Random Thoughts

One morning, this week, as my husband took A. into daycare, I was left alone in the car for a few minutes.

It was quiet, well, almost, I turned the radio off and listened to the birds chirping. The trees are finally budding and the hedges are starting to turn green. I saw a squirrel running along a wire against a steely-blue, almost lavender sky. The wind was pretty strong and had blown the neighbour's gate open, so their giant poodle was happily roaming the front yard.

It's such a common picture, but it gave me tremendous pleasure to watch. This sense of calm overcame me, a true ..ahhhhhhh moment.

Spring is such a happy, positive, invigorating time. It makes me think of all my projects and plans, and their progress. Now that things are settling down, I am finding renewed energy to continue working on my stash for the Craft Market I am planning on participating in. So here's a picture of what I worked on in the past few weeks.

Our Easter

We celebrated Easter this past weekend. The advantage of celebrating it a week later then most people, is that I've been able to scour Pinterest for cute decorating and crafty ideas. The amount of talent and inventiveness out there is crazy!

I had it all planned out. The menu, the activities and the decorations, and I was pretty pleased with the results.

Holidays and family gatherings, such as these, can be tough. Our family is always reminded that we are spread all over the globe, and only get to meet face-to-face rarely. At the same time this fact makes us appreciate the family members that are close by, and nurture these relationships as we know they are precious.Generally I would say that we are too dependent on technology, but to be honest I cannot remember what it was like before we discovered Skype. To be able to "see" your family, to have cousins that have never met interact, recognize and speak to each other has helped me tremendously in accepting that we are living our lives separated. But I am getting too sentimental here.

I started this post by telling you how nicely I had planned out the festivities. As always, plans are one thing, and reality turns into something completely different. The kids squabbled all day, over chocolate, over coloring the Easter eggs, over who was doing a better job with their activity book. I bought the wrong dough for my dessert, and then forgot to defrost the blueberries I needed for it as well (thank God my sister had brought a "just in case" cake), and then I realized I had forgotten to buy lemons, a major ingredient in one of the dishes we were preparing. Finally the laptop shut down in the middle of our Skype conversation because it was not connected to the power-supply.

So our Easter celebrations ended up being the usual mayhem that our family celebrations are.

I will be leaving you with some photos that portray a completely different picture, make you believe it was all a very "zen" get-together. But I am not complaining, after all, how boring would that be?

Butterflies go free

Tomorrow I start my new job. I feel a little nervous, to be honest. Not surprisingly, I have turned toward my kniting to make me feel better, to calm my thoughts. It's amazing what a soothing effect it has on me. I can't help but wonder, what do people do, that do not have such an activity to turn to? I will tell you more about my knitting project in a few weeks, but for now, I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Easter. I will be posting about our own festivities next week, as we are celebrating orthodox Easter, which falls a week later this year.

In the meantime I will tell you a bit about our trip to the Montreal Botanical garden this weekend. Every year, they have the "Butterflies go free" exhibit, and this year we thought the kids would really appreciate the experience. As you walk into the greenhouse you find yourself surrounded by swarms of butterflies. If you can sit still for more then a minute ( which the kids did not), you might even have a butterfly land on you.

It's truly a bit of magic.

Spring is taking it's time in arriving here. After that one week of incredible weather, we are back to wearing scarves, and any little sign of warmth and green is celebrated. Seeing all those beautiful flowers and colors, has lifted our spirits and has made me once again think of all the projects I am planning on working on this year. I feel energized.