Category Archives: Blessings

Weekend Roundup: Sunday, Solstice Edition

Sunday morning we had the upstairs neighbours over for our now-annual Yule waffle brunch and small gift exchange. Blade and I were still in fine form from the party the night before and snarked all morning, amusing ourselves terribly. The boy got a Lego tow truck kit from them and decided that I should be the one to assemble it. I don’t work with Lego very often because I simply don’t think in three-dimensional block form very well, but give me a kit with instructions and I’m fine. They gave me a lovely Celtic knot print in my favourite autumnal earthy colours, and a sampling of Saxon chocolates, including my favourite sea salt caramels!

The local grandparents arrived just past ten-thirty for our early Christmas celebration. The boy was very patient for all of ten minutes, so we settled down and started opening presents. He’s at the age where he can actually appreciate each gift he opens again, instead of just enthusiastically opening things left, right, and centre. There weren’t as many gifts as there usually are, for which was very thankful. Part of this is due to the fact that we didn’t have both sets of our parents here, so the floor around the tree wasn’t as crowded as usual, but part of it was that we were all pretty restrained this year. We gave HRH’s dad a movie, and his mom a hand-knitted scarf, and Liam got a camera of his very own, which he began using right away, taking some very respectable pictures of his favourite ornaments on the tree.

The big hit, though, and the present we saved for last, was the early gift that Santa brought him: the racetrack he’d asked for when he saw Santa at the mall. (I knew HRH’s parents had bought him something from the Cars line of toys, so I pinged his mom to see if that’s what they’d gotten, and it was, so we were all covered. Bless them.) A very close second was Anakin’s Clone Wars starfighter, which went to bed with him for both nap and overnight.

HRH and I both got wallets (with money inside, hurrah!) and socks (it amuses me that when you get socks as a kid you’re let down, but as an adult you’re thrilled because it’s one less necessity you have to buy). I got a lovely plum-coloured knitted wrap that’s just gorgeous and so very soft.

My best gift, hands-down, though, was this:

It’s HRH’s newest painting in his Celtic Totems series. My office smells like oil paint, as it was still a wee bit tacky when HRH brought it up for me. (Kudos to Blade, who improvised a nice cover the other day when I was downstairs in the basement office and said, “Hey, it smells like varnish or something down here.” “Oh, I accidentally hit the button on one of my spray paints,” he said. Apparently when I’d left HRH looked at him and said, “Smooth. Thanks.”)

While everyone else played with the toys and nibbled on the various seafood and other hors d’ouevres that HRH’s parents had brought, I started getting food going. I’d brined the turkey the night before, and had realised while falling asleep that I didn’t have enough bread with which to make stuffing. I made a batch in the breadmaker as soon as I got up, a whole wheat/herb quick bread that I shredded and toasted in the oven when it was ready. In retrospect I shouldn’t have toasted it into croutons, because the whole wheat bread was already drier than white. I mixed up the stuffing and put half in the bird, and half in a baking dish, then put the turkey in the oven. Then I mixed up pie dough, because I was short a pie shell thanks to the previous day’s disaster, and had the worst time trying to get it to stick together. I kept adding ice water and it just wouldn’t cling. Eventually I squeezed it together and put it in the freezer to cool off a bit before rolling it out and mixing up the pecan pie filling. And then I discovered that unlike the little aluminium plates that prepared pie shells come in, my metal pie tin doesn’t fit in the oven next to the roasting tray, so I had to take the turkey out to blind-bake the shell for twenty minutes. I couldn’t afford the next half-hour it would take to bake the pie entirely, though, so a quick phone call confirmed that the neighbours were fine with us borrowing their oven, and HRH went upstairs with it. I set our timer to remind us to go get it when it was ready. The bird went back in the oven, was ready around quarter past four, and HRH carved it for me while I made the gravy. I heated up my mother in law’s excellent special mashed potatoes in the oven as well as baking the other half of the stuffing (which turned out to be unneeded on the table), and parboiled carrots before frying them in butter and doing a quick maple syrup glaze. And then we all feasted, feasted, feasted! The pecan pie was lovely, even though some of the filling managed to work its way through the shell and caramelize on the bottom. A soft dollop of whipped cream balanced it nicely.

Somehow, I completely forgot to make rolls to go with dinner. Didn’t even think about them in the overall meal plan.

After his grandparents left, there was a bath for the boy, the second chapter of Prince Caspian, and then bed. He woke up for no particular reason around ten while I was in the bath, although I didn’t find out till I checked on him between bath and bed. I cuddled him back to sleep, and fell asleep myself. A very full day, and forgetting to eat properly in the middle of it was not a good thing. Apart from that, though, it was wonderful. We are so blessed to have close friends and family with whom to celebrate the season. And the celebrating has only just begun!

Quiet Frost

Leaving orchestra last night, I walked across the church grounds in the dark with my hard case on my back, and watched my red shoes crunch into the frost-covered grass. It was the first real frost I’d observed this fall. We’ve had delicate crystals here and there on the rooves of cars and the edges of fallen leaves, but nothing like this. The whole lawn was brushed with greyish white. Each blade of grass was fully painted in sparkle and chill, lit only by the faint streetlamps down the block. Everything was still — there was no breeze, and it’s a quiet neighbourhood — and all I could hear was the crisp, gentle sound of my soles coming down on those blades of grass. It felt different than walking on unfrosted grass does, too; there was a brittle resistance to every footstep. And as I pulled the car away from the curb, the fan drew in wisps of woodsmoke from far off.

It was one of those moments where you’re fully present, absorbing life as it is. It was just lovely.

In Which She Enjoys Living In The Future

I love living in the future.

Item one: I can place a reserve for new acquisitions at the library online, check my profile, find out that they’re in before the library calls me, and show up to check them out before they’ve even made it to the reserve drawers. I scored An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon, Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (an additional yay for the library taking your advice about new books to buy via online request forms), and Alexander McCall Smith’s The Lost Art of Gratitude. Seriously; check out that trio of bestselling authors! And they’re all on my bedside table. (The books, not the authors. It would be very crowded otherwise.)

Item two: This morning I jumped up and down on Twitter about the hat-trick of library books, because I have friends who understand that sort of thing.

Item three: Two seconds later Peter Gregson, a pro Scottish cellist I follow on Twitter and natter with on occasion, sent me a direct message saying that Sandy McCall Smith is a friend of his, and he’d be happy to pass along anything I might want to share with him.

Yes, the future is a wonderful place, where I can connect with people around the globe, and one of the people on my Twitter list and in our extended cello family knows one of my favourite authors and will say hi for me. (I asked him to say that Smith’s work had brought my ex-pat Scot mum and I much joy. Figured that covered pretty much all the bases.)

Ten!

On this day ten years ago (TEN!), in the company of family and dear chosen family on a spectacular autumn day, I married my best friend.

We have now officially spent a quarter of our lives together!

Today also marks the twelfth anniversary of HRH and I doing our first road trip together, one of the joys I have continued to experience with him throughout our marriage. I’ve been told that the true test of a couple is if they can paint a room together without killing one another, but I suspect the ability to survive a road trip better attests to their ability to co-exist harmoniously.

I received an exquisite handmade wooden rose as an anniversary gift, and my parents sent us a cheque for a dinner out (thanks, Mum and Dad!). I’m exhausted and fighting this cold, and have the boy home for a third day in a row, so I don’t have much energy (there’s also a family dinner and a cello lesson ahead of me; I hope my teacher understands my inability to process much tonight), but I do have enough to say:

I love you, HRH. We’ve put up with a lot of ups and downs, challenges, and obstacles, but I think things are paying off in some sort of stability. We still have a way to go, but I can’t imagine traveling the road ahead with anyone but you… accompanied by the boy, of course, and any number of stuffed rabbits.

The Mac Transition Begins; Or, SQUEE!!!

HRH just handed me a gift bag. While the boy napped and I made Thai noodle salad, he’d gone out to buy ice for the cooler and what he called “a thick card.”

Inside the bag was a joint gift from Meallanmouse and himself: an iPod Touch! It’s Meallanmouse’s original Touch, which was replaced by her new iPhone. And as I’d been looking for a secondhand iTouch to use as an e-book reader, and she was going to sell hers, well, the stars aligned and I have a new toy!

(“Don’t you want me to open it at the picnic this afternoon?” I said when he handed it to me. “No, I want you to open it now to have enough time to play with it before we head out,” he said.)

Scott showed me his Touch at dinner last night, and it further cemented my resolution to get one. Hurrah for things going excitingly well and friends conspiring! And further to the stars-aligning thing, I found a classified listing for someone selling a few-months-old top-model Mac Mini with eighteen months of warranty left on it, for less than the base model I was saving up to buy new. We talked, we clicked, and he took his ad down. HRH and I are heading out Tuesday night to look it over and pick it up if all is as it should be. And so my transition to Mac will be complete! (Once we ascertain that my ergo keyboard and my compact mouse are recognized by the Mac, that is. If they’re not HRH will bring me an Apple set home from work, as they have boxes of used ones taking up space.) I am resisting my desire to connect the Touch to my computer and start loading it with exciting things, because I don’t want to brick it. I’m waiting for the Mac Mini, under the admittedly naive belief that two Apple products will play together better than an Apple and a PC.

Now I am looking out the window disapprovingly at the gathering clouds. We’re meeting a small number of friends at the park for a picnic, and if it rains I will be very displeased indeed. Especially since I have enough Thai noodle salad here to feed a small army. Also, if I cannot show off my shiny new toy I will pout.

Four Years Old!

Four years ago today, during a humid heatwave that was nothing like the cool damp weather we’re having these days, we unexpectedly found ourselves with someone who wasn’t scheduled to arrive till after the Wicca book proofs were handed in um till after the first draft of the green witch book had been handed in er till the nursery was ready no till we were fully unpacked from the move for another nine weeks.

One…

Two…

Three…

FOUR!

The four-year doctor’s appointment is next Thursday, but we know he’s over a metre tall (he shot up over the winter; all his pants are too short), and we’re betting he’s passed forty pounds. He has been using the toilet all on his own for over a year now, and doesn’t even wear nighttime pull-ups any more. He wears size 4 tops and pants, and size 9 shoes (!!!). We love the complexity of conversation he has with us, and how he’s trying to make jokes, and how he has fun with wordplay and nonsense sounds. He sings with glee and enthusiasm, uses French randomly, counts glibly and adds simple numbers, loves crafts. He still sleeps about ten hours at night and averages a ninety-minute nap, although on special and rare occasions the nap can be forgone without spectacular meltdown, so long as we are quiet when we get home and go to bed half an hour earlier. (Although he has passed out around naptime in cars and at concerts even when told he doesn’t need to try to rest. Case in point, my recital last month: “The cello music was so beautiful I fell asleep.”) The fave foods list can pretty much be reproduced verbatim from last year: Chicken nuggets, sausages, pancakes, waffles, maple syrup, cinnamon toast, freshly baked bread, grapes, blackberries, raspberries, ice cream, blue popsicles, peanut butter sandwiches, pizza, pasta, chicken hot dogs, cheeseburgers, homemade granola bars, Rice Krispie squares, cheese, popcorn, all kinds of crackers and breadsticks, milk, apple juice, sneaks sips of iced tea when he thinks I’m not looking, “coffee” (AKA warm milk with a touch of sugar and the foam from a cappuccino on top), “tea” (AKA cambric tea without the hot water), and creamy yoghurt, with the addition of pork chops, steak, salami sandwiches, shrimp, Polo mints (just about any mint, really, but he asks for Polos by name), and “iced cappuccino” (crushed ice blended with chocolate milk, served with a straw).

Current passions: Transformers, short chapter books at bedtime, playing Go Fish, doing more complex jigsaw puzzles, writing his name everywhere, drawing on his chalkboard, going out for hot dogs and french fries ( “and a bun” he always specifies, as if he’s worried they’ll serve him a weiner alone), Lego (he is currently very proud of the Slave 1 MLG bequeathed to him, and has partially disassembled and reassembled it quite capably), and always trains and cars.

Current challenges: Getting him to use the pedals on his trike (he’s been told that he’s not getting a bicycle until he demonstrates that he can consistently use the trike pedals), getting him to understand why it’s rude to shout at people from windows (especially strangers, even if all you’re doing is shouting a cheerful “hello!”), getting him to focus on identifying letters and sounds if he doesn’t initiate it.

Things we’re very proud of: How well he behaves himself at concerts and in public, how good he is when we give him a five-minute window to play before we finish up or leave wherever we are, how much better he is at eating what we’re eating for supper instead of whining and asking for something else, how clearly he spells his name and how capably he copies words out for cards and such, how appreciative he is of gifts (“Oh, wow, this is aweshome. I’ve wanted one of these for years. Thank you!”), how polite he is when he interrupts a conversation (“Excuse me, Mama… excuse me, Mama…”).

Amusing developments: He’s started narrating the cats. One night at supper Nixie appeared in the window between the living room and the kitchen, right next to the table. She delicately used the table’s corner on her way to HRH’s empty chair. And suddenly, there was a soft running narrative in a little falsetto voice happening from my left: “Hello, don’t mind me, I’m not really on the table, I’m just on my way to this chair, yes, like this, and ooh look there’s my water bowl, I’ll just hop down to it then, thank you!” He narrates Gryff, too, in the same slightly gruff, dorky voice we use for him. It’s hilarious. We laughed till we cried when we first heard it.

He’s just… such a fabulous little boy. Even when I’m exasperated because he’s dawdling over something, I’m fully aware that I’m bothered because his behaviour generally sets a high standard that he can’t possibly maintain 24/7. He starts preschool full-time around mid-August, the last step before kindergarten. We’re so proud of him, of his character and his accomplishments. He’s fun to be with, and we’re so very fortunate to have him as part of our family.

The plan for the day: We switched his day with the caregiver to tomorrow so that we could take him out on his birthday itself. We’re headed to the train museum, then lunch out at St Hubert, otherwise known as the “chicken and french fries restaurant.” There was a party at preschool yesterday (which they handled, bless them), a little party at the caregiver’s tomorrow, and then the actual kids’ party on Saturday. I wonder if it’s possible for Sparky to get birthdayed out.