Happy New Year

On the Celtic calendar, last night was Samhain. We celebrated the end of the harvest - anything left in the fields was left to feed the earth in that whole circle of life thing. We honored the past and the dead and the ancestors and we set our intentions and our dreams for the coming year so that they can germinate through the winter and come to fruition in the spring.

Ninja Gavin

Mostly I enjoyed the day with my kids, getting the final touches to Bay's Mariachi band costume, getting Gav into his ninja costume, the pants of which were 3 sizes to big and had to be tied up with string. I wandered our neighborhood with Gavin while Bay partied with his friends in this new place which no longer feels new but in which we had never experienced this particular holiday.

Gavin voluntarily called it quits early due to a nasty head cold - he's home from school today. Bailey came home late with a terrible stomach ache from eating enough candy to keep an army of the undead on a sugar high for weeks. He too is home from school - he's not actually "sick", but you can't send a kid to school barfing.

In honor of the new year, I thought I'd put the old one to bed with a few pictures from the Pleasure Chronicles of the past few weeks and set some happy thoughts into motion for the coming weeks.

Here are some of us at the amazing Bauman Farms Harvest Fest - one week into my Dad's retirement and his first playdate with his grandkids on a no-school day.

There's me on the swing zip line, my parents on the climbing wall, and a shot of the amazing obstacle course which occupied us all for an hour or more. More pictures from this amazing day are on the Gallery of Grace at www.gracefuldeva.com

  Here's my kids at a taping of Friday Night Smackdown at the Portland Rose Garden. I went with them last year, but this time I gave my seat to one of Gav's good friends Nick who is an avid WWE fan.

Here's a couple of roses from the Portland International Rose Test Garden. I went a while back with Deva Kate. I had, of course, been meaning to go all summer and never made it. I was pleasantly surprised to see how many blooms there still were in mid-October. It'll be fun to visit again in the spring and summer.

 Last Friday Bay's school held a giant Harvest Fest carnival. Here's a shot of Leadership Bailey giving candy to a little girl after she played his mini golf game. Green haired Gavin is eating a donut on a string.



I'm looking forward to finishing up the soccer season, regular every other Mondays with my LifeMakeOver group and meeting more new friends through GirlfriendsCircle.com.  We're hosting Thanksgiving this year and staying home for Christmas so it'll be a busy busy few weeks. I'm getting art ready to show at Our Sister's Attic which will open soon! I better set an intention to stay focused, calm and keep my most important power tools of self-care and pleasure sharp and ready to use.

"For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life." - Alfred D. Souza

It's all Red!

In Grace,

Kell