Super Gavin

"Mom, I'm not cute anymore. I'm cool and awesome."

Everybody got that?

Christmas Days

Gavin put on his new pajamas from Gram on Christmas Eve, and has taken them off, briefly, only twice since then: once Christmas Day to go to dinner at some friends', and again Sunday for church. Though the rest of us have actually put on clothes for the past few days, it's not because we had lots of things to do and places to go. That's my favorite part about Christmas, just hanging out, watching videos, reading books, and no to-do lists. Pajamas all day, every day, if you feel like it!

Gripped in Gavin's hand above are the tags from said pajamas -- both his and his sister's. Gavin has decided these are "sports tickets." He's been taking good care of them so he can use them to get into a basketball game sometime soon. The rest of his gifts kind of paled in comparison with new pajamas and pretend sports tickets -- but he was satisfied with Santa's offering of Batman and Superman figures, the Kung-fu Panda movie, a Transformer truck from his cousin Collin, and new outfits for his bear Max from Mom and Grandma.

Santa brought Lucy matching pajamas for Lucy and her doll Kirsten, and an ice-cream maker, but her favorite gift by far has been a collection of I Love Lucy episodes on DVD. The TV Lucy and our Lucy have the same sense of humor. It doesn't seem to matter that these shows were made 50 years ago in black and white, she'll watch them over and over and laugh and laugh.

We've been out playing in the snow every day . . .

And working on art projects . . .

And watching for wildlife out the windows . . .

And just enjoying being together, warm and cozy at home.

And yes, I did have a lovely birthday. Thanks for the phone calls. Austin got me an iPod for my birthday. It's been fun listening to my favorite songs on it, when I can wrestle it away from Lucy.

Traditions

Family traditions are my favorite thing about Christmas! Last week we celebrated St. Lucia Day by taking ginger cookies to Lucy's first grade class and to our neighbors and friends. Gavin's job is to be St. Lucia's starboy, which he's okay with because he gets to wear a "wizard hat."


Last night was our Bethlehem Dinner, in which we feast on foods Jesus might have eaten 2,000 years ago in Israel. It's a bit more challenging to find the ingredients in Central Vermont -- we miss our little Turkish market and the fresh seafood at H-Mart! But Michelle Bedell came up big with a delicious recipe for Baklava and we managed pretty well. After dinner, the kids dressed up and re-enacted the Nativity story for us . . . Lucy wanted to be the angel, which left only 6-month-old Addison to be Mary, but all the kids did great, even our little Mary. Lucy was a glorious and enthusiastic angel, and Gavin made a wonderful wise guy.

We are looking forward to more exciting events and traditions in the next two days! Gavin is rather concerned about Santa coming down our chimney, since it leads to the wood furnace in the basement, and he's a little leery of Austin's explanations about Santa's fireproof suit. But the proof's in the figgy pudding, and I'm sure he'll be quite satisfied when he discovers that Santa made it just fine on Christmas morning. (Though I don' t think Santa's going to manage to fill Gavin's Christmas request for a parachute and a wind-up lobster toy -- I don't think they make those in the old North Pole workshop. Hopefully a surprise substitute gift will do. If you happen to come across a wind-up lobster toy, Santa would appreciate the help.)

We wish you a Merry Christmas and look forward to reading your blog to hear about your traditions and celebrations!

O Holy Night -- Liz Lemon Swindle

Snow much fun

Meet Frosty the Family Snowman, without a hat (lest he come to life.)

We took the kids to Sugarbush for their first big ski day of the season on Saturday. Austin was ski instructor, I was the treat holder / camera person /positive karma at the bottom of the hill. Instead of a chair lift, the bunny hill has a kind of moving sidewalk to the top (the kids called it the "magic carpet").

We brought all our equipment except for Lucy's coat -- oops -- so she had to ski in a couple layers of loaner jackets courtesy of Guest Services. She had a great attitude and looked awesome zooming down the hill, even though her fashion was a bit suspect.

Gavin skiied great too. He loved it. This is probably Gavin's ideal sport, since he doesn't ever seem to get cold. (He howls if his bathwater is above freezing temperature, and right now he's running around the house in his swim trunks.)

His big day of skiing wore him out -- he fell asleep before we could even get his coat off him!

You know you're a Vermonter if . . .

• The cars are covered with more than a foot of snow and there's a raging blizzard forecast for most of the day, but you have gnarly Hakkapellita snow tires on your Corolla so you see no reason to cancel your roadtrip. (We finally did cancel our plans to go to Philly this weekend, not because of the snow in Vermont, but because of an ice storm in Massachusetts.)
• A flock of wild turkeys walks by the house and the first thing you think is, "too bad we don't have a shotgun!" (This is seriously the first time I've ever had this thought and I immediately suppressed it and grabbed the camera. Unfortunately we didn't get a good shot -- with the camera -- the turkeys were great big toms the size of peacocks at the zoo! We'll know we're real Vermonters when we not only have a shotgun, it's loaded and sitting by the door, with an extra in the passenger's seat of the truck.)
• Your butcher calls and says your pig is done. Looks like we'll be spending the winter feasting on organic pork to go with all the applesauce we canned from our apple tree.
• Your wood furnace cranks the heat up to 80 degrees inside, making the prospect of going out in the snow to build a snowman or sled or snowshoe or cross-country ski in the front yard even more inviting. . .

Fire Drills & Ice Cream

Gavin's learning great things at preschool. Not only does he have the politically-correct Thanksgiving story down, he's also been drilling us in the proper procedure for "getting the fire off you" in an emergency. He's been practicing this extensively. Below, you'll see Gavin's rendition of STOP DROP and ROLL. Play the video over and over and you'll get a good sense of what our afternoon was like.



In other news . . . the Johnson family happened to be in town for the holiday so they came to play with us for the day yesterday. The kids were really enthusiastic about the Ben & Jerry's factory tour.

After a whole day of playing with Josh and Emile, Lucy just couldn't keep herself awake any longer. . .

Thankful

Happy Thanksgiving! We are very thankful for you today. Thanks for keeping up with us and making us feel like our friends and family are not so far away.

We've had a great, low-key holiday so far. We kicked it off yesterday by dressing the kids up in their new ski gear. ("New" to us, really -- Austin has been painstakingly assembling a bargain ski kit since August, shopping sales, ski swaps, craigslist, and ebay from Montana to Vermont.) Austin took the kids out for some practice runs on the sledding hill in the front of our house. It started out a little inauspiciously when Lucy smacked herself in the face with her skis, giving herself a black eye. Fortunately, she quickly got over it and Austin showed her a less-hazardous way to carry her skis. Gavin wasn't so sure about things until he saw Lucy having fun and then he got into it too. There was a lot of falling down. Good thing they are so close to the ground to begin with. Lucy's made up a skiing mantra: "Falling's fun, no harm done!" Watch out, Sugarbush, here come the Gray kids. They appear to have inherited their mother's sense of balance. Luckily, they got their father's good attitude and sense of adventure, too.

Gavin spent this morning running around the house in the turkey hat he made at preschool, trying to keep the rest of us from catching and eating him. The kids helped make the feast, which made it take twice as long with twice as much mess, but it was at least twice the fun that way. Austin regaled the kids with the story of the Pilgrims and the Indians at the first Thanksgiving. Gavin wasn't impressed. "Daaaaad, they're called 'Native Americans'!" he informed us in his best exasperated, 3-going-on-17 voice. So embarassing to have politically incorrect parents.

We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving too!

Gram's Pictures

Sharon took some great pictures when she came to visit us in late September! I missed a lot of her visit due to the Exponent conference, so I didn't get many pictures of my own, but I grabbed some of my favorites from her blog . . .

Happy Thanks-o-ween

It doesn't seem fair to only get to dress up at Halloween! Lucy and Gavin gave us a Thanksgiving preview tonight -- Lucy dug the old blowup chicken suit out of the Halloween box to be our Thanksgiving Turkey, and Gavin wore his Pilgrim hat he made at preschool today.

Boo!

Happy Halloween from Pippi Longstocking and her sidekick, Gavin the friendly Ghost!


We were thrilled when Lucy told us she wanted to be Pippi for Halloween, rather than Hannah Montana or some such (mostly, we felt like good parents for reading to our kid, though it's not like she doesn't watch Hannah Montana plenty too!) None of the kids could figure out who she was (a few guessed "Wendy" from Wendy's) but all the adults knew right away. I guess it's a generational thing. We braided pipe cleaners into her hair and used red hair-spray dye to get just the right effect.


Gavin's ghost suit was a lot easier, and a lot less messy. He spent the evening entertaining everyone by waving his arms around and yelling "Boo!" We went trick-or-treating with friends in Montpelier and the kids extorted candy from all sorts of nice people, until their bags were too heavy to carry, which seems like the right signal that it's time to go home. Now the kids are in bed and the parents are raiding the candy stash for all the good stuff. . .

Philly Forever!

Yo Yo Yo Philly! Last night the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series in an exciting, 4 to 3 final game that started in the sixth inning, due to a rain out two nights ago. It was so fun to watch our adopted hometown crowd go crazy -- even fun to watch the notoriously-difficult Philly fans boo Bud Selig for allowing the game to go forward on Monday despite forecasts of heavy rain. We've gone to Phillies games for years with all our favorite people -- we've taken Lucy and Gavin, Sam and Heather, Dave, Jordan, Dad, and other people who've come to visit. We've gone to Mormon Night at the Phillies and watched the missionaries sing the national anthem, we've gone with Austin's office and his friends from law school, and we helped Rob Price use all those free Pfizer tickets. We've seen the Phillies play in Baltimore and DC. The memories are wonderful, despite the fact that Phillies were always pretty average. It's really fun (and totally surprising) to see the Phillies actually become champions!



Even more unbelievable and improbable than a Phillies World Series win, the church recently announced that they were building a temple in Philly. Not in the suburbs -- in Philly itself, at Broad and Spring Garden! (For more info, click http://http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/news-releases-stories/new-temple-site-locations-announced.) It's one of only three urban temples in the world, the others being Manhattan and Hong Kong. I still can't get my mind around it, it's just incredible, and it's going to have such a positive effect on the city. Though most Philadelphians don't know it, this is even bigger than the Phillies.

A Philly temple . . . a Phillies World Series . . . Rob Price, are you pulling some strings up there?

Pumpkin Party

The tradition lives on! A few highlights from this year's annual Pumpkin Party, now transplanted to central Vermont. . .

It's been fun to remember Pumpkin Parties past and the wonderful friends who participated in them. . . Jason Mumford's abstract pumpkin art, Ammon Allred wearing the same sweater every year, Rob Price's creative use of the stem, that funny Dutch couple who ATE the raw pumpkin pieces they carved out. The Pumpkin Curry Soup and Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies are the same as they ever were, but somehow, this party has morphed from an event for urban singles into a party that's all about the kids. I guess a lot has changed in our lives, and the Pumpkin Party adapts, like all great family traditions.

Happy Birthday Lucy!

Lucy Hannah Gray turned six today! We celebrated by taking cupcakes to Lucy's class and having a family party at home. Lucy requested a special dinner -- spiral mac n' cheese, of course!


Lucy got some great presents. She especially liked her Webkinz Chipmunk from Grandma, her new (used) ski boots from Dad, and her jewelry box art kit from Sam and Heather. Sam and Heather also sent Gavin a prize, which he was thrilled about. Lucy has also been enjoying her Ariel DVD from Gram and Papa.

Last Saturday, we invited Lucy's friends over for an Art-y Party. The kids had a great time doing art projects and going for a nature walk through the backyard looking for paintable rocks and rubbable leaves.

In other news . . . we had a guy come today from the Vermont Historical Society to take a look at our barns. It turns out the hay barn dates to the construction of the house -- around 1840! He dated it by the fact that the timbers were hand-hewn with an axe and the sawn boards were done with an up-and-down rather than circular blade at the saw mill. The carriage house (probably originally a horse barn) dates slightly later, and the small wooden barn out front was originally an ice house from the early 1900s. The guy was amazed that they were in such good condition, particularly the old hay barn. We're just amazed that they're all so old! We're going to try to get a preservation grant from the state and put the hay barn on the historic register.

Fall in Vermont

For the past several weeks, the local NPR station has been running a "Signs of Fall" series where people write in and share their signs that fall has arrived. http://www.eotsweb.org/blog.php

We thought we would share our own Gray Family Signs of Fall. . .

• Wood stacked up by the barn, all dry and ready to bring into the basement.

• Brother Young coming to do one last cut of hay in our field, with Gavin's help.

• Friends coming to help pick apples from our apples trees. (Like our ladder?)

• Back-to-School night at Lucy's first grade class.

• Finding really interesting gourds for sale at Ellie's Market (with Berit Price!)

• Picking out the very best pumpkins to make into Jack-o-Lanterns at the Pumpkin Party.
  

• Dense thickets of trees thinning out as the leaves fall to the ground.

• Lots of wonderful dry, crunchy fallen leaves for Lucy and Gavin to stomp through!
  

Becoming a grown-up

On Friday, I drove down to Boston to attend the Exponent Women's Retreat (more about that later). On the way, I found a mall. This might not be particularly exciting to those of our friends who live near malls, but for me it was very exciting. I don't think I've been to a real mall in more than a year! I had to stop. The kids needed jeans, I needed a new watch battery, and I was in desperate need of some casual pants that weren't jeans that I could wear at work when I didn't have to be in uniform.

It didn't take me long to discover that the mall wasn't quite the place I remember.

I wandered into familiar places like the Gap, Abercrombie, H&M, and American Eagle and quickly realized that I was in strange and foreign land. What are these awful clothes! I don't want to wear this stuff! I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Then I went into Banana Republic -- surely Banana Republic would be the same! -- and told an overly-helpful saleswoman what I was looking for. She gave me an appraising look. "How OLD are you, if you don't mind?" she wanted to know. Aha! The lightbulb came on. I am almost 35 years old. I am too old for the Gap, and Abercrombie, and H&M, and even, sigh, Banana Republic. I am a grown up. I have to find grown-up clothes.

This began a quest to find the grown-up store. I had no idea where it would be. I had a lot of scary and distressing experiences, going into this store and that and looking around for people shopping there who might look kind of like me. I went into one store that looked like a grown-up store but everything in the store was a size one, two, or three. The saleswoman explained that a one is really a six, and a two is really a twelve . . . and while she was doing so I realized that the place was full of old women with perms so I beat a hasty retreat.

I did eventually buy myself some clothes at something called J.Jill. I found a nice pair of pants on sale, wore them for a day or two, then ordered a pair in every available color off the internet. I think I won't go back to the mall for a while.

I've had a few "wow, I must be a grown-up" moments in the past few months. Picking my own berries and apples, and bottling jam and applesauce -- that's seemed weirdly grown up. Owning a beautiful grown-up home with fruit trees and a garden and perennials still seems unreal. Realizing that my students this year were born in 1990 and, worse, that they put me in the same age category as their parents totally freaks me out. Then, yesterday, I found my first two gray hairs. Gray hairs!!!

Going to the Exponent retreat made me feel a lot better. The was a wide age-range of women attending, from an 18-year-old high-schooler to an 80-year-old retired biologist. There were grad students and grandmas, and moms in their 30s like me. Everybody stayed up all night chatting like teenagers at girls' camp. Maybe grown up is a state of mind.

Spending the weekend with the Exponent ladies was delightful. I had some trepidation that hanging out with Mormon feminists and intellectuals and liberals might turn into a gripe-fest. Not at all. I left Exponent with a strong sense that the church is great and I have an important place in it. I also left with a renewed desire to love and serve the ladies in my ward, even though so many of them are so different from me. As one participant put it, it's amazing who you can love. If I have to be a grown up, I hope I can be one that turns maturity and experience into patience, compassion and wisdom. And I hope I can find a J.Jill store closer to home.

Tunbridge World's Fair

Friday we braved the rain and took the kids to Tunbridge for the World's Fair. (For LDS trivia buffs, Tunbridge VT was Lucy Mack Smith's hometown.) It felt like we had jumped into Charlotte's Web, or maybe the movie "Babe". We missed the sheepdog competition, that was on Thursday, but we made it for the tractor pulls and the piggy races! We also caught the Yoked Oxen competition, where people showed off the skills of their ox teams. Each ox weighed between 2500 and 3000 lbs and had horns. Wow. Gave me a whole new appreciation for the pioneers!

The kids visited lots of animals, but their favorite animal celebrity was Lady, the horse belonging to Jeremy Young's girlfriend Ashley. Ashley and Lady won several awards in the Western-style riding competitions. Lady is a lot smaller than Aunt Christina's horses! All the horses we saw at the fair, and even our horse-friend Zeb that stopped by the other day are tiny compared to the ranch horses.

Lucy learned how to card fresh-shorn sheep's wool with some ladies spinning yarn for sweaters. They said she was a natural.

Gavin's favorite was the Giant Pumpkin competition (772 lbs.) There were also prize potatoes, tomatoes, and squash. I wonder what makes for a prize-winning potato?

It wouldn't be a World's Fair if there weren't rides, balloons, cotton candy (made of maple sugar, of course!)

Cow-Kids

Here's the kids in their Cowboy and Cowgirl outfits from Montana. Gavin wanted a tan cowboy hat "just like Co-Chad." Actually, all the cowboys at our house have tan or white hats because Uncle Chad only wore those kinds of hats. Gavin's western shirt is from Montana too, but his vest and chaps were birthday gifts.

I'm not sure Co-Chad would approve of how far back Gavin wears his hat on his head -- Lucy tried to fix it but Gavin wasn't having it.

I guess he'll just have to look like a poser until he gets big enough to go help Aunt Christina in the summers, and he learns how REAL cowboys dress!