and flying creatures, and an amazing educational program that keeps kids riveted. Family admission for four (sigh) is $38, and $8 for each additional person. I’m particularly fond of Little Ray’s because that’s the first place I ever took all three boys on my own back in 2008, and we make sure to go back at least once a year.

That’s my five recommendations – do you want to play along? If you blog about animal adventures in the national capital region this week, let me know and I’ll put up a link to your post. Or you can play along in the comment box. Got a suggestion for family fun with animals in or around Ottawa?

Summertime feature series: Friday Family Fun!

Hooray for summer!!

194:365 Birthday beach bliss

I don’t know about your house, but at our house we’ve been counting down the days. Only three more days of school lunches and then we’re free for the summer. Yippee!!!!

230:365 Mud Lake dock

One of the things I love best about living in Ottawa is that there is no shortage of fun family activities. In fact, I’ve made a whole bloggy career about exploring them and then telling you all about them! I’ve been thinking for a while now that this would make a fun summer series, so here we go. Every Friday from now through Labour Day, I’m going to try to post an idea for family fun in Ottawa. Some of them will be specific to the city — places to visit, things to do, events to attend — but some of them will be fun ideas for family play no matter where you live. Some may be repackaged ideas from the deep well of my archives, but some will be fresh new ideas too. Sound like a great way to launch a weekend? I thought so too!

Hiking the rocks

I’ll post my first entry tomorrow. If you have ideas you’d like to share, feel free to pass them along. Maybe we can even make this a carnival sort of event, where lots of us post on Friday Family Fun ideas and we can cross-link the posts. What do you think? I even toyed with the idea of a button or a badge, but I think I exhausted all of my graphic capability for the week on the new photo banner! 😉

Sunglasses

Tune in tomorrow and we’ll get started on a summer of family fun!

Fantastic Summer Camp Giveaway from our newest sponsor, Starr Gymnastics

You know I’m fairly selective about the companies that I endorse, and even more so for the ones that I accept as sponsors for the blog. That’s why I’m extra excited today to be able to tell you about our latest sponsor, an amazing Ottawa company that I’ve been appreciating for years. And! They’re offering up an amazing giveaway to boot!

Welcome to our newest bloggy sponsor, Starr Gymnastics! Look, there’s the new ad over on the sidebar —>>>

Awesome, eh?

I’ve mentioned before how much our family loves Starr Gymnastics. We’ve had several birthday parties there, and both big boys have been registered in their excellent gymnastics programs for a few years running. We’ve even done a week-long summer camp, back in the day. (It’s funny for me to read that summer camp post — seems like yesterday, but it was 2007 when Simon is the age Lucas is now!)

I’ve always found Starr Gymnastics to have high-quality, well-supervised programs and have never hesitated to recommend their programs to anyone. Recently, the folks at Starr got in touch to say thanks for my enthusiastic recommendations, and together we cooked up this great summer camp giveaway for you!

Starr Gymnastics offers three types of Summer Camp programs: half-day, full-day in-house and full-day outdoor adventure camps. Here’s the description for the full-day indoor program:

The In-House camp will be a week full of amazing gymnastics activities, cooperative games, theme day surprises and the introduction of our Starr Bouncy Castles! For a whole afternoon, the athletes will be learning real circus tricks and jumping all over the place. On other days, their time is filled with Arts and Crafts, learning proper gymnastics skills, and preparing for the BIG SHOW TIME where parents are invited to watch their athlete(s) fly through the air in a special demo! It’s the most fun you can have under one roof!

And this is the outdoor adventure camp description:

For those athletes who want to see everything the summer has to offer, Starr has created its very own outings camp which will take you to the moon and back! The week will have the same great gymnastics component as always, along with the favourites like Theme Days and BIG SHOW TIME demonstrations! We have added swim time out of the centre and a major outing that will take the entire day on Thursdays! The athletes will taste the fresh air whether it’s a trip to the park for some organized games, outdoor theme activities, splashing around the pool or even sailing their own pirate ship with real pirates! The Starr Outdoor Adventure Camp is going to be a blast with memories that will last a lifetime!

You can read more about the programs, including weekly themes and daily schedules, on the Starr Gymnastic summer camp page.

Doesn’t that sound like fun? And the awesome peeps at Starr Gymnastics are offering you the chance to win one full week of summer camp at any of their three Ottawa locations (1140 Morrison Drive, 2766 Lancaster Road or 520 Lacolle Way). Here’s the details:

  1. To enter, leave a comment on this post describing one of your favourite summer memories.
  2. One entry per person.
  3. The prize is a one-week registration for one child at the Starr Gymnastics summer camp of your choice during the summer 2011 season, with a value of up to $250.
  4. Camps run weekly from July 4 through August 29, 2011 for ages 3 and up (half-day camp) or ages 5 – 14 (full-day camp). There are more details on the Starr Gymnastics website.
  5. Contest opens today, June 9 and runs through Thursday June 16, 2011.
  6. One winner will be chosen via random.org and announced on Friday, June 17, 2011.

A huge thank you and welcome aboard to Starr Gymnastics, and good luck to all entrants!

IHF Weekly Challenge: From a distance

I had so much fun with the I Heart Faces weekly photo challenge the first time I played that I wanted to try again.

This week’s challenge is “From a Distance” and I thought this capture from last summer would be perfect. This is the statue of Samuel de Champlain, one of the first Europeans to explore the Ottawa region in the first decades of the 1600s. The statue of Champlain holding his astrolabe sits on Nepean Point, just behind Ottawa’s Parliament Buildings. (Ironically, the sculptor who created the statue showed Champlain holding his astrolabe – an ancient astronomical navigational tool – upside down!)

469:1000 Nepean Point silhouette

Just last month, the National Capital Commission announced that it would be tearing out the small open-air theatre at Champlain’s feet. That’s unfortunate, but at least the statue will remain. It’s a wonderful spot with gorgeous views and well-loved by local photographers of all sorts, as you can see by the silhouettes I caught in the setting sun one warm June evening.

Photo credit!

Photo credit! by Dani_Girl
Photo credit!, a photo by Dani_Girl on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
My first print photo credit appeared this week in our community newspaper, the Manotick Messenger! I was expecting a quarter-page ad, and was delighted to see the ad was a half-page, so my collage took up a whole quarter of the page. 🙂

(I’m particularly tickled that the story that runs above my photograph is that of poor Ann Currie, the ghost of Watson’s Mill — I told that story in a blog post just a few months ago!)

If you’re looking for something to do this weekend and live in the Ottawa area, Manotick’s Dickinson Days promises to be some great family fun with a parade, midway rides, tours of the Mill, a pancake breakfast, a crafter’s market, kids’ fishing derby and more. See you there!

Mothership Photography and Manotick’s Dickinson Days

It has been a very exciting couple of days for Mothership Photography!

Remember the I Heart Faces photo challenge I entered? My picture of Lucas jumping into a puddle came in second out of nearly 450 entries! How cool is that?

And!! As if that weren’t exciting enough, I got a note from the office of our city councillor Scott Moffatt, asking if they could use one of my pictures in an ad for Dickinson Days, Manotick’s annual summer festival. The ad will run in this week’s Manotick Messenger – my first print photo credit! Wanna see a sneak peek?

Manotick Messenger Ad featuring Mothership Photography

Isn’t that fun? I took the pictures last Saturday, a perfect and highly photogenic early-summer morning in Manotick. I liked how the collage came together so much that I’ve ordered myself a wall print, even before the councillor’s office asked to use it in the ad.

Here’s the original. (This is the leftover from my weekly Project 365 post, the one that I said needed a post of its own!)

149:365 One morning in Manotick

And speaking of Dickinson Days, the party starts on Friday with a parade, a midway, and fireworks. Through the weekend, there’s all sorts of family fun to be had, including a kids’ fishing derby, a craft market, tours of Watson’s Mill and Dickinson House, live entertainment, and on Saturday afternoon Manotick Main Street is closed to traffic so the local merchants can step out and feature some of their best stuff. I’ve been looking forward to this all winter!

If you’re looking for a family-friendly celebration of summertime fun, Manotick is the place to be next weekend! (Please let the rain abate by then!!)

Will Work for Food Project: The Ottawa Art Gallery Community Art Garden

I promise I’ll be back with more actual blog posts in the very near future (oy, my life right now!) but in the interim, I’m cheating and copying verbatim this press release from the Ottawa Art Gallery about an awesome new project they’ve launched: The Ottawa Art Gallery Community Art Garden!

I know, I love it too! Here’s the deets:

Will Work for Food Project: The Ottawa Art Gallery Community Art Garden is underway!

May 25, 2011—OTTAWA—Over the next few weeks, the Arts Court lawn at Daly and Nicolas Streets will transform into a lush, colourful, edible, community collaboration.

Jennifer Cook is one of two artists selected by a jury in February after a call went out for artists to propose how they would involve the community in growing food at the gallery. She has drawn up designs for a series of vegetable gardens, referencing culinary themes, colour combinations and the patterns of traditional quilts.

With the help of clients at Operation Come Home, Cook started seeds indoors, and is ready to prepare the garden site into which these baby plants and many different vegetable seeds will be grown.

The intention of Cook’s garden is to provide a site for the public to learn how to grow food, contribute their food-growing knowledge, and work alongside the artist throughout the growing and harvesting season. Workshops will be held during the summer and fall, and will cover both food and art-making activities.

Food from the garden will be shared with individual participants, The Ottawa Mission and Operation Come Home.

Cook is hoping the community will roll up their sleeves and dig in for the first stage of the garden construction – A Community Work Bee.

Community Work Bee – Soil Delivery Day
Friday May 27th

Ottawa Art Gallery (Arts Court)
2 Daly Avenue
9:00 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.

RAIN OR SHINE

Come by and lend a helping hand as we mound and shape the soil into garden beds. Bring your tools and gloves—donations of garden implements are welcome.

Food is being provided by the professional kitchen at The Ottawa Mission, thanks to Chef Ric.

The Ottawa Art Gallery is greatful for the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Community Foundation of Ottawa, without whom this project would not be possible.

Ottawa social media scene heats up this July!

Are you interested in Ottawa’s social media scene? If you are, you’re going to want to clear your calendar for the month of July! There are at least two don’t-miss events happening, and they’re both promising to be fantastic experiences.

First, we have the perennial and amazingly fun Blog Out Loud Ottawa (BOLO) on July 7:


Blog Out Loud - July 7, 2011

BOLO is one of my favourite social events of the year! Would you like to be one of the 20 bloggers who takes the stage to read a favourite blog post from the past year? Here are the deets from the official BOLO blog:

Here’s the basic idea:

* There’s a due date for declaring you want to read – Friday, June 10. If you’d like to read, I need to know the exact blog post you have in mind – please don’t send me an email saying you want to read, but you don’t know what. It should be something from the past year (or so) and should be able to be read aloud in less than five minutes. Pick something you really love, that represents who you are and what your blog is about – and that will be sure to come across when you’re standing at the microphone.

* All entries received by June 10 will be read and enjoyed by me and a panel of bloggers (who are not submitting a post for reading). Our favourite 10 entries will be selected for reading at BOLO.

* All other entries will go into a random-draw pot and the final 11 readers will be picked at random.

If we have 21 people or fewer interested by June 10, then you’re all in, and that would be fantastic. I’ll definitely announce it when all the spots are gone, so if it’s after June 10 and you haven’t heard anything, and you’d still like to read, we probably have spots left.

If you are interested in being on my judging panel, please let me know. Note that if you are on the jury, you can’t submit a post for reading.

I’ve thrown my hat into the ring, although I’m not sure I could top last year when I exposed my innermost soul and my favourite bra to a packed and sweaty house. 😉

And!! As if that weren’t enough excitement for the Ottawa social media scene, there is a fantastic new social media “learnathon” that will be the other don’t-miss event of the summer: the Social Capital conference, taking place on Saturday July 23:

If you consider yourself a social media ‘buff’, then Social Capital will be the place to be in Ottawa on Saturday July 23rd! Social Capital is your opportunity to learn from and network with Ottawa’s most connected and knowledgeable people! When it comes to social media, this is the conference you won’t want to miss.

Ottawa has an active and passionate social media community. A community that is craving opportunities to learn, continue to grow and to share knowledge. Social Capital is a one-day conference that will fill this need.

Participants will have the opportunity to meet and network with like-minded social media enthusiasts. A combination of panels, roundtables, and single-leader sessions will cover topics of interest for newbie and experts alike.

I really like how they’ve devised three potential streams of sessions, one for fundamentals, one for more experienced users, and one for business. Whether you’re a social media noob or an old hand, whether you’re a dabbler or a business owner, I think you’ll find something useful in the proposed lineup!

I think the organizers have done an amazing job of making this an accessible, affordable event jam-packed with interesting presentations and speakers. And I don’t say that simply because I’ll be one of them! 😉 Come on out to hear me, Lara Wellman and Vivian Cheng talk about choosing the right social media tools for your business.

That’s a lot of excitement to pack into one month. July is going to rock Ottawa’s social media scene!

In which she discusses windstorms with the Universe

It went something like this:

*ring ring*

Hello?

Hey, Universe. It’s DaniGirl.

DaniGirl! Always a pleasure to hear from you. How are you enjoying your first spring in the new house?

Oh, it’s been gorgeous. There’s daffodils and crocuses, the boys love playing in the yard, and the porch is beyond awesome.

I’m so happy to hear that. I heard you dodged a bullet on that summer water ban issue, too.

Did we ever! As a matter of fact, that’s why I’m calling.

Oh really? Why is that?

Well, I know you have a bit of an, um, odd sense of humour, and I was wondering if maybe you heard me talking about how happy I was to be living out here in Manotick on well water for most of yesterday and today.

Well, yes, I may have heard you. Why do you ask?

Yeah, it’s about that insane windstorm yesterday. The wind was gusting up to 100 km/h here for a couple of hours. Did you know that once they get up to 120 km/h they’re hurricane force winds? It was quite brutal.

There was a lot of damage all around Ottawa, wasn’t there? Don’t tell me your house was damaged?

No, not really. There’s this chimney cap that blew off, and I’m a little worried about that. I’m afraid that if it rains, we’ll get moisture in the walls. And you know, it was just yesterday that we finally laid the carpet in Tristan’s room following the whole mould debacle. Did I even tell you about the leak in the opposite side of the house we had during that big spring melt back in March? So yeah, I’m a little twitchy about potential moisture issues.

I can’t say I blame you. So what are you doing?

Oh, a guy is coming by today to look at it, so I think we’re okay. The big damage, though, was the tree.

The tree?

Yeah, one of the giant old beauties in the back yard. It tipped clean over. It must have been at least 40 years old, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were 50 or 75 feet tall. This is what it looks like now.

20110429-052411.jpg

Wow, DaniGirl, the poor old tree. It didn’t fall on the house did it?

Nope. If it had fallen in the exact opposite direction, it would have crashed through Lucas’s bedroom. If it had fallen 90 degrees to the right, it would have taken out our play structure. But, at first glance, I was pretty relieved to see it only took out some cedar hedges — and it may have landed on my back neighbour’s garden.

Oy, that’s a hell of a way to introduce yourself to the neighbours!

Isn’t it? And that’s exactly what I did, with three boys in tow because Beloved was blissfully oblivious to all the damage at an event for his work. We walked around and I was going to knock on the door when I took a peek in the yard to see how the tree looked from their side. I noticed that it actually cut across the bottom corner of their yard and looked like the top might be resting in their next-door neighbour’s yard.

Pretty tall tree, eh?

No kidding. So I went next door, and my jaw dropped open. This is what I saw.

Holy crap, DaniGirl!

Yeah, that’s what I said. And they weren’t even home so I had to leave a note in their mailbox. What a mess!

I heard there were a lot of trees down in Manotick.

It’s just crazy. Two houses down from all this, a humongous Blue Spruce tipped over and took out the hydro line for the whole street. One block over, another tree fell on someone’s minivan. And there’s a little pocket park with a wooded area just around the corner, it looks like carnage in there, I’m sure more than a half-dozen trees down. And this — remember this gorgeous old silo that’s entranced me since we moved to Manotick?

18:365 Old Barn

This comment was posted on one of my other pictures of it:

Dani, I live just across the street from the Silo, It has fallen down in the last hour, due to the wind storm. 3:30 April 28th.

And this is what it looks like today.

Oh, that’s a shame, I’m sorry to see that. It was a brutal storm. In the end, you were pretty lucky.

Yeah, I did want to say thank you for that. I’m heartbroken to lose that beautiful tree — it was supposed to be my clothesline tree! — and it will be a bit of trouble to get everything back to normal again, but oh my god, it could have been so much worse.

Nobody was hurt, at least.

Exactly. Nobody was hurt, and if there’s nothing more than a dribbling of rain today, we’ll be okay with the naked chimney. I wanted to mention, though, I did notice that every time you wreak some minor disaster on the house, you make sure to wreak much larger disasters out there in the world. Like the day in March when we had the water leaking in the basement was the same day the tsunami happened in Japan, and all Beloved and I could say to each other was “A little water in the basement is nothing compared to that.” And today, thinking about what could have happened — oh my god, can you imagine if that treehouse had blown away? Tristan would have packed his bags and moved back to Barrhaven!

Heh, yes, I did step in and give it a little bit of a buffer from the worst of it. I figured poor Tristan has been through enough, losing the room of his own that was promised to him for the last six months.

Yes, well, thanks for that, Universe. But I gotta ask, are you on the city’s payroll or what?

Pardon me?

Yeah, I was thinking, it’s mighty darn convenient that this unprecedented wind storm blew through and got everybody’s attention diverted from the Barrhaven/Manotick/Riverside South summer water ban in a big hurry. You have anything to do with that, maybe?

I’ll never tell, DaniGirl.

Yeah, fair enough. Okay, well, thanks again for watching out for the treehouse, and the house. Um, not necessarily in that order.

My pleasure, DaniGirl. Take care.