Peter does a turkey play...

The changing of the china.

Somewhat to Mike's chagrin, we are a Family of Seasonal China. This started innocently enough (doesn't everything?) when I got pretty Christmas china with snowmen on it as a Christmas gift from my in-laws, before Grace was born. The china accumulation really started to snowball (ha!) when I was pregnant with Peter and having all sorts of insomnia. I'd shop online for baby shoes and gradually start to look at vintage dishes... and before I knew it, I started collecting a few (ok, three) patterns of vintage china. I also have one set from each of my grandmothers. So all told, we rotate between those inherited patterns, the Christmas china you see here (which has some silly additions, like the slightly menacing snowman there, as well as napkins, tableclothes, dishtowels, and a beaded trivet), some Easter china, and birthday china. Also a different version of the Easter china, which is a pattern by Anchor Hocking called "Rainbow" that was made from the early forties until the mid-sixties. The Easter dishes are pastel, and the ... summer? dishes are primary colors. The birthday china is a really fun pattern called "Ripple" by Hazel Atlas; the dishes I collect have ruffled edges and are tuquoise and white. It's the same basic vintage as the Rainbow china, but has a more sixties look. Happily, the coordinating pitchers for the Ripple pattern are cheap and plentiful (I have - dear Lord, I think I have three, plus glasses in two sizes). The Rainbow pitchers are quite collectible and I'm just not able to bring myself to pay for one. I did score some very difficult-to-find bowls for the Easter dishes this year, which means I have something like service for twelve in that version of that pattern. (Easter at my house this year!) Grace is a huge help with the changing of the china: she's careful and always has good suggestions for arranging the china in the cabinet. Peter really wants to help, but so far I have politely declined. I'm not sure whether it's comforting on some level or just excessive, but if, say, the apocalypse hits, I could provide dishes to feed the neighborhood. No paper plates for us!

Cranberry sauce!

We have a favorite family recipe for cold, fresh cranberry sauce, and also a newer favorite for cold, cooked cranberrry sauce. Grace helped me put it together: a pound of cranberries, the zest of one orange, the juice of two oranges, one apple, and one cup of sugar. It cooks up very nicely and the end result is in the bowl!

Family photos.

In lieu of an actual extended family gathering, I'm posting a couple of family photos - these are my dad and my aunt Diane when they were kids - about 1944, I think. My dad was born in New Orleans, but they lived in DC within a couple of years. I'm not sure where the picture of the two of them was taken, although palm trees don't really seem like a DC kind of foliage. I love that Wally resembles Peter in these pictures.

Turkey!

Every year since we've moved to Illinois, if we're hosting Thanksgiving we get our turkey from the Hoka turkey farm. It's kind of a trek out there, and it involves encountering turkeys in their big, slightly stupid, more than slightly stinky glory, before getting one that's "processed" and ready for cooking. But we enjoy it, and we have turkey farm photos of the kids from way back. This year Mike took the kids himself since I was in California, and they had a good time.

The video is trademark Peter, complete with the bum-shaking. Edited to add: tragically, I cannot figure out how to rotate the video. Y'all will have to just turn your heads.

More CA fun...

So today is the last full day of the conference, and there's one session tomorrow and then we head home. Yesterday involved Lutheran breakfast, women's mentoring lunch, and Rock Bottom for dinner (where, take note: I got carded. I asked the waitress whether she was supposed to card anyone under forty, and she said no, anyone under *thirty*. Apparently having dinner with one's mother in the absense of one's children makes (this) one look under thirty. Huzzah!) My favorite moment of the day was John Dominic Crossan, this amazingly prolific biblical scholar, who spoke at the Lutheran breakfast. He said - after a speech arguing that although the theological concepts of the vengeful God and the God of peace and justice are both present throughout the Bible, Jesus was historically and theologically on the side of peace and justice - that since Jesus is always depicted at the right hand of the Father, to find God, we need to start with Jesus and go left. Given Crossan's mournful references to the war in Iraq, his meaning was perfectly clear, but it was so funny and witty and pointed - even the Republicans laughed.

In which mama is deployed to foggy California

So this is Day Two of all Daddy, all the time at home while Mom whiles away her time at the meetings of the North American Paul Tillich Society. A few oddball things so far: did you know they make binder clips in an even teenier version than the standard teeny version? So cute. Also, the Pinkerton Detective Agency is still doing well enough to post warning signs on doorposts in California - I should get a picture of their very nicely designed logo. And, these NAPTS folks are so nice and welcoming and funny and they drink with great gusto. I've made notes to ask specific presenters for copies of their papers (they get published in the newsletter but I'd like them early) for my research and picked up a nice description of the sort of fine comparision I'm doing in my project, which happily I wrote down because I've forgotten already. Then Bunny and I went to dinner and it was a great meal and very good company. You might not think a dinner of academics devoted to the work of Paul Tillich would be funny as well as interesting (although gossip, you take for granted), but you'd be wrong. And the sessions at the conference have been very good so far. The whole think proper starts up today.

Because I'm still nominially on Chicago time, I woke up at four and went to the fitness center of the hotel (which, btw, is the nicest place I've ever stayed, and has unusually lush towels and a well-designed modern-but-not-cold overall decor and has two separate places to eat and get coffee within steps of the front door). I discovered that I can run two miles without stopping on the treadmill, a feat which I have not (to put it mildly) achieved under Actual Use Conditions, like being outside. I think maybe the controlled incline is a factor. Because (quite sensibly) the TV attached to each treadmill can only be used with headphones, which I don't have, I watched a silent-movie version of "When Harry Met Sally" and frankly it still holds up pretty well. Now I'm in the business center checking my email (a vanity project if ever there was one!) and I'm about to go wrangle some coffee.

Sometimes, a mama has a day.

And sometimes that day comes at the beginning of a week which includes a kid home sick from school, and her midway defense of her dissertation, and a mock job interview, and her official teaching evaluation, and the start of a five-day conference during which she'll be separated from her young for more than 24 hours for the first time. Sometimes the only thing a mama can do is take the kids to the drive-in Starbucks for a chai latte (mama) and oatmeal cookies (the young) and spend a moment thanking her stars that she lives in a country where you can get a warm latte and cookies without leaving your car. So we did that. And then we took a long, slow bike through the neighborhood collecting leaves and navigating puddles and happily picking a stick out of someone else's yard that we looked at earlier in the week but were too shy to pick up. (This is me, folks, not Peter. Hence Grace's photo of mom with a cool stick...)

Edited to add: click on the little video above and you can hear some of Peter's awesome whistling.

Fun with leaves

So Grace was all about playing in the huge pile of leaves in the front yard, but Peter was more interested in helping wash leaves out of the gutters with the hose. (Note to the concerned: no, the three-year-old was *not* allowed to climb on the roof with the hose. Better luck to him next year!) Of course, after several hours of work and ten big leaf bags filled with leaves, the wind blew all night and the yard is now covered in ... freshly fallen leaves. In other foliage news, the hydrangias are starting to turn colors and they're so pretty - even the fading flowers have a certain beauty. And the geraniums we bought in the spring have blossoms still, even after our first good frost. They're a pretty reminder of a lovely summer.

Our local nature preserve.

We visit the little nature preserve near our house pretty regularly - I've been meaning to go for a month or two, though, and kept getting too busy. So we went today and walked the path around the lake, with plenty of stops to throw rocks, look at pretty leaves, irritate fishermen, watch geese, and (in Peter's case) poke at a beaver skull with his bare hands.

Clip from a march organized by our local peace group.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw9OfhmOlRA

Halloween!

Grace was a princess again this year (and she was lovely). Peter was a Super Turtle, which it turns out is his interpretation of the sweetest possible children's TV show, "Wonder Pets," wherein a teeny little duck and a teeny little hamster and a teeny little turtle, who have cute high squeeky voices and whose mission in life is to save even still yet teenier and cuter and more vulnerable baby animals from harm, save said animals and then sing a (cute!) triumphal theme song about it. Happily, it didn't bother Peter that there weren't Wonder Pet turtle costumes at Target - he's unfamilier with the Ninja Turtles, so he assumed the Ninja Turtle costumes were Wonder Pet costumes, and we all supported him in that assumption. A good time was had by all - our elderly neighbors had special trick-or-treat baggies for our kids, the kids had a great time taking turns on the doorbells (Grace rang the high ones, Peter did the low ones), and we now have enough candy to render them permanently buzzed from sugar for the next month.