Holiday Hullabaloo Makes for Tired Mom

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We were just between the main course and dessert of our Thanksgiving meal, when my daughters asked when we could start decorating for Christmas.

Once I’d convinced them that it was not appropriate to begin ripping down the Thanksgiving gourds, turkeys, and autumn leaves and to retrieve the Christmas boxes from the basement immediately, they began happily making plans for the Advent season in between bites of apple pie.

“Oh, I can’t wait to make the Christmas cookies!” my ten-year-old exclaimed.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Meditations on Stick Season

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I’m not sure if I can still call this “stick season,” since snow has lain on the ground for a week now. The most accurate definition of stick season is the period of time between the fall of the last golden leaves and the fall of the first sparkling snow. It’s not really a season at all – just a week or two between late October and early November, a time when the view out our windows displays only grey sticks against the grey sky.

But early this morning as the sun was rising and I was feeding the baby, I couldn’t see the icy snow on the ground; all I could see were the bare branches of the aspen trees outside my window.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” in The Addison Independent. 

The Hole in the Wall, and Other Adventures in Home Improvement

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While there were many things that attracted us to our current house, the house itself was not one of them.

Our house was built in three distinct installments, and it shows. The interior layout is a rambling railroad of rooms. The exterior, when we purchased the house, was covered on three sides with grey vinyl siding and red trim, and on the back side with unfinished wood. Neither vinyl nor wood siding was installed correctly, so water was getting underneath and causing rot.

We bought it anyway, because my husband tends to make decisions based on his vision of what can be, as opposed to what’s right in front of him. (Presumably, this is also why he married me.) His vision included re-siding the house after our budget had recovered from the initial purchase and the more immediate, necessary renovations.

I required some convincing on the house purchase, but was on board entirely when it came to the re-siding. Aside from the obvious issues of mismatched, poorly installed siding, the grey and red color scheme just didn’t seem in line with our family culture. Whenever I contemplated our house’s exterior, the two words that unfailingly came to mind were: Shark Attack.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent. 

“A Sigh is Just a Sigh”

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Our families know us best. The people who live with us, who see us first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening, who have front row seats to what bubbles up when we’re squeezed – they’re the ones with the true insights into our character.

This is why, whenever a non-family-member says to me, “Oh, you always seem so patient, so calm, like you have it all together!” I picture my daughters rolling on the floor, laughing. They know the wild-eyed woman who stands in our mudroom, waving her arms frantically and yelling, “Time to go! We’re running late! You should’ve used the bathroom ten minutes ago when I told you to! GET IN THE CAR NOW!!!”

And it’s also why I took notice when my daughters started doing impressions of our family around the dinner table.

These impressions are not mean-spirited, and are always performed in the presence of those being imitated. Sometimes they begin in a haphazard fashion and spread around the table at random; sometimes they take the form of an organized game, in which everyone performs an impression of one particular family member, who judges the best impersonator.

What emerged from their impressions of me is that my family thinks I sigh a lot.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent. 

The Only Alpine Slide in Vermont

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Vermont is a small state, so it’s easy to assume that after living here eight years we would be aware of all the attractions Vermont has to offer young families. But a couple of weeks ago, we were surprised when a friend told us about Bromley Mountain’s alpine slide.

I’d never heard of an alpine slide before, and for a good reason: There are only 37 such slides in the world. Alpine slides dot Australia, Europe, and Asia, but the United States slides tend to be located out West, and the Bromley slide is the only alpine slide in Vermont.

Click here to continue reading the latest “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent!

Appliance Angst

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Our first clue that the appliances were turning against us was when the oven refused to heat up. It happened at the worst possible moment, of course: A night when I was supposed to be going out for a belated birthday dessert with friends, and my husband would be getting home late after picking up our eldest daughter from a class and our youngest from a playdate. Feeling like I had it all together, I’d tossed some food into the oven to cook while I walked the dog and did the poultry chores. Twenty minutes later – just minutes before the other hungry half of our family would arrive expecting dinner – I checked the oven to find it still stone cold.

My husband saved the day, as usual, by cooking our dinner on the stovetop. In the process, he discovered that our microwave seemed to be acting up: It made a sound like a car revving up, indicating that it was working only intermittently.

It was dark by the time our dinner was ready, so we turned on the lights.

“Wait, are the lights flickering?” one of our daughters observed after a couple of minutes.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Adventures in Back-to-School Shopping

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Our family went back to school the day after Labor Day. The Addison County schools began the week before Labor Day, but since we homeschool I figured: Why be crazy? (My daughters take a great deal of joy in their delayed start; every year they fantasize about appearing on the Mary Hogan School sidewalk on the first day of school in their pajamas, munching doughnuts and waving to their friends as they get off the bus. What prevents them from putting this plan into action is that they’re not even closeto awake at that time.)

One of my favorite things about homeschooling is that I feel like I’m learning (or re-learning) right along with my daughters. As I remind them constantly, you’re never too old to learn, to grow, to change. Which may be why, this past weekend, I did something I thought I’d never do: I took my daughters shopping at big chain stores in Williston and Burlington.

I still remember our family’s first trip to the stores in Williston. We’d just moved to Vermont, and we needed to pick up a lot of cheap, basic home furnishings. We loaded our three daughters, aged three months through three years, into the minivan, and drove north for an hour. At those ages, an hour drive passes in dog years; we kept the minions pacified by tossing fruit chews into the backseat at regular intervals, and braced ourselves for long stretches of baby wailing. When we’d lived in California, an hour drive took us to wine country; driving the same distance for a bunch of chain stores hardly seemed worth the hassle. “I will do anything possible to avoid this drive,” I recall thinking to myself.

For eight years, I did avoid it. But now we have a tween, and our tween “needs” to go to Old Navy.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.