Uncategorized

1. Everyone always loves the quotes! Quotes! & Quotes! Can’t get enough of the quotes!
2. Travel posts, especially Disney [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3], but also other big trips this year~~Thanksgiving in DC; Christmas in NH; New Year’s Eve in CT; Easter in MA; Dominican Republic; Maine for Auntie Stina’s Wedding; Haiti Reunion 2010; NH Summer 2010; Atlanta; Camping in Our Own Backyard; Boston; and many other fabulous day-trips such as Adoption Day 2010; A Day at the Beach; Meera’s First Trip to NYC; A Very Fun Summer Day Trip
3. Heather’s posts on work-home “imbalance,” especially On Princeton and Panties; Continuing Onward In My Existential Crisis; The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
4. Braydon’s profound and poetic posts, especially Mommy Do; A Calm Sea, Currents Run Deep; “Or Whoever He Is”
5. Holding You
6. Big Brothers and Little Sister
7. Posts in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, especially In the Wake of the Earthquake & Haitian Through and Through
8. Meera’s 2nd Birthday & the video from the night before, “On the Eve of Meera’s Second Birthday”
9. Food posts! Especially The Start of The Swap & Food Fridays
10. Honorable Mention~~ Meera’s Necklaces; Horses At the Car; Completely Crazy Stunts; Perfect; The Week Ends, The Weekend Begins; K & O Grocery Shop!

Wowzas! We’ve got our work cut out for us with the blogiversary blogging we’ve got on the horizon! Just compiling the Top Ten List from the past year will take a big chunk of time. And then there are all those questions! Thanks to all of you who commented and emailed! We have the best blog readers ever! I have to be honest with you, the blogging might be slow in the few days to come. We will get it all out there. But it is just going to take a little while. We’ve got MorMor and MorFar arriving tonight for our Thanksgiving Week (yay!!!!!!). And we’ve got a lot going on here with some big happenings on multiple fronts (which will be blogged about soon). So, I guess this is just to say: THANK YOU! & We’re already composing our answers to your questions (if only in our minds and conversations). Lots of love going out from the J-Ms to our readers!!!!

Never did we think our blogging would evolve to what it has become! Crazy, crazy, crazy, but we’ve been blog-blog-blogging for FOUR years now! I’m posting this late (technically our blogiversary was in October), but, don’t worry, we did not forget…

Let me tell you friends, to celebrate this year we’re going all out!!!!

We’re giving you what [lots of] you have been asking for: OPEN BOOK 2010!

&

We’re asking you for something in return: Our Readers’ Favorite Posts From Our FOURTH Year of Blogging!

This is how it works: Ask us anything (anything!) you want to know, and we’ll try our best to answer every question. Leave your question here in the comments. In return, along with your question, please answer our question to you: What was your favorite J-M blog post from this past year? Any post from November 2009 – today qualifies.

So, 1) leave your question, and 2) leave your favorite post!

Deadline = Sunday, November 21, 12:00 noon EST

Please join in on this! I have to admit that I’m nervous nobody will play along this time around. We see our site stats, so we know that hundreds of people are reading everyday, but we have lots of readers who rarely-or-never comment. Please chime in??!!

{P.S. re: Open Book~~  We’ve done this twice before: first, in August of 2007, then again in August of 2008 (browse the archives on the right sidebar if you want to check those out). Re: Readers’ Favorite Posts~~ We’ve done this every year of our blogging (click here).}

My Dear Three Bambinos,

I’ve been a mother now for six Halloweens. Hands down, the six best Halloweens of my life. And I have great memories of the Halloweens of my own childhood, so that really tells you a lot about how great our Halloweens have been. My parents were big on tradition. As you know (probably all too well!), I am too. And so, our J-M Halloween traditions are a sturdy combination of those passed along from my own childhood, and the traditions we have created ourselves. I’m sure when you look back on these years you’ll have your own memories of your Halloweens as a kid. But this post is a little reminder –from my perspective here and now— of our mainstay Halloween traditions during your childhood.

Tradition #1: Halloween afternoon, carving jack-o-lanterns. You dig out the pumpkins, draw on the faces, and we help you carve them out as best we can!

(And just so you don’t think that my rose-colored glasses never come off… here’s a gem of a non-rosy moment from this year’s carving session: the fun-of-it-all veered off in a bad way at one point when Meera took it upon herself to use the marker as “chapstick,” and right at that same time Kyle broke down crying in utter frustration because he couldn’t figure out how to make his pumpkin’s mouth look “scary” enough. We very quickly got right back on track with the good-and-happy… but this is just a reminder that, no, it wasn’t all perfect. And it never is, of course. But, not perfect is just perfect, as far as I’m concerned.) 

Tradition #2: Roasted pumpkin seeds.

Tradition #3: Carrots for dinner (so that while trick-or-treating you can “see better in the dark”… this is a tradition begun entirely by Kyle and Owen… and it has stuck) –along with whatever else we can get you to eat amidst all the excitement (this year it was mac-n-cheese).

Tradition #4: Get into costumes! And head outside to light the jack-o-lanterns!

Tradition #5: Just one posed photo! (Thank you for putting up with it!)

This was Meera’s first “real” Halloween where she fully had a grasp on what was going on. You only have your two-year-old Halloween once. Thankfully, this was a great Halloween and Meera loved every minute!

Tradition #6: Trick-or-treating of course! Here you three are, heading out. Our neighborhood is wonderful for trick-or-treating! MorMor and MorFar have been coming for Halloween every-other-year (rotating with Sadie). This year they weren’t with us, so Mommy and Papi take turns trick-or-treating with you and staying home to give out candy.

Our house on Halloween night:

Tradition #7: At the end of the night, dumping out all of your loot and checking out what you got! The truth is, you don’t really like any of the stuff very much. But it is still super-exciting just to have it all! And we pretty much let you eat whatever you want (which isn’t much). But it is quite a thrill to have that sort of candy-eating-freedom!

Tradition #8: The Candy Witch. For our family this tradition began last year. And, completely 100% initiated by K & O, it has stuck again for this year (and I’m guessing for maybe many years into the future???). It sort of blows my mind that you three would be willing to dump out all of your trick-or-treating candy into our big basket of whatever-is-left-from-what-we-gave-out and then give it all away to The Candy Witch. But, you do it. And you do it completely voluntarily (seriously! this isn’t something that I would necessarily choose to do!). And you believe. Oh, how you believe! So, tonight, after less than 24 hours with your trick-or-treat loot, you left it all in a basket by the front door. And you went to sleep with pure faith that The Candy Witch would come and leave you something in return. So, you won’t have any idea it happened, but tomorrow my Sociology of Education students will receive a big bag of Halloween candy in class (!), and several hours before that happens, when you three bambinos wake up, you will run downstairs to find this awaiting you at the front door (among other things, K & O will be thrilled to find the digital clocks for their rooms… something for which they’ve been asking for quite a long time now):

I had to take this (photo below) picture last night, just as we were heading out of our driveway to trick-or-treat, of these five tall trees on the edge of our yard. When Papi and I first looked at this house with the realtor, before any of you were even born, one of the things that sold us on it were those five trees. We love them. Little did we know that we’d end up being a family of five. Those trees remind me of us five now… growing strong, rooted in real and meaningful traditions. I hope that as the years unfold you’ll question most all of life, but that you three will never question the depths or the heights of our love for you.

Love, Mommy (and Papi) 

Halloween 2010. The costumes were in the works weeks and weeks before today arrived. By mid-August, Kyle and Owen had already decided that they were going to be Toussaint L’Ouverture (legendary leader of the Haitian Revolution), and there was no going back. We have always given them a slow and steady stream of information regarding all-things-Haiti, but in the past couple months they’ve been learning quite a lot about –specifically— early Haitian History (thanks, mostly, to Braydon, who, over the past several years, has educated himself quite well on the subject). And, of course, like any good-history-buff-young-Haitian-American-boys… Kyle and Owen are absolutely enamored with the stories of Toussaint L’Ouverture. (They particularly like the fact that he carries a huge sword). It was originally Kyle’s idea to be “Toussaint” for Halloween. Owen quickly jumped on board. (At least, as of now, they’d never ever even consider being two different things for Halloween). So, Toussint L’Ouverture (x2) it was. I must admit, I got a little nervous about how on earth I was going to make that costume happen (x2!!!). But, in the end, the boys were beyond thrilled with the close resemblance (particularly the swords!!!), and I was really pleased with how it all came out (thanks to a little online shopping and my trusty hot glue gun). Here’s the most famous image of L’Ouverture…

…and here’s K & O (pretty good, huh?!)…

And Meera. Well, given her adoration of all-things-Lion-King, it only made sense to use the hand-me-down Lion costume from the Halloween when K & O were two years old. Meera was thrilled with the idea of being Lion King (or, in her words, “Li Li Ti”) for Halloween. But, she let it be known early on that she wanted to not just be “Li Li Ti,” but to be “Li Li Ti Wid Pink Bow.” Lion King with a pink bow?! No problem! And so, she was “Li Li Ti Wid Pink Bow”… (again, thanks to my trusty hot glue gun)… and she loved every second of it. Here’s the boys when they were lions, Halloween 2006 (they were so incredibly cute that in planning for Halloween 2010 I honestly did not think that it would be possible to reach that level of cuteness with Meera, pink bow or not)…

…however… our girl rarely disappoints. The cuteness level was (in my humble opinion) reached, and reached fully. Here’s Meera 2010…

Happy Halloween!!!

This week we were hit with an October heat wave of near-record highs. We won’t have too many more (if any) of these warm days, so we tried to make the most of them. We ate dinner on the porch barefoot, the boys wore shorts and t-shirts to school, and Meera even got in a last-hurrah-for-the-season of playing in the mud.

Dear Readers, We love you. But we have to take a week-long blog break. We will miss you. But we’ll be back before you know it. Thank you for reading. You are the best blog readers in the whole wide world! Love, the J-Ms

In Kyle’s immortal words: “It’s up, it’s up, it’s up!  It’s a high fly ball to center field!!!” And “Never a Dull Moment” is here – welcome to our “new” blog!  And thank you so very much for all the input and feedback – that was pretty amazing and humbling.

So, In addition to updating the blog in a way we felt good about, we really tried to incorporate comments from everyone.  Some of that will be reflected in what we post about, and some is more structural (as noted below).  We’ll also be posting plenty of pictures, just a little more careful than we were – but not fewer!

Also, in October we’ll be doing another “Open Book” post and we’ll be answering lots of questions then, and we’re looking forward to it!

In any case, here is a brief run down of the “new” blog.  Please let us know what you think.

1. A nicer look: with a new header and cleaner lines!  We’ll keep this one fresh for fun.  The tree photo is not here, but we’ll try to find a place for it.  Also, we’ve taken a lot out of the side to make it easier to read for now. One day we’ll do a totally custom site, but for now we’re pretty happy with it.
2. Find content easier: Check out the categories above (eg: “Bambinos”). These should make it easier to find posts that may interest you
3. Find other content you’ll like: Speaking of interest…. at the bottom of each post are a few other posts loosely related that you might also like.  Easy to click and read, and read, and read, and read.
4. Get it in your blog reader: For everyone who emailed about your RSS reader – yes it’s back – you can get RSS feeds now.  Phew!
5. Sharing the love: There is a little button at the bottom of each post – share this – you can use it to add to your facebook page, twitter, etc.  If you think people you know would like that post (like our adoptive family friends who have friends who want to adopt), use that to share.
6. Start the conversation: When you comment, not only can you subscribe to the comment feed, but you can carry on a dialog with others with threaded comments.  So, when you want to reply to a specific person’s comment, feel free – the comment is specific to the reply – so go for it!
7. Logon how you like: We still require logon for comments (and user validation too), but now you can logon using your old Five Free Spirits ID, or via lots of social networks – however you want to logon – feel free!

Lastly – we’re thinking of adding community features, but want to see if you think it’s a good idea.  With a community, not only can you see who the other members are, but you can see what they write/comment, what they like, who they respond too and a little about them.

There would also be forums that users can logon and contribute to as well (with topics that you create and are interested in).    Is this something you would find valuable at all – any part of it?  If not, then we won’t do it, but if so, then we’ll put it in.

Please let us know what you think and if you have other suggestions – we really, really appreciate all the input!

countdown to “New” J-M Blog!!!… 5 4 3 2 1 days until the big reveal!

Important Question for our Blog Readers: One of the comments below mentions that our blog loads slowly. We want to know about this because we’re trying to work out some things for our newer-better-soon-to-come-best-ever revved up ramped up J-M BLOG!         Please tell us~~ does this blog load slowly for you? do you have a hard time getting all the photos to show up? does the blog load slower for you than other internet sites load? PLEASE tell us by leaving a comment here! The more we know, the better.  Thanks!

We are — once again (!) — in the midst of planning big renovations to the J-M blog! We could really use your help. Will you please leave a comment here, telling us what you’d most like to see more (or less) of as we move onward and upward into our new-bigger-better–never-a-dull-moment–family blog?

Believe it or not we’re going to be taking another blog break. We’ll be blogging again in about a week. And then it will be awhile ’till we blog break again… I promise!