Not dead yet!

Where’d the summer go? Or the fall, to be more exact. The leaves are still on the lawn (we’re calling it mulch) and there is no snow yet, to Jamie’s disappointment. We’ve had flurries, but I haven’t pointed them out to him. Also, I haven’t found him winter boots yet.

That’s a delicate line to dance with a 3-year-old, whose sense of time is still so fluid that Christmas might be tomorrow, despite the Advent calendar to help him keep track. If I buy boots now, he will expect snow soon. If I don’t buy boots now and wait, then he’ll be stomping around in too-big Hello Kitty boots that I paid an arm and a leg for because that's all they had left. be all gone by the first snow.

Ditto for a sled.

Anyway, Halloween blew by, but I did my best to prolong it because I love Halloween. Jamie was a bat and flapped around the house a lot and did very well at his first trick-or-treating outing where he did all the work. He chose houses based mostly on the quality and quantity of their Halloween decorations, and although he seems to have a thing for Tootsie Rolls (really, kid? Who likes those?), he was satisfied with the haul. My favorite part was when he got excited and ran up to two big kids and said “trick or treat!”

Thanksgiving, we had another family over for a nice, low-key holiday. They have a kid about Jamie’s age, and the two of them ran off to play for long enough that we all sat at the table, sipping our wine and sighing happily that we could each speak whole sentences without interruption. Plus! Plus! I divvied up the leftovers right after dinner, and both houses got enough leftover turkey to make our favorite dishes … but not so much that you start looking on the Internet and make a turkey-gravy layer cake with sweet potato frosting and think that’s a good solution.

So now we are heading for Christmas, full tilt. The knitting will continue until morale improves.