Cookies on the Counter. (Though there might have been a better title?)

At about 5:00 a.m. yesterday morning I heard little feet paddle quickly down the hall, past our bedroom door, and into the kitchen. A cupboard opened. Pots and pans jangled. And finally, four-year-old Starling was at my bedside--pan in hand--whimpering, "Mom, I think I'm going to throw up." 

(Dear little soul: running in the dark to find her own little throw-up pan. 😬)

She did end up throwing up once--and then fevering the rest of the day. I would have liked to have kept her snuggled safely on the couch without interruption for the whole of it, but we had to venture out a bit. (One of those ventures was to get a prescription for Mette--whose toe has been swollen, painful and infected for over a week now with no signs of improvement. And you know my slight extra-anxiousness over infections--what with my great-grandfather dying from what began as just an infected thumb, and my own horrendous post-surgery foot infection several years back and all. [I wrote a bit about those here.])

But back to the venturing out. It was bitter cold. And I don't use that "bitter cold" phrase lightly. It was probably about 25 (F), but the wind was thrashing about with such icy determination that it felt ... well, as I said: bitter, icy. Much much colder than the tolerable-sounding "25 degrees" would suggest.

And it was surprising that I had to take poor Starling out in it as, in general, it truly has been unusual for us to be venturing out this winter. Partly because of the cold, and the wet, and the thick fogs lingering till 2 and 3 in the afternoons, and the early dark. Partly because we have yet to get our kids in any instrument or other lessons up here (so there are very few places they need to be). But also because ... we have to go into town now! It's 15 minutes to get ... anywhere. Which isn't so very far really, but it used to be that running a kid to school or picking up a prescription was a matter of five or ten minutes altogether. And now it seems hard to get anywhere (and back) without planning on an hour. So we've done a lot of sticking close to home.

(Some wintry biking with the neighbors while Mike fixes our downed mailbox.)

And along with that sticking close to home, I've been doing a lot of baking. Probably not the best thing for the old waistline, but one needs some sort of treat most days (doesn't one?) and with a trip to the store feeling like such a commitment (and our finances--what with our house taking roughly one billion years to sell [more on that later]--not being particularly conducive to lots of trips to the store anyway), baking has been a regular activity. Mostly cookies. (Though cupcakes and fudge haven't been unheard of. And I did talk Daisy into making me her eclairs [declares as the kids like to call them] last weekend when she was up being wined and dined by Utah State [minus the wined part of course 😁] in an effort to win her over to their graduate program. [Whether they succeeded in winning her over or not remains to be seen.])

Part of me has felt some bits of stir craziness. I'm ready to be out exploring parks and watching the kids jump on the trampoline again. (Even my runs have been sporadic. I don't mind running in the cold, but Starling isn't so fond of being in the stroller if it's below 40 ... which it always seems to be.) But also, I'm really grateful for this ability to just be here in my own little home. 

Every once-in-a-very-rare while I think back on 23-year-old me with her little acceptance to graduate school in one hand ... and her first ever pregnancy test in the other hand. When I look back at that girl, I see that she was at the start of one of those largely diverging paths in a "choose your own ending book"--though she didn't fully know it herself at the time. And the path she didn't take? It would have been a good one. Fulfilling. And, honestly, she would have been quite good at it, I think. I can see that girl in her alternate life as a biology professor. But the path she did take? The one that, 24 years later, has her pulling a third batch of cookies from the oven for her school kids to come home to (while her little tenth child sleeps snuggled in a fuzzy red blanket on the couch)? I'm glad she took that path. Thanks, 23-year-old me, for gifting me that.