Maren riding

 Today Maren learned to ride her bike. She has done training wheels, we’ve taken the petals off so she can use the bike like a balance bike, and Jeff has held the seat to stabilize her while she rides. Suddenly today she decided that she wanted to ride on her own, and she did.

At first she was a little wobbly:

But she was riding like a pro within minutes:

I am so proud of her 😊 and proud of Jeff too – a couple of 12 year old boys were watching him teach Maren to ride, and watching him take videos of her riding, and they told him that he was a good dad. I agree ❤️

Mother’s Day

We went for a little Mother’s Day hike today, on our favourite “dog walking trail.” It is hard to see them in these photos, but we saw several different types of wildflowers blooming.

There are little yellow flowers in the first picture and little white ones in the second. 

Also, about halfway through the walk Maren got hot and took off her shirt, and then Linden took off her shirt, and then Maren wanted to put her shirt back on because she was cold, but somehow at that point they decided to trade shirts. So you may have noticed that in the first picture Linden is wearing the orange shirt and in the second picture she is wearing the white one. They stayed that way the rest of the hike, and actually also the rest of the day.

I love these crazy kids who call me mommy. Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms 🌼🌸💐

Aaaand it’s spring

 There isn’t much of a transition here between winter and spring. It is quite sudden and sometimes almost jarring. Two weeks ago there was snow everywhere and our daytime highs were around -7°C/19°F, and today we were out all day, partly in T-shirts. The trees have yet to leaf out and there are no flowers blooming, but in a couple of weeks it will look like summer and feel like it has always been like this. Time to start enjoying the outdoors right away though.

White Easter

 There was a snowstorm last week and we ended up having a white Easter. The past few years all of the snow has been melted by the end of March, so this much snow (probably 6 inches) this late in the year is  making winter feel long. I think the snow will all be melted within the next week, and fingers crossed that is the last of it!

Despite it not being very spring-like, we had a nice day:

Happy Easter 🐣 

Sisters

 These kiddos. They definitely fight, every day, but they are also spending a lot of time playing together these days. 

It is so sweet to see these sisters so happy together ❤️