One of the very fun perks of writing this blog has been Cuisinart sending me several products from their line. I’ve particularly enjoyed the Smart Stick Hand Blender, which has sent me into a pureeing spree. It also was fantastically timely, since I blew up my blender about a month ago and my poor children had been deprived of their rightful smoothies.
Hey, it’s Thanksgiving! We’re mid-way through our obligatory attendance at all of our parents’ dinners; this year they’ve mixed things up significantly by inviting each other to each meal, which means that it’s going to be the same faces from last night at tonight’s rather sedate Bacchanalia. The Baby has also decided to further liven things up by having a nasty, snotty cold, which isn’t making her feel that bad but IS causing her to suddenly exclaim "I has a booger in my nose!" in the middle of an otherwise reasonably civilized meal.
Canadian Thanksgiving is a funny sort of holiday – American Thanksgiving marks the start of the Christmas season, while Canadian Thanksgiving just sort of marks October. I personally use it as the weekend when I start taping construction paper jack-o-lanterns on the kitchen cupboards, which is as far as I’m really willing to go in terms of Halloween decorating. But Canadian Thanksgiving does get to be rather meaningful within my personal canon and this particular Thanksgiving marks the 17th anniversary of when I met my husband.
It seems unlikely, now, that we managed to make any relationship at all out of who we were then – such callow, childishly mean adolescents with big plans for artistic fame – he was going to be a sculptor/painter and I was going to be the enfant terrible of Canadian literature (sadly, I am now much, much too old and I was never all that terrible, just sort of sarcastic. But I had DREAMS.). Our competing egos – and the fact that we were jerks – capsized whatever fragile love we had.
Six Thankgsivings later, we met again and that was it. You know how the rest of this story played out – the marriage and ALL THOSE BABIES and two Thanksgivings ago we had our very Baby christened on this day, holding her fragile and sick and wearing her father’s Christening gown. And this very Thanksgiving, I am writing and listening to her shriek lustily at her brother and run about the house and my grandmother is still in the hospital but doing SO much better, and I am feeling all at once very thankful for this undeserved and unearned grace, these gifts that love has brought me.