Remarkable Spring

What a strange spring we've been having!  We had a few weeks of record breaking, unseasonably warm temperatures, and the plants have been popping up in the garden.  Last year in the fall I received some bulbs from Danielle for my birthday, and now I'm getting some clues as to where I decided to plant them.  I also dug up and spaced out the existing tulip and daffodil bulbs, and those have come up as well - no flowers on them yet.  However, I did spot my first iris bloom this afternoon!  No picture, sorry, but I was excited to find a flower! 

There are some squirrels who are also excited to see my tulips coming up.  I'm hoping that the red pepper flakes I sprinkled on the gardens might keep them away, as I was NOT pleased to see these chewed off plants.  Aaron is looking forward to me catching some of these squirrel red-handed, as I told him we would eat them for supper.  Whenever he sees me looking at the gardens, he asks me, "Are you frustrated with the squirrels, Mom?"

The boys have enjoyed re-discovering the backyard - they have been able to play out there quite a few days already without even needing a jacket on!

We have a lovely sandbox filled with sand, but for some reason the boys prefer the dirt by the gate or in my now-empty vegetable garden.   This will have to change!

I'm not sure what this bulb is, but it was also from Danielle and it looks promising!  This was on March 19, so it's a little bigger now but no flower yet.

Playing outside makes little boys very dirty!  Nate loves water, so he doesn't mind coming inside as long as he gets to play in the sink!

But he certainly isn't always clean.  You've got to love those spring colds...

There is never a shortage of windows to clean at my house.  Gross!!

Even the lilacs are starting to come out.  I'm looking forward to them!

The apricot tree burst out into full bloom last week Saturday.  Beautiful!  But I've only seen two or three bees around, and I know the farmers are worried about the fruit crops this year.  There is still a lot of opportunity for damaging frost.  I don't mind a non-existent crop of wasp-attracting inedible apricots this year, but for farmers it's a different story. 

A close-up of some blossoms in the sunshine

Those poor blossoms shivering in the snow tonight after supper.  We're supposed to get 1-3 cm of snow overnight.  

I wonder if I should throw an old sleeping bag over them, poor tulips!  

A Book Update

We're still here, don't worry.  But inspiration to write is missing!  Plus my fingertips are dry and cracked, which makes typing quite unfavourable.  I'll use that as my excuse for why it's been so long... but really, I know I need to type through the finger pain.  I'm such a wimp!  Haha.
So, what's been new over here.  We received unexpected and upsetting news a few weeks ago from which we are still reeling.  Doctors have diagnosed Dad VD with leukemia, and while we are still waiting for confirmation of the type and staging of the disease, we are hopeful that it is a fairly treatable form known as Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML).  It is amazing how quickly you can learn about something when given a reason to!  There are a lot of unknowns and  uncertainty about the future, but we rest in the knowledge that all things rest in the Lord's almighty hands, and that His plans for us are perfect. 

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."  Phil. 4:6-7 

"Do you not know?  Have you not heard?  The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.  He will not grow tired or weary, and His understanding no one can fathom.  He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.  " Isaiah 40:28-29

I had the opportunity to borrow and read Ann Voskamp's book One Thousand Gifts over the last few weeks.  I have been reading her blog for some time now, and appreciate her fresh insights on living thankfully before the face of God, as well as her unique style of writing.  I wouldn't mind having a copy of her book for myself, as I felt I needed to read it a little faster than I would have liked since it was a borrowed copy.  There was a lot to digest and think about!  It is an urge to recognize everything as a gift from God - the big and the small, the lovely and the difficult - and when thankful living becomes a matter of habit, our lives will be steeped in joy.  What a challenge, to see even the difficult things, the trials that we face, as gifts from God to be thankful for as they draw us closer to Him.  A lot to chew over and contemplate when life seems to get overwhelming.
Life at home continues on in a relatively predictable fashion - busy!  Life just doesn't slow down, does it?  This week is a bit of a lonely one for me at home as Mike has meetings M, W, Th, and F nights.  He won't even come home for dinner tomorrow.  I think we're actually home this weekend though, which is nice.  There is a long list of things that need to get done on Saturday, and it will be interesting to see how far we can get through that list.  Might as well have a long list - you wouldn't want to run out of things to do or anything!  And at the end of the day, we have a potluck at church to celebrate our 20th anniversary as a congregation - we've been there for six.
The boys are doing well, and we have been enjoying the unseasonably warm temperatures over the past few weeks.  It has been absolutely lovely to increase our living space by playing in the backyard!  It has been a long winter in the house, especially with the basement being out of commission while it is in renovation phase (as that is somewhat stalled at the moment).  The kids have rediscovered the joy of the sandbox, their bicycles, the swings, and the park.  While the past week and a half has seen an inexplicable but unmistakeable rise in grumpiness, I am looking forward to the warmer weather of the spring and summer and the chance to explore the outdoors a bit more.  Hopefully an extra infusion of Vitamin D (together with lots of sunscreen!) will increase the cheerfulness factor in everyone.
Peter is really enjoying school lately, and seems to be blossoming in his learning.  He especially loves days when we have both Story Hour AND school, which is a complete turn-around from the situation in the fall.  According to his teacher, things seem to have "clicked" for him, and he is having a lot more fun interacting with the other kids in his class.  I sure hope this enthusiasm will transfer to his new school in September when he changes over from half days every day to full days every other day.  We'll see when we get there!  He loves helping out around the house and having little jobs to do to help me out.  He has been very affectionate towards Nate the last little while, eager to give him hugs and call him "cutie".  This morning when we dropped Nate and Aaron off at the nursery, Peter called out "Good-bye cuties!" as he skipped off to Story Hour.   
In the meantime, Aaron is convinced he is going to turn four on his next birthday, as he is really looking forward to going to school.  I find it quite ridiculous that he is still two!  I know I've said it before, but I think I must have missed a birthday somewhere along the line.  He is ahead of the game mentally and physically, and I will definitely have to come up with some special learning activities geared towards him in the fall when he sees his brother go off to school again without him.  He is a lot of fun to talk to, and he comes up with some interesting and amusing comments.  We get a kick out of his logic and sometimes out of the randomness of his conversations.  He was talking the other day at the supper table.  "Jesus died on the cross for our sins, eh?  That's good, eh?  Woodpeckers are nice too, eh?"  He also said something funny to me the other day as we were playing outside on the driveway.  He was pretending he had an axe and was chopping down trees.  "Mommy, I have an axe and I am working.  I am cutting down trees.  I won't cut off your arms though".  Ok, thanks kid!  He also assured me today that he wouldn't hit me with his hammer.  How kind of him!
Nate is also at a very fun age right now.  He can be quite a card, making hilarious faces and making us laugh.  He continues to refuse to talk - he babbles a lot and definitely talks to us, but it's all gobble-de-gook right now.  He can get his point across well enough with the noises he makes and the pointing he does, but I'd love to hear him try some talking.  He loves books and reading, and will often climb up in my chair and flip through books on his own.  He often joins me with the older boys in reading longer books on the couch, and he can sit and listen for a surprisingly long time as long as there are some pictures for him to peruse while I read.  He had his 18 month appointment during the March break, and he weighed in at 27lbs  4oz, and 33.5" long. 
What else is there to write about?  I've been sitting here writing for at least an hour now, and I'm sure there is more to catch up on.  When was the last real update anyways?  Oh of course.  Silly me.  How could I forget some of the most exciting things that are going to happen this year?  It will be an exciting year for my family - a wedding and a baby!  Danielle and Timothy got engaged on Feb 14, and we are SO excited for them!  We are looking forward to celebrating with them on October 13, and pray for the Lord's blessings on them as they prepare for their wedding.  And in August, we are looking forward to meeting our first niece? nephew? on the M side of the family, as Tom and Lauren are expecting their first little one.  We are thrilled to have two new members added to the family this year!
Well, Mike just came home from tonight's meeting, so I'd like to chat with him for a while.  Besides, those cracked and dry fingertips are screaming out to stop the bloodshed on my keyboard.  Time to wrap it up!  I'll try to post up a few photos in the next few days - not that there are a whole lot of winners on the camera right now.  Take care!
 

Belly Button

In the middle of a morning full of crying children and excessive amounts of crankiness, I did find one little tidbit of humour.  I was on the phone, trying to track down some rogue tax forms that haven't arrived yet, and had to hang up for the second time because of the screams of distress coming from the kids playing outside.  I went out there to assess the situation, and Aaron came bawling over to me.
"Mommy, I can't do up my belly button!!!" (the button on his pants is open)
"Oh dear, Aaron.  Why isn't your belly button closed?"
"Because I peed on the neighbour's fence."
Huh.

Some Type of Fruit

I was giving Mike a haircut on Saturday and the two older boys were sitting at the table, playing with the extra attachments from the hair trimmer.  They were having a somewhat strained conversation about who was allowed to play with what item, and Aaron was envious about what Peter had.  Peter, becoming increasingly upset, called out, "Mom!!  Aaron's grieving the Holy Spirit!!"  He must have been paying good attention at lunchtime devotions last week when we talked about that verse!

Aaron also pays good attention to what we talk about at lunch, and we see evidence of that occasionally.  The other morning, both boys climbed into bed with us when they woke up and we were all chatting.  Peter said something miserable to Aaron, but instead of replying in kind, Aaron said something like, "Peter is nice, I love him."  It's nice to see him applying that message of "returning good for evil" and "be kind to one another".

A Post About Almost Nothing

I've been suffering from a case of blogger block, which has morphed into a moderate case of blogger's guilt, and I don't know what to do about it.  After consulting with myself, I decided my next course of action should be to post something, but unfortunately, I don't know what to post about.  I turned to my camera for some inspiration:  normally if I run into a case of blogger block, I see what pictures have accumulated on my camera that I can load up to the blog, and thus I can pass off a post of pictures as something creative that might be of interest to my poor readers.  Upon consulting my camera, however, I found that I have been less than diligent in the last little while when it comes to photographing happenings around here.  Perhaps we've been too busy being outside and enjoying the beautiful spring weather this March break has brought us.  So if it's not going to be pictures, it's got to be straight information, and although there have certainly been stories or events or news in the last little while, the stories aren't complete yet and are still under processing.  Maybe sometime soon, but not quite yet. 
So.  I'm still left with nothing to post about, but I do have a few mediocre pictures from the camera.  I'll post those with more description than necessary to alleviate the immediate symptoms of my blogger's guilt, and hopefully sometime in the next week or two, I'll feel the inspiration to sit down and write a worthy update post about something that is actually interesting.  In the meantime, don't say I didn't warn you that this post really has no valuable content.  
I will now bore you with excessive information about our television set.  The following is a picture of our TV while it was on the other night.  No, I'm not suggesting that you should go vacationing on a beach down south somewhere, nor do I think this commercial was anything out of the ordinary.  Yet, I post a picture of our TV.  Why?  Because it is starting to die in a variety of different ways.  It's always been a quiet TV, which doesn't really get any louder after about volume level 30 - after that going up to volume level 70 doesn't make any difference.  Lately, if I play a VHS tape for the kids, it makes a very loud fuzzy noise while the tape plays or the video goes fuzzy and loud every few seconds.  The other night we tried to watch a DVD and the picture quality was awful, but at least it didn't show the left side of the movie on the right side of the screen and the right side of the movie on the left side of the screen like it has done before.  If you try to watch TV, there will be occasional blips of bright colours, and the picture will go extremely bright and washed out, and no fiddling with the settings will fix it.  On the occasion of this picture, the visible part of the screen (inner white square) started slowly shrinking until we had a picture that was about half the size that it should be (outer white square).  We don't watch a lot of TV - actually we only get one channel - but I am still a little sad that our TV is reaching the end of its lifespan.  I like being able to pop in a short movie for the kids if they're incredibly grumpy or if I need to take a shower or something.  You know, for the sake of my sanity.      

Our fridge is also trying to bite the bullet.  It came with the house, and according to the sticker inside, it was rated "high" on the energy use scale when it was new twenty years ago.  I don't want to know how much power it sucks up now, but what I do want to know is why it keeps leaking.  Almost every day, and sometimes every few hours, a big puddle of water collects on the inside floor of the fridge and if I don't catch it in time, it leaks out under the fridge and makes a big mess.  I figured the drain pan or something was frozen inside because I had the freezer too full, so I emptied the whole fridge out and let it thaw for a number of hours last week.  I even unscrewed things inside the freezer and cleaned underneath the freezer floor.  Nate enthusiastically helped me clean it from top to bottom, and when we were all done I filled it back up again (not too full) and plugged 'er in.  The next morning, I found a big puddle of water on the inside floor of the fridge again.  Argh!

The other day I was heading out to Bible study on a Wednesday morning, when I discovered that I couldn't get out of the front door.  Why not, you ask?  Because Canada Post delivered this little box, and the guy decided to put it on the perfect angle that prevents the screen door from opening up.  There wasn't even enough room to reach my hand through the door to move it out of the way.  I don't think I could have done it again if I tried.  (see, I warned you these pictures were not going to be very interesting!)

A few days ago, the older two boys were happily playing outside and I had Nate inside with me.  It was a perfect day to wash the windows!  However, Nate currently has a cold, and has copious amounts of  boogers running down his face at any given time.  When he sees a window, he thinks the most fun thing to do is to smush his face up against it.  As you can imagine, this is somewhat counterproductive to the window-cleaning task.  So I let him play with the split peas that the boys had left on the table from earlier in the morning.  They are pretty good at keeping them on the table. 

Nate, however?  Not so much.  This is the price I paid for booger-free window washing duty.  At least split peas are pretty easy to clean up. 

Randoms

Snow man forensics

Poor confused daffodils - I hope they don't get nipped by the cold!

 Introducing... the amazing spoon-on-the-nose hanger!