Archive | home sweet home

3 things I am thankful for this week

March 25, 2014 at 3:18 pm

This is what Lena does now when we say, “Smile, Lena!”

Ahh, that post-vacation crash! Can anyone relate? It’s been a long couple of weeks around here.

When I’m down, the little things in life can be such pick-me-ups, like the opportunity to finish your coffee while it’s still warm, or a surprise package from your sister-in-law with a new dress and the best chocolate ever, or the quiet joy that settles over your soul when your little one burrows in for a goodnight story.

Here are three things in particular that have made this week extra sweet:

Lena’s uncle Jonathan texted me a couple of weeks ago and asked what Lena’s favorite animal was. Random! And then… this! He drew her an awesome picture and wrote her a sweet note. It made her day! Thank you, Uncle Jonny.

For weeks after we receive a piece of mail, my kids carry the cards around, put them on the fridge, pretend to read the messages, and talk about the pictures. Of course, seeing this inspires me to write more letters or send more packages. Do you make time to write letters and send packages?

My friend Jamie just moved and, as she was unpacking, she discovered a gigantic box of books that her kids have outgrown. She decided to the whole box to us! When it arrived, it was like Christmas morning.

The kids and I have discovered so many treasures in the box, including The Little Engine That Could, The Snowy Day, Pat the Bunny, and The Snowman. However, we already have some of the books, and at first I wasn’t sure what to do with all the duplicates. Then I had a eureka moment — I’ll donate them to the library. Hopefully hundreds of kids will get to enjoy these books over the years. A gift that keeps on giving.

Thank you so much, Jamie!

And lastly: Gil’s toes. Because baby toes make the world go round. Sturdy feet on wobbly legs as a wee little man learns to walk… it’s almost impossible to top a moment like that!

What are you thankful for this week?

9 :: in Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series, home sweet home, life lately

bits and bobs

January 30, 2014 at 3:17 pm

It’s a blustery January day here in Sicily, and my laundry is snapping dangerously in the breeze outside. I might have to use a few more clothespins to make sure some pajamas and socks don’t blow away!

It’s been a quiet week, and there isn’t too much to share, so I thought I’d just give you a picture of the little sweater I’m knitting for Gil. After heaps of craft fairs during the holiday season, I am ready to stop making things to sell to other people and start making things for my own family! Right now I’m working on this little striped sweater for Gil. It’s made entirely from extra fine merino Italian yarn that I purchased here in Sicily, which knits up beautifully.

Besides knitting, I got this new book at the library yesterday, and now all I want to do is read it. Did you know Robert Galbraith is J.K. Rowling’s pseudonym? Elliott teasingly asked me if I was interested in the book before I found out that she wrote it. I’m not sure. But it does make it that much more intriguing!

And finally… today is our fourth wedding anniversary! Four years. It still somehow seems so short considering all we’ve packed into it: buying a house, a year-long deployment, a move to Italy, losing my sister, and welcoming two children. Our married years have been busy. We couldn’t have imagined all those things — some blessings, some challenges — when we wed on that snowy Saturday four years ago. Perhaps it was a good thing we didn’t know because we both might have thought twice about walking down the aisle! I’m grateful these things were hidden from us and that instead we were given each other — flawed but faithful — to walk into those challenges together.

You’re my best friend, Elliott, and I love you!

P.S. Some wedding photos here!

17 :: in home sweet home, husband, knitting business

our last Christmas in Sicily

December 26, 2013 at 4:54 pm

Christmas Eve

Honestly, it gives me some joy to say “our last” here because we love and miss our family so much! You know how wonderful it is to be with all your loved ones for the holidays. We sent heaps of emails and spent hours video chatting with our family on Christmas Day, but it still isn’t the same as sitting around the dinner table or going to the candlelight service or enjoying Christmas morning together.

Therefore, in answer to my family’s requests that they see as much of our Christmas as I can, I took photos all day long! I know they’re going to love seeing them here. Elliott and I knew our children were getting gifts from their grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, and uncles, so we chose to keep things very simple and just gave them each a Sicilian Christmas ornament. We also spent our Christmas cooking, reading by the fire, and going on a wonderful hike into the valley below our house.

Here are a few photos from our Christmas!

Elliott has been tending fires in our fireplace almost every day that he’s home this winter. He often banks the fire at night and coaxes the still-warm coals to life in the morning. I totally love this about him.

Gil’s up and the fire’s lit, so Lena is choosing the first present to open!

Love how Gil is admiring Lena’s new-found destructive tendencies here. “Get it, sista.”

Reading the letters on the package before opening it up.

New books from Marmee and Grampa! My favorite is Extra Yarn, a beautifully illustrated picture book about a girl who knits and knits… so you know the knitter in me just loves it!

Speaking of knitting, this was my favorite present: a set of interchangeable knitting needles that I’ve been dreaming about for a year. Elliott and the kids, meanwhile, enjoy his new bath pillow. This man and his baths!

Thank you, GG and Great-Grampie!

The members of the nativity quake in their sandals once again…

Lena’s new lacing cards from Auntie Eden and Uncle Charlie were an immediate hit. I love to see her being crafty…

… so we’ll work on technique later!

He melts my heart about 492 times a day.

OK, 493 times a day!

While Gil napped, Lena and I made cinnamon rolls. I used Elliott’s mom’s recipe at his request, and thankfully they turned out fairly similar to the Christmas morning breakfast he grew up loving. As of 3pm on Dec 26th, all 25 rolls have been eaten, so I guess he liked them!

Taking a break to read some of our new books by the fireplace. While they read, I was enjoying this cookbook… just as delicious as it looks.

When Gil woke up from his morning nap, we took a walk into town, where we found our town’s nativity scene. Maybe it was made by local school children? The sign says, “Christ is born for us. Come, let us adore.”

We hiked down into the valley and came across our farmer friend’s dogs. They’re all so sweet… and there are so many of them…

Picnic lunch.

Our children and our Sicilian town on Christmas Day.

We returned home to video chat with family (which was unfortunately right after the kids’ naps and they cried the whole time… sigh) and open a few more more presents. Gil eats wrapping paper as Lena plays her current favorite game while wearing my new Weekender bag like a “packpack”: “So… I’m gonna go to fool [school]. I gotta catch da bus. Oh no… da pigeon is driving da bus!!!”

She completely fell in love with this learning game from Auntie Em while I made our Christmas dinner.

And our Christmas dinner was the infamous lamb, of course. Elliott declared it “a triumph, my dear”… whew! I had a harder time eating the lamb that I’d expected. There were not very many steps in between seeing that lamb hanging in the butcher shop and eating it myself!

We burned slim beeswax candles that we bought three Christmases ago in Jerusalem; we met there for our first married Christmas when Elliott was on a yearlong solo assignment in Egypt. So much to be thankful for this Christmas, including the fact that we are together, even if our extended family is far away.

After the kids were in bed, Elliott and I spent awhile reading the story of Jesus’ birth from Luke and praying by the fire. I have been thinking a great deal this Advent season about how Jesus became poor, humbling himself to a fragile human embryo, a messy birth process, a cold and rustic world. For us these days, Christmas is all about comfort — family, gifts, food, firelight — but there was very little comfort that first Christmas. I am so grateful for the sacrifice Jesus made so that we have both immediate and eternal comfort to enjoy.

What are you most grateful for this Christmas?

14 :: in family, hiking, holidays, home sweet home, Sicily

say hello to our Christmas dinner!

December 23, 2013 at 3:36 pm

There it is… half a lamb! When I walked into the local butcher this afternoon, I had only intended to pick up our favorite sausage for an egg and sausage casserole. The lamb looked too unforgettable to pass up, though… so why not?! There’s enough for two meals, so I’ll choose half of the pieces and roast them with root vegetables. Should be tasty, and I know my back-to-the-land husband will love it. Here’s a picture of the butcher hacking the lamb up for me:

He chopped the head and ear off first and laid them on the butcher paper, but I shook my head. I had no plans for those pieces, and I’d rather not look at them in my kitchen. Don’t tell Elliott; he probably would have wanted to make a lamb’s head soup or fry the brains! The butcher did give me the whole liver, so maybe Elliott will be content with that….

What are your plans for Christmas this year? Are they interwoven with family tradition, or are you far from family this year? We’re still establishing our traditions, by which I mean that we have plans for how Christmas will be one day (real tree, Christmas stockings, spending the holidays with family) and our make-do plans in the meantime. Here’s our make-do tree and its tin foil star:

My children are posing outside the butcher shop with the omnipresent Sicilian Christmas decoration: a stuffed Santa climbing walls or railings to deliver presents. A version of this Santa seems to be hanging off every balcony in town.

We’re hosting a small Christmas Eve brunch tomorrow morning for other friends who are far from family, just like we did last year. We also have high hopes of attending the Christmas cantata at church if our little ones can make it through the 6:30-7:30pm service without meltdowns!

Our Christmas morning will be more special this year because I feel like Lena anticipates it and is excited about it for the first time. We’ve been telling and retelling the Christmas story a lot in this house, and Elliott’s been reading the story from The Jesus Storybook Bible to her about every other night for weeks. I have thought about making a birthday cake for Jesus to really emphasize the celebration of the day, but we’ve had enough sweets in this house… so maybe I’ll just stick a candle in one of our Christmas morning cinnamon rolls instead! She would love that.

I’d love to hear about your plans for Christmas, especially if you have any special ways to commemorate the day with little ones. What are your favorite memories from your childhood?

11 :: in holidays, home sweet home, Sicily

thankful & content

December 12, 2013 at 2:47 pm

Elliott took these photos from our balcony. Oh Sicily. Doesn’t this view just give your soul peace?

The houses in the valley right below ours are sometimes pretty to look at — that is, they contribute to that feeling of peace — and sometimes their dogs just bark too much and we would rather live anywhere else. Or the wood chopper hammers away right below us and we wish we’d known about these things before we moved in.

But most of the time we draw a deep breath and thank God for a view like this. What kind of view will we be looking at next winter? We have no idea. I do hope there’s snow in it, though!

A couple of Sunday afternoons ago, we took a family hike down into the valley below our house. We followed the stream (or sewer drainage, for either term would be correct) through the lowest part of the valley until we reached a farmer’s orange groves.

That little yellow house on the very far right corner of the cliff is our house! It looks so tiny and unimportant from down in the valley. But think of all the memories we’ve made in it! Christmases, birthdays, holidays, visitors, bringing Gil home from the hospital, bringing Siena home to live with us, fights and time-outs and tears and kisses. I love that little yellow house.

And I love this beautiful baby. There’s just nothing so cute to me as his beautiful blond curls, which grow thicker and longer and crazier by the day! Even when I tuck them under a hat to keep his ears warm, a few curls escape, and he looks more cherubic than ever.

The sun was setting behind the ridge, silhouetting a few of the apartment buildings in our town.

We made it to the orange grove! I am pretty strict about us not picking oranges from the trees because that seems like blatant stealing… even though I know the farmer would probably pick us a basketful for free if he saw us there. (Such is the generosity of every farmer we’ve ever met here!) As we’ve never met this farmer, we find fallen oranges in the lush green grass under the trees and then eat and eat and eat until we’ve had our fill.

Before I moved to Sicily, I could take or leave oranges. They were great, but not my fave. Now, though, because of the memories laced with the sweetness, fresh oranges are one of my most favorite things in the world.

On the way home, a group of horsemen rode down the hills, across the ridge, and right past us. We watched them, mesmerized. Elliott and I have both ridden a lot in our lives — Elliott mostly when he worked on a ranch in California, me mostly in India and Pakistan as a teenager — and we were gripped with the memories: the tug of leather reins in our hands, the rock of our hips in the saddle, the communicative touch of our heels into our horse’s side, even the automatic shift in our center of gravity to respond to excited rearing. I felt it all again in a moment, in a heady rush that left me breathless.

I was struck by another more sobering emotion, too. Now a horse’s back looks far more dangerous than it ever did before. Now — when I look at the little faces of my children looking up at me — my head feels so much more fragile, the saddle so much farther from the ground. I realized with a touch of sadness that I’ll never ride again like I used to, with the joyful abandon of a girl madly in love with horses, heedless of her own safety. In high school my instructor would say, “Do you want to jump?” and I’d say, “How high?”

But today, well… at least for today, I am content to keep two feet on the ground and two arms around the ones I love. Maybe later Elliott and I will teach Lena and Gil how to ride, or we’ll have a pony of our own*, or we’ll watch Lena jump the jumps that I once jumped.

But that Sunday afternoon, I was content. Content to watch. Content to eat a fallen orange. Content to walk home to our little yellow house on the cliff, tuck my babies into bed, kiss the one I love. So very thankful and so very content.

*And I’ve already chosen a name: Mary Poppins!

Are there things you once did that you’ll never do again?