small snippets

We've found ourselves off by a day, not quite in time with everything else, which is delicious in its own way but means I'm not in the mode of reporting on our days. Time feels dreamy. Isn't that fitting for this time of year? I mean, if we were listening to ourselves? Our bodies, craving warmth and comfort, bread and butter, pumpkin and acorn and butternut, sleep and stories, stories and sleep...It is what the dark and the short days call for, but it isn't what the air feels like outside of our home, so I guess I'm feeling a bit like hibernating, actual and virtual!

Enjoying what is - surely! - the last day of bare feet

 Our Thanksgiving was perfect - a day of late-afternoon sun-slants, a drive through the woods to the warm home of friends, a table groaning under the best turkey I've ever had, Dan's chilean squash, and all the trimmings you could dream of and more. I felt infused with love and starlight and laughter on the long ride home through the fog, dodging deer and singing along to the Indigo Girls. Ha, perfect.

Ani transformed into Frodo thanks to a "new" Goodwill vest

And such have been our days. Late autumn dandelions turned into cake. An adult outing to a poetry reading and art show, so inspiring and...adult! Watching The Yellow Submarine, the girls' new favorite movie (Ani keeps walking around and saying in her best Liverpuddlean accent, "I've got a hole in me pocket!"), playing new family games - Cadoo! - and old ones...

  This morning there was Charades right after breakfast...

 ...followed by You Ate My Radish at Ani's request, and painting for Eliza in the art room.

 We added more radishes and several daikons this time. Ani commented that it was a kimchi garden (yes, she has been brainwashed...).

I'm long overdue for a Gallery post, which I'll try to accomplish soon, before the flurry of making that is bound to occur any day now...(it's happening, but, well...it's slow! Like everything else right now!)

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Really what I'd like to be writing about is how grown-up my daughter is right now. Nine. She is teetering on the edge of puberty already, curious about everything grown-up, but not too anxious to be there quite yet. She celebrates every change in her body, asks will she look like me when she is a woman? (she hopes so, dear child), wonders what it will be like to have breasts.  She caught me in a ragged moment the other day, and while I'm not in the habit of keeping a lot of things from my kids, I brushed off her questions with something evasive and she sighed and asked why she couldn't be a part of the important things? It stopped me short, made me look at her again and wonder how she could be Here already?  She is so capable - carved her jack-o-lantern all by herself, and has been stenciling patches and shirts, using the exacto for the finest details, and, with supervision, the iron. She is able to reach all the light switches and pulls and the dishes on the bottom shelf of the cupboard and fits my old t-shirts, and oh, will someone please slow these next years down so we can enjoy every moment?