reindeer food

 

 

 

Ardleigh's secret recipe for kiddie delight drew sharp interest from our offspring (seen above enticing rats to our lawn).  Weeks after this effort, Charlie would wander over to this part of the lawn saying "Where's the reindeer food, Daddy?"

cookies for santa

 

 

 

 

third christmas

 

 

 

always open

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the drab space of time between the high of Christmas and excitement of a New Year is a long, long gap.  Since we didn't have any immediate family on the island, I thought it would be quite lonely... compounded by the fact that everyone else we knew did have family around and the attendant obligations and also by the fact that everything shuts for this week.  But it dawned on me, that my immediate family IS here... and one of them needs his pull up changed.  We're the family and fortunately for us, the weather was pretty great so we could play outside AND there is one place you can always count on to be open (except Christmas Day): The Aquarium.  This was great because we pretty much had the place to ourselves to run and explore and generally this week went really well.  We just played together and hung out and ate leftovers and played some more.  There was probably too much tv during this time in the form of "Frosty The Snowman" and the stop motion kind of scary Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer story that still haunts me (why the snow monster!?).

christmas cookies

 

 

 

In a tradition dating back to the pre-children/pre-marriage years at Eastside Cottage, we made our batch of Christmas cookies... meaning Mama made cookies and various colours of liquid sugar and let us decorate them.  Schuyler's layer of icing exceeded the height of the cookie by 2:1 and Charlie, well, Charlie was just in  sugar high heaven - this one was apparently finger lickin' good.

lunching in town

 

 

 

 

 

Another Breakfast At Monty's, Christmas Edition.

her style

 

It's a "look" alright.  Whether anyone will follow this trailblazer has yet to be seen.

christmas spirit

So Schuyler went through a mercifully short phase of not wanting her picture taken (and given the volumes of photos taken of her daily, this is an understandable reaction) which led to the above where Charlie is the picture of Christmas childhood glee and Schuyler contrasts nicely with the mood of her pajama top (PJ's courtesy of Kim and Ward; Dou Dou is model's own.)

Stockings are [stapled] by the chimney with care.

small and medium

The "kids tree"... artificial and about as tall as our eldest, this tree has been with us for all the years (since Eastside Cottage) we didn't have enough room for a tree but...

Now, we're officially grown up.  The kids and I drove down to the grocery store and got ourselves a real grown up tree - one that needs actual water and tending to (the kids are extremely keen to help sweep up the needles and dispose of them - to the point where they actually fight over who gets to throw the needles in the trash).  The house looks and smells like Christmas.  Now, if only we could find a real grown up to light a fire in our fireplace...

recording session

 

 

Who doesn't love singing when you won't be embarrassed?  I mean it just feel RIGHT to belt out some tunes regardless of your abilities.  If I had a really good voice, I don't think I would stop singing (until someone tired of me constantly singing hit me with, say, an upright piano)..  Fortunately, although I don't have a great voice, I do have some decent equipment with a lot of cool effects for your voice and the kids really dig it.  So the above are Charlie and Schuyler singing with all kinds of delay and reverb effects on their voice.  Again, who wouldn't have fun doing that!?