They are easier to detect after the fact. They are uncanny encounters, brushes with the supernatural, where the presence of the Lover accompanies us in a very real way, sheltering, directing, loving, moving, giving life to our everyday existence. You can't totally explain the experience, but you leave shaken to the very depths, knowing that you have been kissed by the Divine.
Here are the friends that will be going up to Canada with us to help us with the drive. Their plane tickets home are bought and we've gotten walkie-talkies, so now there is money invested in the move - ie, no turning back! Here are some more friends that we wish we could stuff in the car as well and move up with us! I've started my mental list of things to do before leaving- swim lots, see friends lots, library time, go to the zoo, our favorite 2 restaurants, artwalk downtown. Here, Brian is walking the kids home after Ivan and Dominique's swim lesson. Yesterday they had a fun unique experience, they got to read to some therapy dogs! I'll have to post pics some day of that too. Have a great weekend. It's supposed to snow here tonight, hope it doesn't the peach tree is already in bloom.
We've had a break from soccer these last two weeks with spring break, so our darlings will be really fired up once it starts up again. Aren't they cute in their uniforms? What a fun day we had! Brian has always had a goal of spending time one on one with each kid, which in our normal lives is a scheduling challenge, but since he is in between jobs, he took Dominique today for her and daddy time. They of course had a blast. Meanwhile Ivan and I did laundry with Emora in tow. It was actually quite fun. Ivan just loves to help and is so good at learning skills. He folded towels and helped drag baskets of clothes about the house. We worked on some math and school work and played lots and lots of different card games. The kids had swim lessons and are doing amazingly well. They can both swim without drowning for about a 3 feet now. We also brought them Sunday to swim as a family. There must be something magical about daddies, because they wanted to show him all their skills and even got to swim in the deep end with us.
Then Ivan took us out for supper. Yep, the kids had some money from a loving beneficiary and he wanted to spend it by taking us all out to supper. He had a $5 and a bunch of $1 and took us to one of his favorite places to eat: an all you can eat pizza buffet, with desert pizzas too. It's great to be able to eat out as a fivesome for $15. Emora and Dominique ate free and do they ever lose a lot of money on Emora! I'm telling you she can pack away the food. Then we hit three stores and bought our replacement digital camera. Dominique broke ours some time ago, so if you look closely at the above pictures, they are all blurry around the edges, so now we got a new one and it is strictly off limits to anyone under 21 or who has a tendancy to drop things, both of which exclude our trio. They now have 2 faulty digital cameras to use as their own practice models.
Tomorrow is Ivan's turn with daddy and I have a friend stopping over. They are going to look for a camera case, and walkie-talkies for our move and go for a professional hair cut. I just wrote my letter to the Y telling them I'm leaving. Wow, things are moving along.
She managed to keep her pig tails in most of that morning, but then suffered with post pig tail hair the rest of the day, since she would no longer leave them in. I even had to confiscate her hair clips since she decided that they were better to eat than to wear. It has been hot and sunny, but may change tomorrow. Nevertheless, we are enjoying the beautiful spring before the real heat hits (which we hope to avoid by whisking ourselves away to Canada).
This night I ditched bed routine on Brian because I had to do something, right after I took the picture. And yes, Dominique is sticking out her tongue.
We were watching "Popular Mechanics for Kids" and the host was introducing the man who holds the record for the most rappelling, or something like that... but what struck us was this- Check out that name! He has it a little bit off, Christophe is spelled different, and Ivan's 1st middle name is Truth, not "Spiderman", but it was pretty cool to see our Ivan Truth Christophe's name nearly on the big screen! Apparently the guy is a bit of a hero in Toronto, so that's doubly fun.
It's hard to imagine that just a few weeks ago, we were having snowball fights. Emora did not like getting hit in the head. I don't blame her. We ran into our neighbors Jaime and her brother, so we let them get in on the action and before we knew it, even Big Buddy became a part of the fight. I think it's been a few years since he was in a snowball fight. He was well protected behind his glass door shield. He doesn't get out much, and then it's always just to the doctor's office, so we thought a little diversion would spice up his day. After this, the kids managed to make a snowman family to set on Big Buddy's ramp, which greeted him the next day before they melted off into their watery grave a day later.
Now it is totally spring. Nice and hot with trees budding and the world waking to a new season. I'm sad in a way to not buy our traditional hanging baskets, since the birds always nest in them. I saw a couple of birds flying onto our porch, which I was sure was a signal that they were looking for our beautiful floral arrangements to destroy with a nest and babies.
We changed our clocks tonight in the strange ritual of day light savings. Having grown up in SK, I had never heard of this quirk and when I first did as an adult living in Manitoba, I didn't believe it. I thought the other students were playing a practical joke on me when they said to change the time on my clock. "How could you just change the time? It's like gravity, you can't just change it"- I replied. Little did I know at the time... Now I wonder if this is the last time I will hunt down clocks to spring forward or fall back as we reenter the place where time does not change.
Dad, on the previous post, we transformed our snowcowboy into a bird bath and tunnel, so perhaps you could call it a bird quinzee? Yeah, Ivan is looking forward to a real quinzee and is determined to have 5 snowmen, one for each person in our family, so I'm thinking we will have a heavy load of snow building come winter in Canada. Better schedule some time to come visit. We may need some grandpa assistance with an experienced quinzee builder.
Brian's house flip is officially and totally sold as of now. Yeah, that means that we can start making concrete moving plans. We also have some leads on people who may want to buy our house and we are hoping that will be able to happen before we move. It's pretty exciting!
I've got lots of pics that I should have been posting all week long. Don't know where I've been, but hasn't been here obviously. Can't believe I haven't posted since Monday! Are you suffering withdrawals?- ha,ha
The kids are growing up before our very eyes. I guess that's a given, but it still shocks me. Ivan can pretty much read some books on his own and we've been trying to write more, but he doesn't like it, so I have to trick him by having him do writing adventures- like we write "secret messages". A message is always fun to write if you put "secret" into the title. We also went on a "scavenger" walk where he wrote down things we saw. It was so sweet to see him lay out on the sidewalk to write.
He and Dominique are very nearly swimming. They have a couple more weeks of lessons and are so close to being able to go a couple feet without going under. Dominique is a little too daring. She likes to yell "look mom", push off from the wall and "swim" back. Only thing is, she is very nearly drowning- her swim consists of movements, not very horizontal and her little nose alone above the surface. It is extremely frightening and she has caused me, the lifeguard and her swim teacher to grow quite concerned over it. I rush to the edge and yell for her to get back on the wall. She smiles without a trace of concern and does it all over again. I'm not sure if she is feasting on the rush of facing her physical limitations and stepping just past them, or of watching me obviously tormented by her lack of sensibility. She has done it the last two classes when the teacher is not watching, of course I'm not in the water to scoop her up either. The little turkey!
Dominique put me in a bit of a difficult predicament tonight. She was saying a rambling prayer of thank-yous for nearly everything under the sun. She ended with "thank you God for letting us go to Chuck-E-Cheeses", opened her eyes, looked at me and said "mom, can we go to Chuck-E-Cheeses?"
Emora is getting to be a handful at swimming lessons. They are not for her and she is not at all happy about it. We did take her swimming Sun. and she loved it. So she kept trying to get in the pool with Ivan and Dominique for their lesson today. Even with me right there, she got close on several occasions and exasperated at me, threw her snack container in at one point. She has no fear. At the playground, she wanted to hang from her legs over a bar like Dominique, tried to walk off a 3 foot high landing while reaching for a fireman pole and discovered the joys of slides. I'd put her on and she'd wiggle to get going, then wizz down with me trying to make sure she didn't summersault her way down.
Ivan has troubles finding his gumption to try/start or continue a task, so I use a lot of bribery or competition with him as motivation. Tonight he didn't want to read, so I offered him an incentive and he read nearly every word in an easy to read book by himself. Then he was so thrilled with the fact that he had done it, that he grabbed another book and read it too. Yipee- just let him taste success and away we go. Or so I hope.
OK, it's in little itty bitty video and you really can't see much of anything, especially if you can't spot her in the crowd. I'm hoping we will be able to get a new camera with zoom capabilities soon- this one was damaged by our little soccer extraordinaire. It's funny that she can actually kick the ball and run, but often trips over her feet when just walking, or standing, such as was the case the day she fell with the camera.
The ball drizzled to the goal. I would have swept the grass like crazy if it would have helped (and was allowed), as it was, I yelled instead, which seems to have scared that ball into the net.
I missed her best dancing by the goal line where she looked as big as an ant onscreen.
it helps quite a bit when none of the other kids are actually trying or interfering with her dart across the field, she eventually got it to the goal and kicked it in, as seen in the next shot
we all thought the ball had gone out of play, but Dominique had kept moving it toward the goal and got it in under all of our noses- then did her gloating dance. Brian now admits this may be his doing since they were practicing soccer this week and he demonstrated the gloating dance.
If all goes according to plan, which is to move in June, we made ourselves a pretty ideal year. A mild Texan winter with 3 occurences of snow, enough to get to taste it (literally) without having to subject ourselves to miserable temps and arduous dressing sessions to go outside, beautiful Texan spring, fabulous Canadian spring and perfect summer without the 100plus degrees, hiding in air conditioned places, then a pretty fall with changing colors. We'll call that the perfect year, since after that I will be rudely awakened to the fact that I have returned back to a deep freeze. I am hoping that the winter will woo me with it's beauty and charm, Ivan is quite looking forward to building an igloo and 5 snowmen. But in the meantime, I can regal myself in the fact that I get to experience a perfect year, with seasons and not overly ridiculous temps. Who can claim that?
The pics here are from our second snow. The shots include Emora's first time to touch the snow. Do you notice what happens when a mom has a digital camera? Compassion is gone when there is a picture to shoot. Instead of bursting to her aid as I saw her stumble bare hands into the snow, I snapped a shot, then as she wailed in misery, I took another picture of her cute little handprints in the snow. I did notice that when it snowed last week and we got a serious dump to play in, she was not at all impressed and basically cried the morning away with us outside. She remembered all too well that she was not overly fond of the wet, cold stuff. Then when I tried to endear myself to her like I did the other kids with hot chocolate milk, I discovered that she doesn't like chocolate milk! Can you believe it? She does like warm regular milk though, so I guess I'll just have to have her chocolate for her.
Today the kids wore shorts and summer sleeveless dresses! This was our first real shorts day and the kids were so overjoyed. Everyday they ask to wear shorts. Ivan wears flipflops and t-shirts year round as it is, but it really felt like spring today.
Dominique describes what snow tastes like
Saba in winter training for our upcoming move to Canada
Some of Brian's college friends threw a party with our eventual departure in mind, only we didn't know it was for us really. We just thought they were getting together and they were, but one of their reasons is that we would not be here for ever.
We are trying to get with people when we can. Tighe and I got to enjoy an only 1 child with us outing when the big kids were in Houston with Nana and Papa.
Emora is so fun even with her cutting teeth. Tonight she was playing peek-a-boo with me through a face slimed in supper. She can also make real kisses and blow them to us, and she is very affectionate that way.
The kids are doing so great with swimming classes. We may get them pretty much swimming before we get up there which would be so excellent.
Brian's house is still meeting delays with it's sale that was supposed to happen today, so that is frustrating, but we are getting word out on our house too to see if it will sell as is, or if he should put the work in to flip it. Right now we are thinking the best plan is to get it out of our hands so that we can get into something easier as soon as possible on the Canadian side. So, if you know someone interested in buying a house in Abilene- send them our way!!
a couple of nuts singing their nightly nutcracker song
Dominique's weird impersonation of the singer's voice.
Here are some more friends that we wish we could stuff in the car as well and move up with us! I've started my mental list of things to do before leaving- swim lots, see friends lots, library time, go to the zoo, our favorite 2 restaurants, artwalk downtown. 
Here, Brian is walking the kids home after Ivan and Dominique's swim lesson. Yesterday they had a fun unique experience, they got to read to some therapy dogs! I'll have to post pics some day of that too. Have a great weekend. It's supposed to snow here tonight, hope it doesn't the peach tree is already in bloom.
