Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Despite the fact that we didn't have TuTu with us to paint the world green, and that D-meister in particular missed her presence, we did have a nod toward the holiday. N-man wore his leprechaun socks and danced a jig while we listened to The Pogues and we dined on shamrock pancakes. Of course, we also had traditional corned beef and cabbage for dinner that evening. Erin Go Bragh!

New Year's Eve

Which, in our house, always means:

This year we tried out "family time" for his actual birthday. (The next day, we had a New Year's Day dinner and our friends sang to him then.) So we did things he wanted to do and ate food he planned.

For his cake he wanted cupcakes.

G-girl being goofy while D-meister opens his presents. Make no mistake: he fully knows what she is doing.

Big Brother wanting to "help" with the Transformers.


Our youngest is five now!
I still remember our first December in this state, when we welcomed him into our family.

Christmas Day 2009

On Christmas morning, I had a camera under the tree so I was able to take pictures this year.

That's a LOT of marbles!

G-girl is quite the outdoor enthusiast. Can't have too many flashlights!

Wedgits!

Is this a big giant dollhouse?

It is!

D-meister is a self-assured little dude.

N-man loves the Boo Boo

P-Daddy and N-man putting together the giant legos set

Fourth of July

It was beautiful. 70 degrees, low tide and friends for the Henderson Bay fireworks.

Midnight Sun

From Mr. C-family, who lit the beacon of Amon Din:

Happy Easter

I think she's trying to match the silly expression she drew on the egg.

Date Day

Yesterday was an exercise in something. I don't know for sure what, but maybe someone can illuminate it for me. The nice thing about babysitting copiously for someone who doesn't like or celebrate Valentine's day is a near-guaranteed Valentine's babysitter. Still, I wasnt expecting to hear "drop em at 10. Pick em up the next day at 4."

Well, ok then. I hope she didn't expect me to argue!


After checking out the ReSale Habitat store in Tacoma, P-daddy and I wandered around the Proctor district, an area I have a particular affection for. It's one of those mini-cities within an urban center that has everything from good grocery stores to library to post office to restaurants to pubs to parks all within easy walking distance. It has a theater and a bowling alley and a pottery-painting shop all right there. I should have mentioned the three schools, I guess, but they're not so much on our radar. After checking out some galleries we went in search of food and decided to leave Proctor.

On our meandering way out we spotted the Mandolin cafe, which I adore. We went in just so I could show it off to P-daddy--it's one of those old-school coffee shops I love-- heavily decorated, baristas that actually pull lattes in mugs instead of paper cups and expect you to hang around, live music, board games and tables everywhere. I wanted P-daddy to have a visual. We popped in and there was not just music, but a huge brass band sitting there. We totally snagged some lattes and sat our fannies down. That was good fun.

We ended up hitting more appliance and hardware stores through out the day, which I commented on as being "so romantic." P-daddy reminded me that's pretty much how we always rolled. That's just what we did, even without kids-- we drank coffee and fiddled with home improvement. I suppose romance is in celebrating how you connect, right?

(Hey Reeciebird! Should I put your part of the story in here?)

Happy Diffendoofers Valentines

Yesterday a good day. Our homeschool Diffendoofers got together for a Valentine's Day party. The kids all made Valentines throughout the week and when they got together at M.J.'s house they decorated paper bags into which to put the Valentines for each other. That was the idea anyway.

Mostly they just ate a lot and played like little dervishes.

The Moms in the homeschool group are getting more comfortable with each other. It's pleasant to see and experience the level of rapport and cohesion in a young group with people who know each other well enough to like and respect, but don't know each other well enough to have conflicts of any kind. And hey! They brought me coffee! The hostess doesn't drink it or keep it in the house so I brought my own, along with my French press and a coffee mug. So did Pashca. So did the hostess. I felt the love!

Another mother, watching in amusement as the host kids organized a little hike along their 5 acres, commented to me, "You know, G-girl let my daughter know at homeschool PE that she should be bringing extra clothes today." I laughed-- the last time we were at this house G-girl had stepped into a creek and gotten soaked. She's looking out for her friends, that one!

Today my kids woke up to Valentine's from Mom , Dad and Aunt Barbara and will later go over to Nikirj's while P-daddy and I attempt to be romantic. I don't think I even remember what romantic looks like, but hey, we can try.

Have a good one today-- love on the sweeties who make your heart glow, be they small, furry or otherwise.

And now the Silence?

The trees are green again. The natural world outside is 45 degrees and rainy. This is what has become "normal" for us, and I am grateful to be moving back into that quiet stillness. One of the things I liked about moving here was that seasons and holidays seemed to coincide nicely with the cultural calendar. Growing up in the subtropic, for instance, Christmas NEVER involved snow and sleds. Here, that could happen every year, even if we had to drive an hour to make it happen.

But the cultural backdrop to the holidays clashes horribly with the actual season. Many animals hibernate. Even we humans slow down, eat a bit more, grow sleepy with the shortened days that never really wake up to full sunlight here in the Northwest, anyway. The Solstice is supposed to be a time of meditation and preparation, of waiting for the coming light. I enjoy the preparation. I revel in the children's joy, the music (oh the music!) and the lights. Anything that passes for family tradition makes me feel a little more solid, more connected and this year's snowfall made for a storybook White Christmas and we all reveled in it. Still, let's just say I am not one to mourn the passing of the holidays.

I long for the stillness and the quiet that a homeschooling mother will never, so long as she homeschools, experience. But the kids too, do get reflective, and this time of year is incredible for their art and for their reading. They get the time indoors now to actually do the more involved science projects. It's a time where we really get to engage with one another and spend the time just as us, just as a family. That's a renewal I value, and it's worth starting the new year for that.

We tried to wear them out

Day whatever-it-is of being snowbound with kids and a vacationing hubby.

Determined to escape cabin fever-- which I admit to starting to feel-- I started the day with a giant batch of pancakes for everyone. We had sausage, eggs and orange juice to go with it.

We all went ice-hill sledding again, this time with some inflatable sleds I'd purchased two years ago when I thought we were going up to Hurricane Ridge. Oddly enough, the baby-pull-along sled still fits D-meister and SCREAMS downhill faster than any of the others. The child is fearless, which is a good thing considering our near miss today. With three extra sleds, P-daddy and I were sledding too. We can't aim worth a damn, let's just say, and the three year old is clueless about "off the lane!" I was in one of the inflatables and D-meister was worse than a deer in the headlights-- he was completely nonplussed at my big behind barreling down the hill towards him. As he wouldn't get out of the way and I had no control whatever of the inflatable kiddie sled on a downhill ice slick, I scooped him into my lap as I bore down on him. That motion spun us round and round, faster and faster downhill. It was FUN, even when we crashed into the cliff wall, and the D-man never relinquished his hold on his own sled.

One of us needed to go to the bathroom, so we left. The kids sojourned outside, with P-daddy whipslinging them down our own icy road while I made the royal icing. We did our gingerbread house. Sometime after that we painted glass ornaments, another craft project I've had squirreled away for a couple of years. There was more kiddie craft stuff-- even this evening, when everything is supposed to be fresh on my mind, everything is beginning to blur. Today I chose not to take pictures, mindfully deciding to not have the camera as a distraction.

The big thing for me today though, aside from the sled scoopage, was my canning project at dinner time. Every year my Grandaddy made a mustard-based barbecue sauce and gave it away at Christmas. I suppose to the uninitiated, that sounds like a really weird Christmas gift, but I have first hand knowledge of the ferocity of our friend and family's desire for the stuff. As awful as it was when he passed, Christmas really seemed odd without his sauce on everything from the collard greens to the pulled pork. The last time he made it, my then-fiance was there to help him out. When I inherited the kitchen aid mixer I used to blend it, I had to clean the sauce splatter off of it. For beekeepers, the honey gets everywhere. For us, I guess it's the BBQ sauce.

My Grandmother gave me the recipe some time ago but I haven't had the heart to make it. Grandaddy had scribbled it down on a little spiral memo pad in his distinct script with no instructions. As far as I know, he never canned it. He funneled it into leftover ketchup or mustard squeeze containers and stripped the labels off. Heavy on the vinegar, I suppose the sauce didn't really require canning(we still had some of it when we moved to Washington) but I wanted to make sure. I made ten pints of it this evening while I roasted some chicken. (Only D-meister tried it but then he lapped it up like a little guinea pig.) I'd like to send these jars home to Charleston and brighten some kitchens, and maybe remind them of some Christmases past.


From yesterday-- the igloo is finished:

More snow overnight.

The shoveling has been un-shoveled and the footprints have been softened into ripples in the snow.

Each tree within view of our windows has every single twig coated with white snow. The trees are leaning under the weight, changing familiar surroundings into a completely different landscape. The strawberry pot we left on the back deck has now been covered over completely, and the rest of the deck is like P-daddy never touched it with his new toy. There is a rock retaining wall in my back yard that is no longer visible. Both dogs fell off it this morning when they went out. Then the blind poodle got lost in the snow and I had to go find him. Even I had a hard time-- the snow is now higher than the edges of my snow boots.

It's warmer today-- we're starting out at 32.2. That's higher than the predicted high of 32. I am hoping to be able to go to our Solstice party today. I suspect, though, the hosts will be cancelling it anyway. What a difference this experience has been from the same time period in 2006, having electricity instead of huddling in the dark! Today, two years ago in the afternoon hours, we got power back after being without for over a week.

Still more pix

Tomorrow the neighbors will rise to see that the spirit of Jack Frost went CRACK in my front yard.






It is indeed the shortest day of the year. While the light failed, my family didn't pause in making merry. G-meister and P-Daddy decided to build...an igloo. Yes, really. While I fancied the lights glowing through their blanket of snow, the other two were shoveling the drive for the opportunity to stuff tidy cat buckets to make bricks. (The boys were in the house eating the last of my homemade apple pie that I baked yesterday.) It's like all-home week isn't it?

Happy Winter Solstice!

Preparedness Rawks! Especially when you didn't actually need to prepare. We are well stocked for an extended power outage, in terms of food, fuel and clothes. However, all we got was a foot of snow. It's even warmer today than it was for the past week-- we're at a balmy 32 today!

Window condensation-- on the outside

We have a pretty steep downhill grade approaching our neighborhood beach. In weather like this, it becomes a great ski slope!

While down there, I got some shots of the frozen edges of Henderson Bay.

You've read "If you give a mouse a cookie." Consider, "If you give a P-daddy a snow shovel!" This is him next to his pile of snow that would later become a snowman.

He also had to shovel a path for the dogs so they could get outside to toilet themselves.

The snow, The snow

We got 6 inches of heavy snowfall yesterday, during which I experienced the idyllic winter home day. The snow kept falling all afternoon, which made a beautiful counterpoint to the crackling we kept fire going in the woodstove. The indoor and outdoor Christmas decorations looking so pretty against the snowfall, and everything came together with great holiday music and a fragrant holiday kitchen.

The children sledded most of the afternoon at a neighbor's house then had hot chocolate and snacks there. It was restive for me and exciting for them-- the perfect combination, I think.

The snow had just begun to fall when they started building snowmen.

About mid-day, right when it started to fall harder.

Snow The Day After

The Rose Garden in Repose

6 inches on the rainbow!

Baby It's Cold Outside! This hanging art is underneath the eaves.

Clearly, the dog is neither sleeping nor drinking outside.