One week to go...

The kids are very excited that they only have five days left of school before their mondo winter break - 16 days of holiday parties, road trips, skiing and snowboarding, and just generally not doing much schoolwork of any kind.  This weekend we had our last swim lessons at UVAC for the fall, did some xmas shopping for the pets at Leb Pet Center, and had an awesome lunch in one of the tatami rooms at Koto.  The kids both devoured my "crazy tuna roll" which was about as spicy and raw as sushi can get, leaving me proud and still pretty hungry, so I had to order another one.  We also had sashimi sriped bass, which was delicious, and lots of green tea.  We so love when the kids are in the mood to be adventurous eaters.  I just wish we lived closer to different types of cuisines we could try on them.  Hopefully we'll  be able to get a little more gastronomically adventurous when we visit NYC/Long Island over Christmas break.

We also made our first trip to Ragged Mountain this weekend. Ragged scores major bonus points in my book simply because the crowds (especially in the lodge) are reasonable- you can always find a table to eat at and room to store your boots.  Also, their "bunny slope" chairlift has a nice, wide, and not too steep run that is perfect for Haley to gain confidence and Aiden to practice his snowboarding S turns.  It's further away than Sunapee, but we save some money on 1/2 price NH resident tickets on Sundays.  So, Ragged is often our first choice.   It's a nice little mountain.  This Sunday was chilly but we got in some great runs, had some respectable wipe-outs, and ended the day tired but smiling.  The lodge was almost empty when we headed in, so we enjoyed the rare treat of snuggling up to the huge brick fireplace in the lodge with cookies before heading home to New London.  Winter's not all bad.

Tiptoes to Trees

This past weekend was all about the "fancy" on Saturday.  We went to watch a perfomance of the Nutcracker Ballet at Lebanon Opera House, much to Haley's delight and Aiden's consternation.  Haley had been talking about the ballet for weeks in advance, with Aiden looking on skeptically like she was some kind of weird sea-creature.  Which she is, I suppose.  A she-creature, at least.  On the morning of the ballet, we met Ellis and Beth at the Lebanon Ballet School for "Clara's Tea" - a fancy pre-show tea party with scones, meringues, finger sandwiches and sweet treats galore.   We learned about the production, and that The Nutcracker, which is a Russian ballet, is not popular in Russia (or really anywhere but North America) at Christmastime. Andy and Aiden had to sit by themselves during the tea so that Ellis and Haley could sit together, though they weren't really "alone" if you count all the other mothers and little girls surrounding them.  The boys agreed that they needed to go out and "fight a bear" after the tea, but I did see Aiden snarfing down several nutella finger sandwiches and chocolates so it wasn't a total waste of time for him.  The ballet was lovely, and the girls were really into it for about the first hour, after which their attention waned a bit... which was okay considering more than half the audience was little girls under the age of 6.

On Sunday I redeemed myself with Aiden.  While Andy spent the day with Haley playing various dramatic "let's pretend" games, Aiden and I headed up on a cold and sparkling day to the Rocks Estate Christmas Tree Farm in Bethlehem, NH to help people find Christmas trees.  This is our second year helping out during the holiday season (the property is owned by the Forest Society, so employees are encouraged to help) and we really enjoy it.  Aiden spent the day in the "just-cut" tree section, measuring trees for customers and informing them of the pros and cons of getting a balsam fir vs. a fraser fir.  He did a lot of hauling trees up to the "baling  station" for people, and earned himself quite a few tips which he promptly spent in the gift shop on treats for himself and xmas presents for family.  One woman even bought him a little bag of gummy candy from the gift store, because she thought he was so "sweet and adorable."  I spent the day tying baled trees onto people's cars with green-tinted twine.  As fast as humanly possible, since there were hundreds of people picking out trees that day.  There are special tying methods for vehicles with roof racks versus those without, in case you're wondering, and if you ever need a lightening xmas tree tie-one that will last you from New Hampshire to New Jersey, don't hesitate to give me a call!  I was tying knots in my sleep that night.  Nevertheless, it was an excellent day in a gorgeous location in the White Mountains- and nothing girly about it, either!

Thanksgiving Weekend

When you've traveled many hours for every Thanksgiving and Christmas for most of 40 years, like I have, it's an amazing treat not to have to go anywhere for a major holiday.  To have family come to our house this year for Thanksgiving was wonderful, and we enjoyed hosting in our new space with lots of room for expanded dining tables and dog and kid craziness alike.  Mom came down from Vermont and Micah and Becky and the kids up from Gloucester- though there were only 9 of us, the house definitely felt festive with all the little monsters running around.  And, we were truly thankful to escape the multi-day power outages that most of New Hampshire experienced from a dump of 12+ inches of heavy wet snow the night before Thanksgiving.

On Thanksgiving morning we were up early to pop the turkey in the smoker, and to shovel ourselves out in time to reach the local Turkey Trot in Sunapee Harbor.  The day was actually quite pleasant, despite the foot of snow, but the usual crowds at the race were definitely diminished by those dealing with unplowed driveways and power outages.  Haley ran her first race ever, the 1K "Chicken Run"... we weren't sure how it would go, but Grandma Sally had a tough time keeping up with her and she finished strong, with a huge smile on her face.  Success!  It's all about having fun at these events.  Aiden ran both the Chicken Run and the 5K Turkey Trot, which I think he later regretted as he was really running out of steam around the 6th kilometer.  But he also finished strong and we were quickly bundled up and headed back home to await the Gloucester Deans.

Thanksgiving dinner was delicious, with smoked turkey and duck, mashed potatoes, mushroom stuffing and gravy, home grown squash, and several delicious pies.  We were all stuffed and ready for bed by 6pm.  Well, the adults were... but the kids were just getting going and it was an exercise in futility to get them corralled for bed before they were ready.  Successful "sleepovers" were eventually had by Haley and Phoebe (in the guest room with Grandma) and Aiden and Fisher (in Aiden's room).  Finna wasn't too keen on sleeping over anyone's house but her own, much to Micah & Becky's dismay.  Nevertheless, the next morning everyone was up bright and early, stuffing themselves into jackets and mittens and off to enjoy opening day at Mt. Sunapee.  We arrived 45 minutes too early (not on purpose) and enjoyed hot chocolate in the lodge until the lifts started up.  The magic carpet was having some technical glitches first thing in the morning, so we were forced to take all the littles up the chairlift and down a trail that most likely scared the snowpants off of them.  Maybe not the best idea, whoops.  They recovered, thankfully, and by the end of our day Phoebe and Fisher were really getting into cruising down the little bunny hill and up the magic carpet.  Fisher, especially, is a daredevil who wants NO help at all going down the hill as fast as he can, no turning required!

The Gloucester Deans departed on Saturday, and we set about transitioning from Thanksgiving to Christmas.   We cut our xmas tree, our gigantically huge and unbelievably wide xmas tree (actually Andy felled it on top of me... thanks, hon!) and somehow maneuvered it onto the top of the minivan and secured it with a few flimsy knots.  It's kind of a miracle we got it home without it falling off the car, even though it's only a 2 mile drive.  Stuffing it through the sliding door on the deck was also a challenge, but from then on it was relatively smooth sailing to get it set up and decorated.  Aiden and Haley had a great time unwrapping all of our ornaments with Grandma Sally, reminiscing about the ones they'd made and asking about the ones we've had since before they were born.  This is the first year we fit every last ornament we own onto a single tree, and we have ornaments for at least 2 regular sized trees!  It's a monster of a fir tree, but it came out beautiful in the end.

Sunday we said goodbye to Grandma Sally until we see her next in Islamorada (February seems so far away now!) and headed back out into the snow for some fresh air.  At Low Plain, Aiden tried XC skiing for the first time (rentals) and Haley tried snowshoeing.  Aiden loved his experience ("mom, this is soooo much fun!") and Haley... well, Haley was dreaming of tea parties and next weekend's nutcracker ballet, I think.  She was short lived on the snowshoes.  But we'll try again this winter sometime, since we've got to embrace the cold white stuff here or else shrivel up into pasty seasonally-affected zombies waiting for the light and warmth to return next spring.  Here's to a winter full of sledding, skiing, snowboarding, ice skating, ice fishing, snowshoeing and making snow angels.  Let it snow :)

An Extra Long Weekend

This was an extra long weekend for the Deegan Family. Everyone had Veteran's Day off on Tuesday, but since Aiden's school was closed on Monday as well for teacher workshops, Andy and I and Haley decided to take the day off too.  With four long days ahead of us, we considered bugging out for a few of them to Boston or Rhode Island or someplace for a mini-vacation, but reality prevailed.  We just have too many house projects to get done while the weather is still mild.  Project numero uno was our new garden.  We rented a mean-looking rototiller from Home Depot (where the extraordinarily nice man at the tool rental counter showered the kids with Home Depot freebies- aprons and pins and build-it-yourself kits) and Andy beat a 30' x 12' plot of our yard with it until what passes for our lawn (barely) was minced into upturned dirt clods.  Then we spread on about 3 yards of loam mixed with compost, and covered the whole thing with permeable weed control fabric.  Voila!  We're ready for spring, and for the onslaught of seed catalogs that should be arriving now that the catalog-universe seems to have caught up with our new mailing address.  We'll have to deal with the overabundance of deer that frequent our yard by erecting some sort of fencing eventually, but for now we can cross this off the list.

Next up was a trip to Vermont to help Grandma Sally with her fall chores.  We mulched bags and bags of leaves and transported them to the garden in a never-ending caravan of lawn tractor and ATV loads.  Aiden drove the ATV with Grandma for most of the morning, and Haley got a few rides on the lawn tractor.  When the leaves were done we turned our attention to winterizing all the small engines in the barn, siphoning gas and running them dry for the cold months.  We had a full day of work, but also had time for a tea party, football game, potsticker dinner, and a movie later that evening.  In the morning we had breakfast at Papa Nicks, where a neighboring table of crusty (but extremely nice) old Vermonters in their wool plaid jackets made good conversation throughout our meal.  When we left, Mom said, "well, you don't find that in New London..." and she's right- I think we're all going to miss being in Vermont as often as we have been the past decade or so. We'll have to invent some reasons to visit...

Cruising along as fast as Grandma will let him

On Monday we embarked on more chores- laundry, housecleaning, painting the basement playroom, grocery shopping, etc. etc. so there wasn't much time for kiddo fun, but we did make over to tag our Christmas tree for the season.  This is the last year the Stanley's will be selling xmas trees at Elephant Rock Farm, so we'll have to start a new tradition next year.  Bittersweet, for sure, since the kids love climbing the elephant rock and picking out their special tree.  We have such high ceilings in our living room now, so we thought we might get a larger tree than we normally do.  But Aiden fixated on the first tree he saw that wasn't already tagged- the one closest to the parking area- and it HAD to be that one.  No other tree would do.  We walked the entire lot and he shook his head at them all.  Haley didn't seem to care one way or the other, so we relented.  It's not the most comely Christmas tree we've ever seen, but it's bigger than we normally have, and really wide.  Even decorated, our trees never come out Martha Stewart-perfect anyhow (more like an eclectic riot of color and oddity) so probably this is the perfect tree for us.  Can't wait to see what it looks like in our living room, and how many strings of lights it takes to illuminate!

And here it is, folks!

Babydoll wardrobe malfunction at the xmas tree farm

 Tuesday was Veteran's Day.  We started the day by attending the local Veteran's Day ceremony in New London, where the elementary school kids (including Aiden) sang a handful of patriotic songs for the veterans of at least 5 different wars who were assembled in the local baptist church.  They sang all the different service songs- Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard... and it was moving to see the different vets stand up and salute when their service song was sung by the group of about 30 kids. The whole ceremony was really nicely done, and I hope it made at least some of the veterans feel appreciated and loved.  It certainly gives us some perspective to think about the immeasurable sacrifices others have made on our behalf.

Haley chilling out in our amazing kitchen-dining-living room- THE room of our house.  

Kearsarge Elementary kids singing for the Vets on Tuesday