Cabbagetown's Forsythia Festival, meeting John Tory

Le tout Toronto is out today - a gorgeous day, hot and sunny, at last. Someone did say that in typical Toronto fashion, we'd probably go straight from winter to summer, and so it is.

I've been busy with Mr. Elijah - going across town to get him yesterday, keeping him busy, taking him back across town this afternoon - his mother's birthday present. We spent many hours at the Regent Park playground, which is just the best, the most multicultural group of kids, every colour of skin, running and leaping and climbing. Eli is very big on climbing and hanging from monkey bars and even bigger on jumping, from everything.

And then - Lego. Much much Lego. Luckily I got a big container at Doubletake so have lots on hand, and it kept him happily busy for hours. He took last night's creation into the bath and then into bed with him. And then more Charlotte's Web. The new bed in the new spare room, for its inaugural sleep, was a success.

He rose at 6, however, hungry for breakfast, which did not make a tired Glamma happy. We were at the playground by 9 a.m., and then off to the Forsythia Festival, a neighbourhood celebration of spring this family has been attending for 33 years. Eli even consented to walk in the parade,

and then up to Wellesley Sreet for face painting and other festivities.

It's a wonderful event, getting bigger all the time - now filled not just with young families but with grandparents - saw many old friends with their grandchildren. I ran into John Tory, Toronto's mayor (as well as Barbara Hall, a former mayor who lives in Cabbagetown) and went to talk to him, to commiserate with what the city is enduring from the cretins running the province. I went on about how we now have our own Trump, and he said he hoped the decent people in Ford's cabinet would wake up. Some chance. Please keep up the good fight, I said, but have to say, he's not a fighter, he's a wimp or just a nice polite man, so we're doomed.

Then, at last, the TTC back to the west side of town, to leave my beloved older grandson with his family. On the streetcar home, I saw a million Torontonians out in the streets, soaking it up. I was reading C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed which someone left in the Free Library, about the death of his wife. I have not lost a spouse but grief is there, nonetheless.

Now in my messy Lego- and crumb-strewn house, alone, with the hot sun pouring in through the back door.  Sam comes tonight to watch Game of Thrones. I'm grateful for my family when they're here, and also grateful for the solitude when they are not.