Spring stalled mid-melt, dithering in delay, making us regular-walkers strap crampons to our boots. These pictures are of the path I take, one March 13th, the other just yesterday.
And here’s the dog wishing he could get at the geese.
Birthday party notes
Planning a birthday party is fun. First, some decoration… “What’s the theme?” I asked the birthday boy. “Water fight!” he said. So here’s his age, making a splash:
And here’s a watermelon whale, which doubles as decoration, and optional healthy snack:
And then, if the party guests don’t eat all that much watermelon, you can take it and throw it in the blender and make watermelonade, one batch for kids, and one, with Prosecco, for the adults:
And here’s what Enzo thinks of having to be tied up while his domain is invaded by elementary-school children:
Party favours included these fun erasable pens from Toad Hall toys:
But most of all, it’s just keeping things simple and letting the kids have fun!
A weekend at Riding Mountain
This summer, we booked a weekend away at a small cabin near Riding Mountain National Park. Riding Mountain draws campers, resort-goers, and people with boats. Cabins come in all varieties… ours had pretty sunsets over a lake, and foggy still mornings.
Visiting Wasagaming with its population of tourists made us feel touristy too. We stopped in shops, spent time at the visitor center and made allowance for treats: ice cream and beavertails in the evening; cinnamon buns from The Whitehouse at lunch.
We stopped at picturesque spots and at a Wishing Well, a stranger offered to take our family’s picture.
We spent a warm afternoon at Frith Beach with our chairs perched on a narrow strip of pretty pebbles, while the lake’s clear water made it especially fun for the boys to wear their goggles. Cedric even caught a crayfish!
Have you noticed Enzo? He was with us all the time…
I liked the evening walks along the lakeshore, the lake-life vibe, the little unit we make.
This is how much
A friend, on a trip to Belgium, sent me a picture of greenery. My brother-in-law on a visit to Toronto sent us a snapshot of an icing-sugar-dusting of snow. The other evening a supper-delivery person asked our kid who was standing atop a pile of snow, what he was building. “A mountain!” our son answered.
I came home from a walk Sunday and could hear the kids’ voices from the street. We have so much snow, the garage roof is our kids’ playground.
Loch Ness monster
There’s this add for a productivity app that pops into Youtube playlists. While the Loch Ness monster doesn’t exist, it says, good teamwork can - thanks to Asana.
The Loch Ness monster? It exists! It left its deep murky cove and swam far, far away, and hearing of the sturgeon lying deep below the currents of the Red River came to feast on them. Then the Loch Ness monster grew fat, and one day prayed the gods to be delivered from the pursuit of Manipogo. Like in Daphne’s case, the gods took pity and turned the Loch Ness monster into a tree.
It seems content here through the change of seasons, caught, revealingly, mid stride.
Two moments
This morning when I walked the dog, the river was like glass.
On the Ten Percent Happier podcast, I savoured what Christiane Wolfe had to say about anger and intention:
Forgiveness is a really hard one [emotion]. And forgiveness doesn’t happen overnight. Forgiveness is not something that we decide, just like “yeah that makes sense to forgive that person, or that situation, or myself.” But the thing is that anger will turn into bitterness, if we, over time, can’t let go of it. And that’s just like a yucky feeling. (…) We have agency over our intention. We don’t have agency, as I said, we can’t decide to forgive or we can’t decide to be compassionate or we can’t decide to love, right? But what we do, is we can set the intention and then we can keep inviting these qualities in, over and over and over and just trust basic neuroscience, right, that whatever we do repeatedly, that will change us.
Woolly
Seeing this debris left by a giant poplar, I thought of sheep’s wool. I like the idea of sheep… They pop up on TikTok being gathered by dogs, or being shorn by Katie McRose while she chats about her job… I think I like the idea of sheep because there are so few here, much like I like the idea of living in a rainy place (is it London still?) while the grass on our front lawn looks more like hay.
But back to the poplars… Step on this white fluff and it crunches. Hidden under its soft-looking exterior are the shelf of dried out seed heads.
The view
Toady, we took off to the beach, lunch, children and dog in tow. I burned my neck thinking my hat had a larger brim. I enjoyed taking the dog for a walk along the water’s edge, exploring to the limit of the sand, where beach ran into forest, and trees that once stood had toppled over, their roots like a great big diner-table top, stood vertical. Some of their dried tangle still held captive boulders.
Then we came back to find everyone else in the water, and, after chasing waves, I sat under our umbrella and took in the view.
Backyard
We recently walked through a new neighbourhood where backyards lined a large reedy pond and landscapers had only recently finished with brick hardscaping and young plants. The new development and the size of the houses is impressive, but I still come home and count myself supremely content tending to the changes we’ve made in our own small yard.
Before, we had a raised garden and an apple tree. We took apart the raised bed, moved the garden and cut down the apple tree.
With some of the wood from the raised bed, sanded and painted, we made a larger sandbox. On hot days, we can top the sandbox with an inflatable pool.
Friday!
It’s Friday… kids hang from hammocks, laundry gets folded, adults eat quiche while the kids have cheese-stuffed tortellini.
The lawn is in poor shape, but the installation of fibre-optics underneath it has made it a lawnmower maze of flags and even the dandelions feel outdone by the spray-painted lines everywhere. The Badger truck spent a day around our place, humming noisily. The men gave stickers to the boys and we googled the website written on their truck door. We looked at pictures of badgers and compared them to the logo. The lawn will wait for quieter days.
I crave the ability to draw and since this seems like as futile as wanting to be a sea urchin, I’ve taken to googling the benefits of art. So far, the results have only been gentle persuasions and not gale-force arguments. Perhaps that is the nature of art… it is gentle and it transforms slowly.
School lunches
Schools went online here in Manitoba on the Wednesday after Mother’s Day. Unlike March of last year, the day’s routine is structured around the children’s classroom appointments rather than a schedule I improvised. (I write about it here.) This means the kids are more independent and I have time to make lunch the day-of, rather than doing it the night before. Here is what the kids have for lunch during the week:
Monday: Sandwhiches
Tuesday: Quesadillas
Wednesday: Pasta salad (here with tuna)
Thursday: Fruit smoothie, a muffin (here banana-chocolate, although other favourites include banana chocolate-chip, zucchini, and pumpkin) and nuts and bolts
Friday: Pizza (from frozen)
vicarious
Sometimes, the most delicious feeling is the one in which, for a little while, you are taken away to another place and immersed in a different reality. I don’t care for fantastical worlds or romance novels… instead I like mundane day-to-day. Biographical documentaries are my favourite. Recently, I’ve soaked up the Netflix series “My Love”. But I also appreciate blog posts that gently pull you into a scene.
Here, the house is quiet because Christian and the kids have gone to walk the dog. The sun is here, with the ticking of the clock, after days of rain and clouds. Around my house, the scenes point to temporary absences.
Zoom background
A couple in the family was celebrating their 25th anniversary over Zoom. To demonstrate our good wishes, I made a background, inspired by a paper-flower tutorial here. We set a couch in front to accommodate ourselves comfortably and raised champagne flutes filled with ginger ale when toasts were made.
Paper crafts are my fave!
Walk
Everyday, I take a walk. The same route, worn by the hundreds of other people who also take walks, nonetheless always has something new to offer… and sometimes to celebrate the discovery I take a picture.
Going light
I have a tendency to go deep, to get bogged down, to stare at the ground and feel the weight of things. But going for a walk? Going for a walk reminds me to be light, to look up, to find colour, to notice the sun…
Louis Riel Day
It’s Louis Riel Day here in Manitoba and the best thing about this day is a picture of my dad posing at Riel’s gravesite in Saint Boniface when he was still a young man from Rosetown Saskatchewan, only passing through Winnipeg.
Childhood pictures
This is me at one or two, but not three:
There are a lot of feet in this picture. It’s warm, but my parents are wearing jeans. Mom favoured flip flops for herself, but outfitted me with solid sandals that must have been exercises in patience to buckle. The decor at my grandparents place is full of brown, caramel and orange tones.
Sight-seeing, mom outfitted me in a bonnet. Her mauve stripes and my dotted onesie go together nicely.
Here, a hat, and perfect tresses, a pretty colour combination of white and yellow and pink.
It’s funny how viscerally I remember some clothes… This jacket was a comfortably-soft cotton middle-season jacket, with buckles that were decorative and a little fussy.
Here, I’m 5 and my brother has entered the scene. I have solid pink sandals and a red purse with a cat on it. The purse is used to transport Nuggles, my tiny stuffed bunny whose nose I would stroke falling asleep in bed. The beige bag is a diaper bag that I’m helpfully carrying.
Mom is painting the apartment closet and wishing for a house - and her face is pretty and youthful. I’m wearing a turtleneck. Mom was fond of using turtlenecks under sweaters. This style soaked into me and even when I tried wringing it out, this turtlenecks, turtlenecks, turtlenecks everywhere, it came back this year…. I’ve embraced their cozy-neck feeling and face-framing look.
Mostly, when looking at pictures from my youth, I notice mom’s attention to detail and her pursuit of aesthetically-pleasing portraits. That Pa was able to catch her at it probably earned him a chiding remark, and this spontaneous pose makes me smile. Mom liked pictures that were posed. I’m not sure if now, my pursuit of spontaneous moments is something from my dad, something that is generational, or something in reaction to all the posed moments of my childhood.