melting snow, bring out the sand toys

Sarah helped me pick which pictures to post here.

One evening Sarah wanted us to have a party and part of the party was backpacking.
Also, every day, someone at our house has a birthday. Sarah gathers up some toys and puts them in a little bag, makes a card and sings happy birthday and says, "Here," while handing one of us the present. Then we open it and thank her and life continues on.

She's been also into planning parties. Yesterday the after dinner party consisted of read a story with Mom, who was too sick to to anything else, and dance and color with Dad.

Two days ago we were outside for a long time. We took our last GT Sno Racer ride and found some sand near the Skinner's garage for playing in and had our snack outside also, watching chickadees dart about. More birds are here and huge chunks of snow are sliding off our roof. One chunk slid off and busted an old support for a walkway to our porch off and it made a crack in the basement window.

Ya, our 'sickness season' this week, started with Sarah sick and then Andy (had to take 2 days off) and ended with me. So, our plans to visit Harnett's in Kelowna this weekend have to be postponed.

Here's some stuff I typed a few days ago...kind of like 'winter's almost over reflections' kind of idea.

Andy and I have joined a small group at our church and we are watching the H2O video series. It is a good opportunity to get to know people better from our church and have a night out while Sarah is babysat.

We tried out the swimming pool in Merritt (a few weeks ago) and highly recommend it for young families. The kids pool is extremely warm and fun. They have a 'lazy river' that has moving water you can walk against for float along with. We also had a picnic that day as the weather was great. We also got to redeem some PC point at the Extra Foods and walked away with $40 free groceries. Nice.

We had a few sets of friends visit and that's always nice.
Sarah has been having fun trying out the Skinner's GT Sno Racer and enjoys it.
We also have an extremely friendly cat, which we named Sally, hanging around. We are planning on taking her to the SPCA though, when we go to Kelowna this weekend (not happening, we are recovering from sickness). She's ok to have around now, but another cat digging in the garden in the summer is not appreciated. Sarah has enjoyed the cat a lot and I think I'm getting attached too. HHmmm. Andy reinstalled the cat door on his shop door and we've been feeding it because it was (Andy said) getting thinner and thinner.

We've had few visits at the Skinners - Sarah and I - and they are busy preparing craft ideas for this summer.

On his off-time, Andy has been building a greenhouse for our personal use. We brought back some of the arches for this on our car in Feb. Our hope is to be able to have some fall crops next year. We are having to buy produce from the grocery store right now because our root crops and cabbage and carrots that were stored in the root cellar are almost gone.

Winter has been a nice relaxing, more family time. We have enjoyed eating our canned jams and fruit and I've also gotten into cross country skiing on the field again.

I updated the camp blog a few days ago.