Fun in the Sun

If you are the type of person who doesn't like the heat and your idea for a vacation is to go somewhere cool and stay in the shade the entire time, then I wouldn't recommend coming here in the summer.  If you are like us though and love the heat and can never get too much sun, then Ontario is the place to be in the summer.  For all of July, the daily temperature has averaged about 28C.  There were a few days that it even got as high as 38C.  This great weather has allowed for us to have lots of fun outside.  Our place has air conditioning so we have the best of both worlds!

With the heat, we've had lots of opportunities to cool off in the water.  We've found lots of spray parks and splash pads to play at.  I am not really clear on the lingo here yet.  I thought spray parks are like water parks but without any bells and whistles and splash pads are the wading pools but I'm always getting contradicting answers.  So, regardless of what they are called, we have found lots of places to play in the water!
One Saturday, we walked down to the newest 'fake beach'.  It is called Sugar Beach, since it is next to the sugar refinery and it boasts the softest sand in all of Ontario - quite the claim to fame!

We also checked out the new 'spray park' around the corner from the beach.  Apparently, not many people know about this gem yet because we had it all to ourselves almost the entire time.

We love going to the water park at Ontario Place.  The boys spend hours playing there.

We're lucky enough to have a 'splash pad' a 5 minute walk south of our place and a 'spray park' a 5 minute walk north so we never have to worry about finding water to splash around in. Mike and I have been having fun, too; the great thing about having kids is that you get to go to all these places to cool off without seeming crazy!

We are loving this weather and are looking forward to many more days of fun in the sun (including all of next week that we get to spend at a cottage at a lake).

A fractured start to summer

So, Monday was the first official day of summer vacation and Josh spent five hours of it in the hospital as he waited for an xray and cast for his broken arm!  Poor little guy.  It's good that he has the patience of a saint and actually thinks doctors are nice because otherwise, those 5 hours could have felt like 5 days!
He is quite the trooper; much tougher than we give him credit for.  He fell off a slide on Saturday.  He wasn't far from the ground but the way he landed was right above his elbow.  He could still move his arm pretty well and didn't complain too much.  He woke up once in the night on Saturday because it hurt and complained a bit on Sunday about it hurting when he was changing his shirt.  Otherwise, he didn't complain much about it.  I did notice that even when he was playing, he was not using that arm much though and by Monday, he still couldn't straighten it all the way, so to be safe, I thought I would take him to the dr's.  Her guess was that he had a hairline fracture so she sent us over to the hospital. 
The dr's diagnosis was correct and thankfully, it is just a minor fracture.  He should only need his cast on for a few weeks.  It hasn't seem to bothered him much and it hasn't impeded his ability to play.
He was so brave the whole time we were at the hospital.  He only got upset once he realized that he would have to get a cast.  I felt so bad for him so I told him that since he was being so brave and if he was really brave getting his cast on, I would take him to the toy store the next day and he could get a new Playmobil toy or something.  On Tuesday, he decided that for his treat, he wanted to get jujubes.  When we were at Costco, he decided that rather than getting jujubes, he wanted his treat to be a chocolate icecream cone.  Talk about being easy to appease!
This definitely will go down in the books as a memorable way to start the summer!