Life. Motherhood. Vermont. (Not necessarily in that order.)
It did this last night:
Looks like it’s going to be a white Thanksgiving! Here are the girls exploring our yard and posing with the first snowman of the season. I’m sure the excitement will wear off after another 5 months of this, but it was a thrilling morning!
And the best part: hot chocolate and popcorn after a morning of playing in the snow.
Feeling very thankful for the beautiful snow, for fun with family, and for a warm house with a (finally!) completed new roof!
Fiona had a spectacular 4th birthday. It involved 2 days of celebration, beginning with cupcakes at preschool, continuing on to a family party, and continuing further with her “friend party” today. As I sit to write this, I have just recently survived a house full of 11 children under the age of 5. So I am going to smack up some photos and then go have a glass of Scotch. If you’d like a more sentimental glimpse of Fiona, please read the previous post; this is all about the parties!
Fun times! And while we’re on a roll, tomorrow we’re having Erick’s students over as well. G’night!
Today, Fiona turns 4. This feels like the first birthday we’ve had where the age wasn’t such a big deal. For instance: “You’re 1 year old!”, “Uh-oh, now you’re 2.”, “Phew! You’re 3! Goodbye to the terrible 2s!” But 4? Not a huge milestone. What I would say about this age is that, recently, Fiona seems to have passed through the developmental sturm and drang of the past couple years and emerged as a fairly mature little girl. Someone with her own opinions, capable of sustaining a conversation. It’s now much easier to see who she is, what she’ll love, and what hurdles she’ll face in the future.
So here, in no particular order, are 5 fun facts about Fiona on her birthday:
1. Fiona is dramatic. This will come as no particular surprise to anybody who knows her: Fiona loves drama in every sense. She has always had a vivid imagination; by age 2, she had no fewer than 5 imaginary friends (4 cows: Pak, Pook, Lolo, and Orange, plus one lion named…Lion). Today, whenever left to her own devices she will play make-believe, and reenact any situation: the library, the doctor’s office, preschool, Sunday School, and just about any fairy/princess tale there is. (There is of course a flip side to this drama, when Fiona chooses to bring her drama into everyday life. But we all have things to work on!).
2. Fiona is an all-star big sister. We could not ask for a more loving, thoughtful oldest child when it comes to her two little sisters. If she had her way, she’d carry Georgia around the house all day. And she’s been amazingly generous and patient with Campbell, who is now going through the terrible 2s with a vengeance. All three girls are now sharing a bedroom, and they love it — and it’s so fun to hear them talking and singing on both ends of bedtime. As the oldest, I give a lot of credit to Fiona for helping create a sweet sister culture.
3. Fiona has her own style. Ever since she was old enough to dress herself, Fiona had a very strong sense of what she wanted to wear. She continues to choose outfits that are kind of amazing in the way they mix bizarre elements and yet somehow still work. (Her latest thing is to wear printed t-shirts backwards). And she really loves clothes; given a choice of how to spend her money, she’d choose clothes. Which is just incredible as someone who is the offspring of Erick and me, arguably two of the least fashionable people out there. We don’t value clothes in our house, and have certainly done nothing to encourage this tendency in Fiona. She was truly just born this way.
4. Fiona always surprises us by her kindness. She can still throw a great fit on occasion, but this is also a girl who will always check in on everyone else’s aches and pains. She will suggest taking food to or making a card for somebody in need. She will volunteer to give away toys or clothes that she doesn’t need. With Boom still recuperating at our house, she will go check in on him regularly (overheard yesterday: “Boom, would you like to come out for breakfast or would you like breakfast in bed?”).
5. Fiona likes music. Loud music. At the moment, her criteria for whether a song is good is two-pronged: 1. Is it loud? 2. Is it dramatic? Favorite songs at the moment include “Colors of the Wind” from Disney’s Pocahontas, and “On My Own” from Les Miserables. Needless to say, anything sung by Snow White gets a big thumbs-down.
We can’t imagine our family without Fiona. We love all of her — the good and the challenging — and we hope that she will keep being herself.
1. Snow TWICE before Halloween!
Sure, it all melted. The girls were thrilled. But it’s still kind of wrong.
2. Halloween.
This year, the girls had a multi-day Halloween. It began with the “Trick or Read” party for Middlebury College families, continued with the Middlebury town “Spooktacular” (featuring a Halloween parade in which all the kids trick or treat at the businesses on Main Street), and concluded with trick-or-treating on the actual night with their friend Ruth. They had a blast, and the amount of candy is truly scary. We’re handling it with our usual stern parental authority…combined with our “stealth candy relocation operation.”
Here are the two big girls in their princess costumes. Sadly, we had NO time to take pictures during the actual trick-or-treating, because the 4 adults in attendance were all completely occupied with chasing Campbell. It was like somebody wound her up and let her go; she charged from house to house along the length of South Street until she stopped abruptly an hour later. (Favorite Campbell moment: at one of the first houses we hit, she knocked on the door and, when it was opened by a friendly, candy-bearing resident, charged right past him and into the house. It took some convincing to get her out, too. As best we can figure, she suspected a hidden candy supply).
Georgia was dressed as a guinea pig (her sisters’ nickname for her), but of course we have no pictures. Fate of the third child. But if you take another look at her in the picture of her first snow, and then imagine her in brown, you’ll get the idea.
3. Boom Going Boom.
Nana and Boom came to visit us for a week to help out while Erick was at a seminar in Toronto. Their visit was set to end immediately following Halloween. However, the weekend before Halloween, Boom climbed up a 20-foot extension ladder with a chainsaw in order to take down a birch tree that was bending ominously over our driveway. If you think that sounds like a bad idea, you’d be right; he got the tree down, but he came down, too. We now know that birch trees are notoriously soft and unpredictable; when the top of the tree fell to the ground, the bottom snapped back and Boom went flying through the air. He is INCREDIBLY lucky that he “only” broke 4 ribs and 2 vertebrae.
As of this writing, Boom has just been released after 4 days in the hospital here in Middlebury. He’s resting here at our house, and we’re making plans for his recuperation. He and Nana are doing well, considering, and the girls have been delighted to have TWO ambulance visits in one week, multiple trips to the hospital, and have their grandparents here for longer than expected.
All of which goes to show that scary things, when looked at from the right perspective, can actually be kind of fun!
The Pickle Patch 