Caitlyn and I walked from school to the Westlake Link station yesterday afternoon. We found cherry trees starting to bloom (one totally covered in buds so that it looked pink from a block away) and daffodils pushing their greens up. Caitlyn nearly burst with joy when we found a camillia in bloom; she's been waiting to pick up faded camillia flowers for a full year now.

And while I don't mind not being frozen whenever I step outside, I worry that this past record-breaking warm January will have unpleasant side effects later: a cold snap just as the fruit trees are setting, costing us the cherry or apple crops, or a insufficient snow pack that will have us running out of water in August. It's rather depressing to be (re)confronted with my ability to find the downside to anything, including sunshine and flowers...

In completely unrelated news, I have found a way to make fruit muffins palatable to Caitlyn, I think. She's objected to peach, strawberry or blueberry muffins in the past, something that made no sense to me since all those muffin varieties are sweet. She loves the fruit straight, and she eats carrot muffins, so what's the problem?

Lumps. Serve her a bowl of potato-corn soup with chunks of potato in it, and she won't eat it. Run it through the blender so it's lump-free, and it's delicious. So, perhaps the same principle applies to muffins. I replaced (most of) the milk in the muffin recipe with raspberry purée and (so far) the result is fruit muffins Caitlyn eats. And as a bonus, muffins made with raspberry purée are pink when you put them in the oven! The raspberry seeds get stuck in my teeth, but nothing's perfect, I guess...