A short-ish recap.
I went "home" for two weeks and it was lovely to see family! The nephews continue to be a handful - the younger one (just turned two) is being 2 as hard as he can, with lots of defiance and occaional biting. Despite this he still manages to be super sweet and adorable 90% of the time. Including sleeping time >.> Older nephew is very sweet and serious, and has a very big imagination at the moment. Lots of roleplaying games, like being fish or sharks or crocodiles and different kinds of dinosaurs. Variable attitude to little brother, who is sometimes a part of the family "G is the baby fish!" and sometimes outside it ("We are fish, G is a not nice shark who is trying to eat us"). very into Dinosaur train. I amy be into Dinosaur train. I have learned much about dinosaurs in the past two weeks, that's for sure!
We also managed to follow Dr. Scott the Paleontologist's recommendation and get out into nature and make our own discoveries. Step-mom took the kids each in a short little kayak ride - they did really well! And
longpig and I took older nephew (H) for a canoe trip for an hour or so. It went well - he was really good, but it would have been better if we'd thought to pack a snack and so avoided a hangry melt-down on the way back (he hadn't wanted to come back at all at first). We got out to the bach at Ilse au Foins (hay Island) once, and spent the time devising ways to try and catch minnows. They both enjoyed throwing rocks in the river, and we took H fishing with
balthcat's grandfather, who is certainly a druid. He was very nice, and showed us all kinds of cool naturey things as well. On Saturday, we went to the farmer's market in Fredericton, and then took the boys to Science East, which was a hit, although a lot of the displays could use some TLC.
In the evenings the adults had fire o'clock, which eventually became fireworks o'clock. there were smores and marshmallows as well, and putting little firecrackers into the (enclosed) firepit thing. good times!
longpig and I watched Sharknado 2: The Other One, and we got to go see Guardians of the Galaxy in theatre with
balthcat as well.
The day that
longpig left, I went with her and dad to the airport and got to see my aunt (mom's sister) and uncle for a little bit, which was very nice. Once dad and I got back home, we (and step-mom) went for a kayak trip around Boishébert National Historic Site, a.k.a. Beaubears Island, which was nice. We stopped at the park site and wandered around for a bit and talked to some off-duty intrepreters, then continued our way around the island. The paddle back was a lot harder - coming around the point of the island you get into the area where there are strop cross currents from two rivers meeting, and there was also a strong wind to contend with. Once we got past the two bridges, though, it was easy, as we'd left with the outgoing tide and came in with the incoming (the rivers are tidal pretty far up). Oh - I also saw a bald eagle on the trip out, and it was being very photogenic!
If you want to see some of the pics I took while I was away, I have a selection on imgur over here.
But for all y'all, have my photogenic Canadian eagle ^-^
And in other Adulting news, this week I applied for a job in Edmonton and also submitted a book review to Historical Archaeology