Four-day weekends are extremely unusual. All the more so because HRH’s employers usually give them Easter Monday or Good Friday off, not both. In Quebec the government has decreed that an employer of a certain size must give its employees one of those two days off. Naturally, in the spirit of compliance, every place we intended to shop at on Sunday (assuming that everywhere that was open Good Friday would be closed Easter Monday) was closed that day instead, even though they were usually open on Sundays.
Anyway. It was a lovely Easter weekend.
I sent the freelance assignment out Friday morning, and got it back Friday afternoon confirming that yes, I’d have to do revisions on it because I wasn’t quite supportive and encouraging enough. Honestly, I’d expected this, and I told the editor so. I also pointed out that I’d already redone it twice on my end before my initial submission, so you can imagine what my original looked like. I turned it around and started checking my e-mail every half-hour to see if they’d approved it yet so I could invoice by the Monday deadline.
While I finished it HRH cleaned the BBQ and checked the gas levels, then took the boy out to do some grocery shopping. MLG came over for a late lunch of grilled three-cheese burgers and warm potato salad, with chocolate-peanut butter pudding for dessert. We had a most enjoyable afternoon indeed where we sat and/or worked or played outside in the backyard. I don’t know what was more draining: watching the boy play with great enthusiasm, watching HRH clean up the yard, watching MLG keep up with the boy, or just being in the unseasonably warm sun.
Saturday we dropped the boy off with the local grandparents, picked up the rest of our coven, and headed out to Maxville to spend the day with t! and Jan, who hosted the best Ostara ritual EVER. We had a real egg hunt: we each had a list of six clues, and corresponding eggs hidden in specific places on the property that we had to find! The eggs all had a letter on them, and when everyone assembled their eggs there was a message spelled out. The theme of the rit was being happy with imperfection and/or your best even if it wasn’t perfect, which was a very good message for most if not all of us, too. And the crowning touch was that the eggs were from their small flock of chickens (who are now gloriously full-grown and sporting glossy chestnut feathers). The digital thermometer indicated that the peak temperature was 31 point something degrees while we were there, and it was simply spectacular weather to be running around a couple of acres of land. Then we got to have quiche and two kinds of salads (one green and one a fruit/nut/rice salad) and I’d made a deep-dish butterscotch lemon pie for dessert. The only thing that marred the day was my back doing something odd while I was finishing up the pie that morning, and two hours in the car didn’t make it any better. As usual, we didn’t want to leave.
Sunday we were thwarted in our scheduled errand-running, so we kicked about at home. HRH and I had hidden M&M eggs around the living room before we went to bed Saturday night, and I slept pretty badly, partially due to the wrenched back, but not helped in the least by Gryff ‘finding’ some of the eggs, knocking them down from wherever he’d found them, and chasing them around the floor. I got up four times to ruin his fun, finally shutting him in the bedroom with us until HRH woke up and thought that the cat had somehow shut himself in and let him out to wreak havoc upon the eggs again. The boy woke us up at six, saying that there were eggs everywhere in the living room; HRH and I had some fun being sleepy and not understanding what he was saying before we got up and watched him run around the with a tiny basket, collecting what he could find. He patted himself on the back quite a bit, saying, “I’m a very good hunter,” interspersed with wiping perspiration from his young brow at various points in the endeavour. We refrained from pointing out the ones he didn’t find, but after getting up the second time (because we went back to bed, of course) we discovered that he’d dragged his chair out of his room and had used it to pluck the higher level of eggs he’d missed on his initial go-round.
He had a nap, a good thing because it was beginning to look like he had a spring cold, although we were crossing our fingers and hoping it was allergies. When he got up we went over to HRH’s parents’ house, where there was another egg hunt (this one included chocolate for HRH and I, too, which was a lot of fun because my mother-in-law is great at hiding things in almost-in-plain sight). For dinner we had an absolutely fabulous prime rib roast, with a nice pinot noir from Oregon, of all places.
Monday morning we were scheduled to go visit Miranda and baby Tristan, but we cancelled it because the boy’s cold was very definitely a cold and not allergies. The last thing a week-old baby needs is a cold. Instead, we ran the errands that we couldn’t run on Sunday, which included buying the webcams. At home I tested mine out by plugging it in, and oh, how I love Apple’s recognition-awareness; I opened iChat and clicked the green video button, and voila, the computer knew what it was and where it was and there was video. HRH started trying to install the other on his computer so we could test them, but as he’s got a PC it would have entailed loading all the software and so forth, so I’ve packed it up again and will just take it with me to my parents’ house and install it on Mum’s laptop there.
I made a delicious quiche (I think the pie dough was even better after being frozen, as I’d made a double batch to have enough for the lemon pie and Monday’s quiche) and Ceri and Scott came over for a late lunch and a visit. The boy was going down for his nap just as they arrived and didn’t wake up till about half an hour before they left, and was in an odd mood when he did wake up so he hid in his room doing his own thing. My rewrites on the freelance project were accepted so I got to fire off a quick invoice by deadline, which made me very happy indeed.
After dinner HRH headed off on a Secret Mission, so I got to play with the boy through his bath and put him to bed on my own. HRH showed off his score when I emerged: a practically new bicycle for the boy, one of the ones I’d been stalking on Kijiji last week. (Ours has the colours flipped, red where the blue is and vice versa.) It’s a real pity we couldn’t pick it up before the weekend so the boy could have enjoyed it during the brilliant weather, but the seller was gone for Easter. We have it now, and are feeling very smug about paying half-price for a virtually new bike; the seller said his daughter had been on it maybe five times before she outgrew it.
It’s three days till I leave on the train to stay with my parents. I’m already stressing about what to bring with me and what I might forget.
The bike scored on Kijiji has been received by the intended recipient. I learned this from hearing the boy yelling, “Mama, thank you for my bicycle!” through the back door.
Okay, this week’s freelance assignment has been handed back. It was really tough, because it was good; it was the structure that fought against it. I’m not super confident about my report, but that’s why they’re reviewed by the editorial team. We’ll see if they want me to handle a rewrite. I’m kind of dazed now.
Yes, another boring recap of my scintillating weekend activity. It’s for my records, after all.
Spring hit this weekend, with a vengeance. I wore shoes outside for the first time in months, and a spring coat on Saturday. The boys spent a lot of time going for walks or trike rides (and oy, the boy has so very outgrown the tricycle) or shovelling snow from banks in the yard and spreading it on the gardens to melt there, because we had below average precipitation this winter and the gardens are going to be very unhappy. (HRH was also trying to put the bulbs back to sleep by piling snow on top of them, but I suspect it’s not going to succeed.) As of this morning, our snow was gone in the front and side yards, and it’s not going to take long for what’s left in the back to melt either…
Here is the boy, modelling the woven scarf. The scarf is actually doubled and one end tucked through the loop at the middle, and there’s a bit of extra bundled together behind his neck.
I feel it only fair to warn you that yesterday afternoon on the way home from school, the boy informed his father that he was done with winter. “Because,” he said, “I can’t really make snow angels any more, or play properly, because it’s too wet. So the snow can melt now.”