The Girl is home sick today - not terribly sick but feverish and shaky - and she is terribly, terribly disappointed that she couldn't make it to school, because her French teacher had announced that they would make taffy in class today, like little Canadian girls have been doing for centuries on St. … [Read more...]
A Room Of Her Own And Cheese
We had a lot of goofy hippy ideas about how much our children would love having a shared nursery room - ala A Pattern Language - oh, the security they would feel! The cheerful kinship! They would go to bed singing "Kumbaya" and arise singing "Good Morning Starshine." Um, no? The … [Read more...]
November Blues
It was with a sense of near-panic that I realized that everyone in the house was sick this weekend - it would throw our whole Christmas schedule just off. Which makes me feel like such an adult, really, that I now view major holidays not as an awesome good time, but instead as one big stressful … [Read more...]
November is No Fun
Now that Halloween is over, I have had several people ask me what our plans for Christmas are. And that is just not the thing to ask someone who is still more than slightly nauseated by the really disgusting amounts of candy she's eaten over the weekend, really. But as I was sketching out our plans … [Read more...]
Sick Day
dAll of my kids - every single one of them - are sick today. They're not VERY sick (they just have colds) but they're all sick enough to keep them home from school, and the one who is always home is feverish and miserable. Right this minute, though, she's happy - deliriously happy - because her big … [Read more...]
The Comfort Of Not Knowing
"Add some capers to the slow cooker, honey," I said to The Boy yesterday morning, since he was feeling helpful. "Add a tablespoon of capers.""Okay!" he said, cheerfully, and then dumped the whole jar in. "It looked like a tablespoon to me," he said, … [Read more...]
Happy Thanksgiving!
... if you're Canadian, that is. One of the first Canadian Thanksgivings was held by Martin Frobisher* who held a formal Thanksgiving ceremony in 1578 in what is now Newfoundland, and the Native Canadians held autumn feasts even before that. Another explorer, Samuel de Champlain**, along with the … [Read more...]
Gloom and Comfort
I am well in the middle of my autumnal blahs - at least, I hope it's the middle. It would be terrible to think that you're halfway through some grim thing and in reality, you're just standing on a crevice, looking down. But I think it's already peaked and is packing up its black bags and heading … [Read more...]
Coffee and Crying and Cookbooks
It was a beautiful weekend - we drove through some leafy country places at one point and the red trees and the golden, mellow autumn light and the farm fields quiet in the fall were all so beautiful that I was speechless with it. But today we woke up and there had been a hard frost and my kids … [Read more...]
The Very End Of Summer
This weekend felt weirdly long. Saturday night felt, not unpleasantly, like Sunday night, that relaxed, back-to-school feeling, and Sunday just felt like a day too much of the weekend, Sunday Part II. But most of Saturday was unexpectedly wonderful. My in-laws have a camp about an hour away from … [Read more...]