Success

After sweating about it and planning it for the last couple of weeks, Riley's Easter treasure hunt was a hit. From the moment he got up, saw his basket with the lifesaver gummies and the rabbit footprint we were up and running. It only took half an hour and he had followed all the clues and found the booty. The treasure hunt was a great idea, not that I can really take personal credit for it since I'm sure half of the free world, and maybe half of the not-free world, were doing the same thing. But it provided a focus. As an only child he doesn't have the excitement of competition from siblings to coax him on to find all the hidden eggs. But you know, it could have gone either way. I'm realizing that as much as I think I know my son, there is so much I don't know about him. And that is my own challenge, the learning - and my reward is seeing him truly happy and allowing magic into his life. Here he is somewhere around clue number 3:


And again around clue number 5:


Not to mention the eggs hidden in the bathtub:


And true success on his part:


Later in the morning we went to the Biosphere, which is the former American pavilion from our Expo 67. I was seven years old when Montreal hosted Expo and I remember a lot of it. Since we lived in the city, we had "passports" to the site for the whole summer, I can even remember the black turtle neck sweater I was wearing in the photo on that passport, so I even remember the original American pavilion. For anyone who is not that familiar with my city, it is one of Bucky Fuller's geodesic domes, an immense structure that seems very space age, (think Epcot in Disney) certainly for 1967. And now it has been converted into an interactive ecological site. The first section was the most fun for the kids - all about water. We are quite spoiled here being able to turn on our taps for a seemingly endless supply of cheap water. One of the things that Riley did was a kind of "chop wood and carry water". They had hand pumps at one end of the room and jugs which you would fill, quite slowly, and then you had to carry the full jug across the room and dump in into an old claw-foot bathtub, trying to fill it. Equally slowly. The concept is to see how long it takes to make the water that we soak in every night.

And another shot of Riley walking on pontoons, which of course meant his feet were soaked within the first five minutes:


Amongst other things there was a climbing wall made out of something recyclable (just what escapes my memory at the moment):

And to finish the day, they had an amazing outdoor play park which had very unusual structures - things that use centrifugal force for spinning (lots of those, I almost tossed my lunch a few times), here's just a sweet shot, and you can see it was cold today - we have hats and mitts on again, I believe it was -7 with the windchill: