What a week

My niece's daughter and 2 kids were here for almost a week.  They live in Thunder Bay - a 3 hour flight from here but always longer because there is no direct flight.
Chayse and Maddox are 7 and 6 years old.  They are sweethearts except that Maddox is a little bit ADHD and is showing a lot of anger as his parents have recently split.  Their dad is aboriginal and grew up on a reserve.  He is a guard at the city jail.  When they got together, he was sober and for about 5 years was a doting dad.  There was a stabbing incident at the jail - he tried to do CPR on the victim but he died.  It put Aaron over the top.  He went to counselling for a bit but quit. He has been drinking and womanizing and lost patience with the kids so Liz asked him to leave.  He actually walked out before and talked his way back.  But he didn't change his ways.  She says he is gone for good now.  It is so sad.
Anyway the kids had a ball here.  WE have a pool in our condo so they swam twice a day.  On Sunday, we went downtown where the had a pirate inspired fair.  The opera performed The Pirates of Penzance in the evenings and during the day they had a variety of entertainment e.g. music students performing bits of the Operetta.  The hilite for Maddox was the swashbucklng.  They had 3 performers who demonstrated sword fighting and he got to try it out.  Next we visited my son in Edmonton and they did the wave pool at West Edmonton Mall.  The following day we went to the Torringon Gopher Museum and The Royal Tyrrel Museum in Drumhelller.  They have dug up huge numbers of dinosaur bones in the area so built a beautiful world class museum to house them.  They have reassembled Tyrannosaurus Rex. It is well worth visiting if you are interested in old bones and how they find them and clean them etc.  The gopher museum is a cute little place on the prairie - for Centennial year they got a grant to do something to attract tourists.  Since there are a lot of gophers in Alberta, they decided on the gopher museum.  They have stuffed and dressed up gophers and have them in shadow boxes.  There is Gopher School, Biker Gophers, Gopher Wedding - you get the picture.  The kids loved it!  They also had a real ball climbing rocks at the Hoo Doos (rock formations caused by wind and rain eroding sandstone).  I couldn't watch as they skittered up!  It brought back memories of Lisa and Andrew.  They also loved climbing and went to the top.  it is very high!  L and A looked like ants when they got to the top.  On Tuesday we did Calaway Park - an amusement park with awesome rides and yesterday the zoo to see the Penguin Slash.  This morning they flew out at 6 am and Auntie and Uncle came home and collapsed! 
It was a great week.  It was delightful watching the kids having such a good time and overall they behaved really well considering we did a lot of driving on Tuesday.  Now I have to finish the laundry and prepare for a condo budget meeting.  Life goes on.