Happy April!

A favorite escape from the house this winter has been grocery-store therapy: walking slowly around the grocery store with Little Bear, "window-shopping" past the fancy cheeses and fun meats, thinking about trying out foods we've never tried before, and ultimately making it to the checkout with just a couple of items I needed anyway, and maybe one thing I didn't. Yes, I know I'm weird! But it's kept me from going crazy this long winter, and is definitely cheaper than pretty much anything else we could be doing around town while it's cold and snowy out. The free cookies from the bakery as bribes for Little Bear's good behavior don't hurt either!

Imagine, then, my dismay when I walked into the store this morning for a few essentials and discovered that my super-pregnancy-sense-of-smell has kicked in, and everything we walked past--produce, meat, dairy--made me instantly nauseous. Ugh. If it had to happen, couldn't it have waited until the snow and ice were gone so that I could take Little Bear to the park instead?

Hello, April. I have very high expectations of you in the getting-warm-and-melting-all-the-snow department.

It is warming up, though, and the snow is melting. There's just so much of it, it'll take a while to disappear. Five months' accumulation isn't going to melt in a week! As the snowdrifts slowly shrink, though, Little Bear constantly begs to go play in puddles and I try to come up with new indoor diversions. Yesterday's two bowls, dry beans, and a measuring cup kept him happy for more than a half hour, and he kept going back to it throughout the day!

(Which I suppose you could interpret as, the tired pregnant lady didn't bother picking up all the beans off the kitchen floor until supper time, but I think it sounds better the first way. And he really didn't spill all that many beans on the floor until the very end of the day.)

Yesterday Matt took Little Bear puddle-stomping when he got home from work, giving me a wonderful fifteen minutes of silence to clean up the kitchen and start supper. I don't know why, but somehow the 5-6 pm period, right when I need to be making supper, is when Little Bear schedules the bulk of his Mama-Mama-hold-me-Mama-up-Mama-Mama whining time, so sending him outside at 5:20 was so helpful. And it's so great to see them having fun together now as Little Bear is getting bigger! Hopefully we will be able to make that happen more often as it's getting warmer; tonight Matt works late, unfortunately, so Little Bear and I will be on our own. Slow cooker to the rescue! 

As Mom, the beginning of April is reminding me that it's really time to start planning and preparing for Easter. I know it's not quite as close as it seems--since we don't have a bishop right now, the archbishop of Anchorage is coming up to celebrate the Chrism Mass tonight instead of next week, and that's throwing me off--but I don't even know what needs to be done, and it's stressing me. This will be our first Easter, really our first holiday, with a kid old enough to enjoy and participate in traditions... It's going to be fun, I'm sure, but I definitely need to start making lists and figuring things out!