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Everyday Adventures

Three Wise Men
Everyday Adventures

A Little Christmas Cheer for the Day

Seriously, how cute are kid’s Christmas nativity plays?  Toddlers wandering around aimlessly, shouting out random things (“Hey, I’m four!”), displaying looks of confusion and sometimes joy, singing out of tune, wearing fake beards.  It’s brilliant.

Today was my first as a parent and I loved it.  Little Monkey was a Santa which in the end meant he was just dressed all in red.  Keeping in form with his refusal to be a dinosaur at Halloween, he had no interest in the Santa coat or hat choosing instead to discard the hat somewhere on stage.  And even though I don’t think he sang a word, I’m just proud that he was confident enough to get up on stage in front of a room full of strangers without me holding his hand.

And in a moment of parenting bliss, what did he say when Santa Claus handed him his present?  “Thank you.”  Ahhh. I’ve done one thing right.

So here’s a bit of Christmas cheer for the day.

Everyday Adventures

Don’t Organize the Bathroom Cabinet

Because one day you will be styling a full on “skunk,” the tell-tale sign of a 40 something waging an ongoing war against grey hair.

Because you will also be weeks away from a hair appointment, as you forgot to re-book the last time you were there.

Because on that day you will discover hidden beneath the hairdryer and behind various lotions and creams a box of Clairol Root Touch Up that you forgot you had.

And you will be happy and thankful.  And in 10 minutes time, you will feel young again.

Why rob yourself of this joy?

Everyday Adventures

Our Backyard Autumn Harvest

We’ve been told by one of the life long residents of our neighborhood that the area where our houses now stand was at one time an orchard. The abundance of apple and pear trees along the lane beside our house certainly supports this.  And, the trees are now laden with fruit.  So full of fruit that I wonder how the trees can bear the weight of their own branches.

This is where I fail as  homemaker.  I know that in theory I should fill a few buckets with apples and get busy making apple cobbler, apple sauce, apple butter, apple pie, apple cider, etc. but I just don’t have it in me.  So instead, the fruit mostly just seems to end up on the ground, left to rot or feed the badgers and foxes.  Granted, much of the fruit is so high I’d need more than my kitchen step stool to pluck a few apples.

So today, to keep from squashing them underfoot or with the lawnmower, we spent the mild autumn morning gathering pears off the ground.  Thankfully, we had our very own dump truck in which to collect them.

Sometimes we needed to take a break from putting them in the dump truck and see how many we could line up along the wall.

And, we even found a snail-shell. No one was home though. Phew.

All in all, it was a good harvest today.  Now, if I only knew what to do with it.