We spent Thanksgiving in Washington, D.C. with Braydon’s side of the family. Gamma came from MA, Grandpa Robert and Miss Carol came from GA, and we came from PA. We all descended upon Sabrina and Chris, who graciously volunteered to host us, for the big day. For that (their gracious hosting) we are extremely, extremely, extremely THANKFUL! (Thank you Sabrina and Chris!!!!)

We had a great time. Auntie Sabrina and Chris recently bought a house just outside of D.C., so we got to see their new place – and, even more importantly, meet Chris and his daughter for the first time – and spend the holiday soaking up time with the McCormick side of the family.

As anyone who has read this blog for long knows, the bambinos love to travel. They are real troopers in the travel department and they are always up for any trip. Every minute of our Thanksgiving was a thrill for them – from the road trip snacks, to the hotel pool, to exploring Auntie Sabrina’s new digs. Seriously, they are lovers of adventure. And every trip is an adventure. Each one is an experience that pulls us tighter and brings us closer. Despite the loss of desperately needed naps (Meera), and the loss of desperately needed routine (Kyle and Owen), our kids are able to fully engage in, and appreciate, the life of a trip. They are good travelers. And for that we are THANKFUL.

Sabrina and Chris live in a lovely little neighborhood. We enjoyed our walk to their sweet neighborhood playground (where the boys proceeded to freak out everyone with their crazy swing stunts). And Sabrina and Chris fed us very well for the entire Thanksgiving Day (they didn’t just do Thanksgiving dinner, but a huge pancake breakfast too!). There was football (on the t.v. and in the yard), and parades (on the t.v. and one we attempted to go to in real life, but failed miserably at!), a cranberry jelly contest (still not sure who won that one), and a pumpkin pie contest (still not sure who won that one either). The bambinos got a lot of quality time with Papi’s side of the family. Thanksgiving 2011: it was, as the old saying goes, as good as it gets. And for that we are THANKFUL.

The day after Thanksgiving we all went to the National Zoo. None of us had been there before. It was great fun. And it was a magnificent warm November day for being outside together. And for that we are THANKFUL.

We spent Thanksgiving in D.C. two years ago too. We stayed in the same hotel this year as we did then. Check out this comparison! (These photos were taken waiting for the elevator in the hall outside our hotel room):

Thanksgiving 2009                         *                         Thanksgiving 2011

Man! How quickly they change! Some things don’t change all that much, though— I remember in ‘09 the bambinos were sort of obsessed with this lion sculpture that stood out front of the hotel. They were again this year too:

Grandpa Robert was snapping photos the whole time we were in D.C. (which gave us the luxury of not having to be The Family Photographers). For that we are THANKFUL! Here are a bunch of the photos from Grandpa Robert’s Thanksgiving camera (it is always so interesting to see what someone else captures!):

It was a very happy Thanksgiving 2011!

Last weekend our dear friend Beth (my oldest BFF and Meera’s Godmother) came to visit. We had such a nice weekend hanging out with her. But perhaps the loveliest thing of all (at least, for me) was that on Saturday morning, we woke up to our whole house smelling of something deliciously buttery breakfasty. It was a total surprise.

Imagine… having a weekend house guest who gets up before you do to bake something special for you?!! It was seriously one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for me. Us five J-Ms tip-toed downstairs (it felt like Christmas morning!) to find Beth, in our kitchen, with beautiful Cranberry Chocolate Chip Scones, straight from the oven. She had brought all the ingredients, woken up early, and made these for us. Loveliness. Loveliness. Loveliness. We drank coffee and orange juice, and savored every bite of these surprise scones. It has only been 3 days since Beth left, and I’ve already made another batch of these. Owen can’t get enough of them. They are delicious!

These scones would be a perfect treat to give as a little holiday gift to friends, neighbors, teachers, or friends. They’d make a great hostess gift, a sweet contribution to just about any gathering, or a nice addition to a get together for coffee/tea. If you’ll be hosting guests this holiday season, these would be lovely on your weekend breakfast menu. Or, you could do like Beth did and really make your hosts’ weekend by getting up early and baking them in the kitchen of those you’re visiting!

Beth’s Amazing Cranberry Chocolate Chip Scones

• 2 cups white flour
• 1/2 cup wheat flour
• 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 3/4 cup salted butter, softened

Cut together/mix the above ingredients with pastry cutter until well mixed. Then blend the following into the dough:

• 1 cup coarsely chopped dried cranberries
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup mini chocolate chips
• 3/4 cup buttermilk

Split dough in half. Press each half into an 8 inch circle. Cut each circle into 8 wedges. Sprinkle with sugar. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet at 375 degrees for 14 minutes. Cool on wire rack.

Right up there, on the long, long, loooooong list of things we J-Ms are thankful for, is adoption. As each year goes by, we truly become more and more grateful for the gift and miracle that adoption is in our life. November is National Adoption Awareness Month. In the spirit of thankfulness, we here at Never-A-Dull-Moment-Blog are going to devote next week to some special posts on adoption. Get ready for some long-time-coming posts on one of our favorite topics! In the meantime… we’re eating some turkey and pumpkin pie!

1. Meera’s 3rd Birthday: A Fancy Pink Tea Party

2. Twinny Back To School Shopping… and On Being Conspicuous

3. Meera Goes To School

4. Travel– Christmas in NH (see #7 below); New Year’s Eve in CT; Adoption Day Weekend in Baltimore; Anguilla (and here, and here); Easter in MA; Vacation in the Lowcountry (1 of 3, 2 of 3, 3 of 3; and here); Haiti Reunion 2011; Visit to Auntie Stina’s House in Maine; NH Summer Trip (and the photos: 1 of 3, 2 of 3, 3 of 3); 10th Anniversary Trip to Finger Lakes (for Mommy & Papi); and daytrips to New York City (for the day before K & O’s birthday), Baltimore (for Palm Sunday)…and… a daytrip that totally flopped… Our Day at the Jersey Shore!

5. Food– The Swap; Getting Young Kids to Eat Fruits & Veggies; Snacks in Muffin Tins; and lots of other posts, such as this one (Best Margarita Recipe Ever!); this one (Salsa and Queso!); this one (A Super Easy Tasty Dinner); this one (A Really Nice Summer Supper); this one (a Comfy Cozy Fall Supper); and this one (Soup & Salad with a Thai Twist), etc!

6. Posts about Dual Career / Striking the Work-Home Imbalance– Life in the Fast Lane (AKA Our Triannual Crunch); One Heck of a Day; The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Redux; Rough Spots

7. J-M Family Christmas 2010 (multiple posts, including 1 of 3; 2 of 3; 3 of 3; Skiing; Christmas Morning; and Epilogue)

8. Posts re: 2011 = The Year We Began Our J-M “First Fridays” & The Year We Fully Caved Into Organized Sports for K & O

9. Summer 2011 J-M To Do List

10. Honorable Mention– It is in the Stringing Together of Moments; “Essence” (Satisfactorily Captured); Earthquake Aftershocks; The Sociology of Gendered Masculinity; Purple Polish; Work Hard, Play Hard, and Chillax; Easter Haiku; (Snowy) Halloween 2011

Heather is out interviewing candidates for the department, so I am home with the three. Tonight I asked the boys to help get Meera ready (thinking it would be more hassle, but a good exercise), and they did great – totally brushed her teeth, washed her face, then got her PJ’s on.  Unbelievably amazing.

While getting Meera’s PJ’s on, I overheard this little conversation:

Meera:  Owen, what are you going to be when you grow up?

Owen: A spaceman. What are you going to be?

Meera: A pony rider.

 Owen: Oh!

This fall we celebrate our 5th Blogiversary! Can you believe it? FIVE YEARS OF BLOGGING from never-a-dull-moment-land!?! My biggest blogging regret is that we didn’t start sooner. I wish we had started when we started our adoption process, so that we could have chronicled those early phases of our family’s life. But alas, we were too tired to blog back then (oh, and also, there’s that other tiny detail: most people had never even heard of “blogging” back then). Anyhow…  here we are. Five years in. And I want to say: thank you for reading.

I also want to ask – in keeping with tradition – will you please take a minute to tell us your favorite post from here of this past year? One of my favorites is this one: “Getting Young Kids to Eat Fruits & Veggies.” (Photo above = the bambinos’ favorite fall fruit “dip”– vanilla yogurt drizzled with honey.)

If you’ve read here over the past year, please, share with us your favorites! We’d so greatly appreciate it. You can leave it in the comments here, or you can email it.

Love and thanks going out to the blogosphere to all of you, our dear readers!

Here’s what they are up to lately: they both sit down at the piano bench and, immersed in total concentration and complete sincerity, they – together – play out a complex piece of impromptu piano music. They make it up, entirely on the fly, without ever once glancing at each other, and without uttering a word. The music ebbs and flows – somehow effortlessly – between quiet and loud, slow and fast, soft and hard, gentle and dramatic. It, at once, seems to have no structure and yet be fully structurally intact. The whole time they are playing they are recording their performance on one of their iPods. The pieces range in the vicinity of 8-12 minutes. In their view it seems that the longer the better. When they are done playing the piece on the piano (how they know when they will both, in unison, end it, I’ll never know), they then, gratifyingly, play their recording back to themselves, listening intently (and making anyone else who will listen listen too). And then they run back to the piano bench to do it all again. And again. And again. And again.

Between the “terrible three’s” (since it seems to happen at three for us and not two) and having a cold, cough and ear infection, Meera has been visting Tantrum city regularly. Owen expressed it perfectly. Translation below.

For Meera

You drive us nuts… but we

Still Love [you] like baby cake[s]

I will read you a book!

Love, Owen

And that’s exactly what he did after dinner; went up stairs, and after getting ready for bed, read her The Berenstain Bears: Thunderbolt

Left: Owen’s proclamation on scrap paper— “cool craft table. but if you make a big mess you have to clean it all up. so you be careful.” Right: the craft table, after I made them clean it all up last night (Owen’s proclamation carefully placed front and center for all to see)

Thursday night my graduate seminar was devoted to discussing Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The students always dread the assignment when I give it: read the whole thing, cover-to-cover, every-single-word-please, in two weeks, and then be ready to discuss in depth, no-holds-barred. But they usually thank me later (sometimes much much later). It is hard work to read that book. But the pay-off is well worth it. This time around, there was a new spin to the discussion as we talked a lot about analogies that can be drawn between the “work hard, play hard” motto of certain spheres of life today and the cultural ethos that Weber articulates in The Protestant Ethic. It was an interesting discussion, and it got me thinking, again, about the “work hard, play hard” mentality.

However, on my drive home that night, after stopping to pick up a prescription for Meera (another ear infection), and a load of groceries (to prepare for a weekend at home with my hungry boys), and knowing I was going to get home long after my bambinos were in bed, I was thinking only of how to ensure that my family could properly unwind from the work hard week we had just experienced.

It was a killer week. Of the week-nights last week, I was not home in time for dinner once. Not once. I had work meetings-events-dinners-classes that ran late on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It is not often that my work schedule is this insane, but lately it has been. And it takes a lot out of me (and Braydon; and the kids). It isn’t just the missed time at the dinner table… it is also the coordinating, and planning, and strategizing that is required to pull it off (the scheming on the part of Braydon and I, just to make a week like that possible, is unbelievably involved). It takes a lot of work – on the part of all five of us – to get through a killer week like that. By Friday, we were all done with working so hard, and were more than ready to play.

The motto “work hard, play hard” was big at Colby while Braydon and I were in college there. And it is big, now, at Lehigh (and lots of other places) too. I’ve posted before about it (click here, for three examples), and I’ll probably post again about it too. The thing I’m thinking about today, though, is the piece that is missing from the balance. Amidst all the hard work and hard play, I think that people like me (and families like ours) often neglect the critical importance of total down time. In arenas of ambitious people and in cultures of drive-for-success (and let’s be clear: I’m not just talking about financial success, I’m talking about cultures of drive-for-success very broadly defined), due respect is not paid to the art of chillaxing (as K & O are fond of calling it). Whether you’re a student (or professor) at a top-tier university, or a worker in an NGO or non-profit, or climbing the corporate ladder, or a missionary in the field… chillaxing is not (generally) encouraged. 

chillax: (verb) (intransitive, slang) Etymology: blend of chill out and relax. Pronunciation: chĭlăksʹ. Definition: to relax; to be laid back; to calm down.

What I’ve come to believe is that in the ‘work-life balance’ of “work hard, play hard,” to chillax is just as important as to play hard. In the balance has to hang not just the duo of work-and-play, but the perfect trifecta of the three: work-play-chillax. And so… after a killer week (work)… along with the First Friday (play), there must also be time purposefully devoted to sitting on the couch and watching a movie and cuddling with the kittens (chillax).

Left: Meera and Mommy had a rockin’ night on the town Friday for our First Friday (she insisted that we go back to the same place we went last time— the “chips and salsa and queso restaurant,” and given my own love of that perfect trifecta, there was no way I was going to insist on otherwise). Right: Owen, Hudson, and Quinn chillax. 

SATURDAY: After a long work hard week, there’s not much that we enjoy more in the fall than blowing off some steam at a Lehigh football game. This is play hard at its best!

(Lehigh played Georgetown, and beat them badly, winning the Patriot League Championship)

But then, when we came home from the game, all pink-cheeked and wind-burned from being outside all day, it was time for purposeful and devoted time to chillax. After a play hard day, our chillaxing evening was dinner (Middle Eastern Beef Stew from the crock pot!) and a movie (Joseph: King of Dreams!) and kitten love—

SUNDAY: And amidst a Sunday morning devoted to some pretty serious yard work (note— this is simply work hard for Braydon; this is also play hard for K & O)—

It is just as important to chillax with a hot-chocolate-picnic break—

If taken in moderation, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with hot-chocolate-and-marshmallows-and-store-bought-ginger-snap-cookies (even when they are non-organic and probably laden with all sorts of evil things). In fact, if enjoyed on blankets in the yard together with your family on a Sunday, hot-chocolate-and-marshmallows-and-store-bought-ginger-snap-cookies are pretty dang good. And despite all the mega-bombardment with research articles and expert opinion and media coverage (isn’t that ironic) telling us how terrible “screens” are for our children (and yes, of course, to some degree screens certainly must be terrible), I’m going to force myself to not feel any mother-guilt whatsoever about the fact that quite regularly, on a Saturday afternoon, I’ll forcefully tell my kids (Kyle and Owen especially) that it is time for a “Mandatory Movie.” It is not unusual for us to drag them in from the non-stop-sports-in-the-yard to make them take off their sneakers and “sit on the couch and watch something!!!” I’m not going to feel bad about that, because it is part of the work-play-chillax balance that I’m conscientiously trying to instill.

And so, after all this time (20 years for Braydon and I) of thinking about “work hard, play hard,” I’m now officially changing our own family’s take on this motto to: “work hard, play hard, and chillax.” And now, we move on to another work hard week.

It is a good thing that it is almost Thanksgiving, because here in the J-M-home we are just about all-pumpkined-out. It has been a lot of pumpkin this fall! What started out as a long-held pumpkin obsession on the part of Kyle, has somehow morphed into a pumpkin obsession on the part of all 3 bambinos. In the end, even Meera became pumpkin crazed (thanks to the glazed “cookies” pictured above). Here are 3 of our favorites from this fall season:

1. Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting! This recipe came from a blog reader, Kendall, who gave us her mom’s amazing cupcake recipe in response to my blog post asking for pumpkin recipes. Thank you Kendall!!! I chose to try her recipe because it looked super easy. And it was! I had made the cheater-box-mix-add-can-of-pumpkin recipes in the past… and they were alright… but this version is an amped up one (more added ingredients, but still cheater/easy)… and let me tell you: THEY ARE GREAT!!! Super moist and delicious, and of course anything with cream cheese frosting is sooooo goooooood! I made these just before Halloween when my parents were coming to visit. Everyone loved them! Kendall’s Mom’s recipe for Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing can be found at the bottom of this post.

2. Iced Pumpkin Cookies! One day earlier this fall, the boys each came home from a school bake sale with a zip-loc bag containing “pumpkin cookies.” I put this in quotes because these are actually some sort of crazy-delicious cross between cookies-&-scones-&-muffin-tops. Kyle and Owen had already sampled them on the bus ride home, and were declaring that these were the “best cookies in the whole wide world!” These things were so precious to them that they only let me taste one tiny bite each. But that tiny bite was enough for me to know that these things were indeed something extra special. Through a lengthy interrogation process I was finally able to discern from them who had brought these cookies to the bake sale. I contacted the girl’s mother and asked for the recipe, which she told me she had made on a whim after finding it on the internet. I’ve copied and pasted the recipe below. But, here’s the original link: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/iced-pumpkin-cookies/detail.aspx. Last Friday, Owen and I doubled the recipe to have these cookies on hand for the weekend of Maggie and Eric’s visit. I am not kidding when I say that the entire FIVE DOZEN “Iced Pumpkin Cookies” were completely gone by Monday morning. I have fond memories of Maggie and Eric eating them for breakfast with their coffee, Kyle and Owen eating them for dessert after dinner, and Meera eating them allll daaaaay loooooong. Seriously… best pumpkin “cookies” ever!

3. Spinach Salad with Warm Squash! Last, but not least… have you tried the Spinach Salad with Warm Squash recipe that I posted last December? If not, for the love of squash, try it!!! Braydon and I had this for dinner one night last week and we were reminded of just how really, really, really good it is!!!

Kendall’s Mom’s Recipe for Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting:

One yellow cake mix
3 eggs
1/2 cup oil or substitute 1/2 cup apple sauce
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 can pumpkin (20 oz)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Blend all ingredients, fill paper lined muffin cups (24 regular, 100 mini) 2/3 full. Bake for 15 minutes. Cool, then frost with icing.

Frosting–
one 3 ounce package of cream cheese
3/4 cup butter softened
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon milk
2 cups powdered sugar

Cream together butter and cream cheese. Beat in vanilla and milk, gradually add powdered sugar until frosting is desired consistency.

Iced Pumpkin Cookies:

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 1 cup canned pumpkin puree
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups confectioners’ sugar
• 3 tablespoons milk
• 1 tablespoon melted butter
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, ground cloves, and salt; set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, cream together the 1/2 cup of butter and white sugar. Add pumpkin, egg, and 1 teaspoon vanilla to butter mixture, and beat until creamy. Mix in dry ingredients. Drop on cookie sheet by tablespoonfuls; flatten slightly.
3. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes in the preheated oven. Cool cookies, then drizzle glaze with fork.
4. To Make Glaze: Combine confectioners’ sugar, milk, 1 tablespoon melted butter, and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Add milk as needed, to achieve drizzling consistency.

Maggie and Eric came to visit us for the weekend. They came all the way from Wisconsin. They flew in, and then blew us all away with their sweetness, lightness, and loveliness. Maggie was a very favorite (and best) student of mine at Lehigh (both BA and MA). We’re still in close contact (both personally and professionally). Eric is her adorable and wonderful fiancé. They are both PhD students, writing their dissertations. They are getting married this summer. I’m officiating! We can’t wait for our big trip to Colorado for their wedding!!!

(Some other blog posts where Maggie is mentioned: Maggie gets into her PhD program!; I say “hi” to Maggie re: kid-centered-qualitative-methodology!; We see Maggie in Atlanta at a Sociology conference!)

Favorite memories of the weekend included:

• Friday night “grown-ups”-only dinner out (K, O, M at home with babysitter) with deep conversation about the joys and challenges of weddings, marriages, dual-career unions, and lives-worth-living.
• The quick-as-a-flash profound-life-lasting-bonding between Maggie-Eric-K-O-M on Saturday morning (within 10 minutes of meeting after waking, K & O were playing iPad soccer with Eric on the bed in the guest room, while Maggie painted Meera’s nails)!
• Maggie and Mommy bring Meera to ballet! (an experience in ethnographic observation for Maggie!!!)
• Eric, Papi, and the boys play football in the yard! (we know how to wear out our weekend guests!!!)
• Our dear Greg (another favorite past Lehigh student of mine) joining us for the bulk of Saturday!
• Tailgating! Eric could barely eat/drink because the boys monopolized him in the parking lot throwing the football. Maggie had Meera stealing the cream cheese off her bagel. Greg couldn’t go five minutes without Meera attacking him with cuddly snuggles. Still, lotsa laughs and lotsa fun.
• Lehigh vs. Holy Cross football (Lehigh won).
• Spy Kids with queso dip and salsa.
• A couple rounds of competitive Uno, vegetarian chili, and cornbread for dinner (sour cream on Maggie’s hand, LICKED off by Meera)!
• Late night male bonding: Eric and Braydon do “Nerds shots” with “KitKat chasers” (don’t even ask)!
• More football in the yard, bright and early, Sunday morning.

We had a good time. I am so proud of Maggie. And I could not have chosen a better guy for her. We had such a truly fabulous weekend together! I know, I know, I’m gushing… but really… Gosh, we love these two!

And Greg… gosh, we love him too! [Greg: WE LOVE YOU!]

P.S. “Dear Maggie and Eric: Thank you for coming to visit. We can’t wait for the wedding in Colorado. Thank you for the football. Thank you for the water bottle. Thank you for playing with us. Love, Kyle, Owen, and Meera.”

P.P.S. Dear Maggie & Eric: FYI—after you left, they continued to stay glued to the football (“a championship football!!!!”) and the water bottle, respectively. Just a small sign of their love for you. Thanks for coming to visit! We miss you! Love, Heather and Braydon

When Kyle and Owen were 3 (and younger), we’d often feed them dinner early, get them to bed, and then Braydon and I would eat later. After a long day of work/school/daycare, it is hard (sometimes impossible) for a 3-year-old to wait for dinner. Meera, just like Kyle and Owen when they were her age, is often hungry/cranky/whiney by 5:30. But, unlike when Kyle and Owen were her age, she doesn’t have the rest of the family catering to her schedule and working our lives around hers. So, pretty often, Meera will stand on a stool at the counter by the stove while I cook, eating a “Pre-Dinner Dinner” of her own. I’ll often give her whatever is already ready (some rice from the rice steamer, or some plain pasta that’s just come out of the pot), and she’ll eat that and some raw veggies (that haven’t been cooked for dinner yet). This will usually completely ruin her appetite for dinner. But it helps keep everyone sane. Then she’ll often play in her little “kitchen” right next to our dining table while the rest of us eat dinner.

Halloween 2011 was, by far, the weirdest Halloween of my life. Just to reiterate: it was the weirdest Halloween of my life. Two days before Halloween, in an unprecedented record-breaking-early freak nor’easter, it snowed 8+ inches here in Pennsylvania. That is weird (especially given that we’ll sometimes have whole winters go by in which we never have a storm that big – let alone in October). My parents were visiting, making a 5-day-“long weekend”-of-Halloween, and the storm effectively wiped out nearly every single plan that I had devised. It became, for example, our first year ever to not go to Traugers Farm pre-Halloween (breaking these sorts of traditional rituals is not easy for me). The hayride was cancelled— a sleigh ride would have been more appropriate. The school Halloween party was cancelled (because school was cancelled). But there we were, digging our pumpkins out from under the snow drifts. It was hard for me wrap my mind around how to proceed with a snowy Halloween. It felt more like Christmas. Except that trees were falling down all around us, power outages were surrounding us (amazingly, we were somehow spared), we had to frantically dig our winter boots out from storage, and the whole world seemed to be going berserk. Adding to the drama, Lehigh was shut down (for the first time ever in my 10 years there classes were cancelled—and for three days in a row no less!—the campus just re-opened today); neighbors have been filling water jugs from our faucets and taking showers in our bathrooms; and both Kyle and Meera have been sick (and are now on all sorts of meds for pretty serious head/sinus/ear/throat/respiratory infections). Blah. Humbug.

Now that I’ve had a couple of days to step back from it, I can see that it was not a bad Halloween. It was just a weird Halloween. Given that preamble… here are our Top Ten Highlights from Halloween 2011:

1. The Snow. Yes, it has to be on the list. It is what made Halloween 2011 the unique (weird) experience that it was.

2.  MorMor & MorFar were with us. When all heck broke loose, they did what they do best: they were our anchors in the storm. They went to the grocery store, stocked up, and then cooked us a full blown roasted chicken dinner, complete with stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, about 50 different vegetables, apple pie and ice cream. While this definitely added to the Thanksgiving/Christmas-esque ambiance (and contributed to the difficulty in trying to be in the Halloween spirit), it was most definitely fully appreciated by 5 J-Ms who don’t usually get to eat that kind of a meal (what a treat!!!). And the leftovers from that meal fed us for the rest of our snow-bound days (including an awesome chicken-and-rice soup that MorMor made for Halloween night). They also played several rounds of Uno with us by the fire while the snow poured down; MorFar helped us shovel out; MorMor did about 1,000 loads of laundry; MorFar played baseball with the boys in the midst of a nor’easter (no joke! God love him!); MorMor read 12 Berenstein Bears books in a row to Kyle (no joke! God love her!); MorFar roasted pumpkin seeds; MorMor made “Jack-o-lantern Jars” with Meera and me (see photo at top); they both witnessed us at our very worst (and somehow made us feel not-so-bad about it); gorged on Halloween candy with us; they laughed with us (and at us); and they were – as usual – our tried and true most beloved and steady companions on this crazy-journey-in-Never-A-Dull-Moment-land. This picture doesn’t do them justice, but I love it nonetheless:

3. Meera’s Daycare Parade. On Friday, before all heck broke lose, when things were proceeding along as planned, Meera had her First Ever School Halloween Event. MorMor and I had the pleasure and privilege of cheering her and her friends on at their daycare “Parade.” Meera was so cute.

4. Kyle and Owen’s School “Show.” Also on Friday, before the freak snowstorm and aftermath, we all attended a potluck “Dinner and Show” at Kyle and Owen’s classroom. Their 1st/2nd grade class put on a performance of some “book adaptations” that they had been working very hard on all fall. It was very endearing, and just a tad bit amusing, and we (adults) worked hard to take them (the kids’) oh-so-seriously. It was a special Friday Night Out. Afterwards, K & O got to stay up until midnight watching Game 7 of the World Series with MorFar and Papi (that was a high of their life-to-date)!!!!!!!!

5. The Carving of Jack-o-Lanterns. I don’t care how hard it snows, we will never abandon that Halloween tradition.

6. 3 Skeletons! They insisted early on in the costume-discussions that they all wanted to be “the same.” After weeks and weeks of deliberations and negotiations the three of them finally settled on “glow in the dark skeletons.” By the grace of God I was able to make that vision come true (thanks to Chasing Fireflies).

7. 2 Pumpkins! Hudson and Quinn in costume:

8. Trick-or-Treating (in the snow).

9. The Loot. Yeah, they gave it right up (see #10), but for the 24 hours that they kept it, they delighted in it. Just the thrill of having it is… just such a thrill.

10. The Candy Witch. Oh dear God. The Candy Witch strikes again. Seriously? This kills me. After all the Halloween hoop-la, I then I have to go work my magic as The Candy Witch. As if Santa, The Easter Bunny, and The Tooth Fairy weren’t enough. But, once again, much to my chagrin, they insisted on the whole Candy Witch thing, and were absolutely dead-set against keeping their candy. And so, when they adamantly declared that they were “leaving all the candy for The Candy Witch,” I was left with no other option (I mean, unless I wanted to break their three little spirits)… and so, despite snow and ice and everything else, our Halloween graciously ended with a jolly old visit from The Candy Witch herself (turns out she flies through the night, even over snow banks!).

Last night, as I took down the Halloween decorations from our house, and stored them back in their boxes in the basement, I was glad to have Halloween 2011 behind me. All is well that ends well. But really, it was weird. And now we head into the hard-core holiday season. (I have mixed emotions about that fact… oh the mother-load-of-work-the-holiday-season-is… I’m looking down the pike with genuine excitement mixed with sincere fear and trepidation.) Hopefully Thanksgiving and Christmas will be less weird than Halloween was. We can only hope.

Over and out!