The In-Between Season

We are in that interesting little season between Halloween/autumn and winter/Christmas where some stalwarts purposefully put up a few sparse items in acknowledgement of Thanksgiving (I drove past a house with two blow-up turkeys the other day and even saw some brown and orange lights!), but most of us seem to be somewhere between old jack-o-lanterns still sitting on our front porches and ... fully-lit Christmas trees shining through our windows. 

I typically can't resist a strand or two of twinkly lights and a few sneak listens of Christmas songs somewhere in early November but don't get around to actual decorating until Thanksgiving weekend.

We sent Goldie a little package of pre-Christmas cheer though--lights and tiny trees, treats and pictures from the kids, etc.; and it's fun to see her eager to holiday up her little mission apartment. She's usually a hard and fast "no Christmas 'til after Thanksgiving" sort. But her first companion is getting transferred today, and she'll be training a brand-new missionary for Christmas. I wanted to send a few things to make her feel as homey and cozy as possible with all this newness during her first Christmas away from us.

(Looks like she's between holidays herself--what with the kids Halloween pictures and Christmas ones hanging side by side.)

(I thought a close-up of Jesse's Christmas Guardian [from some Nintendo game?] deserved a spot here.)

Mike is still going to be pretty heavy on work hours throughout November (well, throughout the remainder of this career actually), but they will lessen a bit in December! I got a taste of what having him around will be like last weekend when Daisy came up and sent us off to see Penny's It's a Wonderful Life (Daisy was going with several of the kids the next night), and then let us head up to the cabin for the night while she stayed behind--baking gingerbread cookies with the kids, folding laundry nobody even asked her to fold, and taking them to various places. (Best darn daughter and sister in the west!) 

It was so nice to just be with my Mike! And I'm anxious for an upcoming Christmas with Mike around a little more than he has been during the past several years' Decembers!

(After the play. We weren't allowed to take any during the performance sadly.)
 

I told Mike we needed to do some fun Christmassy things with him around next month, and so he ordered us all tickets for Peter Breinholt's Christmas concert! (Peter Breinholt always makes me feel nostalgic. We listened to him in Jerusalem all the time--especially his "Jerusalem" song; Mike took me to a small concert with Ryan Shupe and also Peter Breinholt when we were first dating; And Peter Breinholt's Noel Christmas album is one of the very first holiday CDs I bought when Mike and I got married. [I almost can't even listen to "Garten Mother's Lullaby" without crying and thinking of rocking my babies in my arms at Christmas time, and it's Peter's "I Saw Three Ships" that we turn on to celebrate each first snowfall]. My kids associate his voice so much with Christmas that if they hear one of his non-Christmassy songs during the rest of the year, ... they ask why we are listening to Christmas music.

Anyway. Here we are. Mid-November. (I placed my very first order of a few Christmas presents today.) And here are a few other pictures from this late-fall/early-winter time of year:

Anders' "Mesopotamian war strategies" project. He and his little group did it all on their own. And then we all got to come and see all the 6th-grade, Mesopotamian projects on display in the school library. There was even official voting. The girls likely would have voted for their brother's ... only ... one project was made entirely with Calico Critters. And there their votes went. Nobody could blame them. (Anders' group still got 2nd place--which he was quite pleased with.) 

I'm pretty sure I saw two ghost ducks as I drove home the other night. 

Last Sunday evening I was feeling a little heavy and discouraged. Luckily Mike was here. He took the kids down the street to feed apples to his Uncle Jodie's horses ... and then just stuck our kids, bareback, on one of his ponies!

Summer below:

Mette:

Daisy:

Hans:

Penny:

Hansie riding back home (he only just mastered bike riding this fall):

Trying to have a little family home evening.

This little turkey running in my front door after school:

I love our little bus stop and the morning ritual of walking and talking with neighbors. Did Nala finally have her puppies last night? And did all 11 survive? Do the ward boundaries really extend all the way over to the dump road? Where is Dick taking that old sway back horse to auction? And was it Becky's cows out the other day? (We laughed to hear Mike discovered cow hoof prints right outside our front door.) 

It seems like it would be a slightly better world if everyone had a fifteen-minute chat with their neighbors most mornings.

And these shows zero depth, but look at my view (first out front and then out back) just from sitting at our kitchen table. I know winters up here last long but think how pretty this will be all stretched out in white!

A Boiled Frog

This morning Starling looked at the cattails growing outside the boys' bedroom window and said, "Mom? Are those ... corndogs?" (I don't know why everyone stops at tomatoes and peaches when they might be bottling corndogs for the winter ahead—like we will be.)

In other news, I realized today that I am the poor, foolish frog gently boiling in a pot of slow-heating water. (You know what I’m talking about.) And my own husband, it must be told, is the one ever turning up the temperature! …

As you already know, Mike’s two, large, dewlap, Toulouse geese, James and Helen, now reside at the farm. (Resulting in me regularly needing to drive the kids over to get the geese watered and fed.) (While I was there on Friday, I noticed a bunch of large vehicles towards the back of the alfalfa field near the canal. I didn’t know what they were doing, but it made me nervous since, occasionally, the canal people [and who even are the canal people?] come along to clear it out and, in the process, dump mud here and there, break off enormous chunks of willow, and make an overall, careless mess of everything.) Also, Mike recently told me of a great money-making opportunity for our kids: trapping beavers for the $50 bounty on their heads! (Beavers dam up the canals around here and cause all sorts of problems.) “But,” I asked (my doubt undisguised), “would they have to be dead?”. “Oh they’d definitely have to be dead,” Mike responded. (Which caused me to wonder if he had ever even met our children.)

Anyway, today Mike and I were talking on the phone, and I mentioned that it was probably time to start doing some sort of thinking about what to get the kids for Christmas.

“We could give them goats,” Mike suggested.

“But then I’d just have to be driving to the farm to feed goats all day!” I protested.

“Well, …” he pointed out, “if you’re already there for the geese …" 

And before I could interject much of anything he continued on: "And then you may as well check a few beaver traps." 

And, sensing he'd already gone too far he figured he may as well throw in: "And while you’re at it, yell a few swear words at anyone you see messing up my canal.”

Hahahah. Oh my husband. I should have jumped out of that pot long ago (the first time he came home with a chicken probably). 

At least there is this: 

I had been worrying that all these fogs I've been loving might not stretch as far east as the farm, so Mike texted me these after driving past the farm on his way to work the other morning. Yes. At least there is that. Not a bad place for a frog to boil I suppose.

The Rest of October

We had a few mornings with no fog to speak of, so I was glad to wake to it surrounding the house in full force this morning. (Before I saw the fog, I woke to the occasional sound of a shotgun firing in the distance. I suppose guns firing in the city might mean something more alarming, but here it meant only what Mike mumbled as he rolled over in bed--still mostly asleep: "first day of the pheasant hunt". When I got out of bed earlier and saw all the thick fog I wondered how successful the pheasant hunters would find their hunt today! A little blessing for the pheasants I suppose. Oh! And that just reminded me of this funny little post I wrote over a decade ago!)

Anders came home from school like this one day. Playing four-square with a basketball. Sigh. It was for the best perhaps. He hadn't mentioned any trouble seeing, but it turns out his vision had grown much much worse since his last eye exam. Getting new glasses was like seeing the world totally fresh again. I'm a little sad for the boy to have such poor eyesight though. I'm a +1.5 and can't see well without glasses or contacts at all. He is now a +4.5! :(

Sometimes Star just asks me to come snuggle. 

A full moon.

Daisy curling the girls' hair for cousin Grace's reception.

We've been without a piano since our move! And we really can't fit one in the rental. But when Daisy came up last weekend we had her pick up a keyboard Mike had seen on ksl on her way! Just in time for Christmas music!

Daisy caught this picture of Starling watching, from the girls' room window, our first official snowflakes fall. (We won't count it as the first actual snowfall since those flakes you see were about all it was.)

And a few photos of little Cherub.

This four-year-old person will not speak to other adults. She generally won't even acknowledge anything they say. What's to be done with such a person? I sometimes marvel at how she will just quietly wait and not utter a single protest if I am talking to someone for a length of time at the grocery store or while she sits in the jog stroller. (When her siblings would have long been interrupting and moaning, "mommmmmm! mommmm!") And if I have to take her along to an appointment at a doctor's office or to the school or some such, she just sits quietly on my lap the entire time. No wiggling and running about. And yet at home she runs and yells and makes demands and chatters away. She refuses to wear anything but what she chooses or to let me do her hair. And she seems to feel that any friends of her young siblings should rightly be her best friend. Such a little person.

And of course, we can't post "the rest of October" without these pictures! Here the kids were before leaving for school on Halloween:

Mette's black hairspray stained the shoulder of her white shirt completely black by the end of the school day. And her hair itself faded enough that she said it just looked like gray hair (an old Jasmine?) so she showered (we had to wash her hair about five times) before the the evening's celebrations.

Summer (Merida from Brave) didn't have such trouble with her orange spray fading or getting on things, BUT the can quit working and would not spray when I'd only done half of her hair! With the school bus coming we had no choice but to pull part of the non orange side back a bit in hopes it would blend and shrug over her half orange hair. She was a good sport about it. 

Here they are with the bus-stop crew:

And little Hansie: always the last to board what with all his demands for one last hug and one last goodbye and so on.

Penny went to school wearing a yellow shirt with a "Hello, my name is Life" sticker on it. She carried a basket of lemons with her. And Jesse wore the tried and true Charlie Brown shirt. Sadly I didn't get a photo of them. And nothing from Daisy or my little missionary. But Abe sent a photo of how he went about campus--just as he did last year. (When I asked how it went getting the paint back off he replied, "I took a shower and looked in the mirror and promptly took another shower.")

Here some girls are all ready to trick-or-treat, only ... where would they possibly go? I certainly don't see any houses!

It was a little strange not having our same tradition for Halloween night just laid out for us! Usually the older girls walk the younger kids around to the neighbor's in our cul-de-sac, and then Mike takes them around the block while I stay to hand out candy. Then the younger, more-tired-out ones get dropped back off to me while Mike takes the rest to his mom's and then to various houses in the ward.

But out here we weren't even sure that any houses in our ward would be prepared with candy to pass out (since trick-or-treaters don't usally opt to trick-or-treat along lonesome country roads). We went to the mutli-ward trunk-or-treat ... just late enough to see the last car leave. Then we drove up to a little neighborhood of closely packed houses. It reminded me a lot of our Halloweens up in our WA neighborhood but I missed seeing familiar faces at the doors. The kids had fun though and Penny and Jesse trailed along with us to watch their siblings (and to run, unabashedly, up to the houses with bowls of candy left for people to take one from). And when that was all done, several of us stopped by the party our neighbor's were holding in their garage. I'm excited to figure out more fully what our new traditions here will be as the years go on (and I'm glad we've still got quite a few years of young trick-or-treaters to help us establish them!)

I was surprised when Starling decided, last minute, on the wolf instead of her pink princess dress! (That wolf costume, first worn by Abe, has served us well for two decades now!)

(As you can see, poor Anders had to wear his glasses like this for several days while we waited for his new ones to arrive!)

(It did seem a little sad to have nobody at all see our jack-o-lantern lit porch! But I guess the coziness was mostly really for us!)

And now I should probably start considering Christmas for all these kids of mine!