East or West, Home Is Best

This year Gavin's class has been studying the colonial period. A few weeks ago the whole fourth and fifth grade took a field trip to Plimoth Plantation near Plymouth, Massachusetts where they saw how both the early colonists and the native peoples lived. They also visited the Mayflower II.

Back at school, they hosted a colonial fair. Here Gavin is teaching visitors to play 9-pin, a typical game from the early colonial period. Elsewhere on his floor we watched people making corn husk dolls, dipping candles, and playing other games.

During another playdate a friend and I looked out in the back yard to see this:


It was fun to find a fellow mom who was thrilled rather than panicked at the site!

This Sunday, between sessions of the semiannual gathering of our faith, to the kids' delight we pulled out a tried and true Easter recipe and made bunny buns. Just enough fun and creativity to be thrilling, not so much work as to exhaust the baker behind the scenes. This just may have to be an annual General Conference tradition!

Although we had to skip the St. Patrick's Day parade, Gavin and Arwen didn't let us forget appropriate attire for the day. Arwen insisted we dig through boxes of outgrown clothes to concoct a fitting outfit. We also painted her nails green.


Today we celebrated the unseasonably warm weather with a drive through the countryside enroute to the open house of a recently returned missionary in our ward. The kids (all three of them!) had a great time selecting and skipping rocks on the pond.

Yesterday we joined several other families from the neighborhood for a St. Patrick’s Day celebration and kids fun run organized by yours truly with lots of help. The community center was all decked out for the holiday. We enjoyed performances by two 7-year-old step dancers from a local dance academy, then both learned about and listened to performances on the bagpipes by a local musician. I threw in a brief history of St. Patrick’s Day. After the entertainment the kids took to the streets, running a half-mile loop around the neighborhood. Gavin was the only one to take on the full mile version. They all came back to medals, cupcakes, and their own individual pots of gold. I think it’s safe to say a good time was had by all. I, for one, was glad when it was over!

Photo courtesy of The Day (our local newspaper). My apologies to the grandparents - I was too busy running things to snap any of our own.

In other news this week, Gavin has spent two hours each morning this week taking CMTs (Connecticut Mastery Test). His comment, “It’s cool because we get a whole bunch of stuff – gum and candy and extra recess.” This will go on for the next two weeks, then the kids get a little break.

Gavin had a great time working on his Pinewood Derby car last weekend. The experience was made even more fun when two of his friends came over with their dad to work on their cars, and only one fingernail was sacrificed to the project. (Gavin was lucky it wasn't his . . . . )

After Thursday’s temperatures in the high 50s, we were all a bit shocked to wake up to a thick blanket of snow Friday morning. Thanks to a wonderful twist of fate, we escaped the school delays of the neighboring districts, a particular relief given a noon paper deadline for my Personality class.

After having Monday and Tuesday off, Gavin and Arwen finished the week with yet another playdate thanks to an early release Friday afternoon. While they waited for friends to arrive, Gavin and Arwen grabbed the snow shovels and went at the driveway unasked. I progressively stunned, impressed, and grateful. Then I ran for the hot cocoa supplies – nothing like positive reinforcement in a moment like that!

Par for the course at this time of year: Chad and I are both fighting bugs that don’t seem to want to go away. Not par for the course: February days in the 50s when you decide it’s smarter just to ditch the coat.

For the first Saturday in many weeks, we all sat down for waffles together and enjoyed some leisurely time before taking Gavin to karate and Arwen to gymnastics. While by afternoon things were back to the usual pace, a family-centered Saturday morning goes a long way toward fueling sanity throughout the week.

In other news this week, Gavin had his annual Cub Scout Blue and Gold Banquet. What a regal affair, with a cardboard castle and stone wall-encased arena for jousters!

A couple of years ago when giving notice that he’d be out of town for the weekend due to one of our getaways, Chad was advised by a church leader that we should be staging such getaways quarterly. We took that seriously and now try to get in an overnighter sans kids in January, March, June, and August each year.

This weekend we combined our getaway with a trip to the Boston temple, snagging a bed and breakfast in Stow, not far from the homes of Louisa May Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson. While we didn’t make the time to visit either of these on this trip, we’ll definitely be staying out that direction again. The hosts of the Amerscot House Inn were possibly the most thoughtful we have encountered in our 12 years of bed and breakfasting. The 1734 inn was amazingly preserved, breakfast was amazing, and every detail of our stay was well thought out and presented. The addition of a heavy blanket of snow (the first of the season for us) made the trip especially mystical.

Many thanks to our friends who made the time fun and memorable for Gavin and Arwen too!

For the past several years I’ve chronicled our traditional Martin Luther King Day feast. This year's observance continued with the usual Southern spread, this time in the home of our friends. As we enjoyed barbecue pork, homemade mac ‘n cheese, biscuits, greens, and cole slaw, I realized that this tradition blesses us in more ways than I had before realized. Where we tend to share the traditions of the more prominent holidays with different people every year, Martin Luther King Day has become the one holiday we spend with the same members of our 'extended family' every year. As such it has come to mean more than even the magnificent cause of social justice and equality that it first represented for us.

When we moved to Connecticut four and a half years ago, the most-repeated prayer in our home was that we would find friends to share our lives with. For a few years we struggled through a series of firsts, not having anyone local with whom we shared any history or significant memories. Sitting around the table together last Monday, I saw how far we have come since that day with four years of MLK tradition and all the other moments shared with these wonderful friends. While not at that particular table, there have been many others as well, some of whom are still here and others who have already moved on. Whether our paths have crossed briefly or are marked by years of memories together, whether you are among our currently local friends or are among the many we keep in touch with across the miles, we appreciate, cherish, and forever value you as answers to our prayers.

The beginning of each new year brings for me a need to get things in order. Perhaps a bit of a reaction to the frenzy of the holidays, I look to the return to routine as an opportunity to revisit personal and family rhythms and set the stage for the new year.

The last few weeks while Gavin and Arwen have been at school and I have not have given me a chance to inventory our home storage, sift through the past few years of the kids’ school papers, and look over the calendar for the coming year. Not so exciting to chronicle, but good to have done.

With shelves refilled in the basement, a few more boxes cleared out of our library, and camping reservations made (sad experience has shown how quickly favorite spots fill up!), I could venture to say that I’m ready to start class again tomorrow. Or would that be fibbing?

Does anyone else out there feel the need to organize in the new year? What projects do you tackle? I’d love to hear about it.

As usual, the shepherds added some dramatic flair:


The next morning was a first - we actually had to wake the kids up so they could open presents before we had to leave for church. They weren't too hard to convince . . .