Happy Everything & A Gratitude List (if you can stand it)

May the season be filled with love,

a few happy surprises, and at least one GIANT hot fudge sundae

Five things I'm grateful for right now, in no particular order:

1. My job.  It's good work.  It's 3 days a week.  There is often free food and wine.  What more could I want?

2. The Mister's work.  Yes, retail is shaky, but he owns a bookstore.  A bookstore!  How cool is that?

3. My kids.  To be honest I vacillate wildly between an awe-struck feeling of luck at being their mother, and the distinct impression that motherhood is best reserved for people without my personality.  But when I think about how they almost never came to be, I can't bear it. I literally can't bear the thought.  

4. Creative people.  Despite my fits of ungenerous jealousy, I am so often inspired by the amazing minds of others: writers, seamstresses, poets, singers, people doing weird things with glue guns and yarn.  You people make a world full of Dress Barns and Bratz dolls and The Bachelor worth living in.  

5. Perspective.  Every time I get some I realize that I am a lucky, lucky girl.  Stressed, a little zaftig, famous in very few places, and definitely not rich.  But lucky just the same. 

Merry, merry, happy, happy everything

Kids Don't Really Like Santa, They Just Like his Loot

My kids will not sit on Santa's lap.  They love to talk a big game about everything they want to say to him, but the minute we come near him, they clam up, hide their faces, and start whimpering. But here's what they would ask him for, if they could muster the courage:

MAGGIE: Lollipops and cookies.

OLLIE: Lollipops and cookies and black toys and orange toys and candy.

Here' the excellent part.  I can make that happen.  Someday they will ask for ponies or trips to Europe and I will fall so terribly short.  But lollipops and a couple black toys?  I can totally swing that.

A thing I like

I saw these coolio retro-brooches by Elefante, e a vida on the fabulous Mighty Girl.  They are like something my grandmother would have worn on one of her many second-hand cloth coats if she had been a little less small, moody, and Jewish.  I love them, or as we like to say in my family,  I lerve them. I'd say you should buy one here, but it seems they are sold out.  But just you wait, she'll make more.