A love of running water, or so the story goes, runs on my mother’s side of the family. My grandmother, my mother, I and now Neko all have the utter inability to resist running water of any sort – melting snow creating rivers, melting ice creating paths through the still-frozen ice, springs, creeks, rivers, anything. I’ve been known to stop on the side of a mountain road just to inspect a spring runoff creek running in the ditch.

So when a spring dump of snow brought a big melt the following day, sending rushing rivers through the gutters, I could only think one thing: BOATS!

What is more fun than building boats, then floating them down streams? I would argue, pretty much nothing.

My recipe for boats? Styrofoam meat trays (we don’t have many, but I save the ones that pass through our house), toothpicks or bamboo skewers (to be the flagpole of course!), wine corks (for this… we must drink more wine!), string (to retrieve the boats when they go off course), and anything you have around that is light and might be nice for decorating the boats.

In the end, we discovered that the streams didn’t exist in our own neighbourhood (we were in a different quadrant of the city when we spotted them in the morning), however, all you need is a bit of a puddle to have a satisfying boat-floating experience.

We ended up with Neko’s styrofoam-basket-boat with a half, popsicle stick roof, and a flag; my wine cork and popsicle stick boat; and a styrofoam meat tray each for Mairead and Finn.

My best tip? Use hot glue. Seals up the holes, holds things in place, and of course, impervious to water. Fantastic!

Happy spring, everyone!