Christmas was fun and tiring. We had lots of presents, lots of cookies and chocolate, zoom calls with family, Christmas dinner, and generally a chaotic, messy, joyous house. I hardly took any pictures. But the ones I did get captured the day: Linden loves chocolate, and Maren wanted to try out all of her presents immediately.
By the end of the day, everyone was exhausted but we had a good day :-)
Things have been a little crazy over here. Last week Maren’s school went to “remote learning.” This means that during school hours Maren needed someone acting as her “teacher,” and balancing that with full-time toddler care plus two academics trying to manage the end of the term has been basically impossible.
On Friday I did my best to slow way down. One batch of Christmas cookies baked and eaten since then 🍪
Now there is no school for two weeks, I am basically done with work until January, and Jeff has just one more exam to give tomorrow. We have had some lovely weather the past two days, and have been doing our best to take advantage.
It is rare around here to have snow that is wet enough to build a snowman - usually the snow is so dry that it won’t stick together enough to even to make a snowball. Well today we had perfect snowman building weather - temperature hovering near freezing with new snow.
We also made baked play dough ornaments.
I think we are getting into our Christmas groove.
On Thursday I suddenly became a Canadian citizen. Some of you may recall that I took my citizenship test and passed last February. Then everything went haywire in March and I never got to do the last step, which was the oath of citizenship ceremony. Well, quite suddenly I was summoned to do my ceremony over zoom, and right there and then I became a citizen.
Here I am with my signed oath of citizenship document, and my cut up permanent resident card:
I was recently talking to some of my students about how problematic it is for mental health when people make it look like they have perfect lives on social media. Like only posting about great things happening, only putting up the best pictures, and completely leaving out all of the times they feel sad, angry, irritated, bored, etc. Other people see this and unconsciously start to think that other peoples lives are better than their lives.
When I sat down to write this blog post, I realized that I kind of do that. Of course it seems like what people want to hear about is the positive stuff. But of course that is not the whole picture. So in the spirit of trying to be more balanced, I will include a bit of the crappy stuff about today.
No one slept adequately last night — a combination of middle of the night needing to pee, cats waking everyone up, and trouble getting back to sleep. As a result, Maren had extremely poor inhibitory control, and Linden had mini rages all day long. Linden also had a very short nap and woke up even more grumpy than she was when she went to sleep. It was an exhausting day.
We also had some fun times this weekend. The weather has been sunny and just above freezing, which is warm when there is snow on the ground. We had some great sledding yesterday. We have had some fun Christmas activities. However, we may never get to decorate our Christmas tree because the cats are just getting more adept at climbing. Oh well.
The holiday season is upon us.
Last week I submitted a grant proposal. It is for a relatively small grant, but it was a big deal for me to finish. I am catching up with my other work, but as soon as the grant application was done I felt much more jolly and bright.
Thursday was just a regular day here, but we celebrated American Thanksgiving on Saturday. I made an apple pie which was a bit of an experiment for me (a vegan crust that is substantially different from a butter crust) but it turned out very well. I have some notes for what I might do differently next time, but I was pleasantly surprised by how buttery it tasted.
I know that many places are still feeling like fall, but it is definitely winter here. There is lots of snow that is here to stay, and the temperatures have been very cold. We are happy to have our warm kitties.
We adopted two cats on Thursday.
We still miss Maddy and Koshka. We also missed having cats around. Most days Linden would say “Maddy died,” and I think that was her way of saying that she missed having cats too. On Tuesday while Maren was at school and Jeff was in a meeting, Linden and I went to our local cat café, where there is a room where you can hang out with adoptable cats from a local rescue. We met these sweet siblings, a brother and sister pair, and knew they were the ones. I texted Jeff, then we talked on the phone and we decided we would adopt them.
On Thursday we got to bring them home. They are adjusting very quickly, and are not scared of Maren and Linden at all. Last week the weather was incredibly warm, with highs around 22°C/72°F. Today a winter storm rolled in and it got cold, really fast. So we had chocolate chip pancakes and a fire in the fireplace. Nyx and Puck were enamored.
I am working on writing a grant proposal, which means I have to work all the time, even on the weekends. But I had a lovely morning with my little family.
We also celebrated Halloween. We thought that it might be very different this year, but it really wasn’t. We had lots of trick-or-treaters and we gave them candy through a chute. Maren and I dressed up as a couple of one eyed one horned flying purple people eaters, in our matching purple snowsuits. Linden was a tiger.
Maren’s candy is quarantining, and we will have to take out all the non-vegan stuff, but there is so much candy that will not be a problem. We also bought some vegan Halloween chocolates to swap out, and made some Halloween cookies.
All in all, it was a pretty festive day!
Around October 10 we were still having highs around 70°F/21°C. Then the weather started to get crisper and cooler, and then all of a sudden about a week ago the highs didn’t get above freezing. And the overnight lows have been frigid. We are supposed to get some better fall weather again starting on Tuesday, but winter is definitely coming.
I got new snowsuits for Maren and Linden, and I liked them so much that I wished they came in my size. Then I had a thought. Linden is in toddler sizes, but Maren is in kid sizes and is an XXS. Doing the math in my head, I started to think that maybe I could fit into a kid size extra large. I checked the measurements for the extra large in their online chart and compared that with measurements for clothes that fit me well right now, and they were basically identical. So I ordered myself a snowsuit and was happy to find that it does indeed fit. Now Maren and I are snowsuit twins, right down to the colour, but she said it’s OK with her so it’s fine with me too :-)
Linden’s language and pretend play have exploded. It took me watching this video a couple of times to catch everything. One big hint is that Ritz = witch, and surprisingly it took me a couple of days and a number of frustration related tantrums to figure that out. So watch this and just imagine that this goes on for several hours (which it does). She is fun to watch and also kind of exhausting :-)
Linden was having a bad hair day today.
I suggested that we do her hair. Her response:
Last weekend was Maren‘s birthday but it was also a sad time for us. Our cat Maddy died. The last we saw her was after school the Thursday before Maren’s birthday, and then she went missing. The weather was nice and we thought maybe she was roaming and didn’t come in for the night when we expected her. But then she didn’t come back Friday and she didn’t come back Saturday. She had never been away more than a couple of hours before.
Last Sunday, Jeff did a really thorough search around our house, and also around our neighbours houses, one by one. He found her body under a neighbour’s deck. It looked like she stretched out for a nap and died in her sleep. We are glad we found her, and that it seems like she died peacefully.
We had a little funeral for her and buried her body in our backyard, right next to where we had put Koshka‘s ashes. Apparently it is illegal to bury the body of a pet in your yard in our city, and since we had a vet help Koshka die we had to have her cremated. We decided to break the law with Maddy because having a funeral and burying her body seemed like the right thing to do, especially for Maren and Linden.
For the first time basically ever, we have no pets in our house. It feel strange. We will see how long it lasts.
Yesterday Maren turned five years old. We were not quite sure how to celebrate given the current pandemic situation. We thought a lot about it and decided to invite her kindergarten class. We figured that she is already exposed to those kids so it doesn’t really add any risk. But in thinking about how to be safe we decided to specifically not invite parents, to wear masks the whole time, to purchase cupcakes from a bakery and have individual juice boxes, and to have the party outside.
Well. Things didn’t go exactly as we had hoped. First, Maren’s teacher didn’t get back to us right away regarding distributing invitations. Apparently she had to check with the principal to make sure it was all right. Then the invitations had to be brought to school and left for three days before being sent home with the kids. But Maren only goes to school twice a week so there was a long delay between getting the invitations to school and getting them back to parents. In the end invitations went home on Tuesday and the party was on Saturday, so people didn’t have much time to plan or RSVP. Only three kids were able to make it, but that was much better than the zero we worried would be able to come.
Then there was the weather. It was predicted to be sunny and warm, then sunny and relatively warm, and by Thursday night it was predicted to rain. So our plans for an outdoor party did not come to fruition. We decided that since so few kids would be coming anyway it wouldn’t be too big a risk to have it indoors. In the end it didn’t actually rain during the party but it was chilly. The kids went outside to play for a little while but got too cold and came back in (one of the guests was wearing a tank top dress and no socks and did not have a jacket with her so even though it wasn’t that cold they couldn’t stay out for very long). We were able to keep them pretty well distanced while they were eating their individual cupcakes, and their games consisted mostly of running and screaming so they kept a decent distance from one another then too. I think we did all right.
All in all the birthday party was kind of a normal five-year-old birthday party. Balloons, freeze dance, music, screaming, running, cake. Maren will probably just remember this as a birthday party, not a pandemic birthday party, which is good I think. Happy birthday Maren! We love you ❤️
Maren started kindergarten this week. The first day we were confused. It was not totally clear to us what time she was supposed to show up, or what was supposed to happen. Jeff took a phone call from the teacher the Friday before Maren started, and when she called he was in the middle of changing Linden’s diaper. So some of the information was slightly confused.
The morning didn’t go exactly how we hoped it would. No first day of school photo. No leisurely walking her to school. No helping her get to her classroom. Instead, we were late, saw the kids lining up to go inside, rushed Maren to the door, and didn’t even get to say goodbye as she was quickly ushered inside. However, when I came to pick her up she had had a great day and apparently didn’t even notice that we were stressed and rushing in the morning.
That was Tuesday. She goes to school Tuesdays, Thursdays, and some Fridays. On Thursday we were much better prepared. Jeff got a second day of school photo although he said it didn’t turn out very well and I haven’t seen it. But she got to school on time, and hung out with her class waiting for their turn to go inside. Jeff and Linden and I waited outside the school fence and watched until they went inside. There were lots of parents doing the same.
We won’t get to see the inside of her classroom or meet her teacher face to face this year. It’s a strange time to be starting school, but Maren is happy and that is all that matters :-)
Things aren’t changing much for Linden, but she has definitely noticed that it is getting colder. Yesterday she wanted a hoodie, a blanket, and her mittens when it was a crisp 18 degrees Celsius/ 65 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Oh, my little baby, if only you knew what was coming...
In the meantime we will enjoy fall as much as we can.
Tomorrow Maren starts daycare at her school. She has kindergarten 2 to 3 days a week starting on September 8, and she will be at daycare in the same building on days that she doesn’t have school. I am currently in the backyard and it occurs to me that I can see her classroom window, so I will take a picture:
The kindergarten classroom is the one on the bottom left, and her daycare is just at the other end of the hall. So she will always be close by.
Yesterday was hot, and today it started to feel like fall. Yesterday was the last day for the inflatable pool in the backyard:
It’s hard to tell in this picture but Maren is finishing a milkshake. Our local candy store/ice cream shop does custom milkshakes, and they have vegan milkshakes that come in many varieties. Maren had raspberry chocolate, I had cappuccino Oreo, Jeff had butter rum, and Linden had some of each. She especially liked the butter rum :-)
Today was the first day that it was cool enough in the evening to have a fire in our fire pit. We made s’more‘s. Unfortunately, we discovered too late that our marshmallows had a best by date of October 2019. Vegan marshmallows don’t always fly off the shelves, so apparently we need to be more careful checking dates. But even if the marshmallows started out a bit dry, after melting on the fire they were pretty good in s’more’s. I also realized as we were sitting by the fire that it would make an excellent physical distancing tool, and I should think about inviting someone over for distant marshmallow roasting :-)
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