Glory

We discovered the nature of our temperamental garage door less than a month after we bought this house. It was the morning after the first snow, and we were due to fly back to Ottawa for (American) Thanksgiving. Ozayr and Dan (who was visiting at the time) went to put the bags in the car, which was in our detached garage at the bottom of the back garden. Dan punched the code into the keypad and... nothing. But we had a plane to catch, and before we knew it Ozayr had climbed in through the garage window and opened the door with the remote opener inside the car. The garage door did not open again via the keypad until above 0 degree temperatures the following spring.

I know that spring is coming because today our garage door opened.

Today was the kind of day that you might remember from when you were a kid. The first day of the year when you realized that maybe you could get to the park. Maybe you'd get wet, maybe it'd be slushy. Maybe you'd get stranded on a bench. But maybe you could get to the park. I saw that moment on my daughter's face this afternoon. It was a warm afternoon and we decided to go out for a walk. Heeey, she said, maybe....

Let's dwell on the warm weather again for a second... This was our backyard path, what, ten days ago?


This is Maymuna playing outside there today:


It was great spending so much time outside this afternoon. Our walk did inevitably take us to the park, where we managed to leap over the pools of water and slush to get each child a turn on the swing and the slide too. On our walk back to the house Maymuna and Nan managed to run through the same puddle about 20 times, back and forth, back and forth. Thankfully Maymuna was wearing her rain boots and splash pants, so she definitely didn't get as wet as... well, Nan.

Maymuna showed her roots today. My family are great collectors of things. Hobbies in my immediate family alone include the collecting of hockey cards, cigarette cards, stamps, coins, postcards, movies, matchboxes, porcelain horses, and National Geographic magazines. And I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Anyway, Maymuna insisted on picking up about a hundred little rocks on the way home today. And if she dropped one we had to stop and look for it even though sometimes they were so small that they were indistinguishable from the asphalt (and those rocks that made it home couldn't live in the garage, no, they had to come inside the house). After we got home she played outside in the backyard for another 45 minutes while Hafsa looked on from her stroller...

The sun on our faces was glorious today, just the lift my heart needed after a long, cold winter...