Well the holiday is over and as my sister Foxy proclaimed to me yesterday on facebook messenger, "We survived! Yes!!!" I really am not a Scrooge, I do love the fuss and the celebration and I try not to cut corners on the  excitement but good golly, does a normal week sound good.

Am working on housework today tag-teaming orders of duty with Foxy using IM. Have been blasting through recording receipts for our budget recrding, stripping and re-making the beds, sorting winter from summer and pregnancy from non-pregnancy in the clothing department and bagging and bagging and bagging up loose-leaf pregnancy tea that I bought and haven't been using at all because I haven't been organized enough to get it ready to use. Whew. Am ready for a huge goods purge, immersing myself in a housekeeper's routine again and booting up of my weekly menu system. All good things which, somehow feel relieving. Am feeling all together at the moment because I have some beef thawing out in the kitchen for swiss steak for dinner (one of those classic comfort dishes that I've never made or eaten).

Speaking of classic food I've never made...A asked me at breakfast if I might make his eggs sunny-side up sometime. I said, "Sure!" And then there was this long pause and I followed up with a casual  "So do you know how?" I feel silly but, I've always made eggs over easy or scrambled and I haven't really got any idea how to make a proper sunny-side up egg....will have to look it up and broaden my experiences.

The garden is looking properly drab and I keep wondering if I should just put it out of its misery, trim, chop and rake it up for the winter. On the other hand, there's a lot to indoors and the cosmos are still pumping out blossoms and I hate to cut them off, mid-bloom. I just hope I don't put it off so long that I find myself out there in the snow, clipping stems and finally stacking pots and pulling in the outdoor cushions.

We had a really nice and extremely low key get-away. Just my speed these days, I keep telling people. We took one small hike amongst amazing fall foliage, had a yummy stack of whole grain pancakes for breakfast, picked some oyster mushrooms, slept in, took a nap and drank matching mugs of hot cocoa foaming with whipped cream. Yum. Just right. And I think the morals are:

Breaks are fabulous.
A and I really like each other.
Jane is brave.


We hear there were slightly sleepless nights at home, we experienced a few teary phone calls from one very short boy and there was a bit of bleary eyed relief when we finally made it home but all in all Aunt Jane was a really huge hit. In fact Reuben cried halfway home from Newark after we dropped her off at the airport, woke up the next two mornings when he woke up that life was hardly worth living without his Aunt Jane here and then told me periodically that he wanted her to come back now. We even had one small, teary episode with Gideon where I swear he was sniffing "Aunt Jaaaaaane!" in the morning when he woke up. Parenting alone is ridiculous hard, no question about that but, somebody who can hack that and still have the little charges wailing piteously because she's gone is made of pretty great stuff. Color me impressed.

In current news, there's not a whole lot of action to report exactly. We're holed up, cuddled in our den together snuggled down for Autumn. Reuben is displaced a bit zone-wise as he is anticipating snow daily now, I keep trying to remind him that we won't have snow until around Christmas but he persists in hoping. I made a big German pancake in my cast iron skillet in the oven for breakfast this morning and served homemade, spiced apple pie filling over the top. So yummy with the sausage we had on the side. Mmmm.... Hot tea has become a breakfast regular lately too since its only in the 30's in the morning. The houseplants have moved indoors again and twice now I've smelled the toasty, hot smell that the furnace makes on chilly mornings. I love that smell. I feel so snug and happy when we're pulling out the extra quilts and closing the curtains to keep off the chill. Autumn grows on me more every year. I have a bundle of firewood sitting by the fireplace, waiting hopefully for me to get up the motivation to light it. Reuben keeps suggesting marshmallows in an encouraging way.

AND...I don't feel nauseous anymore! Well, mostly. I have to be careful and make sure I don't get hungry and when I wake up in the morning I have to get a quick mouthful of something to fortify The Wee One and I but if I dot my I's and cross my T's I feel fine! Its really really really nice to not feel so seasick. 9 weeks was the key for me. Really I only had 3 weeks of nausea which seems kind of pitiful in retrospect but, it really was truly horrible in the moment. I am really looking forward to the second trimester when I won't feel so uncontrollably drowsy anymore. I am still napping every day and turning in early at night. I think Fall coupled with pregnancy has turned me into a hibernating mammal.

The leaves on our pumpkin vine are starting to die away now and my excitement over our one pumpkin we'd grown turned to astonishment when I noticed all the splashes of orange amongst the grass and counted not one but nine pumpkins! Whew! We're going to have a lot of pumpkin pie at our house this fall! Yum!

The boys and I made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies yesterday which I really like. The recipe makes little cookies (just right for little hands) and actually has more oats than regular flour which I love. I am contemplating the wisdom of making some pumpkin quick bread today. I realize there must be foods out there to eat that aren't baked goods but, I am in a baking frame of mind and its hard to imagine anything else at the moment. Chicken and dumplings is on the docket for dinner, cold weather food all round.

I had planned to take pictures of the three really cute little baby hats I knitted for my sister Doubleddog but realized in a fit of slight panic yesterday that I really had to mail them to her instantly as she's in labor as we speak! EEK! So we whirled down to the post office post haste and though there are no pictures there might be some from Doubled herself after the tiny wearer of my hats arrives. I'm praying for her and thinking of her around the clock and trying trying not to call incessantly to check and see how things are progressing. So far everything is absolutely as good as you could wish for...a slow, gradual first labor with definitely marked progression and appropriate peaceful moments and even some breaks for sleep. We await the final word with baited breath!

In other less headline style news....I need a good book. Can anybody reccomend a feel-good and yet not inane novel that they think I might enjoy? I need something happy to escape into at bedtime every evening for 10 minutes or so. I just finished a book I hated intensely and would really like to swap out that memory for a book that makes me glow and hum.