Sugar Shack!

Last year's outing to the sugar shack was a complete disaster. Hours of driving, hours of waiting, no syrup. (We ended up having lunch at St-Hubert BBQ.)

This year we found a quieter place more off the beaten path. No horses, no miniature goats, but also no lines and no hassles. A vast improvement on all accounts.

Oskie fell asleep on the way.
I'll add some of Emma's photos later.

Emma, Annick, France, & Denis behind the sugar shack.

Our garden

We will be back to Emma and Oscar posts shortly, but I just wanted to mention my plans for our vegetable garden this year. This is the first year we will have the full growing season. (We moved into the house in July last year.) Moreover, most of the major yardwork (in the form of digging out stones and shoveling topsoil) was finished last year, so I should be able to focus quite a lot of attention on the veggies.
I've set up a schedule and have been starting my little seeds for the past couple of weeks now. The fact that we're snow-free here has me eager to get planting outside, but so far I'm sticking to a schedule and not getting too far ahead of myself.
Many of my seeds are scavenged from vegetables we bought at the market last year or ate over the winter.

My goal is to have so much variety in the garden that it won't be too attractive to bugs. I've also noticed that some plants (lavender for instance) are pretty good for scaring off pests, so I'm hoping that my companion planting scheme will keep the garden mostly pest-free.

I've got about 60 different vegetables that I'm planning on planting. Highlights include purple carrots, blue potatoes, thai basil, and sweet potatoes. I started the sweet potato indoors, and it has some nice sprouts on it already. Hopefully it will agree to move out of the house and into the garden in a couple of months...

I'm also going to try a bit of a "three sisters" (beans, squash, and corn) approach to part of the garden. I'll keep you posted on how that works.

Oh, and I'm still planting apple and pear seeds for my espalier fence. My two prized plants are a russet apple seedling and a Bosc pear "tricot" (three seed leaves, an oddity). Maybe in 10 years or so one of these will give edible fruit.

Emmaisms

Q: What do you like to think about before you go to bed?
R: Pansements. (bandages)

Annick: My friends would really like to have a little baby.
Emma: Maybe we could give them Oscar...

Oscar's first haircut

We would have left him in ringlets until his 18th birthday, but our naughty boy is becoming a knotty boy and his bangs are bothering his eyes, so it was time for a trim.
Oscar was amazingly calm during the haircut. Just before leaving the house I told Annick, "I don't want him to have a spike haircut. No gel."

...which Annick interpreted as, "let's get him a Mohawk." I have to admit he's pretty much the cutest little punk ever.

Maeva's Birthday

Why the plain brown paper? Well to let the spotlight shine on Emmanuelle's artistic genius, of course. A work inspired by her muse, Maeva, surely.

The classic Scrivens look of enthusiasm.

Yes, all these girls are Emma's age. She must be taller because her parents are such giants. The new version of musical chairs. A chair for everyone. Not like the old days, when one person was left standing, and one person got a broken chair...

Guess which three girls spit on the cake!