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these days...

January 24, 2005

christmas in retrospect

January 22, 2005

our living room has somehow exploded into a mess of primary colors: blue, red, mainly yellow have intruded upon our subtle tones of green and brown (it sounds uglier than it is, believe me). it's all seba's fault. not really. it's all his grandparents' fault. here are some pictures of seb on christmas day...

first "bike"!

first railroad!

first boat!

over the river and through the woods, to grandmother's house we go....

seb's favorite thing to do at the home is play with all of great grandpa's locomotion aids--since great grandpa was using his wheelchair, seb took off with the walking stick--runaway! runaway!

great grandma mcmillan

great grandma hemphill

great grandpa hemphill

for all good things must come to an end

January 17, 2005

the christmas tree has exited the house. i might say, "finally." last week when temps were in the 60s and it felt more like may than january, i began thinking that the tree had filled its full christmas potential. the lights just weren't doing it for me anymore, and the tree was better defined as a gigantic peice of firestarter. i began to fear leaving the lights on when i left the house lest i come back to a smokey skeleton of a brick house.

so today i embarked on the heinous task with such a tumult of feeling: oh, to have my living room back again. the joy! the task did not, at first, take on the prevailing modifier. taking down the ornaments went quickly and smoothly as i had only placed them on the visible side of the tree. likewise, the bead-garlands pulled away from the branches swimmingly. it was the lights (the lights, for crying out loud!) that threw me into a frenzy of christmas tree-hating that i only moments ago was able to lay to rest.

i did manage to tear the lights out of the tree's vice-like grasp without loss of life or limb. however, my living room floor took on the characteristics of a soft, needle covered forest floor. i might add that even sebastien noticed this, and, before brian took him away from the house so that i could recover some sort of normalcy to our carpet, was trudging through the pine needles like he was on a rocky mountain path. he laughed aloud at the "crunch, crunch, crunch" harkening from his feet.

at last, i vacuumed away the last remnants of christmas, the orange-piney-not-so-goodness blasting from the machine into my poor, over stimulated olfactory nerve. a month ago, i didn't think this possible, but MAN, am i sick of that smell!

in seb's words, *fweeee*!

the blackest month of all the year...

January 08, 2005

is the month of janveer. that's january folks. and if you live in pittsburgh, pa, you know what i mean. it has been cloudy for two weeks straight, and it's starting to make me weary. the brightest it has been seems like dusk to me, with the charcoal clouds hanging low. and winter is just getting started.

i've decided to keep my therapeutic christmas tree up through this month. the extra lights and prettiness help seb and i through the dreary days. seb is as attached to the therapy tree as me--he insists on turning on the lights as soon as we come downstairs in the morning. thank goodness for seb so i have an excuse to keep it up!

friends of ours came to town for the holidays. they are newly-weds (gag, choke) and brought pictures to astound us with from their honeymoon in the canadian rockies. the canadian rockies somehow put the us rockies to shame. so now i have mountains on my mind and no plan to get a dose.

one optimistic thought brings me some relief: the days are getting longer again.

stay tuned for some pics of christmas presents and seb...