Thanksgiving week: all in the family

So much to this day! Our Thanksgiving gathering continues, even as it has to be still not entirely in the way that it would have been before the pandemic. With one super pregnant daughter and two unvaccinated little kids from different households and both attending schools, we are not yet ready to all sit down around a table inside. Nonetheless, we can do so much! And it seems this glorious weekend we do it all. 

Let's break it down a little:

The morning of the sleepover -- Primrose, here, from Chicago.

 

(Every child here has loved every single toy food here. Primrose is no exception.)

(Heading out)

Going to Madison Sourdough bakery with grandma.

Meet up with cousins and aunt and uncle at the Arboretum. With pain au chocolat.

Primrose is reunited with mom and dad.

(A hike)

The whole gang.

The four grandkids: Sandpiper is astonished.

The four grandkids: Sandpiper is delighted.

Back at the farmhouse now: preparing Thanksgiving dinner number one: my prep starts with the pie. Melissa Clark-- your advice was great. Pie, loaded with nearly four pounds of honeycrisp apples, spiced with cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg, is delicious.

Primrose paints.

Her talent is obvious.

Predinner snacks.

A hug for little sister.

The threesome, or maybe we should start saying foursome?

The chicken, stuffed with wild mushrooms and sage.

Getting the meal going...

And now it's almost midnight, but I'm hanging on to my last moments with my youngest girl and her husband before things get crazy busy for all of us.

A beautiful day. I am so full of gratitude and love...

Thanksgiving week

It begins today for us. Thanksgiving week. Much has to be accomplished! I'll bypass the explanations and concentrate on a pictorial message: of time with family in funny, and reliably familiar, sometimes convoluted, always wonderful ways.

"Family? We're a family too, no? Just a chicken family!"

Let's stick with the people family.

On a very pretty November day, where not all the leaves have left the trees yet!

Breakfast is a muddle. With Ed. Without Ed. Then with him again. It's complicated.

The task for this morning is to start in on Melissa Clark's apple pie. I'm sure one million Americans are making Melissa Clark's apple pie this Thanksgiving (she's the food person at the NYT), because she actually has a novel suggestion and after you've been baking for many years, you get excited when someone says something new about a standard dish. (And what could be more standard here then apple pie, right?) Her suggestion? Cook up the spiced apples before putting them into the pie shell. It will keep the crust from getting soggy. 

 

So, I precooked and pre-made the shell, to be baked tomorrow, so that it's bubbly hot and fragrant for our family feast number one.

The goal then was to pick up Snowdrop at school, deliver her home, and return to the farmette where the young Chicago family should be arriving. Good goal. Impossible to realize. For the first time EVER, I sat on the Beltline Highway for close to an hour, stuck in a traffic jam created by an accident up ahead. Instead of being first in line to pick up Snowdrop, I was last in line. Luckily, the first graders are picked up in a shorter line, so I wasn't terribly late. 

Quick, Snowdrop, here's your fruit snack! We're going home!

Bye, see you tomorrow! Turn around, drive back to the farmette where.... drum roll ....

... the young family has arrived.

The goal is for the parents to go off alone for a last overnight before the arrival of you know who. (Primrose will stay with us at the farmhouse.)

Once they leave, Primrose and I concentrate on serious play. It always involves dress up. Always that puffy dress pulled over her usual clothing. And eventually she settles in to do art. She has her mother's talent  and the ability to concentrate on her design until every last little space is filled in.

In the evening, we do the usual.

Like Sparrow, she insists that she no longer needs the booster seat.

Tradition has it that there will be popcorn and a movie after dinner. Tradition also has it that the movie viewing is a mess of trying to bring up a film that refuses to stream. And thus tradition has it that the sleepover child goes to bed very very late.

And so does her grandma. And that's not unusual either. However old I am, I still like to stay up nearly as late as Ed. Well, maybe not until 3 or 4 in the morning. After all, I have a little one who is bound to wake up just about the time the rooster starts crowing.

 

Thursday

There is a ladder precariously angled from step to the ceiling over our stairs. The weather outside is bracing (aka cold). And I have a morning appointment with an ENT, so that I can get clearance to have oral surgery in order to get tooth implants. So, a fun day fur us here at the farmette!

I don't really mind any of it. It's all mightily amusing. Ed has had to apply numerous coats of paint to patch up the ceiling and only halfway into the process did he conclude that maybe he should have sealed the ceiling first with a primer. I mean, whoever uses eight coats of paint to cover a stain?! But, too late now. He is moving along, laying on coat after coat after coat, until the stains are no longer visible. 

 

 

 

And the weather? Well, it's what we have in November. Caps, gloves and warm jackets were invented to make us feel cozy despite any winter blast. Finally -- the ENT? Well now, that proved to be a lovely visit. Too bad it didn't provide the coveted thumbs up, so that the oral surgeon can go ahead and blast away at my sinuses. The ENT doc smiled a patronizing smile (directed at the dental guy, not me) and said -- I can't rely on his (inferior) scans. I need to have you get nice, detailed CT scans before I can give you your thumbs up.

So, my dear Doctor, are you telling me I may have sinus blockage problems?

Oh, probably not. But I need a medical opinion of a radiologist to tell you that for sure (and not the inferior one of an oral surgeon).

So, now I have to go get a "real" scan, so that I can get an ENT to sign off on a procedure done by an oral surgeon, to get me ready for an implant so that I can have the dentist put a crown in. I'm counting a half a dozen various visits just to get this show moving along! All for a tooth.

By afternoon, I am more than ready to visit with Snowdrop.

Pick up at school? Well, she is well covered against the chilly winds.

I ask her if she is at all cold playing outside at recess. She tells me -- only if she takes off her mask. Her nose gets cold then. Reflecting on that she says -- maybe I'll continue to bring a mask to school in the winter once Covid is over.

Despite the cold, on the walk from the car to the farmhouse, she is always without a jacket, cap, or scarf -- she claims she needs none of it.

After reading...

She works on her homework, then hits the art supplies.

And soon it is time to return home, where her two brothers are settling in for the evening. First, I greet Sandpiper. Can I do my usual photo?

Sparrow joins him.

For some bizarre reason, Lucas the cat decides that he really must be part of this scene. The kids love Lucas, despite the fact that he is old, he has absolutely dreadful health problems, and he is as shy as can be. Plus, one could argue that he isn't exactly cuddly. We're shocked that he even is here, ready to be photographed with the rest. Lucas is big on retreating and hiding.

And if the brothers plus Lucas are there, then Snowdrop cannot be left out.

My daughter is cooking dinner, their other two cats are taking in the smells of the kitchen at the same time that they are keeping an eye on the spirited shenanigans on the arm chair. Somehow I was reminded of the nursery rhyme -- kitts, cats, sacks, wives -- how many were going to St. Ives?

 

Tomorrow, my own cooking begins.

Wednesday

Ed wakes up this morning and mumbles through his half sleep -- I really need to be in a (Zoom) meeting in 15 minutes.

Well that wont do. It takes me all of an hour to tidy myself up, tidy the house, feed the animals and prepare breakfast.

Okay, but you're on your own for breakfast. There's no point in rushing the day for a quick crunch of fruit together. 

You know I told you about this.

You did not.

I did too! Last night! 

All we talked about before I went to bed was why there should be a strange cat outside on the porch.

Well that too...

 

It is not unusual for us to have this kind of back and forth. Ed intends to say something and then, in his mind, he thinks he said it out loud. Of course, you could say that I'm just not remembering things -- a fault of older years after all! But I tend not to be that forgetful about trivial details of our lives. 

Which brings me to the other marker of older years (in addition to from forgetfulness, leaving aside for the moment whether it is his or mine) -- hearing. When we watch our movie or show in the evening, I decide the volume, because whatever his choice would be, it is too quiet for me. Last night, as he handed me the remote, he said -- you know, there is this excellent hearing test on the internet that you can run for yourself. It tells you the degree of attrition in one or both ears. I took it to see the effect of being around a loud machine.

Ed always wears ear muffs when he rides the tractor-mower or operated heavy machinery. I do not. I get off the tractor with my head buzzing and I'm full of regrets about having passed on the ear guards, but somehow when the time comes around for me to ride that thing again, I neglect the guards and hop on once again. So maybe I should check my hearing?

All this is why in the morning -- a very lovely November morning at that! -- I feed the animals...

Eat breakfast not alone... 

(Wait, how did that happen? Well, he was on a break from his meeting and ran over to join me. Both silly and sweet all at the same time.)

... And at his meeting lunch break, we go out for a walk in the neighborhood (where I take no photos, so I'll just show off the farmette crab yet again!)

And then I sit down and run the hearing test. (You can do it here, but it has to be at a time when it's very quiet in your house!)

And the results? Probably much the same as Ed's -- some mild hearing loss that comes with our demographic. So why do I always ask him to turn up the TV? Because, I like it louder, and he likes it quieter. Is there a test for personality differences? Because I'm sure we'd score wildly differently on that one!

Tuesday

What's on my mind? Honestly -- food. I am still not going to grocery stores to shop (habit and caution are a powerful partnership) and so I have to weigh the size of the fridge (small) against the availability of core ingredients (uncertain) and the time I have to pull it all together (varies), in my stocking of foods in preparation for the upcoming holidays. I'm on top of it! -- I tell myself. But that's not really true. Until a the final dish is scraped clean after the last holiday meal, you're foolish to think you're anything but trotting along, with zigzags, faltering steps, setbacks and uphill climbs still before you.

Adding to my load, Dance is "mysteriously" let into the farmhouse this morning, waking me up with her sudden lumpy presence on the bed. Ed!

Morning walk...

Morning breakfast...

And then it's back to getting foods together for the week ahead, while Ed proceeds to paint the interior of the farmhouse.

 

 

You heard it here: he chose this moment to touch up big water marks in various rooms where the roof (ultimately repaired by him) sprung water leaks into the house. He's been meaning to do it and, well, it's cold outside, so this is seemingly good planning on his part. Me, I'd grown so used to the water marks (they're all on the ceiling), that it's like the ugly wallpaper you found in the house you moved into: after a few months you don't even notice it. I'm sure it will look great once he's done, or at least it wont look bad, but in the mean time, with ladders and paint cans everywhere, the house very much feels like it is in a state of chaos.

I turn my back on it all and mow down fallen leaves with the tractor-mower.

To this chaos I bring the girl, who notices some things with the precision of a Swiss horologist (like the presence of infinitesimally tiny spiders) and other things (like the presence of paint cans and ladders) not at all. 

We read, we play, and now it's time to head out again.

Home. Where Sparrow is just coming in from his day at school (only he is more bundled; Snowdrop can ignore the cold and skip the jacket on her walk to and from my car).

(Sandpiper - happy to have both sibs around again!)

("I'm hungry! I want some cashews!" "I'll wait until you ask nicely.")

For Ed and me, it's getting to be chili weather out there. Beans and tomatoes and bits of this and that, bubbling in my big yellow pot. The cats are content (all seven of them -- another came along for the ride tonight), we're content. What more could you possibly want! (Ed, can we put away the paint cans by the weekend? Thank you!)