We spent Thanksgiving in Cincinnati with Gabby and Granddaddy. Everett was with them for about a week before Chris and Melissa arrived, so everyone got a lot of quality time without parental supervision. Once everyone was together we engaged in a few annual family traditions. First was eating well on Thanksgiving, which meant turkey with fixings for lunch, dinner, bedtime snack and breakfast the next morning. Second was listening to Chris’ favorite Arlo Guthrie song on Thanksgiving morning, complete with full orchestration and five part harmony. The song is called Alice’s Restaurant, and it’s about Alice, and the restaurant, but Alice’s Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant, that’s just the name of the song, and that’s why he calls the song Alice’s Restaurant. Third was gingerbread houses, a long tradition for Chris that the Barbers have really taken to. Everett has now reached the age where he can anticipate upcoming events, so he had been looking forward to this for some time. He helped Chris make the dough and bake the gingerbread.

We made a house in the spirit of Friday Harbor: a gingerbread family at an oceanfront house, replete with lots of creatures we observed in and around the ocean.

And it turns out that other friends and family members were similarly creative, which allowed us to display our house in a nice neighborhood.

Since then the gingerbread has stayed in our thoughts for a couple reasons. First, it is especially fragrant since we switched to using fresh spices from the Spice House in our neighborhood. Second, we have been listening repeatedly to Cookie Monster recently, especially in the car during the long drive back from Cincinnati, and he sings a song called Gingerbread Man which is now stuck in our heads. In fact I can hear it right now…

While we were in town Everett had his first big boy haircut in a man’s barber shop. That’s right – no frou-frou lotions or “product”, no incense or new age music, no fruity drinks in champagne flutes and nothing made by Aveda. This is a place that still uses straight razors to shave your neck and after your haircut gives you a quick shoulder massage with a device that looks like a car buffer. Cress has gone there for some time, and now Chris goes there when he is in Cincinnati, so it was pretty neat to take Everett there as well. We weren’t sure exactly how this was going to go, but as soon as we walked in Everett jumped in the chair and then sat still the entire time. It most certainly helped that Jack, the barber, has lots of experience cutting hair and is a great-grandfather himself.

Once we returned home we experienced another family tradition: putting up the Christmas tree and decorating it. Everett really got into decorating this year, which resulted in a very high ornament density for the bottom three feet of the tree and virtually nothing above that.

Chris and Melissa later balanced things out and in the process really enjoyed going through our ornaments. One tradition we have while traveling is to buy a Christmas ornament when we go somewhere new. As a result, this time of year we get to relive lots of travel memories while decorating the tree. Here is how it turned out:

And here is a picture of how it looks while wearing my new Holiday Dreams glasses, which turns every light source into candy canes and Christmas stockings.

When I as young I distinctly remember feeling a great sense of injustice that sometimes I had to go to bed when I was not tired. But as a parent I now understand: no one cares if you are tired or not – your parents need a break, so you are going to bed. You don’t have to go to sleep, but you do have to stay in your room and we aren’t going to entertain you any more tonight. This is our feeling about Everett’s bedtime, which has evolved quite a bit over the last year. First, he has learned to procrastinate, and comes up with many creative ways to do so.

“Can I have the iPad?”

“Can I have another story?”

“You forgot to give me some honey.” We give him honey when he has a cough, but he asks for it a lot of the time now.

“You forgot to give me water.”

“You forgot to put the gate up”

“You guys are always forgetting things!”

“I need the hall light on.”

“I need a nightlight”

“I need one more thing” or “Daaaaaaaaaaaaad. I neeeeeeeeed something.” This usually happens after Melissa puts him to bed. I think his reasoning is that once one parent has finished putting him to bed it’s time to repeat the process with the other parent. In an effort to emphasize the finality of bedtime I will resist going to see what he wants. The times that I do go upstairs and ask what he needs he will quickly ask for some random object that is within sight, quickly followed by “Do you want to snuggle with me?” He asks this as if it just occurred to him what a fortuitous series of events have led up to this moment.

Earlier this year we decided to get a new bed for the master bedroom which set off a series furniture moves. We moved the queen bed into the guest room and the full bed from the guest room to Everett’s room. Melissa wasn’t crazy about this idea but was willing to try it for a while, and now acknowledges how nice it is to have a bed that can accommodate the whole family for roughhousing and storytime. Over the summer Everett started sleeping on the bed instead of his crib. When we were in Friday Harbor Everett slept in his own room on a twin mattress that we put on the floor to minimize the impact of rolling out of bed. And after a couple weeks of this he realized that he no longer needed to call us to get him out of bed. So when we returned from Friday Harbor we took apart his crib and put it away and we stopped putting the gate on his door.

The sum of all of these events translates to a big increase in the amount of freedom Everett has after bedtime. It also means that our live-in alarm clock has changed from “Momma, Dada! I’m awaaaaaaaake!” to a stomping sound that starts faintly but gets progressively louder and comes to an abrupt stop next to our bed.

There are many signs of being a parent that I never noticed before becoming one. Diaper bags are easy enough to identify, but how often do you see a grown woman with a purse full of lizards and snakes? Or see a grown man who unknowingly shows up to work with a Cookie Monster sticker on his pants? Chances are they are parents. When iPads first came out we got a couple of them at work and at the time there were no protective cases available, so Chris made one out of a cloth diaper folded in two. Coworkers without children didn’t seem to notice anything unusual, but it caused a lot of laughter from other parents. Today Chris is traveling to (yet another) meeting. On the way through security one of the TSA agents said “Nice bandaid!” after seeing his feet in the scanner.

Dora the Explorer is probably quite a contrast to the beard Chris grew in Friday Harbor. And it turns out that the beard coincided with deer season in Wisconsin, so several colleagues have been asking Chris if he is planning a hunting trip.

Lastly, I never anticipated what a bonding experience parenting would be. The time we were at the smelt fry in Sheboygan was a prominent example: Everett started choking on a smelt and within seconds there were several other parents around us, none of whom we knew, but nonetheless they were providing plates, napkins and trash cans to clean up the ensuing mess. It has also changed our feelings about travel. In the past when we saw a parent with a screaming child we thought “that poor child”, but now most sympathy is directed toward the parent.

This is a talking stick:

The talking stick came into our lives because of the three people in our family, two of them were having trouble getting enough air time during dinner and were talking over each other. Initially this caused some tension about whose turn it was to talk, and eventually led to the introduction of the talking stick with the idea that the stick gets passed around the table and whoever is holding it gets to speak. We tried this one night recently with moderate success – eventually we got into a rhythm of talking, talking, quiet, talking, talking, quiet, depending on who was holding the stick. One thing we have mentioned from time to time is about how Everett, like other children his age, comes up with innovative solutions to problems. So the next night when we sat down for dinner Everett went around the table and handed everyone their own talking stick. Problem solved.