Bye-bye

 This past week was our last week with our nanny Taline. She is a graduate student and had to go back to Vancouver to continue her program. She was only here living with her parents for the summer. Maren understands saying goodbye, but I don’t think Linden does. It is going to be a process explaining to her that Taline is not coming back.

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 :-)

The last week of August??

 I am not ready for September. It is hard for me to believe that it is already the last week of August. The weather has been lovely, with some days being kind of overly hot, but definitely feeling like summer.

 The idea that we will be back to teaching in less than two weeks is feeling a bit surreal. This is the last week that we have our nanny - she is a graduate student in Vancouver and going back to school. We have decided not to replace her and instead are going back to splitting worktime. Maren will be starting kindergarten, which is full days two days a week and some Fridays, and on her off days she will be at a daycare that is in her school most of the time with just a couple of other kids. The school and playground are literally right across the street from us. I can see the window to Maren’s classroom from where I am sitting on the couch right at this moment. Linden will be at home with us, which is why we are splitting time.

Meanwhile, we are trying to enjoy the last bit of summer. We have been here for eight years now, and I feel like I am finally starting to understand summer here and how to enjoy it. Being from Oregon, I never really experienced “going to the lake“ in the same way that you can do it here. In Oregon, all of the lakes are either mountain lakes or mountain runoff (which means perpetually cold and usually rocky) but here there are sandy beaches and water warm enough to actually hang out in for long periods of time. We have also been really exploring some of the natural areas around here, and I am starting to get a sense of which plants are part of the natural ecosystems and which are not, and appreciating the nature that is here. In previous years I really felt like there was no nature here but that is not correct. And I’m starting to realize that there are so many different ecosystems within Saskatchewan that we need to explore. Mostly about four hours of driving to get places, which by Oregon standards is insanely long, But I’m also getting used to the idea of longer drives.

Right now Jeff is at the playground across the street with Maren and Linden, the inflatable kiddie pool is filled up in the backyard, the garden it is full and growing, and all is generally well.

Easy as Re-learning Everything I Know About Pie

A mixed blessing that has come out of going vegan is having to relearn everything I know about dessert. I had pretty much figured out how to make pie crust with dairy butter, and ice cream dairy cream. Now decades worth of learning and taste testing has kind of gone out the window. Not totally of course, because I have learned a lot along the way that is still relevant, but I am having to learn all about new ingredients.

This weekend I had a failure and a success. I am doing a lot of experimenting with vegan ice cream, and I have actually had many successes. I may share some of my ice cream recipes once I decide which ones are best. It is kind of exciting because there are so many different types of ice cream you can make – coconut-based, cashew-based, and my most recent favorite, pea milk-based. I had a thought about pea milk, and wondered if I could use powdered pea protein instead. Pea milk has surprisingly few ingredients, mostly water, pea protein, and sunflower oil. So I wondered if maybe I could make my ice cream using those ingredients instead of the commercially available pea milk, and in doing so make it quite inexpensive. 

Well. Let’s just say it tastes more like chicken nuggets than maple ice cream. At least now I know that my next experiment with pea protein powder should be simulated chicken, but I don’t think I will ever try to use it to make ice cream again.

But in a much tastier experiment, I made some good apple pies. I used a mixture of coconut oil and olive oil in the crust. The apples came from our neighbors/colleague/friends – they have an apple tree in their front yard and can’t use all of the apples. So Maren and Linden picked apples from the tree and we made two pies, one as a thank you for the apples and one for us. I definitely have some thoughts about how to improve, but everyone agreed that the pies were quite tasty.

Donut day

 Months ago we started having donut day on Saturdays while Linden was napping in the morning. She no longer has a morning nap, and does one nap in the afternoon after lunch instead. So we’ve tried different things with donut day, but it wasn’t really working anymore to do it during nap. So now Linden just gets to be part of it. She doesn’t get her own whole donut, but she is well on her way. I tried to take a photo of her eating, but she was way too fast with each piece and I was not fast enough with my camera.

As many of you know, Jeff is a huge donut fan. It appears that he has passed on his love of donuts to Maren and Linden.

Growing and growing

*Note: I tried to post this Sunday night, but there kept being errors so I waited and tried to fix the problems. Now it is working properly on my computer but not my phone - one of the photos is stretched and the videos are not showing up. So I am posting anyway, and hopefully it works okay for you!

My kiddos are getting so big. Maren grew half an inch sometime in the last month and a half. Linden is four or five pounds heavier all of a sudden, or at least it seemed like all of a sudden until we realized it had been five months since we weighed her. But they are growing up in other ways too — they are getting more capable all the time.

Maren is sounding out words and writing them a lot. One of her most recent things is using magnetic letters to write words, but since there are only two of each letter she ends up getting very creative sometimes:

This one says “bewaruvthedrknis,” or “beware of the darkness.” Not sure why she chose to write this, or where she heard it, but I love it.

Linden has started making things out of Legos. One of her favourite things to make is a hammer, and another favourite is an airplane. Sometimes she makes cars. You know which is which because of the sound she makes when she is playing with it: bang bang, whoosh, or vroom. The other day she decided to make a tower as tall as her:

She has also started drawing all kinds of pictures with sidewalk chalk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ssXpC0Bssk

However, she insists that she is not growing up, and that is just fine by me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2L2x3pPj08