Merry Christmas to Me

You know those ugly dog contests? Two months ago, my kitchen could have won one of those awards—for kitchens. I’d gotten to the point I wasn’t sure I could duct tape the dishwasher closed one more day. So, you bet your bottom dollar I celebrated when the renovations for our kitchen wrapped up late last week.

And now I'm tempted to make a bed on the floor and live there.

More Before pictures...

I hated the cabinet doors so much, one day while my husband was away on a business trip, I ripped them off and painted them. I do things like this. My husband loves me still.

The pulls for the lights hung down so far that you hit your head every time you walked by them. And that lower corner cabinet didn't budge. So many things did nothing to endear me to that old kitchen.

And now more of the After pictures...

I can't stop staring at the backsplash!

And the lights make me smile.

The space has opened up entirely. It feels so much bigger. So much more room to cook &

to dance! 

(Caught my youngest doing just that last night.)

Because...

*Meet you back here in a few weeks. Merry Christmas!

When a Book Inhabits

I’ve been spoiled by reading some great books lately. I’m reading a particular one slowly. I want it to last. I’m cherishing the messages within.

In WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR, Dr. Paul Kalanithi faces his own mortality, after wrestling with conceptualizing this in his own patients for years. The book description states, “One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live.”

I find I gravitate toward books where the main character or memoirist faces a challenge that specifically presses into an area where they’ve grown accustomed to feeling like an expert or somehow contented. Reading a book like this becomes a lesson for me, grasping how people react when their lives are radically stretched, when the comfortable becomes severely uncomfortable. I suppose it cycles back to my fascination with humankind and resilience.

I’ll openly admit I think about life and death matters somewhat frequently. I can’t say if this is a result of my older sister being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in her late teens or if I’m just wired to think deep about such matters.

It’s lines like the following in WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR that burrow beneath the minutiae of buying groceries and crossing off lists. “There is a moment, a cusp when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”

And this: “Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: ‘What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?’”

Some books are quickly forgotten. Then there are those that inhabit us, they stay with us forever, influencing how we think and the way we view the world. WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR has nested inside me.

Have you read a noteworthy book that’s inhabited you lately?

Feeling Festive

We’re all deer souls around here. Finally got our tree up. 

Youngest sprinted the end of a local Santa’s Run this past weekend. She was Blitzen. 

Sneaking peeks in the backyard, hoping to spy our resident Vixen (we really do have a female fox in the neighborhood). 

Oldest has been rehearsing for a special Christmas performance at a professional hockey game. She’s a solid Dancer. 

Middle child still crushin’ on Bieber. Ha, what a Prancer. 

Some Christmas presents have been purchased. I’m all Cupid like that. Some mailed. Dasher on the fly. 

Making lists and checking them twice. Another Prancer in da house. 

And someday . . . someday our kitchen renovation will be complete. Then we’ll go nuts with Comet.

Whew. All Donner.

But do you recall . . .