365 Days in a Year

What makes up 365 days in a year
If you're a wife and mother with busy career?

8,760 hours. 525,600 seconds...
Fueled with maternal instinct that beckons.

Ice and snow clumped to mittens
Wet socks and jeans
Are hung where the heat is
While hot chocolate steams

A working parents worst nightmare
The dreaded school break
The first few days are joyous
Then ibuprofen I take

Sleepovers, movies, board games
Uproarious laughter
Bonfires, manhunt, great memories
Are what I am after

The best at housework or
Culinary delights, I am not
But I'll be late to work to bring
The homework you forgot

Football, Basketball, Field hockey
Joints that need ice
Open houses, teacher conferences
Concerts and....LICE!!

Fevers, vomiting and coughing
To the vets with the dog
The laundry backs up
And the toilet is clogged

Rashes and whimpers
Teen attitude divine
The late night quiet
And a few glasses of wine

Dances, graduations
Ironing shirts, tieing a tie
Please wear a dress
Please zipper your fly

Volunteering, baking, glueing
Fixing, mending,
Lecturing, chauffering,
Observing and...Spending $

Summer vacations with sand
Shore and sun
Now, pose with your sister
This is supposed to be fun

Date night with my husband
To try and regroup
Cut short with a phone call
And a bout of the croup

Make each day worth it
in your beautiful mess
Take a moment to breathe
'Wag more, bark less'

At the end of the day
Or the week, or the year
For the love of my family
It's the reason I'm here


Happy 2012 to you all! May you and your family have a wonderfully joyous, healthy, prosperous and chaotic new year!

The Christmas Pudding

I may be unusual. Or potentially suffer from an early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. It could also just be the minor stresses of daily life taking their toll, but I can not recollect an impressive amount of detail or memories in general, from my childhood. If you or someone else brings it up, I will probably remember it, but I can not extrapolate these memories on my own. It's sad. I used to be the go to person of my friends who would remember 'who dated who' in high school. I could come up with that person across the room's name even though we hadn't seen them in over 10 years. Now I am lucky if I remember to pick up a gallon of milk on day three of being out.

Memories of Christmas are the exception, fortunately.

Some of my fondest Christmas moments circulate around my grandparents’ house. I am the oldest of their fourteen grandchildren. When I was born, the youngest of their five children was eleven years old. So, in essence, I became their ‘sixth’ child. My grandparents were the age that I am now, when I was born. Their Victorian house was the epitome of Christmas, decorated in Wedgewood blue and gold. The dinner table was always adorned with an heirloom tablecloth and set with fine china. The sterling silver freshly polished with the reflection of the twinkling lights on their prongs and handles, always grabbed and held my young attention.

My great-grandmother lived in an attached in law apartment of the house and she would bake hermits, spice cake, and dozens of varieties of cookies. My grandparents’ home was enveloped in scents of cinnamon and onions and balsam. I loved it. Upon our arrival, my grandfather would almost always be wearing his white apron, folded down to his waist, carving knife in hand, delicately sculpting the meat off of the turkey. My grandparents were caterers. They had owned their own catering company so food was important. It was the pivotal point between a good Christmas and a great, extraordinary Christmas. Family, food and faith were the cornerstones of their holiday.

I always looked forward to one tradition in particular at my grandparents’ home on Christmas. My modus operandi was: get in, give kisses and hugs all around and then off to the kitchen to help with the plum pudding. For those of you, not of English descent, plum pudding is a bread like dessert, with spices and fruit and nuts. Please do NOT call it ‘fruit cake’. It is lovingly mixed and steamed for hours. My grandmother had a plum pudding ‘can’. It was a long tube made of a silvery metal, which she would steam the plum pudding in. She knew exactly how long that can filled with delicious goodness needed to be exposed to the oversized pot of boiling water, by using her internal clock and her sense of smell. The best part for me, was mixing and preparing the sauces that dressed the plum pudding. ‘Hard Sauce’ and ‘Soft Sauce’. The hard sauce wasn’t really a sauce at all. It was spreadable, not saucy. It was the consistency of a sweet creamed cheese, made with whipped combination of sugar, butter and other decadent ingredients that were always taste tested by me, and whoever else was my partner in sauce engineering. The soft sauce was a buttery; warm, sweet concoction that I believe was finished off with a touch of rum. Once dessert was on the table, the soft sauce could be drizzled over the warm pudding.  I always had two pieces of plum pudding for dessert, because I could not decide which sauce I liked more.

 For our traditional Christmas dinner, my grandmother would always make her traditional bread stuffing. In addition she would also make an oyster stuffing, especially for my father, in the same bright blue baking dish every year. There were not many takers on the oyster stuffing, except for my Dad. But it was tradition, and there was always family banter as he tried to entice each one of us into trying an ooey, gooey oyster.

Each year, my grandparents would always buy my brothers and me our winter jackets. As a young child, I always looked forward to opening whatever they had picked out. I remember opening a very patriotic red, white and blue jacket one year.  Regretfully, as a grew older, I looked forward to someone else selecting my jacket less and less, because as a pre-teen and a teenager, I am sure the thought of it registered lower and lower on the ‘coolness’ meter as the years went by.

More than anything else, I remember a bustling home filled with laughter and shouting. Visual snapshots of remnants of red and white Santa themed wrapping paper and green pine needles, dishes of ribbon candy, tinsel strewn across a blue carpet and the propensity for story telling and ridiculous laughter that we all shared, scatter throughout the memory of each and every year.

Today, some of the traditions are the same and some are quite different. My family has dispersed as we are all raising our own children now and we live just far apart enough from each other to make it difficult to be in the same place for the holiday. In February of this year, my grandmother passed away at the age of eighty-six years old. Even though she had not been able to host a holiday for quite sometime, she and my grandfather will always be the heart and soul of my Christmas memories.

May each and every one of you have a blessed Christmas filled with peace, joy, laughter and a slice or two of your own plum pudding.