Family Day.

Today is Family Day, which if you don't live in this province, is a new holiday designed by the provincial government to give us all more quality time to spend with our families in our increasingly hectic lifestyles. It is also known as "The Day the New Government Promised Us In The Last Provincial Election To Get Us To Vote For Them". Of course, as hairdressers, the Mister and I always have Mondays off, because we work on Saturdays, and as a business, it's costing us around a thousand dollars to pay our staff for a stat holiday. For a day we are off anyway. But, a day off is a day off, and I will take one any way I can get it; it was nice to get a bonus day to sleep in and not have to be anywhere.

I don't think we have a big problem finding time to spend with each other. The Mister and I have been lucky enough to be able to design our lives so that neither one of us works a 5 day week, and we get to be home with the kids way more than most people do. We live a very nice life for people who don't work very hard. We also have a very firm "One Child-One Activity" policy that has worked very well for us as well, and we are not off hither and yon every evening chauffering children around the city. Perhaps they are not benefiting from numerous learning opportunities, but they have a rational mother who's sanity is intact. A fair bargain, I think.

Today we went off to feed the ducks down by the stream. Even though the temperatures have moderated somewhat over the past few days, the themometer dropped steadily today, and the wind was vindictive. But the ducks were counting on us, so off we went.

Here is Thing 1, Thing 2 and the Mister:

Notice that everyone is wearing Wellies. As our background is Irish, we are entirely comfortable wearing the national costume of our people.

I wish you could hear the ducks; they were clearly shouting "Buffet! Buffet!!" to all the ducks in the vicinity, because there were ducks flapping in from all over the place in no time. It was like a supply plane had landed at a UN refugee camp. At one point, Thing 2 had one duck literally eating out of her hand. Fortune favours the brave, after all. The duck was torn between getting something delicious to eat and taking the chance of being murdered at any moment. Thing 2 had to continually remind it not to eat off her fingers, and then there was the issue of "duck slobber". It was tense all around.

We hightailed it home not too long after, because nobody could feel their toes anymore.
And that was our first Family Day. Not bad at all.