Happy Belated!

Happy belated Canada Day! And 4th of July!  :)

Canada Day was on Monday of this week. We didn't do anything special. Well, I didn't do anything special. Kyle, on the other hand, did. He came home from work that afternoon and walked straight into the kitchen and closed the door. I assumed he still had some work/phone calls to take care of, so I stayed in the living room where I wouldn't bother him. But when I went out a little later to get dinner ready, this was what I saw on the table...

He had been out there working on this as a surprise!

He was disappointed that he didn't have time to finish what he had planned, but I thought it was super cool that he accomplished what he did! Wasn't it sweet of him to remember my holiday?  

Each letter had something different. These two have the provincial capitals and abbreviations.

...some of the national foods of Canada. I noticed he forgot puffed wheat cake on the list.  :)

Kyle had written out the entire poem "In Flanders Fields" on this letter.

This last one has the names of Canada's Prime Ministers. He said he forgot one, but I would never have known.

We're keeping the letters and we decided that next year we'll pull them out and continue decorating them with more Canadian facts. We ended the day by reading some Canadian trivia questions to some friends. I learned that 3/4 of Canadian households have clothes dryers. Which makes me imagine the other 1/4 of the households having wet clothes and underwear hanging around the house to dry.   :-D

Then, of course, we celebrated July 4th on Thursday. What could I do that would be as cool as what Kyle did for me? Hmmm.... nothing really came to mind. So I went out and got him coffee and donuts for breakfast! His donuts were a little drab looking for a holiday, so I tried to embellish them.  :)

I wanted to make something with Parker this week and decided that this would be a good day for it. I had recently picked up supplies to make chocolate dipped pretzels. And we had planned to go to a friend's home for a bbq later so this would be a good treat to take.  I pulled out all the supplies needed and sat Parker in his booster. He was ready to help!

The chocolate was kind of thick and needed to be spread onto the pretzels. I wasn't sure if Parker would be able to do it, so I did the 'dipping' and he did the decorating. It. Was. Hilarious. I had set out two bottles of red and blue sugar sprinkles, which Parker wanted to use first. But he didn't really understand how to 'sprinkle' them on the chocolate. His idea of sprinkling was to hold the bottle upside-down in one place. Needless to say, he only had enough for a couple pretzels!

We made most of them white. However, Kyle isn't a fan of chocolate, so for the last few I melted half a bag of Reece's chips and used that for dipping. Those ones turned out really good--wish I had done a few more like that! They turned out pretty cute and Parker couldn't wait to try one. 

We ended up canceling our plans for the evening and staying home. Kyle wasn't feeling well and both kids were having a really rough day so we figured it was better for everyone if we stayed home instead. So we had dinner and then Parker picked out a pretzel for dessert. 

I had no idea someone could get so sticky from one chocolate covered pretzel! I used two wet wipes and I still had to take him to wash his hands to get it all off.  But he thoroughly enjoyed it, so that's all the matters, right? :)