Christmas 2014

Another beautiful Christmas in Vermont! It rained all day, but nothing can melt the perma-snow once it has taken hold so we had a white Christmas anyway. 

Christmas Jammies

Indy's favorite gift: rawhide candy canes.

Austin loved a Beastie Boys
cross-stitch from Mardi.

Gavin built Legos all day, as always.

But his favorite gift was an
African djembe drum.

Lucy loved all her gifts.
All at the same time.

Christmas Music

This has been a season full of music for our family. 

Gavin began playing the trombone this year. He stuck with it, despite being only one of two brass instruments in the elementary school band (one other kid plays a trumpet). He practiced hard for the concert and he did a great job, but was rather drowned out by some others that didn't practice at home quite so hard. Gotta love elementary school band concerts!

Lucy's middle school chorus put on a very nice concert. She's in the back row, in the Santa hat.

This isn't a great photo, but it's evidence that I sang in a choir this year too! (Front row, in red.) The Northfield Community choir joined up with the Norwich choir to do a concert of Christmas songs including Handel's Messiah. It was all worth it just for that! 

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I don't have photos of our family serenading the ward with the German hymn "Stille Nacht" during the Christmas program -- our first big family concert! We certainly aren't the VonTrapps, even with the Young family singing with us. 

And I don't have any photos of us getting all dressed up to go to the final Hobbit movie . . . so we could attend a production of the Green Mountain Nutcracker ballet immediately afterward. The music was lovely, as always, and we loved the dancing and the quirky, hippy, Vermonty production of the ballet. 

St. Lucia

 St. Lucia has officially graduated to the grown-up candle crown! She looked completely gorgeous last night for the Lucia procession, and only got a little bit of wax in her hair. (We're still working on this!) We got together with the Youngs and with their Swedish friends to make Pepparkakor, Saffron Buns, and fabulous new outfits for the starboys. 

Lucia with silly starboys and beautiful attendant.

Lucia selfie.

Just the girls.

Pepparkakor stars.

Sweet saffron Lussekater buns.

On the way to the neighbors.

So pretty in the dark!

Winter Wonderland

It's definitely winter now. We got 12 inches of heavy wet snow with a layer of ice over the top of that, making it stick to the tree branches and the roads and everything. We won't see dirt again until spring. Lots of our neighbors up the mountain still have no power several days after the storm (in fact, we let one farmer friend park a chest freezer in our barn so he wouldn't lose his whole winter meat storage). It's nice to live rural . . . but not too rural. We are close enough to town that we rarely lose power for more than an hour or two. 

The kids got out of school for two days and took full advantage. They've already been skiing a half-dozen times, not counting all the cross-country skiing they've been doing in the field by the house. And sledding. And getting pulled behind the snowmobile.

Lucky for us, it turns out Indiana is a snow dog! She is as happy romping through the snow as she was swimming in the river. She just bounds through the deep powder with her ears flapping and her tail in the air. She comes in with huge snow balls stuck to her long fur. We stick her in the shower so we can melt them off her legs.

Halloween 2014

Weird double "butt" pumpkin + photo bomb.

Lucy and her friends decided that this Halloween they would dress up as Wizard of Oz characters for the school dance and trick-or-treat. I found a cute Dorothy costume online, but Lucy insisted on up-cycling her old Laura Ingalls costume skirt into a Dorothy dress. Gavin, who wanted to be a mad scientist, needed his lab coat shortened anyway so it was probably inevitable that I would spend some time at the sewing machine this Halloween despite my best efforts to avoid it.

Gavin's hair would make him perfect for Dorothy's companion Scarecrow. He wouldn't let me cut it because he thought a Mad Scientist should have wild and crazy hair. To make things worse, he's been going to swim team three nights a week then washing his hair with whatever soap he can find in the locker room afterward (ewww!) so he's had Mad Scientist hair pretty much every day for the past few weeks. Time for a haircut and a discussion of the merits of conditioner. 

Dorothy at the Middle School Dance with
Tin Man, Glinda, and the Wicked Witch (sans hats)

Dorothy heading to a Halloween party.
Mad Scientist heading to Trunk or Treat.

Method actors.

Austin gave his Jack-o-Lantern a carrot nose.
Gavin named his frowny guy "Grumpkin"

Spooky.

Ready to Trick or Treat!

Doesn't every one sort their candy by genre and brand?

Fall Sports

This year, Gavin decided to give fall soccer another try. It's the recess game of choice for most of his pals and he had a great time playing soccer with our cute Chinese exchange students this summer.

So serious about this game.

He completely loved it. He's probably not the next Pele or Messi, but he couldn't wait to get to the practices and the games and he always begged us to let him stay as a sub for the next game or run around on the field after practice (even though it was usually pitch dark by the time practice ended!)

Meanwhile, Lucy has been running cross-country. She does these crazy grueling practices after school and 6:00 am on Fridays, where she runs straight up hills or to the top of Paine Mountain or eight straight miles along the road, or does other things that sound insane to me but somehow fill her with joy. She has great coaches, which probably helps, and good friends on the team as well. I love these middle school girl runners, every one of them. Actually, I might even run if it means I got to hang out with these fun girls.

Cross-country meets are more fun than track meets, I've discovered. Spectators can line the course, and run from place to place to cheer on the runners as they come by. I've tried to take action photos a few times, but I'm usually screaming at the top of my lungs and ringing two cow bells while operating the camera, which doesn't work out too well.

Waiting for team results . . .

First place at the Harwood Meet!

Lucy's Birthday

I can't believe my little girl is twelve! How did this happen?

She wanted a low-key birthday party . . . just a sleepover with a handful of best friends to eat junk food and watch chick flicks (Divergent and The Fault in our Stars). Big extravagant theme parties appear to be a thing of the past, at least for this girl. In fact, I just canned applesauce all evening, there was nothing else for me to do! (That and overhear their chatter. Middle school girls are hilarious.)

On Lucy's "actual" birthday, she went to school, did a full cross country practice until 5:00, hurried home for dinner and presents, then went to the pool to swim laps with the swim team for almost two hours. By the end of the day she was so exhausted she was walking into walls. Luckily, we fueled her up with a Ben & Jerry's ice cream cake, made with Cookies & Cream on a base of chocolate chip cookies, with Milk & Cookies as the top layer. We agreed to contribute half the cost of an iPod for her birthday (basically, an iPhone without the phone capabilities) so she thought the cake was all she was getting. But she scored TWO Alex & Ani bracelets from Gram and Papa and some beautiful jewelry and Snowbird shirt from Grandma, so she was very happy.

My darling 12-year-old Lucy, I hope this wish and all your wishes come true!

Garden

We had an amazing garden year. I didn't blog about it because I was too busy canning it. It always seems like such a great idea in the spring ... sure, put in a few more rows of peppers ... an extra hill of zucchini ... a new variety of tomatoes. Then September rolls around and I find myself with 55 lbs of ripe tomatoes to process after work but before leaving for a conference the next morning and I think, what was I thinking?!

The kids were more involved this year. Gavin loves to help plant stuff (perhaps I can blame him?) and Lucy is good about picking berries. There weren't many blackberries this year but the raspberries came in strong and we had blueberries galore, once we realized we could scare the crows away by attaching Mylar balloons to the blueberry plants. The kids held their annual Northfield Farmer's Market jam sale over two Tuesdays in August, but they've sold more by word of mouth than they did sitting at their stand.

After losing last year's zucchini crop to squash bugs, I was more aggressive this year and got two nice strong zucchini hills, which produced more zucchini than I could ever have anticipated. Even after unloading bags of zucchini on friends, I was still left with more than I knew what to do with. So I tried my Aunt Brenda's zucchini relish recipe, which turned out extremely well. I think I'll look for an antique food grinder on eBay so I can give next year's batch the right texture.

The green peppers took off this summer. When Howard helped me harvest them the night before the first September frost, he counted 75 green peppers. And that doesn't count all the peppers I brought in to use in my salsa batches and zucchini relish and fajitas and everything else I could think of using peppers in. A couple of Anaheim pepper plants yielded what seemed like hundreds of hot peppers, and I planted jalapenos as well. I didn't have to buy much for this year's salsa.

After all that work, it is SO satisfying to look in the jam cupboard! It didn't all fit, so the extra stuff (applesauce, tomatillo salsa) is on top.

This year's supply of garden preserves:

Jams: raspberry, triple-berry, raspberry-peach, low-sugar raspberry, wild raspberry. All home-grown except the peaches and the wild raspberries, which were foraged from Paine Mountain.

Syrups: blackberry and blueberry. Delicious. I'm making more of both next year!

Salsas: garden salsa, jalapeno salsa, green tomatillo salsa.

Zucchini Relish

Spaghetti Sauce (I had to do something quick with all those tomatoes!)

Pink Applesauce (apples from Ellie's, not much on my trees this year)

In the freezer: grated zucchini for zucchini bread, cubed rhubarb for Rhabarberkuchen (from Kate's garden, but she gave me my own plant for next year), roasted Anaheim chiles, and gallon bags of butternut squash for soup. Just a few more squash to cook and I'm declaring myself DONE until next fall.

Gram & Papa

It has turned into a lovely tradition to have Sharon and Howard come to Vermont each September. Sharon and I go to the Exponent retreat and Howard takes Austin and the kids to the Tunbridge World's Fair.

Exponent Gala

This year's Exponent retreat marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of the magazine, so we went the night before to a gala celebration at the First United Church of Cambridge. It was amazing, and so fun to meet some more of the women who started this whole thing in Boston the year I was born. Sharon was our photographer as the board re-created an iconic Exponent photo with the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Square. She managed to get this photo before the Harvard police chased us off. Well-behaved women, indeed.

Exponent Board 2014

Mother Daughter Book Club (MDBC) Team

Howard was the photographer for the Book Club and BookKids at the Color Run 5K while Sharon and I were away. I was disappointed to miss all the fun, but it sounds like everybody had a great time and nobody was mad that their younger/older sibling got to do it too. Or at least, they got over it.

BookKids ("Book Nerds") Team

Gram has been doing a lot of family history lately. She came with hundreds of photographs of family members and ancestors for a family card game. We didn't work on making the game because we were having too much fun looking at the pictures.

It's so pleasant to have Gram and Papa around to hang out with. I love that they are retired and can just come and stay for a few weeks.

Happy #70 a little early, Howard!