We took the kids to an early dinner last night, at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. Let's just say we've had better, more romantic Valentine's Day dinners in the past. L. spent the entire car ride there and the time before dinner in a deep funk, throwing out insults and perseverating round and round on the fact that T. brought Molly McIntire to dinner. Then he ate soup for about ten minutes and spent the rest of the meal trying to use a toothpick to break into the candy machine behind our table. [more]

It's the Day Before the New Year today, and I'll spend it the way I usually do every year, cleaning house before the end of the year, and making the traditional Greek yeast bread, the Vasilopita. We'll hide a coin in the dough, as I always do, and the kids will fold the sweet, soft dough over it and argue, purposelessly, over who will be the lucky one this year. [more]

Only a week or so after we first set up Christmas around our house, and hanging our stockings above the fireplace in our family room, I was sitting at the kitchen table grading papers and listening to T. playing a pretend Christmas game in the adjacent family room. She was chattering to herself in whispers and stuffing the stockings with toys from the room: stuffed animals, a DVD, a wooden recorder. I smiled to myself as I listened to her play, because I remembered--what seemed like eons ago--L. playing similar pretend Christmas games. [more]

This is what you feed your kids for dinner when they had scones and cream and jam at a tea house at four o'clock, washed down with tea and enough sugar cubes to make you pucker, and then you had the bright idea to take them into an old-fashioned general store--the kind with big glass jars filled with candy--and then you had another brilliant idea and give them 25 cents a piece to pick out candy, which they ate before you even make it to the highway:

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I have always--all my life--been one to get a head start on processing change, or upcoming traumatic events (the loss of a pet, loss of a loved one). Rather than waiting until the thing happens, I face it head on months before I need to. When I was pregnant with T., for instance, I spent weeks mourning the loss of L.'s only child status, and worrying about the shift from a family of three to a family of four. Hormones running rampant, I would weep over silly story books, or simple moments with L., as I tried to come to terms with the transition. [more]