Spent a couple days with Dina, Dan & the girls. Nice to be somewhere where Spring is already happening! Last night, it hailed and snowed here! Enough to make the ground all white again...luckily it's gone now, but yuck! The boys had a wonderful time in Mass and Rhode Island, we did lots of fun "kid stuff" and got to see Mag win a blue ribbon too!
Rain, rain, go away... The Kid is down with a fever, so we are spending a quiet day at home. Anyway, we need the rain, April showers and all that... My new laptop is still a bit of a mystery to me, it won't just accept my recent photos, it wants to upload the entire memory card every time, so I need to figure it out before too long. We helped move Justin's Grandma to a different floor in her housing complex this weekend...stuffing sofas into little elevators is pretty tricky! And on Sunday, we cleaned up the back yard some and planned out our garden space. Sugaring is done for us, well, even if the sap is still running a bit, we don't feel like getting soaked gathering it. Funny thing: a coworker of Mom's helped us tap the trees a month and a half ago when the snow was thigh-deep. He tripped over fallen tree trunks a few times in his snowshoes and somewhere in the woods, over about four acres, lost his wedding ring. The last time we gathered, the snow was gone, it was just piles of dead leaves and underbrush, so we all kept our eyes glued to the ground, on the look-out for something shiny. Cynical Justin kept saying not to bother, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack, and we'd never find it. Ten minutes later, he sheepishly opened his hand to show me the wedding ring he found beneath a tree. Man! There is a cold drizzle running down the windows, everything outside is a shade of grey/ brown and I'm wishing we were in Santorini or someplace hot, dry and colorful. Soon enough, I suppose, soon enough. Maybe after this rain, the fields will start to green up! We have a three page list of things we want to get done this summer and I'm itching to get started. Some of it, like replacing the windows and furnace should help us never have another winter like this one! Also projects that will help us stay organized, more bookshelves, re-doing the office space, etc will help with the craziness I feel when I look around at the sea of paperwork, leaning towers of books and random odds and ends on every surface. OK, going to go read some stories to my little sicky. He also wants to listen to wolves howl on youtube. We have a deal where we look up a different animal every day and learn about them...(wolves were over a week ago, but he really likes hearing them again.) Today it's the platypus! -Emily
Dreaming of the beach cabin...only a month and a half before we can go.
Sugaring almost every night.
Snowstorm that thankfully melted the same day it fell! And I got a new laptop...so I was playing around, doing cheesy things to pictures with it's photo program... 
More baby bum pictures!
I just like these barns on the way to Jim's.
My wee Anne?
Made the first syrup of the season last night... Yay! It took several days for the pans to sweeten, but it should be hourly from here on out! That's the good news, well, that and the fact that everybody is healthy and happy for the most part... Bad news is: We woke up on Saturday morning to the smoke detectors going off. We are NEVER turning that old oil furnace on again...No more cement is going to do a thing for it. It's been hobbed back together a dozen times. Justin decided he would cut down a half-uprooted tree that has been leaning towards our barn for a while, and fire up the wood furnace. As luck would have it, his chainsaw died and he spent half the day tinkering with it before we got cold enough to go get some wood from Mom & Dad's house. We actually ordered three cords of firewood months ago, but the guy had no wood to deliver, and kept telling us he'd get some soon, but winter's practically over! Anyway, it's warm today. I just gave the baby his first chocolate chip cookie after lunch. He seemed to enjoy it and then the next thing I knew, he had gone and chewed on my white dining room curtains with a mouthful of chocolate...not a pretty sight. Uuuggg. He also had a diaper explosion earlier while seated on a dainty, lacy, floral throw cushion. Right now he's seeing if he can cover every inch of the kitchen with dog kibble...the only thing worth playing with, in his opinion. It was a rather calm morning though, as The Kid slept in until 9:30, an unheard of time for rising in our house! All the sugaring/snowshoeing/late nights are getting to him. I am forseeing school mornings to be trouble with a capital T! He had a fabulous time raking mud in my parent's driveway yesterday. He was caked with it from toe to chest, but quite thrilled with himself. On Saturday, we took the kids to see Goodnight Moon/The Runaway Bunny by the Mermaid Theatre, a traveling group from Nova Scotia. I highly recommend it for little people, absolutely wonderful, and they loved it. My hard-drive is still dead, not dead and buried, but certainly dead for the time being until we can afford to have the data recovered. My pictures on here may be very limited for awhile because there is no room on my computer to hold them. I can upload straight from my camera onto flickr and then pull them from flickr to here, but that seems like an awful lot of work at the moment. Just putting a couple of pictures on and typing a little is a lot of work today...The Kid leaned over to see these pictures, and fell out of his chair, yanking out a good sized fistful of my hair on his way down. And now they've both left me nursing my bald spot to go play in their rice table. E calls to me every few seconds to tell me his brother is eating it/dumping it out/spitting in it/mixing in dog food/or wrecking whatever he is trying to do, but they are very cute playing together. Spring sunshine is pouring in, the river is rushing along, all choppy and brown, bare patches of ground are growing barer and mud-squishy...things are improving, maybe not in looks, but I'm thawing too. A little less tense, frozen and grouchy every day closer to bare feet, green grass and wide open windows.
Some of my kids danced in the Mini-Mud Season Talent Show last night...they are just the cutest things!
