Boardwalk

 Today Maren had a Girl Scout event at a wildlife center (learning about local wildlife and visiting with injured birds), and Jeff, Linden, and I went for a little walk. One very nice thing about Corvallis is that there are several boardwalk trails, and I can very easily navigate them on my trike. It was a lovely day to be outside!

Happy Mother’s Day 🪻🌿🪷

 Today was going to be the first Mother’s Day in over a decade that I spent with my mom. However, Maren woke up with a tummy ache this morning and it was not getting better by the time we were supposed to leave. 

We decided to hold off leaving for just a bit to see if her tummy ache would get better, and we are glad we did because she threw up just as we were supposed to start driving. So no trip to Eugene for us. 

Fortunately Maren started to feel better just a few hours after throwing up (she still reports feeling a little sick, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at her or by watching her laughing and playing with Linden). But even so we wanted her to take it easy do today was an extremely low-key day. Lots of reading and board games, ending with eating outside in the lovely weather, and the kids wanting to take a bunch of selfies:

Spring is for…

 Soccer

Bring your kids to campus day

Making seed bombs (Linden got to be an honorary Girl Scout for one activity)

Rainy walks

Aaaand colds. We have all been sick, but hopefully we will all be better by the time we get some summer weather later this week!

Camp

 Yesterday Maren had her first Girl Scout camp experience. It was “spring camp,” a day out at a Girl Scout campground with no overnight but everything else you would expect a camp experience to be. 

It has been 30 years or so since I was last at a Girl Scout camp, but I have very fond memories of them so I decided to volunteer. My job was to sit and watch the lake and when girls were out canoeing to blow my whistle if anyone tipped over, which they didn’t. So I spent the afternoon sitting and watching this:

At the end of the day Maren was extremely tired but said it was the best day of her entire life. I am so happy that she had such a good time 😊

Taxes, I shake my fist at you

Much of yesterday and most of today were spent doing taxes. I will spare the boring details but there was a lot of stopping and restarting, doing and redoing, and finally feeling pretty confident about our Canadian taxes. Then after several hours spent on our US taxes we figured out that we were doing them wrong. Although Jeff will be a resident for tax purposes this year, last year he was not. That means that we spent hours trying to complete the form for married filing jointly when in fact I have to file as married filing separately and he hast to file as a non-resident. Overall this will actually be a good thing for us and we will not owe thousands and thousands of dollars to the US government, but unfortunately we wasted many hours figuring that out. 

So here is a photo of a fun thing we did to help remind me that we did more than taxes: