That time of year

 Around here this is the time of year when the weather can do just about anything. Last week we had a lovely snow day. It wasn’t that cold out, just cold enough to snow, and the snow was delightfully packable. In a very short time we managed to build a snowman:

The snow was gone as quickly as it came. School was closed for one day, as was the University (so different from Saskatchewan where no one would blink an eye at this little snow), and the next day everything had melted and was back to normal. But so much fun for the kids who feel very much at home in the snow.

It is also a season of change and preparation. Spring is just around the corner, and we are getting ready. I am so looking forward to having a garden space this year. Our backyard is fairly shady, so not great for gardening. But the front yard is wide-open and sunny, and great except for the fact that deer traipse through almost daily. There is an immense amount of deer poop on the lawn.

In order to keep the deer out so that I can have my garden, we are building a fence. However, keeping deer out and sunlight in while adhering to city bylaws is not such an easy task. After much research and planning we have come up with a solution and the fence builders are well underway. The first step was to remove some old trees and bushes from the front, and you can see where Linden was playing in a giant juniper in the first picture below and climbing the tree behind it in the second:

Hopefully next week I can show you the fence and in the weeks to come show progress on the garden!

Cookies

 This year Maren and Linden are both in Girl Scouts, so they are both selling cookies. This year the local Girl Scout council also changed which of the two Girl Scout cookie bakers they use, and there are six (SIX!) different kinds of vegan cookies. The baker only advertises five as being vegan but VegNews magazine has confirmed that they recently changed the recipe of another variety so that it is also vegan.

We are stoked. And also I am shamelessly going to put their digital cookie pages here: 

Linden

Maren

When I was young and selling Girl Scout cookies we were not so high tech. I think I usually sold about 10 boxes of cookies, but their goals are much higher so buy some cookies and enjoy 😊 

Celebrations

 The last two weeks have been full of celebrations. We had Christmas at home, then Christmas with my family in Eugene, then took a trip up to Vancouver BC to visit Jeff‘s brother and family. 

We played lots of games, engaged in feats of strength, and generally enjoyed our holidays and visits.

Today is the last day before kids go back to school and we go back to a new term at work, and things go back to normal. As one last hurrah, Linden managed to get her shoes stuck in the mud at the park and decided to carry her muddy shoes and walk all the way home in her socks. 

There is nothing more quintessentially childhood than that. 

Permanent

A few exciting things have happened since my last blog post.

First, and maybe most importantly, Jeff became a permanent resident of the United States again. He had to give up his permanent residence status about two years after we moved to Canada, and go through the whole process of applying again when we moved back. We had no idea how long the process would take, and one day we checked the status and it said we were 14 months from a decision, and the next day the application was approved. He got his card in the mail and hilariously they used his picture from 2007 (even though he sent a new photo with his application).

The second most exciting thing is that Maren got her ears pierced. She has been asking and waiting for months, and now was finally a good time (in between soccer and basketball). She is pretty thrilled.

Other stuff less exciting: we had the end of a fairly tumultuous term, where the grad student employees were on strike and then finally a month later reached an agreement, and we are all glad to have a little rest now. We are enjoying spending some time outdoors, and having our holiday celebrations :-)

Christmas tree

 Today we took the kids to a Christmas tree farm to cut our own tree. It was their second time at the tree farm but their first time wandering around and choosing and cutting a tree. It is much earlier than I would normally want to get a tree, because I really don’t like when the needles are dry and falling off by Christmas. But it has been another tough year for tree farms and they are likely to run out of U-cut trees within the next week or so. I didn’t want to risk it, so we went today.

It looks quite lovely 😊 🎄