Happy New Year!

Hello Friends.
I hope you’ve had the kind of Holiday over the past few weeks that makes you happy.

Please forgive my indulgence but this is going to be just a lot of family photos. Sometimes I don’t think anyone out there really reads what is going on here which is fine. Sometimes I look at this space as my own online journal keeping. I’ll get back to the art stuff very soon. Promise. I’ve got a whole series of posts already written and scheduled for this month.

We didn’t go anywhere big but my two grown daughters and their husbands came home.

It was the first time in several years we’ve all been here. And there were shenanigans. Lots of them. Here we see the infamous Montgomery hips being open while the non-geneticaly weird Montgomery’s-at-heart people think “ouch.”

The whole holiday season was amazing. My best friend got married after many rough years. We mostly raised our oldest kids together so I was as happy to see these kids again as I was my own!
This would be a recreation of many an earlier New Year’s memory.
Except we didn’t turn all the clocks back by two hours so we could have midnight at 10pm.

We spent lots of time just hanging out at home but managed to make it out for some pretty cool afternoons. This campus used to be Raleigh’s mental health hospital. It’s now a park with the biggest open space here. It’s NC so if you haven’t mown or paved there is a tree there. This field was big enough for a crew of model airplane enthusiasts and another model rocket family besides our own. It was like having our own mini air show.

We made it to the Videri Chocolate Factory and I found a sweet little log book to give a little structure to my (ahem) dark chocolate obsession. I have a thing for little books. I now have three of them that live in my every-day pocket sized purse. It’s too many. I can’t fit my phone and keys in now. It’s a very small purse.
Christmas morning was low key as usual and lovely. Marcel brought home an amazing Craigs List find and we spent a night or two when the clouds were only patchy instead of solid viewing the big, bright, beautiful moon. Through the trees. There are a lot of trees here. We are going to have to head out to a nearby lake to have an unlit, open view. Soon.

So it can be an advantage when your mom owns a screen making service. My 14yr old drew her Brother-in-Law’s name for the gift exchange and heard there was a certain Porg video that he loved. We think there is an inside joke somewhere in there. Marin worked for quite a while and did a two color print. yes – copyright. But I let her make it because it was for personal use only. We had a good conversation about that.

Watching my other children light up in their presence brings utter joy to my soul.  I swear this kid never stopped smiling the whole time his sisters were home.

The night before all four of them left there were a LOT of shenanigans. Nobody wanted to go to bed so they invented a new sport called “sibling squatting.” Five reps. Full squats. This girl is a chef. With muscles!

These two big boys are both over 6′ tall. The best part was watching Ammon giggle so hard. He said “THIS is what little kids get to do all the time?!” Yup. The entire first year I brought my sweet boyfriend home he had my little siblings climbing all over him the whole time!

All four of these young adults have such a good influence on my family. My heart hurts so much – about ready to burst. Knowing how lucky I am to have these amazing people as part of my life. Some of you will say “parenting.” I’m telling you, they all came as exactly who they are. We have done our best to channel who they are into productive, kind, good citizens of the world. But they are who they are and we are just plain lucky.