Sunshine and strawberries

Today was a beautiful day – warm and sunshiny and perfectly perfect for picking strawberries with my favorite girl and her classmates.

In addition to all the yummy berries we picked, we also got to watch the famous Ottawa Farms pig races! Lola Gray and I just can’t get enough of those piggies!

birdie

I have been in a bit of a funk the last few weeks. Not without reason, mind you, but still . . . it’s time to snap out of it. And so I am going to start reminding myself again of all the wonderful things that surround me. Wonderful things like my beautiful daughter who has taken to whistling incessantly.
It really is beautiful . . . when it isn’t annoying. 🙂

This was filmed the morning after St. Patrick’s Day. You can still see my phone number written on her arm, just in case we got separated in the crowd. The bubble gun was her parade souvenir and frankly I’m amazed that it is still working 2 days out!

going green!

Savannah on St. Pat’s is not to be missed, and this year’s festivities may have been the best yet. It seemed half the world came out for the parade – the newspaper is claiming close to a million spectators! Thanks to good friends with prime real estate, we managed a balcony view for the bands, the bagpipes, the clydesdales, the dancers, and of course all those Irish families dressed to the nines in green. I do love a parade!!

But of course my favorite part, as always, was biking downtown through the parade staging ground. This year Fletcher biked on his own – and he did great! I imagine it won’t be long before he is biking to school every day.

 

A post I don’t want to write

I keep sitting down to write about my dear Grandmother Sophie, but I haven’t been able to do it. It’s been a week now, and I still just can’t process it. My logical brain knows that it was time: she had 96 beautiful years on this planet and I am incredibly lucky to have had her in my life for so long.

But my birthday was this past Monday, and she didn’t call. She always called me on my birthday.  And while my logical brain knows she is isn’t suffering anymore, knows that it was time . . . that hasn’t kept my heart from breaking.

I just really miss her.

Debut Strings Ensemble

It was less than 2 months ago that Fletcher took a huge leap of faith and auditioned for the Armstrong Atlantic Youth Orchestra. None of us knew exactly what to expect, none of us could have ever anticipated just how hard he would work or how much he would improve over the course of the next two months.

But Saturday he rehearsed on the big stage and we bought our first concert tickets. I say first because I’m pretty sure (hopeful) that these will be the first of many.

After years of seeing such a big deal made over his sister’s ballet recitals, I wanted to make sure there was an equally big deal made of this concert. I told him we would take him anywhere he wanted for dinner after the concert, but he said what he really wanted was pizza at home and a trip to the library to pick out a new book.

He was less than thrilled with his concert attire – or more specifically, with the bow tie. He said he would never be able to play violin while wearing that thing. But of course he did. And he was amazing.

Unfortunately the Flip video camera died, and my phone ran out of memory before the end of the 3rd song, so the video of the performance is less than perfect. The performance, however, was perfect. To think that he was playing this just a few short months ago!

Just for fun, here is a photo my friend Atsuko took of Raymond, Lola Gray and me waiting for the concert to begin. I can’t get over how grown up (and beautiful!) Lola has become all of a sudden.