A Good Week

Good Food, and adorable.

A visit from family!

And done.  

Patric on shot two this week.

 

And my stint as cafeteria worker after 13 months is over on Wednesday when all of the children go back to school!

 

Sunday Is Coming

 The Best Sunday of the Year

https://youtu.be/QS2wPotScZY

Oddly

These hung around for quite a while.  

The eyes made them hard to consider eating. 

These not long at all. 

Thank you, valentines.

 

Happy New Year

Because everyone should go ahead and throw on a swimsuit on New Year's Day. 

And warm themselves by the fire after their polar plunge. 

And run inside as fast as possible after the show. 

Because it was cold in there. 

But even colder outside. 

Family Time

Calories Complete

Wait patiently for my oven to prepare dinner. 

But the girls made these, 

To go with Chocolate mousse, which was the perfect way to ensure we had all of our Christmas calories.  Now we must plan salad for the next 11 months.

The Christmas Food

Turn this 

Into this

And get an hour of family time and good cheer together.

Candy Cane Bread

Prepare the cherries

Prepare the dough

Deploy the sweet dough giving to the neighbors, and perhaps eat a piece or two  ourselves.

Happy New Year

A decade ago. Happy New Year!

Ten years later, a pretty good looking crew. 

Sending Christmas videos this year to those we cannot spend time with.

What a long strange and beautiful adventure.

Giving

Surprise

And this.

And joy

And fun

And a new toilet seat cracked us up this year.

The Stocking Were Hung

By the chimney  with care, because they could topple at any moment.

Christmas Flashback

A decade ago. 

I cannot wait until the day I ask them to remake all of these photos. 

Merry Christmas!

Tradition

Wake up in the morning to the tree going over in the living room. 

And the Decorating Begins

Needing scissors to get to the scissors.  Cruel.

This makes me laugh out loud.

Go buy a tree that is as big as a room.  We love our tradition.

The girls struggling with light stringing--more tradition. 

2020 Style Thanksgiving

Tradition

We should have been with family; we had to make due with evoking family. 

And then since nothing in this world makes sense, we went ahead and made stuffing and seafood.

There was an Alida hurt in the making of Thanksgiving.  Usually it is just a close call. 

Board game. 

Something normal. 

Bringing in the last of the harvest after the end of harvest season  celebration meal, sure why not.

Halloween 2020

Spooky for sure. 

None of the kids chose to go trick-or-treating this year.

But if you braved the evening and showed up to our house, you won the candy lottery. 

Halloween Comes

Muted Mummy Shoes

And ghosts in the front yard. 

We're ready; we'll see who shows up. 

Happy Father's Day!

Man, I lucked out.

Happy Mother's Day Mom

Happy Mother's Day!

You taught me everything, including perseverance.  

I just failed to master sewing.

Home for Easter

The red blankets as curtains because we are adults but have not yet decided how to decorate this room were a nice Easter morning touch.

But we were able to stream Easter service together here. 

We did make it out to Target to do a little Easter basket shopping the day before, where things were a little weird. There were people there, but the quiet was way too quiet.

No social distancing within the house.

And when I read a local article about limiting Easter dinner gatherings to parents and 2-3 kids at most, I wondered who on earth would be left out.  So we just didn't.