Busy holidays?

This was how I found Kieran (the one totally asleep is our friend) about 5 mins after coming in from a long morning of playing and digging in the snow.  Before you ask, I swear the only drug they are on is fresh air!  Totally made the list of the greatest moments of 2012 right here.

Merry Cookbookmas

Last year my friend Andrea sent me a hilarious cookbook for Christmas, and this year was no different.

Bound to be delicious!

Oh yes, it's real... and it made my freaking day mainly because it came in a package with no explanation whatsoever.  While it MIGHT make my list for my 30-30 dinner party.. I am almost tempted to make something for Christmas Eve dinner.   My grandmother will be eating it and I'll simply have no choice but to explain why I am laughing randomly through dinner otherwise she will no doubt try and drag me to an AA meeting on Christmas Day.

This Christmas I must say has been pretty sweet since we've stepped up the festiveness .. i.e. there is currently a 20 foot inflatable snowman on my lawn!  Among making new memories, one thing that I hope my boys don't remember from the holidays but I am 100% certain they will, is their mother is an astoundingly terrible present wrapper.  I had about 2 hours today while wrapping to think about how I hope none of them inherit this.  Go with bags, you say? ripping through paper on Christmas morning is not something I can bare to deprive them of.. even if I can already feel them making fun of me.  I'm totally up to a grade 3 level in wrapping now.

That's a doodle for absolutely no reason??  I had to take a break, guys.

Hoping you all have a wonderful, memorable holiday!

Places you will go

One of the notable changes about my 30th year of living is that I have come to terms with the fact that, barring some kind of electrical storm where my brain is re-wired, there is one time of year that to me personally might as well be a physical place on Earth.  "Winter" might as well have a real destination pin on a map, and cute candy cane font sign on the road when you enter it, because, for all intents and purposes, I travel there to visit smiles I've had and smiles I've saved up so much it built a town.  

Indulge me for a moment.  

"Winterville" always has the right amount of shimmery snow to walk in; it is vanilla, big blankets and wool sweaters, hugs, and every snowman I've ever built, every fort I ever dug out with a red runny nose.  There, there are toboggan runs any time, fresh trees in every house and so many Christmas lights you'd never wish it was daytime.  It has heart.  Though I do not stay very long at all; those Winters are gone of course and this one is happening now.  It's just so many first things started in Winter for me, best of all my boys birthdays.  Maybe it is the death of the seasons, death of the year, mixed all in with the exciting new.. it either feels some minutes as if I have lived the luckiest life I couldn't possibly ever live long enough to deserve it.  My heart is filled with gratitude instead of the grief that mostly everything pretty and warm in "Winter" town does not really exist, these small memories cannot leave this place.. and then other minutes feeling as if it's too much for me.  Like I am standing in a place equivalent to this commercial.

And that's when I leave.  By that time it is always dark, which make the lights all prettier, and I am always late.

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.” 
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night