Wow! 2014 was an amazingly photogenic year. I could easily post 50 favourite photos just from our trip to Prince Edward Island alone (yes, I know, I’m on about PEI again – I never really stop thinking about it!) or 50 favourite photos of fun family adventures with the boys. I probably even have 50 photos of Bella and Willie, and 2014 was my most successful year with Mothership Photography, so I’m sure I have 50 favourite portrait session photos I could post.
I’ll restrain myself, though. Some of these are dear to me because of the moment they captured, or the memory they evoke, or even the fact that I look at them and think to myself, “wow, I made that?” Every single one of them, though, makes me smile. They’re in no particular order.
Happy sigh. Thank you to everyone who was a part of this year, whether that was letting me get you in my viewfinder or letting me interrupt whatever it was we were supposed to be doing so I could take a photograph or letting me share my treasures with you. It’s been a beautiful year, and I cannot wait to see what 2015 has in store!
It wasn’t so much that I was resisting getting an e-reader of my own up until now. Beloved got a Kindle way back in the day when they first came out, and I’d use his every now and then, but it was attached to his credit card and it was always a bit of an inconvenience to get him to buy books for me. Besides, I’ve always been loathe to pay for books when the library has stacks of them for free. Then, my mom upgraded to a Kindle Fire and I inherited her old Kindle loaded with hundreds of books, and that kept me busy for a while.
Still, while there is a lot of overlap between what my mom likes to read (Stephen King, John Sandford, Janet Evanovich, John Grisham, Kathy Reichs, just about any of the good mystery series out there) and what Beloved likes to read (everything from classics to comic books), it just seemed easier to get a Kindle of my own so I could cater to my own eclectic tastes without having to be 357th on the waiting list for interesting new books that come out.
So that’s what Santa, erm, I mean Beloved, got me for Christmas. Hello 2008, I have a Kindle of my own! Of course, now I have to fill it up, which is where you come in.
Thanks to Goodreads, here’s what I’ve been reading lately – although it’s not incredibly accurate. For one thing, it’s got all the books I’ve read out loud to the boys. For another, it’s missed a few that I’ve tagged as read. I know for a fact we read Anne of Green Gables last year as well as at least one or two others in the Hitchhikers trilogy, and I’m sure I read at least one more Neil Gaiman and Gillian Flynn – and yet they’re not showing up here even though they’re on my Goodreads shelves. Who knows with my Swiss-cheese memory what else could be missing? Weird thing is they show up individually, just not in this list. *shrug*
I’ve just started reading The Rosie Project, which seems cute but I’m having a hard time not hearing Sheldon Cooper as the narrator. People have raved about it, though, so I’m curious to see where it goes. I’ve been meaning to read Terry Fallis’s The High Road for quite a while now, so that might be next in the queue.
What say ye, bloggy peeps? What do I need to read in 2015?
I took so many photos over the last few days, and I’ve barely edited any of them – and clearly I’ve shared almost none of them. I decided a while ago that Christmas photos are more for documentary purposes than fine art or even sharing. I heaved a huge sigh of relief when I gave myself permission to simply enjoy Christmas without trying to turn every moment into a perfect piece of art.
Having said all that, when the presents are all open and the kids are playing with their new booty and we’ve entered that zen period of calm late Christmas morning, it’s a perfect time to try to capture a last little bit of Christmas magic. I was trying to get a nice defocused shot of the shapes of the Christmas tree lights when a curious pup stuck her head into my frame. And I remembered – hey, Christmas day is Bella’s birthday, too.
Happy 2nd birthday Bella! Let’s hope this is the year you learn just a wee bit more impulse control. (But we love you anyway!)
Aside from the Reindeer Rant, this post from last year is probably my holiday favourite, and definitely worth sharing again!
If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember I spent some time working with the Canadian Army. When I was there, I was lucky enough to work with Captain Jennifer Stadnyk, and long after I left we stayed in touch over mutual interests in photography and social media. Capt Stadnyk has since moved from Ottawa to Colorado for what I think is an incredibly cool job – she’s the public affairs officer for the North American Aerospace Defence Command, aka NORAD. Peeps, she works with NORAD’s Santa Tracker team! How awesome is that?
I’ve blogged before about how I’ve always loved the NORAD Santa Tracker program. I remember the sense of wonder and anticipation that was torqued by watching NORAD’s Santa Tracker updates on the evening news when I was growing up in the 1970s. Now the kids and I visit the Santa Tracker website frequently on December 24 to track the Big Guy’s progress around the world.
I gotta tell you, when Capt Stadnyk was kind enough to grant me an interview, I kind of froze. Oh the pressure! What should I ask? How to strike the balance between hard-nosed journalist and fawning fangirl? In the end, her answers totally redeemed my questions – and I’ve been giggling like a schoolgirl in my excitement to share them with you.
DaniGirl:I have been watching NORAD’s Santa tracker as long as I can remember. Tell me a little bit about the program?
Capt Stadnyk: NORAD Tracks Santa traces its roots all the way back to 1955, when the local Sears-Roebuck in Colorado Springs took out an advertisement in the local newspaper inviting children to call Santa’s private line on Christmas Eve. The ad that was printed however, had a misprint and the number given was for the Continental Air Defense Command. Colonel Harry Shoup, who was on duty that night, answered the phone to a child’s voice asking if he was Santa. Once he realized what was going on, he played along, giving the child information about where Santa was and instructed his officers to do the same. Thus an annual tradition was born! NORAD continued the tradition when we replaced CONAD in 1958, and still each year, we track Santa around the globe and tell children where he is and when he’ll be at their house!
DaniGirl:You are a soldier in the Canadian Army. How did you end up at NORAD?
Capt Stadnyk: It is funny, most people think that NORAD is solely Air Force, however there are members from all elements of both the Canadian and American militaries. I definitely feel blessed to be down here and be a part of this incredible program during the holiday season!
Army Maj. Gen. Charles Luckey, NORAD and USNORTHCOM Chief of Staff, prepares to do a media interview via satellite from the NORAD Tracks Santa Operations Center Dec. 24, 2012. Dozens of interviews were conducted with NORAD leadership to get the word out on how NORAD tracks Santa every year. (U.S. Navy photo by LCDR. Bill Lewis)
DaniGirl:What kind of technology do you use to track Santa?
Capt Stadnyk: We are definitely well-equipped to track Santa, being the bi-national command responsible for tracking and keeping airspace over North America safe! We use the same satellites, radars and fighter jets that we use year round to track Santa. He knows we’re tracking him and often coordinates some of his plans with us! We also have “Santa Cams†strategically placed around the globe so that kids can catch a glimpse of the jolly old elf!
DaniGirl:: How many people are involved in the operation?
Capt Stadnyk: Well, along with our 55 corporate partners, we have over 1,250 volunteers (Canadian & American military, civilians, and members of the local Colorado Springs community) who donate their time on December 24th to answer calls and emails. Planning starts early in the spring of each year in order to ensure the event is a success.
DaniGirl:Have poor weather or other obstacles ever prevented Santa from getting to any locations?
Capt Stadnyk: There have been a few times over the years where Santa has had to adjust his flight path due to poor weather, but he has always been able to make it to every house! He has been flying for centuries, so little snowstorms have nothing on him!
Marine Staff Sgts. Hugh Wood and Randall Ayers, NORAD and USNORTHCOM, take calls at the NORAD Tracks Santa Operations Center Dec. 24, 2012. Wood and Ayers came to the operations center to collect toys for the Marine Corps' Toys for Tots program and took a break to participate in NORAD Tracks Santa. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Thomas J. Doscher)
DaniGirl:Does Santa need permission to fly over Canadian or American air space?
DaniGirl:Now that you’re seeing it in action from the inside, what’s your favourite part of the Santa tracker program?
Capt Stadnyk: It’s incredible to see what a large operation the NORAD Tracks Santa program is. There is so much magic involved in Santa’s journey that I kind of expected tracking him would be a piece of cake. Not so much! Tracking Santa becomes our main effort around this time each year, and we all work together at NORAD to make sure we continue to share the holiday spirit with the young, and young-at-heart around the world!
Awesome, right? I KNOW! Even better than a conversation with the Universe, eh?
Want to track Santa with NORAD this Christmas Eve? He’s multimedia – check it out!
Thank you, Capt Stadnyk, for the exclusive scoop and for making me a cool mom this Christmas in the eyes of three little boys! Warm wishes and thanks to you and and everyone at NORAD for the great work you do with Santa!
When your best friend asks you to collaborate on a family portrait project to celebrate her extended, blended family, of course you say yes. And when she has an idea that is equal parts silly, fun and hilarious and perfectly exemplifies a family that prides itself on chaos, humour and love, you know you have to make it work. A little 1970s retro pop culture reference is just the icing on the cake!
And then, you have a little fun.
Pro tip: When you’ve been friends for 30+ years, you cannot make faces like this in front of a camera and not expect them to end up on the Internet.
And if your photographer friend has a truly evil streak, she’ll go one step further and turn them into one of these:
Merry Christmas to my best friends in the whole world. I love you guys and I’m always happy to be a part of your crazy. 🙂
My bloggy peeps, I have a reindeer-palooza of fun for you today! You might have read the reindeer rant a time or two (or coughninecough) before, but now we have reindeer trivia! And photoshop! And webcams! And even reindeer on a rampage! Oh my.
But first, the rant. Because especially at Christmas, traditions matter. Also? Because Donder.
“You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen; Comet and Cupid and DONDER and Blitzen…â€
You did know that Santa’s reindeer is actually Donder and not Donner, right?
Here’s a little history lesson for you. The poem “A Visit From St Nicholasâ€, commonly known as “The Night Before Christmasâ€, was written back in 1823 and is generally attributed to American poet Clement Clarke Moore (although there have been recent arguments that the poem was in fact written by his contemporary Henry Livingston Jr.) The original poem reads, in part:
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came, And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name. “Now Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! on, Cupid! on Dunder and Blixem!
In the original publication of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” in 1823 in the Troy Sentinel, “Dunder and Blixem” are listed as the last two reindeer. These are very close to the Dutch words for thunder and lightning, “Donder and Bliksem”. Blixem is an alternative spelling for Bliksem, but Dunder is not an alternative spelling for Donder. It is likely that the word “Dunder” was a misprint. Blitzen’s true name, then, might actually have been “Bliksem”.
In 1994, the Washington Post delved into the matter by sending a reporter to the Library of Congress to reference the source material. (In past years, I’d been able to link to a Geocities site with the full text, but sadly, Geocities is no more.)
We were successful. In fact, Library of Congress reference librarian David Kresh described Donner/Donder as “a fairly open-and-shut case.” As we marshaled the evidence near Alcove 7 in the Library’s Main Reading Room a few days ago, it quickly became clear that Clement Clarke Moore, author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” wanted to call him (or her?) “Donder.” Never mind that editors didn’t always cooperate. […] Further confirmation came quickly. In “The Annotated Night Before Christmas,” which discusses the poem in an elegantly illustrated modern presentation, editor Martin Gardner notes that the “Troy Sentinel” used “Dunder”, but dismisses this as a typo. Gardner cites the 1844 spelling as definitive, but also found that Moore wrote “Donder” in a longhand rendering of the poem penned the year before he died: “That pretty well sews it up,” concluded Kresh.
So there you have it. This Christmas season, make sure you give proper credit to Santa’s seventh reindeer. On DONDER and Blitzen. It’s a matter of family pride.
(Oh yes I did take that photo with this blog post in mind. Of COURSE I did!)
And now, as promised: reindeer trivia! Courtesy of mental_floss, amaze your colleagues at the office Christmas party with these clever facts about reindeer! Did you know:
Reindeer and caribou are more or less the same – but not quite!
Baby reindeer can run within 90 minutes of being born.
Clement Clark Moore’s poem (see above) was the first ever reference to Santa having reindeer to pull his sleigh.
Santa’s reindeer are most likely the R.t. platyrhynchus subspecies from the Svalbard islands off of Norway, the only reindeer that could really be considered tiny, weighing about half as much as the average reindeer species and at least a foot shorter in length.
Click through to the mental_floss article for more fun reindeer facts!
But this — THIS is my favourite find of this holiday season: the ReindeerCam! I discovered this through Twitter late last week, and have been clicking through rather regularly. It’s a live feed of Santa’s reindeer-in-training enclosure at Nova Scotia’s Shubenacadie Wildlife Park (“Halfway to the North Pole”!)
I find watching the reindeer strangely compelling. Santa comes out to feed the reindeer daily through Christmas at 9 am and 3:30 pm AST (that’s 8 am and 2:30 pm EST) and waves to the camera. It’s adorable!
I noticed yesterday that Santa’s sleigh had disappeared (I’m not kidding, I’m clicking through at least a couple of times each day!) and I laughed out loud when I saw what had happened. Mad reindeer on a rampage had toppled Santa’s sleigh – and of course it was all caught on camera. Naughty Donder!!
So there you go – it’s a multimedia reindeer-palooza! But don’t forget the key message here, folks – it’s Donder, not Donner. Tell your friends!
And *this* is what makes my endless curation of family moments worth while.
Christmas 2014:
Christmas 2013:
Christmas 2012:
Christmas 2011:
Christmas 2010 (our first in Manotick and our first with a natural tree):
Christmas 2009 (in the midst of my first Project 365):
It looks like I didn’t take any photos while we decorated the tree in 2006, 2007 or 2008, but I did a genuine little “awwwwww!” of delight when I found this one hiding in the archives on Flickr.
Christmas 2005 – Tristan is three and Simon not quite two.
Oh my goodness, that seems like yesterday — and a million years ago!
Also? Apparently I love to take photos of the back of Lucas’s head!
There are a lot of needy things in my life, and I’ll be the first to admit that blog has slowly slid down the hierarchy of things that get my attention. Facebook steals all my short-form content and impulsive commentary, and while I still love to write for blog, finding the time to get all my good ideas out of my murky brain and into the computer in anything that even remotely resembles a coherent narrative is proving more and more challenging as the years go by. Poor old blog is sort of like the third child in the family these days. It’s no less loved and no less deserving of attention, but it sort of has to learn to fend for itself in the cacophony of all the other needy things making endless demands on my shrinking attention span. And, like the third child, I’m always surprised and delighted when it manages to thrive despite my best intentions stewed in a cocktail of love and benign neglect.
I saw on Twitter earlier this week that the blog had been nominated in the Best Family and Parenting Blog category of the Canadian Weblog Awards, and I was so touched. Here I feel like I’ve been dialing it in for the last little while, and (at least?) one of you still loves the blog enough to take the time to nominate it. Thank you! “They do still love me!” I thought to myself. I clicked through and took a peek to see who else had been nominated, and saw there were more than 100 other amazing blogs that had also been nominated – really a who’s who of the best of the Canadian blogosphere. I smiled and sighed and got distracted by something shiny and pretty much forgot about it.
And then Saturday morning, I was playing on Twitter and nearly fell off my chair when I saw a tweet saying the blog had been shortlisted to the group of five finalists not only in the Best Family and Parenting category but in the Life category as well. Whaaaaaat?! For reals?? I was gobsmacked, not to put too fine a point on it. Shortlisted – twice?
There were over 100 blogs nominated in each of these two categories, lists comprising many of the best blogs in Canada. I am truly and absolutely shocked to have made the top five in either, let alone both. I’ve always liked the Canadian Weblog Awards because they’re very inclusive – anyone can make a nomination – and they’re a juried competition. Real people visit each blog and make notes and give scores to create the list of top five nominees in each category, and then they do it all over again to determine the top three. I looked at all the other blogs who made the top five in each category and I gotta say, I’m genuinely honoured to have made the cut. The winners in each category will be announced December 15 after another round of juried review, but I’ve already won this one in my heart. I don’t need a first- or second- or third- place ribbon, I am truly honoured to have made it this far.
You probably know by now that your affection and interaction and adulation (too far? I always push it too far) are the fuel that runs this blog. I tried doing it for fame and for money, but in the end I can’t help coming back to doing it for love. In fact, I’ve struggled this whole post between referring to the nomination in the third person (you nominated the blog) and in the first person (you nominated me) because they are so inextricably intertwined.
I feel pangs of regret every now and then that I haven’t devoted more attention to the blog. Sometimes I feel like I’m mired back in 2007, and there are all sorts of interactive gizmos and fancy widgets I should be installing to make your experience more modern. Is it a complete anachronism to worry that the blog is getting old fashioned? Sigh. I’ll have to rely on the content and not the flashy packaging to keep you coming back!
All that to say, in a rambly way that absolutely lacks both flashy widgets and a coherent narrative: thank you. Thank you to Schmutzie for continuing to support the Canadian Weblog Awards, and thank you to the lovely peep(s) kind enough to nominate the blog, and thank you to the jurors who screened the blog through to the top five. But mostly, thanks to all of you – the new readers and the ones who have been reading and commenting and kibitzing and making this such a fun place to play for the best part of the last decade. You’ve inspired me and delighted me – and now I’ll never shut up. 🙂
Edited to add: hey, wow, lookit that! I’m number two!!
Silly old blog placed second overall in the “Life” category. Yay! This makes me very happy, and very proud. Thank you!
I don’t know what it is about the light at the Thomas Tree Farm near North Gower, but I always love the portraits I take of the boys there. I can’t believe we resisted getting a natural tree for so many years – getting the tree has turned into one of our favourite family traditions.
Winter portraits are lovely, and now that the crazy autumn season is over, I’ve got lots of free time (well, relatively speaking!) in my schedule. If you’d like to consider an outdoor winter family portrait session, let me know!
Yesterday was so crazy jam-packed with stuff that we didn’t have time to decorate. I’m pretty sure there may be a photo or two of that today. 🙂
