Hey Friends and StandUpSisters,

Our Easter love to you all! I finally have a few minutes to write and let you all know how we’re doing. Please forgive me for not keeping in touch. It doesn’t show how much I love you all and think of you.

Liam and I have been very busy, because we just bought a house! It is a fine, solid, old thing, which smells and is decorated exactly like my chain-smoking grandmother’s house…you know the kind. However, we are going to attack the carpets and wallpaper with tools. Underneath, there are oak floors and beautiful wood trim. After it is stripped and painted and scrubbed, it will be amazing! The kitchen and bathroom are nice and clean and spacious and I love them. They are the two most important rooms in the house. It’s in East City, the hip part of town, with it’s own little village markets and a bike trail. So we will be students and poor as mice, but we will have our own place. It doesn’t matter how humble, as long as it’s yours! I’m hoping we can find a piano somewhere so that I can teach piano out of my home.

We have no furniture, other than our futon, my great-grandmother’s trunk, my husband’s desk, and two fantastically comfortable swivel chairs, which look very 1968. But we will have books, oh have we got books! Maybe, if we stacked and varnished them, they could work as good, sturdy furniture. I’ll run that by my husband.

I can’t believe a whole year has gone by since my baby was born. It is teaching me to value the little stages of babyhood (the nights without sleep, the diapers!). They are over so quickly. Baby Will has seven sharp teeth, bites verything, walks with the aid of furniture, claps hands, blows kisses, “dances” (shakes his big diapered bum around). He has lots of strawberry blond hair, and big bright red cheeks like his papa’s. No worry about him wasting away. He loves music and speed and motion and rhythm. The minute he hears music, especially if it has a strong beat, he starts to move and groove. We think he’s pretty fly for a white baby.

We’ve had a wonderful but busy year. Liam has been teaching nine courses, as well as music lessons, which help us get by as students. Some friends found us a forge at an auction, and my husband has bought an anvil and forge tools, and is setting up a little blacksmith shop in our shed in East City. Hopefully our neighbor’s won’t lynch us at night. We will both be teaching part time next year, at a small country school. Baby Will will have a babysitter there, which is nice for me, mama, since I’d miss him too much anywhere else. My husband will also be going to school full time. Our house is on a beautiful bike trail that goes all the way up to the University, north of town, so he’s hoping to get back in shape.

So much for news. I hope everyone had a beautiful Easter. Here in Ontario, there is nothing like spring. I practically crave green by the time April comes around. OK, I have to go. My baby is eating pussy-willows.

Sending our love to you all!

Mary