Ten Things I Loved This Week

I'm getting this out a little later than normal because I've been without a modem all weekend. And surprisingly, was NOT going through withdrawal. :)

1. THE WEATHER. Absolute perfection. Most days there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the temperatures hovered around 80 degrees every single day. Not humid like it'll be in a month or so, so every window in the house has been open with warm breezes flowing through the rooms, and we've left them open at night. I'd be happy if it stayed here year-round.

2. With the suddenly warmer weather, the buds on the trees have all decided to open really quickly, as if they sense they have a small window of time. Trees are blooming, tulips and daffodils are opening, flowers are popping up all over. The entire neighbourhood looks like spring.

3. We have trilliums in our backyard! We moved into this house in August of last year, so until now I didn't know what spring flowers the house would boast. Each one is a new surprise. The white trillium, for anyone not local, is Ontario's provincial flower, and while we all learn in school that it's three white petals and three green leaves and you cannot pick one because it's against the law, you rarely actually see them. They tend to grow in woodsy areas or in clearings in the middle of the forests. Growing up we had a large piece of land upon which my dad was building a house, and my brother and I saw trilliums all the time. Then years went by where I didn't see any, and then recently I found a bunch of wine-coloured trilliums growing in the conservation area behind my parents' house. So to find white trilliums in my backyard, a few feet away from the deck, was very exciting! (In my daughter's Brownie unit we recently talked about how it's illegal to pick a trillium, something the girls thought was fascinating, and so my daughter's first reaction was to gasp and say oh no! What if her little brother picks a flower and then the police will come and take him away!!!! LOL!)

4. Taking my kids to Free Comic Book Day yesterday. I'd done it before on my own or with a friend, but this time I was taking my kids. I was saying to my husband that it sometimes feels like the only thing we do with both of them when they're together is to shuttle them from one extracurricular activity to the next, and to just hang out with them, having them join in on something that Mommy likes to do (unlike most of my friends, I didn't actually marry a fellow geek, so hubby wasn't there), was a lot of fun. And I was able to hang out with a friend of mine in line for a few hours while my kids were — for the majority of the time — well behaved. It was a lot of fun, though after waiting in the two-hour lineup at the second comic book store we kind of ended our day there.

5. To gear up for baseball season, my husband took the kids out into the driveway to try batting. He threw the ball to my daughter and she knocked it... far. So for the next try, he wound up and threw her a really hard fastball pitch... and she drove that sucker so far down the street I said, "OK, enough of the driveway batting. You need to move to a park." It was amazing.

6. I drove to Toronto for a book launch of a book I've been working on for several years. It's always fun to see a book come to fruition, and this was no different (it was doubly fun because I hadn't seen the author in ages). That is one feeling that never gets old.

7. I've been watching a BBC show on PBS called Call the Midwife and I'm totally hooked, and found myself sobbing twice this week while watching it. We're talking full-on, Friday Night Lights ugly crying here. You know what I mean.

8. I was driving home last night, and it was a two-hour drive, and at first the sun was in my eyes, but as it went down I saw the most spectacular sunset. When I was a kid I used to climb on top of my house (you could go out my brother's bedroom window, onto the roof of the garage, and then climb from there up to the highest rooftop of the house — if my parents had ever caught me they would have killed me) just to watch the sunsets, and then I'd go back into the house and try to describe them in writing as best I could. But I often found that sunsets just defy description.

9. Going out onto the back deck one night when I was locking up the back patio door, and looking at the stars and listening to the bugs out in the woods. Peace. Joy.

10. My son tonight said to me that he wished he could play a game with me and no one else. I said, "Why no one else?" He looked at me like he was surprised I didn't know the obvious answer, and said, "Because you're my best pal, Mommy!" ♥♥♥