Nameless Snowstorm of October 29, 2011
Crash!
Bad luck. If only our garage doors had been working or we had parked a few inches forward...
Destructiveness of the storm aside, the contrast of autumn foliage against winter snow was quite beautiful.
Destructiveness of the storm aside, the contrast of autumn foliage against winter snow was quite beautiful.
It always cheers my heart to see a dragonfly, whether it's zipping about in the air or resting lazily on a leaf.
Here's a pretty fungus that reminds me of seashells.
Here's a fungus that reminds me of chocolate.
Here is a cup that some dumb-ass left in the woods. I wish people wouldn't do that.
Take heed, Mojo. He who sleeps in laundry basket will one day wake up in washing machine.
Zooming in at the zoo.
My first look at the boat. OMG, we have a boat!
From Third Girl
But one could not relax forever, one had to go on to the next thing. Unfortunately he had no idea what the next thing might be. Some further literary accomplishment? He thought not. Do a thing well, then leave it alone. That was his maxim.
I have not been relaxing, but I feel in many ways that it is time for me to “go on to the next thing.” I have done some things well and perhaps it is time to leave them alone.
Here are some pictures I took in 2011 that never made it into blog posts.
One day I walked into Marshall's room and this is what I found. Apparently Marshall had decided that "Dear Zoo" should not be a lift-the-flap book, and now it is not.
Sometimes the oddest things strike me as being photo-worthy. Can you guess what this is? The answer is posted in the comments.
Reading by Candlelight
The last picture is my favorite of the three. There is a story behind it. Hurricane Irene knocked out our power for a couple of days. We ate dinner outside to take advantage of the light from the setting sun. Later, with no laptops or TV, we had little to do but read, and we had no choice but to share the meager light of our candles and flashlights, so my husband and I read together for the first time in a long time. I enjoyed that night so much, I think maybe we should have a Lights-Out Night on purpose every now and again.
Christmas 2011 was Livia’s first Christmas and Marshall’s third.
We talked to Marshall about Santa Claus many times in the weeks approaching Christmas, and he learned to recognize the fat man in the red, fur-lined coat, but he still didn’t quite get the whole idea of what Christmas and Santa mean. He grasped the idea of gifts, though. As we were coming down the stairs Christmas Eve, he saw one of the presents his dad was taking out to the car and he said, “Present! Downstairs!” He was very excited.
Having mastered the art of opening gifts at his last birthday party, he eagerly tore into the pile of Christmas gifts at his vovó’s house. He got so good at it that he started opening everyone else’s gifts, too, like Vovó’s nightgowns. He was quite glad to unwrap Livia’s gifts, as well. I noticed, though, that as soon as he saw that a gift contained clothing, he would toss the clothes into the air and move on to the next thing.
Marshall ate all the butterfly-shaped crackers on the cheese-and-cracker plate. Then he asked for another butterfly, and everyone said, “Oh, he said ‘butterfly!’ How cute!” His dad told me about this later and he seemed disgusted. He said, “It wasn’t cute. He was just trying to get another cracker out of them!” It was cute, I think, but yeah, he was totally working an angle.
Marshall got a set of toy Black & Decker tools. They are impressively realistic and sturdy. Both kids were totally engrossed by them and we had silence in the house for at least half an hour Christmas morning. That makes those plastic toys worth their weight in gold!
Livia couldn’t resist the snowflake ornaments on the tree. By the time we were done opening presents on Christmas day, she had removed all of the ones that she could reach. She’d grab a snowflake, ball it up in one of her moist little hands, then run around until someone took it away from her.
My husband likes 60 Minutes, and sometimes I watch it with him. I wouldn’t necessarily consider the broadcasts memorable, but I remember Andy Rooney once saying something like this: “The good [columns] take an hour [to write]. The bad ones take weeks.”
He was so right! When I write Dear Marshall and Dear Livia posts, the ones that I like best are almost always those that seem to write themselves. Most of them are painful and slow, and sometimes I give up trying to make them good. I just post them, because if I wait too long they’ll no longer feel relevant and I’ll have to delete them. I figure that someday I’ll be happy to have all of the posts, whether poor or mediocre or excellent, because each one tells a story, not just about the children but about the whole family and our life together. So I continue to put out those Dear Marshall and Dear Livia posts, even the slow ones that probably aren’t any good.
This is my labor of love.
The year 2011 definitely had its ups and downs, but overall it was a good year. To reminisce, here is the first paragraph of my favorite post from each month.
January, from I’m Back, Sort Of
My blog completely fell apart last year. I had so many things to say about my amazing son and the baby girl who was about to join our family that I felt overwhelmed by the task. I also had a lot to do: work to finish up before maternity leave and a guest bedroom to prepare for my parents. So December passed with nothing more than the Weekly Poirot. In January, even that ceased, and on the 12th, everything else in my universe came to a screeching halt, because the baby, my beautiful Livia, arrived on the winds of a snowy winter storm.
This was only non-Poirot post for January!
February, from One Stormy Night
It was a dark and stormy night….
Livia’s birth was the landmark moment for the year. This post tells the story of her arrival.
March, from A Buffet of Books
Dear Marshall, When you were very young, we kept all of your books on a shelf in your room. We wanted them to be close at hand for spontaneous reading. After you learned to stand, you were able to reach them yourself and, as we had hoped, you started bringing the books to us to be read.
March was a decent month for the blog, so there were many posts from which to choose. I chose this one because it is one of my favorite Dear Marshall posts. There is nothing I enjoy more than reading to my children!
April, from Deathbed Confessions
It was a cold, winter night one Christmastime when I got the call. My grandfather was in the hospital and the doctors did not think he would make it through the night. I met up with my parents, and we all took the long drive north. It was near midnight when we arrived at the hospital.
I had been waiting a long time for my Muse to bring me a story about that night, so it was a great relief to finally get this post out, and that’s why it’s still a favorite.
May, from SITY: Memories of Violets
I recently wrote about ticks and how much they were ticking me off. If you read my comment on the post, you’ll see that just a quick walk in the yard garnered me another tick crawling on my leg. Yuck! I haven’t been out in the yard since, sad though that is.
It really was sad how the ticks kept us indoors for so much of the summer, and I really hope 2012 is a less ticky year. The reason I picked this post as my favorite, though, is because it has pictures of violets. I love taking and posting pictures of the beautiful things I see outside!
June, from My Moment
In Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, Amy said, PURPLE FLOWER…
This is just a post about me being silly. Gotta have one of those every once in a while.
July, from Sugar High
Dear Marshall, At your birthday party, you ate cake. You’re not used to so much sugar, and later you were acting crazy. You even kicked your sister a couple of times and we said, “He usually doesn’t act like that!” Your grandfather said, under his breath, “In sucrose veritas.” I turned to him and said, “Hey, I speak pseudo-Latin and I know what that means!” He just laughed. For the record, it means, “In sugar there is truth.” Or, to put it another way, “Sugar makes you act the way you really feel.”
Ah, the complicated relationships of siblings…
August, from Thanks
I was working in my office yesterday when my husband brought Marshall in to play for a while. I was concentrating on my work and so I didn’t pay much attention to what either of them was doing. Occasionally Marshall would grab a candle or a picture or something else that he wasn’t supposed to have. Eventually this wore down his dad’s patience, so they left. As my husband carried the boy out of the room, he said, “Sorry about the mess.”
This post is a nice little snapshot of a typical day.
September, from Wise-Bits
Trying to read (but unable to stomach) a book called Ella Mental and the Good Sense Guide convinced me that I ought to pay more attention to my own bits of hard-won wisdom. Here are three wise-bits that I learned through my own experience.
I really do hope that I’m getting wiser as I get older.
October, from Tiny Gardens
I went for a walk in our woods yesterday. The clouds swept across the hill just before I left, darkening the sky and threatening rain. The woods were dim and damp. Mushrooms abounded. A white fungus or mold blotched the trail in spots. Branches and twigs littered the path, suggesting that no one had been walking these woods since before Irene.
Here is another post with (I think) interesting pictures of the outside world. The cold weather should be keeping the ticks inactive right now, so soon I’ll be walking up in the woods again. I can’t wait to see how the tiny garden looks now!
November, from Good-Bye, October
It was a strange October. I’m not sure I will miss it. I’m going to say why, and then “Good-bye!”
Yeah, October was a bad month, but worth remembering as a learning experience.
December, from Quick Like Lightning
Dear Livia, You’re our second child, so a lot of your stuff is second-hand. Even some of your songs are. For example, I borrowed “Who’s the Cutest Baby?” from Marshall and changed it to “Who’s the Sweetest Baby?” for you.
Last but not least, a Dear Livia post. She is a beauty. So much of our attention was devoted to her this year, so it seems fitting that the last favorite post of the year be about her.
To Marshall, Livia, and Faithful Reader: thanks for making my 2011 a memorable one. I love you all so much and I’m looking forward to spending another year with you!
To the World: wishing everyone a happy, peaceful, successful 2012!
Poirot speaking to Ariadne Oliver in Third Girl:
One day you rang me up. I was in distress. Yes, I admit it, I was in distress. Something extremely painful had been said to me. You, madame were kindness itself. You cheered me, you encouraged me. You gave me a delicious tasse de chocolat.
Never underestimate the cheering power of a cup of cocoa.
Well, we made it through another year. We loved, we laughed, and just as importantly, we read. My reading tally for the year was a rather paltry 36, but I had a baby and so my reading time was once again limited. I can accept that, especially since so many of the books turned out to be good. Let’s take a closer look at what I read in 2011.
Biggest surprise: The biggest surprise is how much it bothered me to leave books unreviewed. I had resolved not to write reviews for the majority of books I read, but I found that it left me with a feeling of incompleteness, of important tasks left undone. The thing is, no matter how many times my husband tells me that he dislikes my book posts and thinks they’re a waste of time, and no matter how many times I feel like I agree with him, it still just bugs me to say nothing about my reading experiences. So in the future I resolve to write at least one sentence for each book. I will allow myself that much and demand no more.
Favorite book for the year: My favorite book this year was Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. I loved it and I gave it an A+. It was one of the richest reading experiences I have had in a while. Murray’s prose created the most vivid pictures in my mind, and he imbued the story with quite a bit of wisdom.
Book most likely to be gifted to others: I already gave James Thurber’s Many Moons to my friend K. It is a well-constructed and very sweet children’s story, just the type of thing to read when your spirits are low. I will keep it in mind as a gift for other people in the future, and I will be sure to give a copy to Livia one day. BTW, before I read it, I wasn’t expecting much from it, because some of Thurber’s stuff is only so-so. This book was very nearly the Biggest Surprise for the year.
I hope the new year brings more reading surprises and favorite books and bookish gifts!
Wishing everyone another great year of reading in 2012,
Chick
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