Thinking Allowed: Home for the hols

If our blogging has slowed down lately, it’s only because our hands are too busy cramming baked goods into our mouths as fast as possible. We are in Ottawa for the winter/summer break, and the girls are making up for lost time in the gingerbread cookie decorating department. Aurora makes them as perfect as possible. Sophia makes them as colourful as possible. Zadie slaps a blob of icing in the centre, jams a smartie on top and calls it a day (at age 2, she is already the fastest and most prolific). Tova goes her own way (is anyone really surprised?) Four thick layers of icing like wallpaper in an old house. Unprecedented smartie density by stacking smarties on top of each other for 3D sugar highs. Strategic spillage of icing onto fingers for extra licking (ok, I’ve done this one).

Maybe it’s genetic. For Tova’s birthday her aunt Mari made a giant Trojan horse chocolate cake which concealed at least 500 lollies, all of which came avalanching out when Tova cut it open. There was Norwegian bløtekake, two swiss-rolls, an “I want chocolate cake” cake, a wedding chocolate cake, saccharine Lebanese pastries, boxes of Lindt and See’s, pavlova, and tomorrow a gingerbread house. Actually kind of appalling but also so satisfying.

Ok now that I’m past the sweets, there is of course all of life to relate. It is wondrous to see family again. Our girls are defecting to their cousins’ families every chance they get. Aurora and her cousin Zoe are particularly cute, constantly whispering like lovebirds in corners. We have spent lots of time at the family cottage, visited family and friends in Montreal, and generally enjoyed life.

Aurora, Sophia and Tova have gotten really into skating, they’ve probably been 5 times already. Tova went from utterly-helpless to not-bad impressively fast. Zadie has been cooed at by her forebears and it’s nice to see her Norwegian improving. My back is still noisy but an MRI suggests it’s not worse per se. Tamar and I went to Spa Nordik for a date which was a total flop (funny how often our date getaways are) but then we salvaged it with pizza and sudoku in the Byward Market which was lovely.

There have been masses of presents and birthdays - Zadie is now 2, Sophia 7 and Tova 5! NYE tomorrow heralds the end of Holiday Mania, and it will be nice to coast into a less frenetic fortnight of visiting family and friends in Montreal and Ottawa before heading back to Oz.