Emily's New Smile

Today was a big day for Emily. As you can see, she is sporting a new smile as her braces were removed! To say she is happy would be a vast understatement. Mary and I think she is just beautiful. Just the mere fact that she let us photograph her should speak volumes. Adding to her happiness is that fact that she had a lot of wooden nickels. Each visit to the orthodontist would earn a few nickels. If they brushed and maintained their braces well, she would get more nickels. Emily saved enough nickels to earn 2 $10 gift cards to Barns and Noble, where she intends to spend the entire thing on Hobbit stuff, and a $10 gift card to Starbucks. I told her the nice thing to do would be to give the Starbucks card to me as I have suffered through this as much as she has. She dismissed my suggestion in its entirety. 

Dinner with the Fozards

Over the summer and much of the year we have enjoyed many dinners with our neighbors Miranda, Damian, Isaac, and Louie Fozard. In case you haven’t met the Fozard family, they live just a few houses down from us on Franklin Street. If you have met them you would remember them as they talk funny. Yes, that is right, they talk funny. But it isn’t their fault as they are from the Isle of Man.

If you are a birdwatcher you will know the Isle of Man as there is a bird named after it, the Manx Shearwater. If you are a cyclist, you will know the Isle of Man as it is the home of Mark Cavendish, a.k.a. the Manx Missile. If you are not a birder or a cycling fan, you really have no reason to know of the Isle of Man unless your boat went adrift in the Caribbean Sea. The Isle of Man is where you are likely to end up. It is a small island in the middle of the Irish Sea between England and Ireland.

Dinner conversations sometimes need a translator as I speak with a southern speech impairment, Mary employs the Philadelphia lexicon, Miranda and Damian speak Mannish, and the kids, as far as we can tell, speak some form of Pigeon English that no one else understands at all. For example, we call the evening meal dinner. The Fozards call it tea, whether or not tea is actually served. Tea it is. 

We did plan one thing right. We managed our turns at dinner so that the Thanksgiving Dinner fell on the Americans. If it went the other way, we could have ended up with a fish pie on turkey day! As it was, we had the Fozards, the elder Fozards, Brian and Kate who were visiting for the holidays, our friend Lucy, and Kevin and Rico for our big Thanksgiving feast! See photos of our soirée here.