April Fool(ishness)

Frozen leaves and patterns in the ever-shifting puddles on my walks.  Some days, they are pure mud puddles, some days, pure ice, and many others they are somewhere in between.  Ahhhh.... early spring.

Brrrr. Today is a chilly, chilly April day.  Sunny, with only a few scattered mounds of snow, like you might expect on a glorious spring day, but with full-on winter temperatures.  This has been a flip-floppy winter, and is promising to be a flip-floppy spring.  Almost like an extended April Fool's joke.  Nonetheless, we have been trying to take advantage as much as possible, donning full-on rain gear or snow gear as a given day demands.

It is hard to tell, but this tree was full of almost as many birds (female cardinals?) as there were berries.  It was alive! 

As such, I had no idea what to expect when I wound up volunteering for a grand full-day outing with Juniper's 1st grade class last week - on April Fool's day, no less.  We were to go to a sugar cabin nestled within Ottawa proper, and were among seemingly endless other school groups from across the city.  It was, as Juniper's teacher suggested part way through, "organized chaos".

Why volunteer for such an outing, you ask?  Well, for all the altruistic reasons, certainly: donating my time while I have it (I'm still twiddling my thumbs while waiting for revisions on my thesis to come back), getting to know Juniper's classmates better, making the outing special for Juniper, etc. etc etc.  But also, I have to admit, I volunteered thinking that chances were low that I'd actually get chosen - this particular outing was limited to only 3 volunteers, to be chosen at random.  I just happened to end up being one of the lucky ones :)

I actually didn't get all that many pictures - everything was too crowded, too chaotic, and too busy most of the time.  I did get a few, however:

Owl in flight at the Birds of Prey demonstration

The finalé at the demonstration:  a HUGE turkey vulture.  Did you know that they defend themselves by VOMITING?  They can projectile vomit truly great distances.  Luckily, we didn't get THAT particular demonstration.

Some of the many tapped maples en route to the sugar cabin

Juniper's class, waiting (mostly) patiently in line for their maple taffy and sugar cabin tour

Perhaps one of the sweetest treats on a stick in the world!

As these few pictures demonstrate, the day was, at least, sunny.  There was a very good chance that it could have poured rain, which would have made everything decidedly miserable.  A bit chilly is absolutely fine by comparison! And besides the headache and exhaustion that followed me home that afternoon, I was in the end very glad that I went.

And truly, that is really all I have to report from this first week in April.  Except for this little video from Easter that I had meant to get to last week. It may be late, but it has fancy dance moves, a sparkly dress, a strange accent of some sort, and even some outtakes - what more could you ask for?