My little unicorn

 Today Maren had a dance performance for a dance class she has been in since September. It was a big deal - at the University, on a real stage. She did really well and had a super good time. Here is a video of the performance. Maren is the one who is in the back left corner (with a blue mane) once everyone is on stage:

I am so proud of my little unicorn 🦄 

Gardening

 The typical wisdom here is that you plant your garden on the May long weekend. That is this weekend – Victoria day is Monday – so today we spent all day outside planting. Petunias, a few native perennial flowers for the bees, and lots of vegetables – cucumbers, zucchinis, bok choy, tomatoes, potatoes, and pumpkins. It took all day to prepare the beds/planters/trenches and do the planting. We are exhausted, but satisfied.

We didn’t get any pictures of today, and I looked on my phone to try to find good pictures of this week. Maren and Linden both started soccer classes this week, and my pictures are terrible. Jeff says atrocious. They don’t really look like pictures of anything. It’s hard to take pictures of kids moving. 

But I do have this one of Maren and Linden helping prepare dinner. 

They are cutting mushrooms and peppers with kid knives. The one Linden is using is plastic, but the one Maren has is a real knife but small and safer to use. Linden likes to cut mushrooms for pizza but not eat the pizza or any of the mushrooms she has cut. But it is nice that they can both help with dinner!

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.