My seed catalogue came in the mail! 2020 saw us start a vegetable garden for the first time. This year I hope to be plan our garden out a little more and it has been surprisingly fun to browse through the seed catalogue and think about what we can do.
Our local COVID numbers made a significant drop in the last two weeks from where they were in November/early December. Our community is also set to begin receiving vaccinations this week. (We are rural enough that we are slightly behind the areas that have already been receiving vaccines.)
Sunshine! January (and a lot of December…and November…) has been pretty rainy so far so when the sun appeared on Wednesday and the temperatures soared to 10 degrees, it felt like the whole world was singing. I didn’t get a single thing on my To Do List done that day but it was a good one. Rose and I took a long walk to the library in the morning and after school the girls and I played at the park until it got too cold.
This tree in our yard that got one day of sun and started to bloom:
Rose’s new habit of randomly yelling out, “MUM! I LOVE you!” with all the force her 3-year-old voice can carry. She’ll yell it at Pearl. She’ll greet Peter at the door with an “I love you!” yell. It’s pretty great.
Karissa Reads Books 
As much as I love your pictures showing signs of warming up, every year it worries me more. What happened to winter?? It can barely stay freezing where I am, and we’ve only had a bit of snow on Christmas Day. It’s important for things to freeze so the environment can rest for spring. However, your story about Pearl cheered me greatly, and I’m so glad she’s letting her love burst out of her! I have a really hard time with my nieces and nephew being highly reluctant to say they love me…
I know…apparently 2020 was one of the warmest years in recent record. If it makes you feel any better, it was actually still quite cold for most of the week, it would just normally be cold AND raining this time of year. We don’t normally get snow in December here but we do more often get a few days in January/February and I doubt we will this year.
Your nieces and nephews are a bit older, right? I feel like there’s a definite stage where saying, “I love you” even when you want to is awkward and feels weird. Keep telling them you love them – I bet they’ll come around eventually.
They are 11, 10, 4, and 3. I’ll keep saying it 🙂
It helps me too to remember that even children express love in different ways. Sometimes it’s verbal and sometimes it’s not and that can show up even from a young age.
Well, just to cheer you up on the environment front, it’s flippin’ freezin’ here! 😉 The supermarket shelves are full despite all the dire predictions from the eternal pessimists about how Brexit would leave us all starving. Our vaccination programme is going well – faster than expected! Kinda negative positives, but still positives… 😉
Any kind of positives are good right now! We’re being told that the cost of groceries is going to increase quite a bit this year but haven’t seen it yet and the shelves remain well-stocked. And the news is full of the fact that Pfizer is cutting vaccine delivery to Canada by 50% for a couple of weeks. But the vaccine rollout locally has gone well so far and just yesterday I spoke with someone who got his first jab even though he didn’t expect to be in the first round. So there’s ups and downs. It’s cold here too now but the sun is still shining!
Ooh, the I Love You yell sounds like just the perfect pick-me-up, I hope it’ll last a while! 🙂 Also happy to see you finally got some sun! It’s been warmer here than usual for winter which is hard not to worry about, although tbh I really hate the cold and can’t help enjoying those sunny days when we get them. Although it actually hasn’t been up to 10 C in my part of the world in months, I’m just happy when the temp creeps above freezing! If I could hibernate from Dec – March, I totally would.
Hopefully she’ll always be as exuberantly affectionate, even if the yelling stops!
The sun has been lovely! This week temperatures are more around 5 or 6 degrees but still sun. It’s not completely unusual for our area though this time last year we had snow. I don’t mind the cold leading up to Christmas but as soon as January hits, I’m ready for spring!