Saturday 27 August 2011

It's the Little Things


Wow, today was a scorcher!  I'm pretty sure that it reached 30 degrees Celcius in Vancouver by midday, it honestly was the hottest day that we've had all summer, hard to believe that it's going to be September next week!

Today was one of those days that reminded me that when you have kids it really is the little things that count.  We had a completely free day today,  no appointments, no agenda, just a blank slate to fill.  We had breakfast together with Daddy and headed out to run a few errands.   While we were out, we walked past a store on Broadway that has a bunch of garden pinwheels on display.  Sydney loves that store!  Every time we walk past, she points out the pinwheels excitedly to me and asks to spin one around.  The last time we drove by the store I promised her that I would buy her one, so today we did.  This is the one she chose:


It actually looks very cute in the backyard, all bright and cheerful.  She played with it for almost an hour in the garden today, sticking it in containers and the dirt, spinning it round and round and just carrying it about proudly.  It was so sweet to see how much joy she got from such a small thing.  We could have spent hundreds of dollars on a toy for her and not gotten half as good a reaction.  She so sincerely loves this pinwheel.  She can see it from her bedroom window, so later this afternoon when she was peering out of her window, she saw it and squealed with delight.  Too cute!

On our way home from errands, we stopped a block away as our neighbors were having a block long yard sale.  There was more kids stuff for sale that you can imagine, I could have bought a ton!  In the end, I got just one cute toy for Syd, this little wooden croquet set:


It is so adorable, the hoops are little chicks hooked together with rope:


Sydney thought the mallets were garden tools and spent the better part of the afternoon digging in the garden with them.  I tried to show her how to bang the little balls around with the mallets but she was more interested in digging so we left it at that!

We headed up to Kerrisdale for their annual Kerrisdale days later this afternoon.  It was a blast, tons of stuff going on, bands, carriage rides, prizes and balloons for the kids galore!  We got a fairly good helium balloon collection for Sydney only to have most of it fly out the sunroof on the way home!  In the end, only this one lone red Vancity balloon survived but it was all Sydney needed.  She has always loved balloons and the colour red so she was more than happy to have it alone when she got home!

 
Such a good reminder that the little things in life truly are what matters and that we can get so much joy from learning to appreciate even the most minor things in a day.  For all the teaching that I think I've done with Sydney, today I felt like she taught me more!

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