The girls and I have started a new tradition of taking a family walk each Sunday afternoon, after we get home from church and have eaten lunch. Marblehead is a wonderful town, with a lot of conservation area, and a lot of places for enjoyable family walks.

Our lives are so busy now that the girls are in school – there’s school, homework, activities, playdates, plus computers, iPods, and other technology distractions… So it’s wonderful to take Sundays off to go slowly, enjoy the outdoors, and spend time as a family, with few interruptions. It’s been wonderful. There are moments when they are lost in their own worlds, and times when we really connect and get into intense discussions.

I haven’t had the best luck, personally, with the Sunday family walks (I lost my cell phone the first time, then twisted my ankle the second, and we were rained out for what would’ve been the third), but despite that, I’m eager to take a new walk together on this Sunday! I created a flickr photoset for the pictures of our Sunday walks. I’m aiming for some more artistic pictures, not just a lot of pictures of the girls being goofy with sticks. However, I’ve amassed quite a few pictures of girls being goofy with sticks, which could someday become valuable. Or useful somehow, someday, in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances…

We’re loving this new tradition, and I hope some of my readers will try taking some Sunday family walks as the weather improves and the sun shines!

We love you!

The Gaggle of Girls thanks all of you for your love and support over the years – you’re all awesome! We really appreciate and are very grateful for you.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

The girls got a ton of wonderful presents this Christmas. Including several things we haven’t tried yet – like puzzles and games. Yesterday two of the three girls were too sick to take to Church, so we ended up with a quiet day at home. MG started to perk up in the afternoon, and wanted to try the Magic Science Wizard’s Kit my brother and his girlfriend had given her.

After some setup time and enforced “read the instructions” time, they were set to go. They had so much fun! They started by making a wand with magic purple crystals inside. Then moved on to invisible ink, a crystal ball, and the piece de resistance: explosions! OK, so they were really just test tubes bubbling over, but they loved that so much! I don’t think they could have been happier with this present unless there was fire involved!

They started to make a webshow out of the science fun, but unfortunately it kept getting interrupted. It was quite a good attempt, though MG thought they would be a “one hit wonder”, lol. MG looked great as a mad scientist in safety goggles paired with her purple robe, too.

Out of the three girls, MG is the most precise, which makes her perfect as a scientist and as a cook. She had to stay home from school today (can’t go to school until you’re fever-free for 24 hours), and spent an hour very careful following a cookie recipe. Personally, I prefer cookies to magic wands, so I’m happy to push her in that direction… I remember when she created the fluffernutter cookies three years ago! Wow, they grow up so fast.

My gave the girls a trip to the Aquarium and the IMAX theater for Christmas. However, between relatives from out of state and a stomach bug, he couldn’t take them. I rounded up the girls and one of their friends and took them into Boston. My brother stepped in to help out, and we had quite a fun outing!

The New England Aquarium has a giant center tank, and you walk round-and-round, looking at the coral reef dwellers at different depths. Along the outer edges of the aquarium are different exhibits about creatures in other habitats. The two types of exhibits that are my girls’ favorites, though, are the two penguin exhibits and the two seal exhibits.

The girls all loved to watch the African Penguins groom eachother and go for a swim. Watching the penguins groom made me think of sisters – helping each other out, but simultaneously picking on them. Just like the penguins (or penguinis, as MG calls them) are helping each other clean their feathers, the girls love to be helpful. BG was helping LG as she was reading a book yesterday, which really warmed my heart! I’m sure the penguins get annoyed by the nibbling sometimes, just as one of the girls will get fed up with the others and start yelling rude things at them.

Unlike the girls, I’ve never seen penguins argue. I don’t speak penguin, though, so when the African penguins bray at each other, so they could be arguing. The adorable Little Blue Penguins just sit around and look cute, kind of like what small children do when they aren’t being picked at by their siblings…

The other place in the aquarium where I really thought the kids and the animals were very similar is the seals. The girls love to swim underwater, splash, and play in the pool, just the way the harbor seals and fur seals do. Admittedly, my girls have no interest in swimming in an outdoor pool when the windchill is -8. They do look like seals and penguins when they tummy-slide down the hill at the park in the winter! I’m taking the girls to go swimming in the Y’s indoor pool tomorrow afternoon, and I’m sure they’ll remind me of seals and penguinis when they’re barreling down the new water slide!

As an aside to anyone who also has monocular vision, the 3D movies at the New England Aquarium IMAX theater don’t use 1 eye green, 1 eye red glasses, instead they use special sunglasses. This meant that I could actually see most of what was on the screen – there was just a shadow, and I ended up with a bit of a headache afterward.

From this:

To This:

took about a minute. I think the girls enjoyed smashing the gingerbread house as much as they enjoyed making it! Eating it on (or near) New Year’s Day helps the gluten-free gingerbread still taste delicious.

I’m so glad we finally made the gingerbread house this year! The girls had so much fun making it! It was a wonderful team effort – I made the dough, their grandmother made the template and the frosting glue, the girls decorated, and I took a bunch of pictures.

I highly recommend trying this project. It took time and effort, but it looked and tasted great. I wouldn’t suggest using canned frosting and graham crackers, though – it’s worth the extra time to bake this from scratch!

And now off to try to avoid eating little bits of gingerbread house while I am on a low-carb diet…

The Gaggle of Girls finished 2009 by needing to rehome our youngest dog, Ra the wonder-puppy.

We found him a wonderful home on a farm with horses, and we’re looking forward to driving out to visit him in the spring. It was a hard and heartbreaking decision, but after we accepted we didn’t know when we would be able to move into our own place (as I need to get a job first), we knew it was the right thing to do.

So, welcome 2010! We are hoping and praying for a prosperous and happy New Year! We couldn’t have gotten through 2009 without or friends, family, and Church, and we are so grateful to everyone for the love and support. Here’s hoping we are spend more of 2010 being supportive than being supported!

We aren’t sending out physical cards this year, so here’s some virtual holiday cheer from the Gaggle of Girls!

Sorry it’s been so long between posts – we’ve been busy with school, job hunting, playdates, and Church, plus I was reading Anna Karenina for book club last month – 800 pages!

We had a lovely November, filled with food, friends, and family. A party for my mother’s birthday had 9 kids 11 and under, plus a dozen or so adults. We had a lovely Thanksgiving with our cousins, and a similar adult:child ratio.

We got some snow last Sunday, which meant we had girls playing in the snow and making snowballs before Church, then sledding as soon as Church was over. After everyone was worn out from sledding we decorated the house and the tree. We put out my parents’ collections – carolers, smokers, Santas, and nutcrackers. Combine that with the tree and the wreath I made, the house is very, very Christmas-y! Watching everyone work together peacefully to get the house decorated. It was LG’s turn to put the star on the tree, but of course she needed to put the star on herself, first!

Last night the girls and I went to our Church’s Christmas party – so much fun with great food, lovely conversation, a talent show, and then Santa came! Much fun was enjoyed by all. LG had a great time sitting on Santa’s lap, and all the girls enjoyed one church member’s re-enactment of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
All this joy and fun, and still a week and a half before Christmas!

Last year, due to some forces beyond my control, we weren’t able to go to the Topsfield Fair. It’s the longest-running county fair in the country, and it’s a lot of fun. There’s so much to do and see – I have so many wonderful memories of going to the fair when I was a kid, and now the girls have memories of the fair from attending every year we lived in Ipswich.

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  This year was wonderful – we started the day just like every year, with a trip on the ferris wheel. From the ferris wheel you can see all of the midway spread out before you, before you explore the Fair.

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  The other reason to go on the ferris wheel is to see the foliage – all the trees spread out with their beautiful colors. It’s a gorgeous sight that I look forward to every year.

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  The girls like looking at the Fair from the top of the Ferris wheel, but seem to prefer the fun of the ride to the view of the foliage.

• Looking at the fair is only the first step at the fair – there’s so much more!

There are all the animals to look at, feed, and pet, the giant pumpkin, and all the rides to try.

Plus the food! Maple cotton candy, caramel apples, fudge, maple sugar candies, chocolate covered apples, fresh squeezed lemonade, and so much more. If only we didn’t have to wait until next October for the next time!

The girls are now in school, which is a monumental change. Another huge change that happened around the same time is that they can now have dairy. After 11 years of being comfortably moored in one place, we’ve starting a new journey, into waters that we haven’t charted or tested yet.

We’re zooming away from where we had been, like a motor boat speeding out of the harbor. A part of me doesn’t quite believe we can have dairy, and many of our favorite foods are still naturally dairy-free. However, now there are these new found treats – squeezable yogurt! Milk boxes! String cheese! Cheese popcorn! And “why, Mama, why won’t you buy me insert name of overly-processed, artificial edible food-like substance?” To which I reply that just because they can eat something, it doesn’t mean they will. Thankfully, many of the popular snack treats have natural or organic counterparts. I’m happy to inform my daughters, with a big smile on my face, that you can eat fruit in a roll without artificial colors, and the same is true for squeezable yogurt…

Is it the same? No. Do my kids complain about still being “different”? Yup. But you pick your battles, and keeping their bodies fueled with healthy foods is one of the battles I’m willing to fight. They don’t need artificial hormones, artificial colors, or overly-processed foods to be healthy or happy. If they want to be like the other kids, we’ll try to get something similar, or they can just start a new trend!

I remember reading a Celiac Disease book that told a story of a young man with Celiac who went to college. Rather than bemoaning that he couldn’t eat pizza or drink beer, he started a new group of wine-drinking cheese-eaters, and talked about how mature they all were. As with everything in life, it’s all in how you spin it!

So as we start to map out these new waters, we still have our map from where we have been, and we are finding that there’s a lot of overlap with where we are now. We just have some new things to add to our maps as well – and some of these waters are wonderful. (I’m still hoping we end up at a chocolate waterfall, myself…)