Hooray for Breakup

Breakup. The term Alaskans use when the temperatures finally rise and the ice and snow begin to melt away....only to give us impromptu mini lakes and mud! I don't think I've ever been happier to see a "season" arrive. This past winter was incredibly hard. I don't mind the short days at all (actually, I prefer them to our neverending days of summer), but the bitter cold was difficult to handle this time around.

Tristan's most requested activity right now is to grab drinks and a snack and "take a drive and look at nature" while listening to audiobooks. It's wonderful to have clear, dry roads again so I've been taking him up on this! We've been plowing our way through the audiobook series of Harry Potter and are now well into "The Goblet of Fire." Even though we've listened to these tapes countless times, we never seem to tire of them.

Now that it is warmer (it's been in the mid 40's for sometime now), the neighborhood is overflowing with kids...at least on the weekends and after school. Tristan's been taking full advantage of this, playing for hours and hours at a time with a number of kids. I think today he played with 10+ kids. And my parents worry about "socialization"? ROFL

The warmer weather has finally awakened our neighborhood moose. We had not seen them in months, and now we've seen them three times in the past week or so, practically walking right on top of her twice and seeing her from the car this morning. Guess I need to keep my eyes open or we are liable to get charged! She's a quirky thing. She's fairly tolerant but has been known to bluff charge and follow folks for quite a distance until they are out of her territory; this happened to us our first summer here. Yesterday one of my friends said she finally spotted last years calf, and he is a bull!! He should be fun to see, but I think momma will push him from the immediate area, as it looks like she will be having another calf very soon.