Food. Family.

It's my Dad's birthday today, and not only did I really enjoy having dinner over at my parents' house, but my husband had to eat pot roast.

Poor Dear Husband. For the first ten years of our relationship, he claimed that he hated the very thought of the meal--all those mushy vegetables and stringy beef.

I'm pot roast agnostic, and pretty much happy to eat anything that I don't have to cook in my kitchen.

On the other hand, Dad looooves pot roast, and almost always requests it for his birthday dinner. Plus, he just loves to give my husband a hard time.

My mother makes pot roast in the slow cooker, and covers the meat with a jar of horseradish sauce. Horseradish sounds like a less than ideal condiment, but when you cook it for a period of several hours, the flavor mellows out and the beef becomes fork tender. It's delicious.

And you know, I think I saw my husband sneaking seconds onto his plate.

The best part of the evening, however, was watching Nora eat her own piece of chocolate cake. By the time she was finished, she had crumbs in her nose, hair, and in every crease of her neck. She brandished her spoon overhead and laughed. She clearly has her mamma's sweet tooth.

It's nights like tonight that I really miss when we are overseas--time to just be an extended family, to tease each other, sneak extra pieces of cake, and just revel in sharing our daily lives together.

Smells even better than it looks . . .

I love bread, especially when I make it myself and the smell of it baking fills my entire house.

Lost and Found

When I travel I like to buy souvenirs that I will use on a regular basis. I like things that remind me of the places I have been, yet have a function.

As a result of my peripatetic life, I have a stack of thick wool blankets from Guatemala, hand carved wooden spoons from Latvia, and table linens from Romania. I also have a pair of prized woolen mittens from Estonia.

The Estonians, they know cold. They also know their sheep and how to spin a thick, soft wool unlike any I have ever found anywhere else in the world. On a trip to Tallinn way back in the winter of 2005, I bought a pair of double lined wool gray mittens at an outdoor market . They sustained me through -30 Fahrenheit weather in Riga and weeks of snow in Bucharest.

Last Friday I emerged from the metro and my regular "it's Friday and I really need something to get me going" trip to Starbucks. (This rationale actually works quite well for every day of the week.) I reached into my purse to put on my mittens and only found one.

You know that child's poem about the three little kittens? Well, I spent the rest of the weekend meowing and searching for my lost mitten. It was ridiculous really, a small unimportant thing in the grand scale of things. But since I have had children I feel like I have lost entire continents without knowing. And that really irks me.

And thinking back to that now long ago trip to Estonia, I remembered driving back from Tallinn with my husband, in the no-man's-land on the border between Estonia and Latvia. It was there, on a long gray road tended by surly border guards that I came to the decision that I was ready to become a mother. Why there, I don't know. Maybe the car trip was just too uneventful with just two adults. But after that trip we decided to have a baby and I had Miss Bee and the mittens were somehow inextricably wrapped up in all that.

But then I found the missing mitten today, in the restroom at work. Miraculously, or maybe not so miraculously, the cleaning crew did not throw it away over the weekend, and some helpful person placed it right on the mirror where I would find it. And I am embarrassed to admit that I rejoiced.

It is the little things, you know? A lost mitten found; a handmade card from my daughter; a dinner alone with my husband . . . There are just so many small joys in life that are too easily overlooked.

Weekend Escape

This is where I spent yesterday afternoon:


As a Christmas gift, my in-laws got us a night away at a bed and breakfast in Maryland called Antrim 1844.

It has been two years since we have gone away by ourselves. The last time was to the ice hotel where there was no roaring fire to warm my toes, only the ominous threat of hypothermia.

This was much, much, better.

Two heartbeats

Cheeks McGoo is growing up and I can hardly stand it. My little precious baby, the daughter who at this time last year was cleaved to my body at least 15 hours a day, that little baby is now driving a car. And it's a red one. And she will periodically attempt to stand on top of it, just to show me that she can.

Thank goodness the car in question is only a small ride on toy as opposed to our family station wagon. If her legs were long enough, I'm certain that she would commandeer that one as well.

McGoo went from crawling and taking just a few tentative steps to reeling around the living room like a wild drunken sailor in the space of a week. Turn your back from 15 seconds, and she will try her best to climb the stairs. If I sit her down in the middle of my bed, she races to the edge, peers over, and . . . laughs.

I don't know what to make of her daring behavior. Miss Bee was a cautious toddler, and I hovered over her in the way that most first time parents do, waiting to steady any potential wobble.

I am not a daring person. I think I have done exactly one daring thing in my life--cliff jumping at Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. I wanted to impress my husband, so after he had taken the plunge, and a number of our other acquaintances had done so as well, I scrambled up the rough-hewn trail at the edge of the cliff.

Climbing barefoot over the sharp rocks and spiny weeds was a struggle. At the precipice, at the literal edge of sheer rock and nothingness, I looked down and saw the water sparkling almost 30 feet below. I made the decision then and there that I wasn't going to jump, and that I would try to go back down the way I had come.

But then, I looked down at my legs, and realized they were covered, just covered, in a swarm mosquitos and other biting insects. So I stepped out. I remembered to take a big step forward, away from the edge, as opposed to merely jumping into the air. (Jumping didn't get you enough distance away from the rocks.)

It was two heartbeats from the cliff to the water.

I closed my eyes as I fell. In doing so, I made a crucial mistake. When I closed my eyes, I tipped my head back and my whole body landed in the water as if I were sitting in an office chair. Feet, thighs and bottom. (I still flinch when I think the sound I made entering the water.) My dear husband swum over to rescue me; I was in complete shock.

The next day, the price of my daring would be revealed, in dark purple bruises from my heels to my back. Even the spaces between my fingers were not spared. I watched in fascination over the course of a week and a half as the bruises slowly faded from purple, to green, to yellow.

Someday McGoo and Bee will take their own big leaps, but hopefully not from a mosquito infested cliff-side in Guatemala. I am savoring these early years before independence.

My daughters, they fill the space between my heartbeats. I don't know how I can ever let them go.

Morning commute

Riding the escalator up to the metro platform this morning, I found myself trapped behind two over-large business men in suits. They were talking loudly and not paying attention to the fact that they had completely blocked the stair. As we reached the top, the train was on the platform, doors closing. The first man said, "Hey that's our train!"

(Yeah genius, it sure was.)

The other man laughed for far longer than was necessary.

I'm glad they thought it was funny. I didn't. Spent the next short eternity stamping my feet and blowing my breath, shivering on the frozen platform.

I was actually glad to get to work this morning.

Thundersnow

Boy did we ever have a snowstorm this afternoon, emphasis on the storm, to include the very rare combination of swirling white flakes plus thunder and lightening. That's kinda like the Easter bunny showing up on Christmas eve, if you ask me.

The good thing about thundersnow is that my office closed two hours early and I enjoyed a long evening with my girls and dear husband.

Miss Bee was beside herself with excitement at the snow and the prospect of a snow day tomorrow.

Dear husband made her hot chocolate for dessert and threw in a giant handful of mini marshmallows which caused no end of excitement. Every time she ate a marshmallow she counted how many remained. It was a good exercise in subtraction.

The wintry weather continues outside and our lights are flickering. I am off to say a little prayer that our power stays on.