Dadda, will you sit with me?

The soft and innocent voice of the child who should have been asleep half an hour ago beckons from the dark at the top of the stairs.

“Dadda, will you sit with me?”

I know it is partly a ploy, a distraction to stay awake longer, but deep down we both know it is also a sincere request for a soothing presence to help a child fall asleep. How can I say no?

Yes, there are times when it seems inconvenient or when I am just a little frustrated because I assumed from the quiet upstairs that the children were already asleep. Sometimes I wonder what have they been doing all this time to stay awake before finally announcing themselves?

Tonight I was sitting contemplating a new blog post. I have not been keeping current on the blog – it has been a long time – months – since my last post. I can explain all that in future posts. Then that voice in a tone only imperceptibly different from little Cindy Lou Who called from the top of the stairs, “Dadda, will you sit with me?”

I have learned not to fight it. There will be a negotiation of how many minutes I will sit there in the dark beside their beds, waiting quietly, patiently, for them to fall asleep. Our girls are seven and five, almost eight and six, and I long ago saw that this request has nothing to do with insecurities or monsters under the bed. We as parents are big participants in the girls’ lives. I think they just like to end the day with one of us close by.

Sometimes it takes only a minute or two before the rhythmic breathing of slumber tells me they have drifted off immediately. Sometimes they are still awake when I leave the room, but I know that sleep is not far off.

Perhaps most importantly I have learned that those 10 minutes or more (it always becomes longer than originally planned) are as valuable to me as they are to them. What better way to be mindful and focus on the moment than to sit in calming reverie to sooth a happy child to sleep. What an opportunity to just be present with them. I think about the day, the next day. I think about what a soothing influence their lives are for me, for us.

The other evening when Ava wanted me to carry her up the stairs to bed, I groaned as I lifted her up, how did she get to be so big?

“Well, Dadda, day by day, night by night, I just keep growing,” she answered.

A year or so ago, I asked her the same thing, how did the little baby that I held in my hands get to be this big girl? while she was dancing in the hallway on her way to bed in sheer bliss to no music other than what was in her head. In her sweet and knowledgeable sing song voice, she answered as she kept dancing, “That’s just the way life is, Daddy, that’s just the way life is.”

Sitting here contemplating where the time has gone since I last posted a blog is nothing compared to wondering where the time has gone since the girls were babies, toddlers, even pre-schoolers. I know the day will come when they stop asking Dadda to sit with them at bedtime. These minutes in the quiet of bedtime with them are ours to cherish right now. They know I cannot refuse. It may play out as a bit of a game, as I reluctantly say I will but only for a few minutes. But we all know how this is going to turn out.

“Dadda, will you sit with me?” Of course I will.

Cold hard lessons of the cold frame

Cold frame, good. Fresh garden greens, radishes and green onions, good. Windy day and open cold frame, bad. The picture about sums it up. Don’t leave the cold frame propped open on a windy PEI day without securing it. Lesson learned.

We had finished most of the greens. They were starting to bolt. Picked out all the glass, cleaned out all the plants and more glass, removed the top and replanted. Now the cats think it is a lovely outdoor litter box just for them. Must reseed and find mesh for the top until the plants are up. Then I’ll start looking for a new window to fit the cold frame.

There’s always something to do.

All that book learnin’

Books play a major role in our house. My wife Stephenie is a librarian. We both read a lot. We own a lot of books. More than 500. I know that. I counted. I counted because I read a story in the news last year about a study that said that children who grow up in households with more than 500 books in them are much more likely to pursue post secondary and graduate school educations. As soon as I got home, I started counting. I was confident we would eclipse the 500 mark and relieved that we did. That does not include children’s books. We probably have 500 more counting those.

Our two girls love to be read to and to look at books. Kat, now seven, reads, no consumes, books almost as quickly as her mother does. They are fast readers. I am a slow reader, or as I prefer to think of it, I take my time reading and absorbing a book. Sometimes that sucks. It can take a long time to finish a long book.

We have always loved books. I have always turned to books to satiate my curiosity or find an answer to a question. I know it annoyed some people in my family when we would be having a discussion about something and I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I had looked up the answer. I always knew I had a book somewhere that would be able to give me the answer. If it isn’t obvious, I was, and still am, a book geek who found the table of contents and the index of a book a fascinating realm of information.

Which brings us to today when people Google questions rather than look up the answers in a book. It takes longer to find an online dictionary than to pick up a real one and look up the word, but it is the habit of the day. Often Google is simpler and easier. It is an amazing tool. But it hasn’t replaced books entirely, at least not in our house.

Our girls wanted to research something, anything. The idea must have come from Kat’s grade 1 class. Great idea. I said maybe to tie in with Documentary Night, we should pick a topic each month to research. They picked big cats. They wanted to get on the computer and start researching. I said we didn’t need to do that and pulled off the shelf a National Geographic book, a book about Canadian wildlife that I knew included great photos of mountain lions, and a book on wild cats of British Columbia. I presented them with the books and said, here start with these. In the old days, this is what we did. We looked in books when we wanted to research something.

I think they were a bit disappointed. Perhaps the whole research idea was a way to get some computer time. Kat even said something about that may be how we did it in the old days but she likes to be modern. After awhile, though, they were flipping through the books, asking about the pictures, and having a grand time. Then we went on the computer and watched some big cat videos on National Geographic Kids. My point, I guess, was a holistic approach. We have all these books; they have plenty of information; let’s use them. We also use the computer, but when we can, let’s start with the books.

It makes me wonder where we are headed with Google and Wikipedia and e-books. Will the study of the future say that children in a house with more than 500 books on their e-reader are more likely to finish school? Or children in homes with more than one e-reader and computer? What will happen to used book stores and what will we put on all those empty bookshelves once everything is digitized? We once tried to explain what a card catalogue was to the girls. We soon came to the conclusion of what’s the point? I don’t really miss card catalogues anyway. But I will miss all the books.

Shouldn’t it be called a warm frame?

The first greens of the season!

The cold frame works! Two weeks after we planted the first seeds, the mixed salad greens are up. We have had two snow storms, a couple of +15 Celsius days, and plenty of mornings with frost these past two weeks. The wooden box with the window on top is doing its job.

We planted radishes last weekend, and they are up, too. Gotta love those fast growing radishes. Fresh radishes are the surest sign that the garden is off to a good start. They are delicious, but even if you don’t care for radishes, plant them for the quick ego boost that something you sowed is growing.

It’s another great learning experience for the girls as well. They check the thermometer in the cold frame every day, and as soon as we are outside, they check to see what is growing. It makes us wonder why we didn’t try this sooner.

It also makes me wonder why it is called a cold frame when its purpose is to keep things warm. The girls pondered this question as well, and we agreed that the name cold frame is misleading. We put things in cold storage or an ice box to keep them cool, yet we plant seeds in cool weather in a cold frame to keep them warm. Ah, the intricacies of the English language.

Rather than make it more complicated than that, we are simply rejoicing that we have some signs of the renewal of life with the arrival of spring!

Vintage Easter card wishes

These vintage Easter cards belonged to my grandparents. My best guess is that they date to the early 1920s. Happy Easter!

No foolin’, we planted today

Let's hope the green onions grow as well as these did in the garden last year.

Quick update on the cold frame: after snow, blizzards and other March weather, we planted lettuce, mixed greens and green onion seeds in the cold frame today. It was up to 25 degrees Celsius in there today, only about 7 or 8 outside, so it is functioning. Yay! I’ll add a photo from this year when we see some growth.

Our $4 cold frame

Just finished installing our first attempt at a cold frame. We built it with left over wood, miscellaneous hardware, and a window we found covered in dust in a back corner of the basement that we used to call our Blair Witch room (it was just creepy). The only materials I had to buy were the four pieces of wood for the window frame that I paid $4 for at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Summerside. I couldn’t find four pieces that fit in all my other wood.

It is about 30 inches by 44 inches – almost nine square feet of inside space – 18 inches high at the back, about 11 at the front. It’s cold inside and outside the frame today. We’ll see how quickly the soil warms; we are eager to plant and get a jump on the season. I’ll post photos of our progress. With any luck, we’ll be eating fresh greens in a few weeks!

Documentary night a hit in our house

On top of the world.

We have been to the far reaches of outer space to watch the birth of stars and the bottom of the ocean to discover new species of bizarre looking sea creatures. We have IMAX to thank for these wild and informative adventures. We are hooked on Documentary Night at our house. One night a week we have designated as the time to watch nature movies from the library. Our daughters, ages seven and four, are enthralled.

I have been sharing my interest in astronomy with them. They know some of their constellations and have looked at Jupiter’s moons, Venus and the mountains on our moon through a spotting scope. It occurred to me one day to see what the library had for space documentaries. The IMAX movie Hubble started us off. It’s breathtaking. It’s just the right length (about 45 minutes). It’s family friendly. I had to pause it every few minutes to answer questions, but that’s fine. They have good questions. Though often they are most concerned with what something eats or where the people go to the bathroom, but hey, they are still learning.

For the next two weeks the girls played astronaut, complete with back pack, gloves and helmet for their space walk. Everything was about Hubble. We built the Hubble telescope out of Lego. We decided Documentary Night might be a good idea. The IMAX movie Galapagos was next. Again, lots of questions, but a keen interest. For the next week, the girls were going to be marine biologists and were planning our trip to the Galapagos Islands. We were very happy with their enthusiasm.

IMAX is their new standard for quality film making. Under the Sea was the next movie. They were impressed that, just like the people in the movie, I have been snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef. The movies help us make things relevant. The sea lions were cute. There was great concern over which fish were going to get eaten, but we had that great circle of life talk.

Everest was not the best choice. People die. It’s more about the expedition than the mountain. A good movie but not family friendly for the younger crowd. They still eagerly told mommy all about it when she got home, but she asked me what exactly I was showing them when the girls told her that it got too cold for some of the people to live. Oops.

Rather than make us appreciate the majesty of the world’s tallest mountain, it made us wonder why people do this. And why, even today, do the Sherpas get no recognition? Sure, in the special features they talk about them and thank them, but come on, three people climbed the mountain, a director and five Sherpas carried all the gear up and did the filming, but they don’t get any air time.

We’re going back underwater this week with Disney’s Oceans, then there are a few National Geographic films on the way. The girls get excited about Documentary Night, which is exactly what we were hoping for. They are keen to learn, and the older one is sharing her new info with her class and her teacher. Awesome! And I don’t think Everest scarred them too badly: one of them climbed the modest pile of snow in the front yard and gleefully declared that she was climbing Mount Everest and was on top of the world.

Looking for signs of spring

This Blue Jay tried to keep out of the frigid wind by settling near the bird feeder.

The first robins of the season arrived a week or so ago. Not sure how they define spring because we are a long way from green grass and early buds. The temperature yesterday morning was hovering around freezing, but the wind out of the south was bitterly cold. The days are noticeably longer but that just gives us more time to look at the frozen landscape. If January is the dead of winter, then February in the Maritimes must be winter purgatory – you’re not sure if you’re ever going to get out.

We try to look forward to spring, planning the garden, thinking about green growing things, and the chance to get out the bikes and the kayaks. We are still three or four months from the first fresh rhubarb. Good thing we still have some in the freezer from last year. The Blue Jays, chickadees and crows stay close to our house seeking shelter from the wind. The Hungarian partridges have yet to show themselves in daylight. A few times they have come in the night to eat the seed we put out for them. Their tracks are pretty obvious, going in a group of little steps. There were eight distinct lines of tracks.

It has been an odd winter with a cycle of freeze/thaw weather and not much snow. That doesn’t make the season go any faster though. We have to look hard for signs that there will be a new season eventually. I read a magazine article about forcing blossoms, so I pruned a few branches from our prolific crab apple tree, apple tree and cherry tree. The crab apple blossoms are open now and the other two are getting close. It is so nice to see fresh flowers in the house!

It reminds me that we have to make our own efforts to enjoy the season or the day. Being mindful of today and what we can enjoy right now goes a long way toward shedding the winter blahs. Last weekend we had a fabulous day of outdoor fun skating and tubing at Mill River Resort in western PEI. The skies were blue, the weather was great, and the whole family had fun. Today we have more sunshine, fresh blossoms on the windowsill and a day ahead of us to enjoy. Perhaps we will get out for some snowshoeing this afternoon.

Tonight and tomorrow there is a big winter storm forecast. Crap.

Making tracks

Sunshine and fresh snow – time for some fresh air. Trying to convince our younger daughter, Ava, age four and a half, to go outside, I took the “let’s go on a nature walk!” approach. I suggested we fill the bird feeders and look for tracks in the snow. I am always trying to interest the girls in the nature we can see right here in our yard. Prince Edward Island is not brimming with wildlife, so we make do with what we can. Lots of bird watching and the occasional visit from the local fox. A few winters ago we had a raccoon drop by occasionally, and every winter we get a covey of Hungarian partridges, though this year they have been noticeably absent. We put out the special seed we get for them, and there were suspicious tracks around those trees, but we haven’t seen the birds like we usually do. I did see a covey of eight across the field a couple of weeks ago, though.

I suggested to Ava that we walk around the perimeter of our yard and see how many different animal tracks we could find in the snow. She was game. Out we went. The tracks of our cats were easy. We compared them to the larger tracks and determined they must be the fox. Bird tracks were everywhere, big ones from the crows down to tiny ones she described as so cute. Further afield we found rabbit tracks and what we guessed to be mouse tracks. Later when we checked our animal tracks book, we decided they were probably meadow vole. Small, grey, furry rodent – whose going to split hairs?

Telling her mother and sister about our expedition, Ava ticked off the tracks we found: big bird tracks, little bird tracks, our cats, fox, rabbit and mouse. We had fun, we got some fresh air and exercise, and hopefully, I am helping them develop a lifelong interest in our environment and the outdoors.