Backyard bubbles

 The weather has been lovely. Friday we barbecued and ate outside, yesterday we played with bubbles in the backyard.  

I think fake spring is over and real spring is here!

Happy and dirty

 A mom friend of mine recently told me about an experience she had where a childless acquaintance complained about dirty-faced toddlers. I think it was in agreement with something the acquaintance had seen on Facebook. My friend didn’t know whether to laugh, be offended, or try to educate the person. As most of you know, toddlers are dirty much of the time. Here are some photos that I happen to have of the last few days:

And I don’t know if you can tell, but in that last picture Linden is wearing two hoodies on top and only tights on the bottom. 

Right now Maren has been doing “remote learning” for the past month, and we are not quite sure when it will end. Covid case numbers spiked here, and have been holding steady but not really declining. One issue I didn’t think about at all is the tendency for parents to “help” too much with schoolwork when everything is done at home. I am sure this is old news to many of you, but a huge barrier to learning for some kids is parents wanting to make sure work is done correctly. We were falling into that trap at first, and I am grateful that Maren was able to get mad and say “stop, it’s *my* schoolwork not yours!” Right you are kiddo. 

 I think that over time we have gotten better and better at letting our children try things out, fail, and learn by failing. It is hard to sit back and watch our babies get frustrated, but they will just get more frustrated if we try to help, so we are better off just leaving the area and helping clean up the mess later. I love our happy dirty kids ❤️

When life gives you snow, bake brownies

 Our spring snowstorm ended up dumping about a foot of snow on us. It looked and felt just like winter. We had already washed and put away the snowsuits, but we had to get them out again. And once again they got all muddy because the snow didn’t last long and underneath melting snow is a nice layer of mud.

While there was snow on the ground and it looked like winter I did what anyone would do in the circumstances and attempted to bake brownies. Unfortunately I had not yet thought through veganizing my favourite brownie recipe, made some quick changes on the fly that involved a couple of miscalculations, and ended up with a crumbly mess. Fortunately, my children didn’t care one bit and ate it anyway, although they did ask for spoons.

The snow is gone, and although the weather is still going back-and-forth between extremes, it is feeling more like spring 🌿🌱

Spring extremes

 The weather this week has been true Saskatchewan spring. From sunny T-shirt weather to snow. It is currently snowing, with 10-15cm of accumulation expected now through Tuesday. Then Wednesday it will start melting and should all be gone by probably Friday. Hopefully that is the last we see of the snow, but it’s hard to say. 

Today we had a fire in our fireplace, and mostly had a cosy indoor day. 

We went out for a bike ride this morning before it started snowing, and it was pretty cold and windy but good to get out.

But yesterday we went on a little hike where we saw a few prairie crocuses, and explored the pollen/“flowers” on the aspens. 

Kids (and probably adults too) build some pretty amazing forts among the trees, and yesterday we checked some of them out.

In the afternoon we did a bunch of playing in the backyard, which we have been doing a lot of this week.

So even though this week was plenty busy, it was nothing compared to last week and by this weekend things have felt pretty calm 😊

Too eventful

 We ended up doing covid testing for Maren and Jeff. Since Linden and I basically have no contact with the outside world, we didn’t really need tests because any germs we had would come through Maren or Jeff. After doing some reconnaissance we found out that the lineup at the testing site ebbs and flows. They also have signs that say what the wait time is. So Jeff drove by, saw a wait time of 30 minutes, drove back here and scooped up Maren and took her immediately. They ended up having to wait more like an hour but that was partly because the testing site lost Internet service for about 20 minutes which slowed everything down. Of course the tests were negative, as we expected, but better safe than sorry.

But man, it has been a week. We all ended up getting Maren’s cold, and while Jeff and I didn’t have bad symptoms at all, Linden has been having a hard go of it. She seems to have been hit the hardest and being a two-year-old who is also constantly teething, her mood has been pretty explosive.

Then one of our kitties, Puck, started to seem quite unwell. Long story short, he ate probably 12 novelty Christmas erasers which were about a half inch in diameter. He puked up most of them, but two got stuck in his stomach and two got stuck in his intestines, and we had to take him to the emergency vet (because good Friday is a holiday here and no regular vets were open) and he ended up having to have surgery. He came home late last night and now we have lots of aftercare to do.

But today was Easter and despite being pretty tired we had some good times.

However, Linden definitely ate too much chocolate and had quite a sugar crash. She got really really mad at Maren and tried to put her brand new toy (an Easter gift from grandma) through the paper shredder. Props for creativity, but generally not appreciated. Here’s hoping that the coming week is a little bit calmer 😂