Day 232-262: November in a Nutshell

Well! What a month, eh? 

Election day and the week after was a chance to use every coping mechanism I've learned in my 38 years of life. Deep breathing, meditation, chanting, long walks, dog therapy, avoidance, retail therapy, gratitude practices, chocolate therapy... and it all turned out okay in the end. For the first few days after the election I avoided the news completely, Jeremy giving me the briefest of updates. Then I started looking at NPR's graphic with the bubbles that were colored red and blue, and I watched with rapture as the red bubbles edged closer to the center line, and then crossed that line and turned blue... Thank you Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona! Thank you so much! 

In other November news, we bought a farm truck. It's a Toyota Tundra with over 200,000 miles on it and still going strong. We got it from Jeremy's cousin Daniel, so we know it has been well taken care of. We now have a whole fleet of Toyotas in our driveway (Yaris, Prius, Tundra) that we're hoping to drive for many hundreds of thousands of miles more. And these days, with the once-a-week trip to town for groceries, that should last us quite a long time. 

Taiya actually said, "Hashtag newtruck" when I took this picture. So, #NewTruck

Peekaboo!

Daisy approves.

The kids love the truck and immediately invented games to play in it. They made it a "food truck" by opening the back window and serving food to whoever was ordering from the bed of the truck. Oh, and they named the truck Owl. 

The most important event of November in our house, of course, is Taiya's birthday. She is now a big nine-year-old, and is getting to be such a big kid. A couple days before her birthday we had an outdoor get-together with her Gammie and Poppie so they could give her their presents in person. I had told the kids before we got there that we couldn't do hugs, but when Taiya got out of the car and saw her Gammie, she completely forgot and ran up and gave her a huge hug. And I didn't have the heart to stop her. I could see how much they both needed that hug. Taiya and Gammie normally have a very snuggly relationship, and it's one of the cruelties of the pandemic that is just isn't safe to allow that closeness. During our visit we kept masks on most of the time, sat even more than six feet apart on the patio, and stayed outside. Our time together showed me even more clearly, since these gatherings are so rare, just how precious they are. 

Taiya's actual birthday was a day of ups and downs. She was excited in the morning to open her presents, and loved them. Then later in the day, the day was NO fun, and it was the WORST birthday ever, and she was in tears. It's so hard to meet birthday expectations, and it made me so sad that she was disappointed. We made chocolate covered pretzels, and that helped a little. Then she decided to spend her birthday money on a doll she really wanted, and we drove to Target to do a curbside pick-up, and suddenly it was the BEST day ever, and everything was all better. Her meals of choice for the day were: biscuits and gravy for breakfast, ramen for lunch, and chicken noodle soup for dinner. Her cake was the Peerless Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Butter Frosting from the Fannie Farmer Baking Book, and it was so moist and rich. Definitely a winner. We ended the day watching one of her gifts: Anne of Green Gables on DVD (the Megan Follows version of course).

With her birthday behind us, we could start thinking about Thanksgiving. We stayed home and cooked a feast for the four of us. I did most of the cooking the day before: apple pie, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, bread stuffing, cranberry sauce, butternut squash, and sweet potatoes. On Thanksgiving, the kids wanted pie for breakfast, and I thought, why not? We don't have to save it for after dinner when everyone is too full to fully appreciate it anyway. So William had pumpkin pie and Taiya had apple pie (and I had some of each, just to taste-test of course). It was a beautiful, warm day, and since most of the work was already done I could relax and enjoy it. Jeremy smoked the turkey and made mashed potatoes. I took a nice walk in the woods with William, FaceTimed with my brother Thatcher and his girls, read (Miss Buncle's Book, by D.E. Stevenson - a fun read), drank tea, and got the house tidied up enough for a celebration. At dinnertime, we brought a folding table into the house to put all the food on, set the table all fancy, put on dressy clothes, and had a lovely feast. 

We heard several days after Thanksgiving that Jeremy's cousin Daniel's wife tested positive for COVID. She got her results back on Thanksgiving. Daniel thinks now that he had it too, though at the time he thought it was allergies. During the time period where they would have been positive and potentially shedding the virus, Jeremy and Daniel reroofed part of Aunt Kathy's house (Daniel's mom). They were outside, but not masked. And that's how it happens! No one in our house has been tested or have felt any symptoms. We are staying home for another week to make sure we don't spread it unknowingly. This is the closest we've come, that we know of, to being exposed to the virus. It is an excellent reminder to stay vigilant and stay physically distanced from everyone. 

On the last day of November, we transitioned from Thanksgiving season to Christmas season. Normally we don't make the switch quite so early. And normally, we go cut down a scraggly cedar from somewhere on the farm. But this year I wanted a pretty Christmas and I wanted it now. So, on a rainy Sunday we loaded up in the new truck and went to the local Christmas tree farm in Rudy. We found a tree remarkably quickly. I was expecting them to want to search a little more for the perfect tree, but they found one right away and said, yep that's good! That is so not how we did it when we were kids, tramping through knee-deep snow in the National Forests of Ripton. The kids ran around playing hide and seek, they were given candy canes when we were loading up, and we went home and decorated the tree right away, Christmas music playing cheerily from the small speaker on my phone. 

We are all ready for December now!