One night recently, as Reid gave Ken a goodnight kiss and hug, she squeezed him a bit extra at the end and told him, “We love each other A LOT. We play together…” As Reid’s voice trailed off you could hear the love and joy at the memory. It was one of the moments that you try to fix in your memory. Since my memory is shakey, I’m writing it down.
Archive for March, 2008
Sweet goodnight
Monday, March 31st, 2008Earth Hour – Report from our part of Ottawa
Sunday, March 30th, 2008I wrote on Friday about that we would be stargazing during Earth Hour. Ken looked at me questioningly when I suggested it but I, in my rose-coloured glasses, dismissed his concerns about light pollution. It was going to be dark for Earth Hour, after all. Well, I was wrong. There is a SilverCity cinema at the end of our street and as far as I can tell they didn’t turn off so much as a 60 watt bulb. Had they reduced their external lighting, they would have changed ourn neighbourhood substantially But, of course, they didn’t.
We lit a bee’s wax candle instead and read some stories. We talked about not using electricity and how people used to rely on candles for light. I don’t know what Reid made of it. I just read a post at Journeys in Between that suggested using the story of Noah and the Ark to draw a parallel of how taking action on climate change helps save animals, too. I think that Reid would understand helping animals better than the abstract “helping the earth”.
Bloggers Act: Canada wrote about Earth Hour and the Nelly Furtado concert in Toronto. I wish there had been a “gathering” in Ottawa. It would have been good to have a reason to be downtown where, I think, the difference in light level would have been much more obvious. Next year, I will have to look for an event or make one of my own.
Thinking about Earth Hour in Ottawa and around the world
Friday, March 28th, 2008First, the facts and then my thoughts:
Earth Hour
March 29, 2008
8-9 pm, local time
Earth Hour is a global initiative that was first held in
We’ll be celebrating somehow at our house – though 8-9 pm generally finds us with most of the lights out anyway – and we’ll be embracing the darkness as much as thinking about the climate change, I expect.
Update: I see that the Peace Towers face will go dark and other non-essential lights on Parliament Hill be turned off.
Put ons and cream
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008We had hamburgers for supper one night last week and Reid said that she wanted to get the “put ons” out and I said, “Sure, you get the condiments out and put them on the table.” Reid gave me that look she has that says, “Muh-therr” and said, “No, they’re put ons”. It’s better than Reid offering put downs, I guess.
At my house, because I’m cheap and don’t always plan meals as well as I should, we tend to use plain, low fat yogurt interchangeably with fat-free sour cream. The taste is subtly different but it’s not too noticeable. Reid calls both “cream”. It’s an awful insult to cream, even to full fat sour cream but it’s a good nutritional habit and that’s good enough for me.
Stanley’s Olde Maple Lane farm
Thursday, March 20th, 2008Have you ever noticed how some words or expressions sound so much better in French, or another language, than they do in English? If I were to tell you that Reid and I went to a “cabane a sucre” on Sunday, you would say to yourself, “ooh, that sounds like a fun learning experience”. If I said that Reid and I went to a “sugar shack” on Sunday, you would stop paying attention while the B52′s *Love Shack* ran through your head. You might pull yourself back to think how quaint it was that I took Reid to see the tapped maple trees with their buckets hanging down and then the boiling table. I hope you keep reading because we did that and more at Stanley’s Olde Maple Lane Farm on Sunday.
I booked us for the Easter egg hunt at 12:00 but we arrived closer to 11:00 so that we’d have time use the bathroom and look at the animals in the barn. They open at 9:00 and so we could have gone earlier if we were free. The animals in the barn each had signs announcing their names and some had additional information as well. The texts were informative and amusing. The goat’s said:
Hi my name is Barbara Jean. I am a goat. I eat just about anything so watch out. I love to pull hair and I take hats and nibble on coats. This note is hanging above me because I ate the last two they put on my pen.
And the goose’s said:
My name is Goosey-Lucy. I am a very noisy goose. I am always in a bad mood. I love to hiss and I may bite you so watch out for me. I patrol the barnyard in the summer and I am very good at my job. Sometimes, I do go for a walk with the pig and donkey, we are quite the trio.
The signs were only in English, though, a concern in this part of Ontario.
We picked up our tickets for the Easter egg hunt in the tea shop/gift shop. Reid was immediately overcome by hunger and pleaded for maple syrup lollipops and chocolate. I offered a cookie as a pseudo-healthy snack but was glad that she refused because I noticed that the cookies cost $4.50 each. Wow! They were pretty but I can’t imagine how good they’d have to taste for me not to feel short changed when I was done. The maple products in the shop were much more reasonably priced. Pure maple syrup obviously cost more than “table syrup” but the prices were in line with the Byward farmers market.
We turned up at the rendez-vous point 10 minutes early as directed and turned in our tickets. Reid chose a pink plastic bucket for storing her eggs and we boarded a horse drawn sleigh for our trip to the egg patch. The Belgian horses that pulled the sleigh were a lovely light brown rather than the beautiful auburn of Bella and Lady at the Agricultural Museum. (I know a horse-lover would know the proper terms for the colours but I’m more of a dilitente.) Reid climbed onto the bales of straw that sat on the wagon and staked out a prime piece of blanket, just behind the driver. It’s always good to be close enough to ask the names of the horses. Ours were Brent and Brian, or something like that. Reid probably remembers. The horses pulled the sleigh to the sugar bush where a family of rabbits – 2 teen boys and a girl of 10 or so – had been practicing hiding Easter eggs when they discovered that there was a hole in their basket. There were brightly-coloured plastic eggs scattered all over the snow. I liked the way that their scenario didn’t lead to questions about the “real” Easter bunny or why the eggs weren’t actually hidden because, really, they weren’t even pretending to be concealed. The kids put eggs into their buckets and then tipped them into the ones the bunnies carried around. The bunnies weren’t always as careful as they should be and I’m pretty sure Reid picked up the same egg more than once ;+) It was a fun activity for Reid and kids younger but I’m wondering if even next year she’ll realize that those bunnies were dropping the eggs on purpose and if that will bother her or just seem part of the fun. Once the kids started losing interest, the bunnies collected all of the eggs and gave out little treat bags containing a game, car, pencil, eraser and small chocolate egg and we boarded the sleigh once again.
While we were in the bush, I pointed out the buckets hanging from the trees and we lifted a lid to see the sap dripping from the spout into the bucket. Sunday was fairly mild – right around freezing – and the sap was dripping one droplet after another. I asked one of the farmers and he said that a good day would see a steady flow of sap but that the day would need to be 8 degrees Celsius.
We went to see the actual “sugar shack” once the sleigh returned us to the front of the property. The boiling sap was producing lots of steam but the fellow who was minding the fire under the boiling table and the sugaring off process, generally was doing a good job explaining what was happening. There was quite a crowd of people, though, and we couldn’t get close to the syrup making. Reid wanted to leave and I followed her out. It *was* our lunch time after all.
At the dining hall, the line for the buffet seemed intimidating and so I left Reid playing with her treat bag at the table, within my line of sight, and joined the queue. The line moved quickly and we had our waffles, sausages, eggs, beans and ham within 10 minutes. Not before Reid had discovered that the multicoloured egg was, in fact, an eraser rather than a gum drop. Poor kid. At least she had nibbled off a little piece without swallowing immediately.
On the way home, I followed the directions Google Maps had provided and we travelled down Pana Road to Boundary Line. Pana is a secondary road that was snow covered but easy to drive on nonetheless. On the way out, we had followed the big “Stanley’s Old Maple Lane” signs that directed us along Mitch Owens Drive to Yorks Corners road once we left Boundary Line. Yorks Corners Road was cleared of snow but has such great bumps that we made most of the trip at 30 kilometres an hour. Reid was asleep within 3 or 4 minutes and so I took the backroads home to prolong her naptime. I was surprised with my knowledge of the countryside around Ottawa; we were 35 minutes from my house and still I got us home. With the 417 on one side and the Ottawa River on the other, I knew I wouldn’t get too lost but who knew that I wouldn’t have to retrace my route at all!
If you’ve got the time this weekend or even the next couple, Reid and I highly recommend a trip to the local sugar bush.