A new year

 Happy new year! Lots of people have said that 2021 has to be better than 2020. I am not in the business of predicting the future, so all I will say is that I am sure 2021 will be different than 2020.

We haven’t gotten out of the house much other than walks around our neighborhood, but a few days ago we went to The Royal Saskatchewan Museum. Technically it is still in our neighbourhood because it is only about half a kilometre from our house, but we hadn’t been in a while so it was something different. 

We celebrated New Year’s Eve with some homemade ice cream from a recipe in a cookbook my mom got me for Christmas, The Homemade Vegan Pantry. I was really unsure about the recipe because it is super simple and I have spent a lot of time trying to make good vegan ice cream and it isn’t always a simple endeavor. However, it turned out to be really good. We ate it with sprinkles 😊

I think I will use this basic recipe for my next ice cream attempt as well: I am planning to use the remnants of our gingerbread house, which we put in the freezer, to make a gingerbread cookie ice cream. I also made a super easy pancake mix from this cookbook, and we had pancakes this morning for breakfast which were really good. Once again I was a bit sceptical given how easy the recipe was, but it did not disappoint. Only two recipes so far, but two for two so I would definitely recommend this cookbook.

Last but not least, two super cute videos of Linden. If you only have time to watch one, I think you should watch the second one :-)

Merry Christmas!

 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 :-)

Getting into gear for Christmas

 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.

Suddenly citizen!

 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:

Not perfect

 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.