Georgia's 6th Birthday Party!

Big sister Lily was a big help, although she was a reptile with a red tongue for a bit.

Decorating gingerbread cookies with her friends.






Lily turned out to be a wonder with frosting.
She made that exquisite elephant and decorated Georgia's very popular cupcake cake. (I made a chocolate whipped cream frosted cake that looked like a sloping and strange mushroom cupcake that no one ate!)

The finished product.
I am still not eating sugar or gluten so it feels weird to be offering all these foods to people (children!) that make me feel like such crap. But Georgia wanted cookies and cakes and that's just fine.
Blowing out the candles!
























And opening presents.





















She had a good time, although she was mopey when it was done. She has been waiting forever for her birthday. She's got some nice friends in kindergarten and really seems to be settling in to school and enjoying it. Thank goodness, no more sitting outside the pricipal's office for calling someone an "Idiot shit face!" Oh I didn't mention that? It was a difficult transition for a while, but she's finally got her groove.

To Cambridge for the Christmas Revels

We went by the Peabody museum of Natural History again this year.
Georgia was transfixed by these eggs.
She really has a deep connection to eggs. She yearns for them, to sit on them to take care of them.
She was curious who was tending to these.
We had to convince her that they were empty before she would walk away.























We couldn't walk through Harvard Yard because there were police guards all around preventing the Occupy folks from coming in and setting up their tents. You can see a few students had settled in and the administration were preventing any more. I tried to explain the situation to the girls and explain the Occupy movement, but I kept getting choked up when I tried to explain it, which puzzled them and surprised me.

Sanders Theater, with a food truck for the occupy crowd. My mother got a grilled cheese sandwich and said it was great.

















Lily said, "Look there's Athena!" and I felt proud she know her Greek Goddesses.





The set was magnificent!
The lights delight me!




























Georgia was nervous because last year ghosts roamed up and down the aisles. She sat on my mom's lap and worried (appropriately!) about the creepy beautiful skeleton that danced around the edges of the stage throughout the performance.




















Dancing at intermission in the lobby! The horns were blasting from the balcony as we all song Lord of the Dance.






My sister and Lily applauding. It was a marvelous show, well worth the drive there and back (sometimes I wonder as I am packing them up in the car to go on these adventures..)







Fishing for starlight.
Suddenly all around us in the balcony there were singers holding stars.
Breathtaking! I started when I looked beside me and there was a woman in costume holding a light. She had moved in so quietly, I hadn't known she was there. I elbowed Lily on my left who jumped when she looked over, then she nudged my sister who also was surprised.







































Then the woman began to sing gloriously!
It felt like such a blessing to be sitting there as all this magic was happening around us. It felt like how I imagine the angels that surround and support us, so powerful and full of light, so close and ready to sing, but usually we don't know they are there, just waiting for us to ask them for their help.




Here is a quick clip of the magnificent singing!



The chandelier, the stained glass, the reddish glowing wood!






The crowd at the end of the night.

Georgia turns six!

"Finally!!" She says

















I went into labor with her 6 years ago today. It was pouring rain over layers of hardened ice, I had a baby shower scheduled, but instead I started to contract. I paged the office and Susan Liddell called me back and said, "Looks like we're going to do this again, Katherine. Why don't you come in." It was quite an adventure, Georgia's birth. One I will tell sometime when I am not so tired. But when I looked down at my belly in the bath that Lily and I were taking while we waited for Rob to get home from work, I thought, "That looks like a sideways-baby-belly." and it was. Rascal had turned last minute and was not even head down!

Mary, Jesus and a Lamb

I was looking for an image to inspire me in the midst of the holiday chaos that was about to take me down.
Although I am not Christian, I am inspired by Mother Mary and Jesus. I love the paintings and the images the mother and son together.
My friend has some pet donkeys and we were talking about them someday starring in nativity plays which brought us to the story of Christmas: the stable, the sweet warm breath of the animals and the baby Jesus wrapped and put in a manger, which is a roughly carved wooden food trough for animals. A miracle in a very grounded setting.

In my work I see so many new mothers swaddling and holding their new babies with such love and awe. It is a momentous transformation, becoming a mother. I love that part of the Christmas story that sanctifies new motherhood and blesses the family as they are surrounded by the quietly breathing animals.

The Cherry Tree carol is one of my very favorite holiday songs and I sang it to the girls when I was pregnant and as a lullaby when they were young. Here's Joan Baez singing it on youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYaFGSG_x80&feature=related

Lovely

Lily's first clarinet concert

with beginner band was actually quite stirring. They did a beautiful job and all took the performance very seriously.

Here's Lily with her band instructor who held them all together with a perfect balance of cheerful and strict. It was delightful!

Happy Holidays!

New chickens in the mix

So, the girl's lovely art teacher has quite a few chickens and she heard we only had two. She didn't think ours would fare well through the winter (They need more bodies to generate heat on these cold nights.) so she offered us two of hers.

I asked the family if maybe, instead, we would want to give our two chickens to her or to another loving home where we could visit them.

Georgia pondered the question. She loves the chickens very very much, but she is burdened by the fear of losing them. Now, wherever we are, at dusk she begins to fret about putting the chickens in their coop, so they don't get eaten.

Even when we were at my parent's last weekend and had a reliable chicken babysitter, Georgia worried when the sun fell. My sister let her call the home answering machine (where no one was) and leave a couple messages. I listened to them from my class and they were heart rending, "Hi Papa, Umm how are you? Uhhh. Are the chickens in? It's getting dark out and I'm worried. Will you call me?" in her little voice over and over on the machine.

There is a jolt of terror that goes through you, as a chicken owner, every night; even after you tuck them into their cozy coop. "Did I forget?? Did we put them away??"
Usually we say it out loud and then someone else gets a panicked look and then we all remind each other that they are in and they should be fine. It is stressful to be responsible for such sweet gentle creatures that will get devoured and carried away, squawking, in the teeth of a death if you forget yourself in some menial task.




When I proposed my idea of handing off the chickens to a bigger group of hens to Rob, he was completely appalled and looked at me with horror and distrust. He thought I must be kidding. "Never! I love those chickens! I really love them. Are you crazy?!" He looked at me like I was a stranger. And Lily was equally shocked by the proposal.

So off we went to pick up some new chickens to plump up our flock.

Janice had three waiting for us. They were unnamed, so the girls are going to call them Mango, Cinnamon and Ginger.




These are not them, I just loved this photo with the door handle and the sunlit coop.






















Here is Cinnamon.


They are much more flighty and wild than our chickens, who seem like plump and docile ladies compared the these new wiry suspicious girls.

Lily called me crying at work their first night to say that the new birds had attacked our unsuspecting hens and there had been a fray. It was bad.

"No one died." she sobbed into the phone. Our chickens looked fine the next morning, but Rob and the girls were traumatized to have seen their dear chickens get mauled and pecked by these newcomers. I think the new girls were just trying to be at the top of the pecking order. Now we are letting them sleep together but having them in separate fenced in areas during the day. There has not been another fight. Over time we will slowly let them acclimate to each other.

We'll see what happens.