Edmonton, fall 2021

 Our final day of driving from New Brunswick was uneventful and then I "hit the ground running". Both Caleidoscope and Spellbound were taken out of the water and I helped Rick put her to bed for the winter. I had visits from Aimee and Eve and went to Fort Erie for lunch with Mum and Dad. The garden needed final fall chores done - planted a Golden Spruce, put away the rain barrels, mulched the flower beds, cut the grass twice (in between rain storms). There were various appointments - physio, doctor, massage, snow tires. All in all a busy 2 weeks and then off to Edmonton.

This is a busy household and I have found very little time for taking pictures. Mike is working, Aimee on maternity leave, Avery home from school with a cough and after two attempts to get it done, had a covid test that came back negative (he can go back to school on Monday), Maya's daycare has covid so she just has her half days of kindergarten, River at 1 month is still a feeding (every 2 hours night and day), pooping, cranking, sleeping machine who objects if not in someones arms.

I have been walking every day, slipping out of the house with Iggy (and sometimes Maya) for a walk around the neighbourhood. It is cold enough that there is a thin layer of ice on the ponds.

One of the big attractions of this area is "the hill" or as Maya calls it "the mountain", unusual in this flat landscape. There are trails, stairs, benches at the top and tobogganing in the winter. We walked up one evening to see the lights of downtown. Every night I hear the coyotes that live in the bush and fields nearby.

Avery is the "gamer" but there is one video game that they play together.

Maya likes to bake - so far lemon muffins, tea biscuits and cornmeal muffins. She also likes to eat them.

Avery had taken a fantastic dragon book out of the library with

beautiful water colour pictures of different dragons. I must remember to take a picture of the cover of the book, to give credit.

As I bought my watercolours with me he asked me to paint him another dragon (this may become an annual activity). So what I did, with each of the kids, was ask them to create a dragon from their favorite parts of the dragons in the book, so each will have an individual dragon of their choosing. ie the body of the sky dragon, head of the city dragon, wings like the fire dragon ..... They also instructed me on the colours and the setting.

This is the start of Avery's dragon, so much fun to do with Avery looking over my shoulder saying "that's pretty good" and then making more suggestions ie "one of the eggs could have a dragon coming out of it", "he should have fire or smoke coming from his mouth"....

I suspect that Maya will have just as much input although at this point she keeps changing her mind regarding the colouring.

Back in Toronto, Cigi was an elephant for Halloween.