On the Third Day of Christmas…

December 27, 2007 @ 8:27 am | Filed under: Family Adventures

…I looked at my box of Christmas cards and thought, hmm, maybe tomorrow? And planned a trip to the dentist instead.

Wonderboy made it through the holiday with no infection, woohoo! His gum where the teeth got shoved up (and are still up there) is horribly red and swollen, still bleeding on and off. I watched him like a hawk for fever all week, but he’s been fine. Whew. The gum still needs attending, of course, so after breakfast, off we go. I bet they’re going to have to pull those teeth. (Not today.) Argh.

But our Christmas was lovely, lovely. On Christmas Eve we took a drive to the mountains, lunching in the same little mountain town Scott and I visited on my birthday. The girls marveled at the wildfire damage we saw on the way up, lots and lots of it.

Firedamage

I put a bunch more pictures on Flickr, if you’re interested. I snapped them all as we drove past, so some of them are blurry.

Julian is famous for its apples. In the autumn, San Diegans flock to the pick-your-own orchards surrounding the quaint little gold rush town. (Well, not this year. First, an early frost decimated the crop; then the wildfires overtook picking season.) The old-timey main street boasts a pie kitchen every hundred yards, more or less. We wanted to bring home a pie for our Christmas Eve dinner (bit of a pie theme going right now), but our first choice of bakeries was closed, and our second choice had a line out the door and down the block.

Scott ducked into a nearby garden shop we’d visited the week before (and where I found the perfect Christmas gift for my mom), purportedly to ask for a pie-shop recommendation. In a town famous for its apple pies, choosing the right pie shop is serious business. I took the kids to the "candy mine" in the basement of the neighboring drugstore. Mining for candy (filling a tin pail with bulk candy from the vast array in a sunken cavern) is also Serious Business, so this kept us occupied for some time, and I didn’t notice that it took Scott an awfully long time to get that pie-shop recommendation. On Christmas morning he surprised me with a dear little robins-egg-blue pitcher I’d been sighing over during the first trip, while shopping for my mother.

Sweet.

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  1. Jenny says:

    What a darling little town! I had never heard of it before, but I now know where to make a stop on our next trip through CA! (Wish you had posted a photo of the pitcher; it sounds lovely)

  2. patience says:

    It sounds like a wonderful place to visit. The wildfire damage is stunning but it helps me to keep in mind that from all this natural disaster will come new life. But I feel for the people who lost their homes and livelihoods.

    Best wishes regarding Wonderboy’s dental woes. He may be coping well but I can imagine how it must be hurting your heart.

  3. sarah in va says:

    Hope things went well at the dentist. Waiting to hear.

  4. Karen Edmisten says:

    We hope WonderBoy is doing okay, and the pitcher sounds lovely. :-)

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My Bonny Clan


Jane, 13 yrs old
Rose, 10 yrs
Beanie, 7 yrs
Wonderboy, 5 yrs
Rilla, 2 yrs
baby eagerly expected Jan. 2

and Scott, the love of my life




Book Log 09


The Ten-Year Nap
by Meg Wolitzer

The Uncommon Reader: A Novella
by Alan Bennett

World Made by Hand
by James Howard Kunstler






Book Log 08


Lots of picture books
for the Cybils

The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution
by Alice Waters

How I Live Now
by Meg Rosoff

The Great Turkey Walk
by Kathleen Karr
(family read-aloud)

The Trees Kneel at Christmas
by Maud Hart Lovelace

A Reader's Delight
by Neil Perrin
(a book I have savored, essay by essay, all year—thank you again, sweet friend who sent it)

Ethan Frome
by Edith Wharton

The Ransom of Red Chief
by O. Henry
(family read-aloud)

Sign of the Beaver
by Elizabeth George Speare
(family read-aloud)

Stitched in Time: Memory-Keeping Projects to Sew and Share
by Alicia Paulson

Bend-the-Rules Sewing
by Amy Karol

Understood Betsy
by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
(read-aloud to Beanie)

The King's Fifth
by Scott O'Dell
(middle-grade novel about a young Spanish cartographer's travels with Coronado in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola)

A Murder for Her Majesty
by Beth Hilgartner
(I posted about it here)


haystackcover

Haystack Full of Needles
by Alice Gunther
(Here's my post about it)

The Highwaymen
by Marc Bernardin and Adam Freeman

Number the Stars
by Lois Lowry

Swallows and Amazons
by Arthur Ransom

A Street in Marrakesh
by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea

Knight's Castle
by Edward Eager (to Beanie)

(a sequel to Half Magic)



The Creative Family
by Amanda Soule

The Losers (Vol.1): Ante Up
by Andy Diggle and Jock

Green Arrow: Year One
by Andy Diggle and Jock

Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places
by John R. Stilgoe
(here's a post about it)

Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
by Madeleine L'Engle

Dogger
by Shirley Hughes

As for the rest:

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They're still accessible at melissawiley.typepad.com, where this blog lived from January 2005-March 2008. You can also find all my Lilting House posts there, or try the search bar here. All my previous Bonny Glen and Lilting House posts have been imported to this site.


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Every day is complicated, messy, and full of friction. And every day has glorious or cozy moments worth celebrating. I seldom bother to chronicle the friction and the mess because writing time is fleeting and precious—and childhood even more so. I’d rather capture the small joys that I might forget—or take for granted—if I don’t take time to set them down in words.

(Excerpt from this post about Real Life, quoted here because I don't want anyone to be under the impression that things are always perfect around here! Heaven knows we are anything but. Perfect, frictionless, orderly? Nope. Happy? Most of the time!)


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