Winter??

 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 am doggy 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 :-)

Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving!

Linden was having a bad hair day today.

I suggested that we do her hair. Her response:

Today we celebrated Thanksgiving. We had mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mushroom gravy, and soy curls (which are made of soy beans and are very tasty). We also had pumpkin pie and coconut whipped cream. 

Maren made a little crown of fall leaves. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Goodbye Maddy

 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.