Snow day on a Saturday

Henriette yesterday: “I am definitely NOT sitting home all day Saturday. I want to get out of Doylestown and go to Philly”Henriette watching the weather forecast:“😖🤦‍♀️🥺”

The Michigander in me is rolling her eyes of the patheticness of making a big fuzz out of 1-4 inches of snow but Pennsylvania roads are not for the faint of heart as soon as snow and ice hit so we’ll just stay here in top of our hill all day. Sigh.Luckily there is still a day tomorrow to go to Philly and even better - MLK day Monday where both our jobs and the schools have decided to give us time off at the same time. Yay! Luca is away on camp with church. Without his phone!!!! We hope the poor kid will survive. Teresa was gone for a similar trip a few months ago and here’s the exact moment she realized that they actually took the phones away for realz:

Luckily she survived too. And I honestly think it is quite a good way to ensure that all kiddos have real life interactions in real life scenarios.

Otherwise we are making our way through January one day at a time. Like everybody else on the northern hemisphere I guess. We are still keeping up our intention of cooking two vegan meals per week. Last weekend we tried nacho dip for vegan nachos:

Surprisingly good! And based off something as simple as potatoes after applying the no-go technique of blending them (everyone who has had babies has tried to short cut mashed potatoes in the blender and ended up with a sticky gooey mess. Not so good for babies. Awesome for nacho dip!).

Some of us are not vegan at all. Ever:

This is “angry dog” chewing on the antler I happened to find in the grass next to the parking lot at work yesterday. Bailey did not want to share!

Well. I’ll get dressed and take doggo out for a good walk before the snow hits. Hasta la vista✌🏻🌨

Back to business

All good things come to an end. Also Christmas breaks and 2020 is in full swing. It has been good for me with a couple of weeks of mental unplugging to get 2019 all wrapped up and put behind me. It is almost like I can feel the cranks and gears in my brain has fallen into place - probably helped quite a bit by sleeping a lot. When my insomnia was at its worst I almost lost hope that I would ever get to sleep a full night again and it almost feels victorious to be able to sleep again.

So what’s on the agenda for 2020? Many many good things actually. I have a few 2020 resolutions (besides getting myself an assquatch - I have found someone who has a taxidermist friend, so there is hope). One of them is to eat 2 vegan dinners per week. For the climate, for my health, and also from sheer fascination of how to get by in a kitchen using common ingredients in almost magical new ways - aquafaba for instance. The liquid from a can of chickpeas that can be transformed into white fluffy foam as a substitute for egg whites. Here’s one of our dinners. Shepherds pie. Yes. It is vegan!

I want to start investing just a little bit of money. In something that benefits others in a good way. I was thinking micro loans to women starting their own businesses in third world countries (hmmmm. You have first world problems and third world countries - what is the second world?) or investing in green technology.

2020 will also be the year where child #2 will leave the nest. Teresa will be going back to Denmark and (hopefully - we are working on it) spend a year in 3.G. (last year of high school in Denmark) to get back into the Danish way of doing things before deciding what to do and applying for university.

Luca will get to spend a large chunk of the summer in Denmark too. My sister gave him a trip for his confirmation and we have made plans to ensure he can stay for about 5 weeks since it is a big trip. He also gets to go back to Michigan to spend 10 days at blue lake music camp with one of this best friends from Ann Arbor.

And that leaves Kristian and the dog and I to sort of figure what we want to do over the summer. Luckily - or whatever - the American way of vacation will not leave us weeks upon weeks of time off so we’ll probably be doing everyday life like usual.