Enjoying Our Christmas Things

My husband has taken this whole week off, so we are enjoying some family time together, and enjoying the things we got for Christmas.

Our son got a box of modelling clay on Christmas Eve, and before he went to bed, he made his version of the Pokemon "Cyndaquil". (Yes, I too was amazed to find that Wikipedia covered Pokemon.) The things in front of Cyndaquil are some grass and trees it has set on fire.

He said critically, "It doesn't look quite like I had it in my head. I'm not a very good artist."

How do I tell him that one of the reasons artists keep on making things is to keep trying to make the thing in our hands come out more like the one in our heads?

My best friend from back in school combined two of my loves, tea drinking and Alice in Wonderland, and bought me an Alice in Wonderland teapot. Thank you -- it's a very nice pot and doesn't dribble when it pours! I was trying to get a picture of the steam coming out of the spout and my mug, but you'll have to take my word that the pot is full in this picture.

(Aside to my husband: I don't, either, collect teapots. They collect me. I have one from my mother, one from her mother, one from my dad's mother, one from my mother-in-law, and one that I rescued from an estate sale, because it was so grimy and grungy and obviously needed me.)

One of the things my husband enjoys is cooking. This is a pot of bigos, Polish hunter's stew, that simmered for hours yesterday, spent the night in the fridge, and is now simmering its way to hot on the stove. As soon as I finish typing, I am going to go enjoy a bowl of bigos. (You say it "BEE-gohs," as if you are saying "ghost" but leaving off the "T" sound at the end.)

I've also been enjoying the birds on my feeder. Since I filled the thistle feeder, I've been getting lots of goldfinches again, but it was chickadees and a red-breasted nuthatch that were flying in and out as I tried to take pictures yesterday.



I took these pictures one after another in about half a minute. The birds (mostly housefinches) had already emptied the mesh bag of seed. I went out and filled it after I took the pictures.

And yes, that's grass out there. We still don't have any snow, so no motivation to knit the last couple of inches on my scarf.