357 days in and getting stronger everyday!

The Extreme Family Blending Experiment is approaching its one year anniversary of not killing each other living together in harmony!

It make take some time for me to catch up the blog posts in order to show off some present days photos.  I guess thats what the Instagram is for.  In the meantime, I notice that I still have more of last summer’s photos to post and THIS summer is already upon us!

Today’s post shows some highlights of our trip into Canada’s Desolation Sound last August.  It was a search for warm water where Laura and I promised they could jump off of the boat and NOT freeze to death.  It was a great success!  We averaged about 7 days at anchor in between marina stops for trash disposal and grocery runs.  We loved it so much, it will be our first stop on this summer’s cruise around Vancouver Island.  We can’t stay longer than a week though; we only have a month to get around it and the Pacific Coast is supposed to offer some of the best/wildest coastline on Earth.

So how are we doing?

Well, for Laura and I, I compare it to to a cat trying to chasing its own tail.  As soon as we fix one kids problem the other needs our attention.  We have learned to give the problem back to them. We have learned to tell the difference between negative and positive attention.  And we have learned that they use our attention to create a competition between themselves.  Like a doll being fought over, we felt like were being ripped in half at times and have been working on spotting this before becomes too exhausting.  Laura and I, tag team these issues better than anyone I know.  We talk daily about beating these smart little critters to the punch.  Everyone gets a fair amount of alone time, solo parent time, and family time.  Still, its exhausting. But apparently, as we look around, we see that every family with three kids deals with these same issues, maritally blended or not.

So for the moment, it seems that we are all going to grow old together.

The scene of 5 people and a dog living on a floating island of 350 square feet is so entertaining that we are considering dedicating a whole blog to it.  With all 5 of us contributing, we might just be able to fill in our friends and family in real time.

Sorry for taking so long to get these cute pictures out!  Enjoy!

There’s always a project or 5 going on.

Leech collecting and cliff diving…Anchored beside another homebuilt C-Strutter sistership! What a treat.

We have had some pretty hard laughs at Laura’s freaky disturbing underwater swimming photos here….

A detachable flash lights up a Pryex dish with some gelatinous sea creatures inside!  

Keeping it EXTREME!  Going from Desolation Sound for a month to anchoring in the middle of Vancouver the next day!  Wammy!

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