Bittersweettoast

Sometimes when I finish a post I start wondering if I'll ever come up with another idea again. Fortunately, inspiration keeps coming, sometimes in the strangest ways. We were up in Victoria, B.C. this past weekend, a last-minute getaway to join up with Eric after he finished sailing in the Swiftsure race. If you've never been, Victoria is one of those places that beckons you to become English. We had perfect, drizzly, tea-drinking weather, and my son quickly proclaimed the weekend to be his favorite "eating" holiday ever. He divides our vacations into two categories: "active" trips in which we burn off more calories that we take in and "eating" trips, which speak for themselves. Imagine that -- a 16-year-old boy who actually enjoyed touring the Butchart Gardens, perhaps because the afternoon tea there involved some really delicious eating. The gardens were indeed beautiful and captured well by my sous-photographer, Johanna. So my mind was o

Sixteen years ago today I had one of the most fearful moments of my life. Well, that may be a little dramatic, but I was very pregnant with our second child. We had  moved two weeks earlier to the Eastside, one bridge away from Seattle where I was set to deliver. For those of you who do not live in this area, there's a really big lake that separates Seattle and the Eastside communities and  two bridges that connect them. Every morning and every afternoon many cars travel very slowly over those bridges as Seattleites and Eastsiders drive to work and back home. So my fear of going into labor during rush-hour, complete with visions of a bridge delivery dancing through my brain, was not a crazy one. Lucky me, my first contraction on May 14th arrived at 5:30am, just as all those little worker bees were leaving their garages and heading to the office. I was doomed to deliver in the backseat of our car; not exactly what I was hoping for. By 6:30 we were on the road. It was a beautiful bl