And just like that, Michael is two.

He was showered with love at church on his birthday, and got many hugs and well wishes. I snuck a photo of him going up to get a blessing with my mother and another parishioner, who both celebrate their patron saints’ name day that week (St Ita!).

Michael’s birthday gift to us was a nap: he actually slept for a few hours in the afternoon while I made his birthday cake (a chocolate sheet cake, inspired by Little Bear’s love of chocolate cake).

That evening, we had a small family dinner for him. We opened presents and watched happy birthday videos and FaceTimed his aunts and uncles who couldn’t be with us.

I am extremely grateful that we can connect with those family members who live far away. I love that he recognizes their voices and faces and says their names, even though we can’t visit often.

We also had a small birthday party for him with some of our friends from church! One of his favorite books right now is Where the Wild Things Are, so I leaned into that for the “theme”.

It was small and sweet. He got to run around outside with his friends (thankfully there was a break from rain!), and color and open presents and sing happy birthday — so he was quite happy.

Over the last few weeks, it seems like Michael has been talking more and more: we chat about our day together and he asks me “what doing?” whenever I’m working around the house. We often narrate our daily adventures together. Whenever he bonks his head or has a small injury, he makes sure to offer it to us for kisses to make it all better. If we happen to also get an injury or say “ouch”, he runs over to kiss it for us.

He loves helping: almost daily, we make the bed together (he puts the pillows on the bed), and empty the dishwasher (he hands me plates and silverware) and fill it (he puts silverware and plates in). He’s still working on putting up laundry with me: he thinks all laundry belongs in the dirty clothes hamper, so I’ve had to fish some folded socks and shirts out of the hamper.

He loves the outdoors with a passion: he plays for hours in the dirt and grass and still doesn’t want to come inside, even if it’s raining. My grandparents — his Gigi and Papaw — got him a fantastic outdoor climbing gym for his birthday, and he absolutely adores it.

We’ve been going to our local park a bit more often to help satiate his desire for the outdoors: he really enjoys watching the ducks and geese, and climbing on all the play structures. He’s still not sure about the slides.

The current favorites for books right now are Where the Wild Things Are, as I mentioned above, and Green Eggs and Ham. He has large sections of both of them memorized, and often recites them as we read to him.

To nobody’s surprise, Grandpa remains his best friend. Even if he’s in the worst of moods, my dad can somehow make him smile.

I know they’re nicknamed the terrible twos, but I’ve loved this explosion of communication and curiosity. Sleep may still be a struggle, and he may have quite a strong will which needs to be taught and redirected (often), but he’s such a sweet boy, with a fiery soul and a tender heart. I’m so grateful to walk alongside him as he explores the world, and I’m so blessed to be his mother.

Thankfully, the sinus infection that’s been raging through our household seems to have missed me. Michael is still sniffly but his energy and personality (and dislike of sleep) are back. Poor Jake is down for the count, as are both of my parents.

January 7th, the day after Epiphany (also called Theophany) is traditionally called Distaff Day, the day when spinners returned to their wheels and spindles after the Christmas festivities ended. A distaff is a tool used by spinners to hold their fiber as they worked on their spindles or spinning wheels. Heather Sleightholm (one of my favorite artists) illustrates it here beautifully.

The first Monday after Epiphany is called Plow Monday: marking when farmers returned to the fields. While researching a bit more on Distaff Day, I found this poem by the Anglican poet Robert Herrick. It’s quite delightful. It also details some of the medieval traditions around the day, including men and women playing pranks on each other.

Give S. Distaff all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport good-night;
And next morrow everyone
To his own vocation.

Saint Distaff’s Day, Or The Morrow After Twelfth Day, by Robert Herrick

I love the idea of Distaff Day: after a beautiful time of Christmas celebration, a day for communal returning to our duties. After the busyness of Christmas and illness, I (and our house) definitely needed a focused return to vocation.

The liminal time around Christmas always wreaks havoc on routine so I’ve been slowly setting the house in order, starting with the kitchen. I took inventory of my fridge and freezer and realized we had leftovers to use up or throw away, and a large grocery list of important staples.

I’ve started doing the “artisan bread in five minutes a day” method for bread baking again: I’m ready to keep a sourdough starter alive (yet) and the price of bread is crazy (like everything else). It’s been nice having fresh bread with our stews and soups.

I needed to make some room in our freezer, so I pulled out some of my frozen ingredients to finally use: veggie scraps and chicken carcasses for broth, and frozen beef chuck for canned beef stew. This time, I won the battle against the pressure canner: I now have twelve quarts of stock and stew. They’ll be very useful in my postpartum stage when everything is topsy-turvy.

Now that it’s the new year, it was time to restock my vanilla. Making vanilla extract is one of the simplest and tastiest things to do, and it makes great gifts. I like to use a combination of bourbon and vodka and put in as many vanilla beans as I can into a jar to steep. Then I put it in a dark cupboard, forget about it for six months, and presto! Vanilla extract.

Inspired by one of my favorite blogs, A Wooden Nest, I also took the old vanilla beans from my last batch and dried them in the oven. Then I ground them up, sifted out the husks, and added the vanilla bean dust to sugar to make vanilla sugar. A spoonful is lovely in a cup of earl grey tea or in shortbread cookies.

I’ve been in a nesting mood, thanks to the third trimester. Our studio/guest room is completely transformed: I had an idea right before Thanksgiving on how to better arrange it, and in a whirlwind few days we put a full size bed in, purged unnecessary items, and moved things around. It’s not quite finished, but I’m much happier with this set up. It feels much more spacious, and is delightfully cozy.

I always laughed at the memes describing pregnant women cleaning baseboards from the nesting instinct, but now I’m one of them. With Michael’s pregnancy, I didn’t really have mental or physical space to nest. Now, nothing is safe from my organizing and cleaning. Our bathroom, closets, drawers and cabinets, fridge and freezer: all organized and purged and cleaned. And I still have more to do!

As January goes on, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about labor. Not just childbirth, though that’s been on my mind too. But mostly, I’ve been contemplating good work. Distaff Day especially brought these thoughts to the front of my mind, with the idea of a day marking a return to our vocations.

We often think of work as something to endure in order to live the life we want to live. There is indeed such a thing as bad work: not just work done poorly, but work that crushes the soul and goes against our human natures. I’m not here to argue what work is bad, but to draw our attention to the good labor we can easily overlook as a chore or inconvenience.

When I was young — about 5 years old — I proclaimed, “When I grow up, I’m not going to work: I’m going to be an artist” (and my family has never let me live down this story). But the older I get, the more I see the overlap between good work and art and prayer. They are intricately intertwined. Many times, folding laundry or doing dishes lead into prayer simply through presence, repetition, and offering up the work. Making dinner or mending a ripped blanket change from chore to a way to infuse beauty and color into daily life.

When I think of this overlap between work and art and prayer, I’m reminded of two quotes. The first is attributed to Martin Luther:

The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes.

Martin Luther

And the second is by St Teresa of Calcutta:

Wash the plate not because it is dirty, nor because you are told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next.

St Teresa of Calcutta

If we properly orient our minds and our hearts, doing the dishes can become prayer. Making shoes (or dinner) can become art. The idea of this makes my heart sing: I have a long way to go, but I want to be a person whose labor is infused with beauty and with prayer, so much so that everyday tasks become art.

So with all this in mind, I guess I stand by my 5 year old self: I still want to be an artist when I grow up.

December flew by in a whirl of guests and gift wrap and gingerbread and carols. Our family tradition is to host a simple Christmas Eve dinner and then open gifts with immediate family. Our larger gathering and present exchange happen after Liturgy on Christmas Day.

I was happy to host this Christmas Eve, and even happier my grandfather was able to come, even though he was only a few days post surgery for his melanoma. We had a simple meal of soup and bread and salad, and my heart was so full I failed to get any photos at all. Looking at the people I love seated around my table, the people who fed me and hosted me throughout my life that I was now feeding and hosting, made my soul sing.

Michael loved Christmas: he had so much fun opening presents, but refused to open more than two at a time because he was so excited to play with what he had. So we spread out some of his gifts through a few days (good thing there are twelve days of Christmas!), and saved some for his birthday.

It was so much fun having my siblings home again. Their visit home for Thanksgiving was very brief, but this time we got to spend a week together and it was wonderful. We had many good meals, played games, and watched Christmas movies. Michael especially adored playing chase with Uncle Jon and Aunt Boo.

Because of my grandfather’s surgery, we had Christmas Day at my parents’ this year. It was a smaller, simpler meal than we usual do given all that was going on, but it was delicious all the same. We went to Liturgy (Christ is born! Glorify Him!), and when we got home I foraged greenery for the table and interspersed some dried orange slices with my thrifted candle holders.

We opened presents with the extended family, and set up for dinner as more guests arrived. Bacon-wrapped and rosemary glazed pork loin, green beans with bacon and shallots, crusty homemade bread, spiced wine cranberry sauce: it was a feast. After dinner, we sang carols while cleaning up the dishes and watched the football game and played cards. The busyness of the week was too much for Michael; for the first time in months he fell asleep without a fight, laying on me surrounded by bustle and noise.

Family friends came to stay with us for a few days after Christmas, extending our festivities. More games, more laughter; more delicious food. They left shortly before New Year’s Eve, and Jake and I had a delightfully introverted NYE, ending with us in bed by 9 pm. I still didn’t miss midnight: the neighbors’ fireworks and gunshots made sure of that (welcome to living in the country).

And now, it’s 2024. It’s been a quiet beginning to the year. Michael developed a nasty cold as soon as the holiday busyness was over, so been a rough week: his cough and stuffed sinuses have made sleep difficult for everyone, and there’s not much sadder than a sick baby crying to be “all better”. We’re hunkering down in our cozy cottage, eating soup and tea and hoping no one else gets sick.

In full honesty, I’ve started and stopped, written and erased this post several times, trying to find a way to traditionally recap 2023 in a way that feels genuine. And words just aren’t coming.

December and January always bring waves of memories: nostalgic childhood memories, family traditions, smells or sounds that evoke long forgotten bits of youth, memories of community and people who are both with us and not with us, separated by physical space or by death.

Instead of reflecting on the memories of the past year, I find myself instead thinking about memory itself.

On December 26th, our dear Khouria Sally (my mother’s godmother and the wife of our prior parish priest) passed away. For me, her death looms larger than the past year, and I feel her absence more keenly than the memories of 2023.

She was one of the kindest, strongest, and fiercest women I have ever met. We bonded over a love of music and hymns, specifically Western ones, and after our move to our communal living situation, she always went out of her way to make me feel welcome through the growing pains of attending a new church.

Her funeral was January 2nd, and burial the 3rd. I’m so grateful Michael and I were able to attend the funeral before he got sick. We say and sing memory eternal many times throughout the funeral service, and every time we pray for the departed. At the funeral, they offered a beautiful explanation to those who might not be familiar with why we use this phrase. It harkens back to the words spoken by the thief on the cross: “Lord, remember me when you come into your Kingdom”. To be remembered by God is to have eternal life — to be among the blessed.

Bishop John also offered more explanation in his short homily to the congregation: at the funeral service, we are helping the departed say their last prayers. We ask for mercy, and for forgiveness, and for rest in blessedness. The texts we use are ancient and poignant: below I’ve included an excerpt written by St John of Damascus.

After the service, we lined up to give Kh Sally the Last Kiss: pressing our lips to the lid of the coffin in veneration for the body that remains and will be resurrected one day. I was unable to attend the burial since Michael woke with a raging sinus infection, but I teared up hearing how the priest threw the first handful of dirt upon the coffin, proclaiming “this tomb is sealed until the Day of Resurrection”.

When I was trying to write a traditional recap, I stumbled across a photo of the shawl I made her at the beginning of 2023, shortly after her cancer diagnosis. Cleaning out our closet, I found the card she wrote for us at Michael’s baby shower and baptism the year prior. Memories both beautiful and bittersweet, much like the funeral service itself.

2023 held so much for us, both good and difficult. Michael’s first birthday, our second child’s first kicks and flutters, settling into our cottage, a Fenton family reunion, my siblings’ graduation from college, and our fourth wedding anniversary, along with extreme power outages, debilitating pregnancy nausea and weight loss, my grandfather’s diagnosis of melanoma, health issues, friends’ deaths, and the decline and death of Kh Sally.

Going into 2024, I find myself thinking about both the previous and the upcoming year more somberly than I usually do. I don’t have any resolutions, just the words spoken at the funeral running through my soul.

I am an image of Thy glory ineffable Though I bear the brands of transgressions: Show Thy compassion upon Thy creature, O Master, and purify me by Thy loving kindness; and grant unto me the home-country of my heart’s desire, making me again a citizen of Paradise.

Maybe at some point, I’ll write a more formal recap of 2023. But right now, I can’t do justice to it. The deep goodness and the growing pains and the struggles. My memory is mortal and fallible.

But God’s isn’t.