The Five Senses

• Grace and Violet have been doing swimming lessons in the indoor pool at the community rec center close to our house. It is surprisingly relaxing to be there-- a huge warm echo-y space full of quiet splashy noises and voices muted by the huge volume of water.

• We had a lovely snowfall last weekend that summoned everyone up to the ski resorts and burdened all the trees with a layer of glittering white. I wonder how many years of living where it actually snows it will take for me to not be utterly enchanted by the sight of it.

• Lewis' skin and cheeks and feet and hands are so gorgeous and amazing I almost can't bring words to bear on them. The oxytocin rush from his rosy, velvety, perfect skin makes me swoon and I hope I can remember the exact feeling of kissing his dimpled knuckles or rubbing my cheek against his forever. 
• I mix up my all-purpose cleaner from a concentrate (this stuff, which I really like, FYI) and usually doctor it up with some essential oils to make it smell nice. I always put in tea tree oil because a) I like how it smells and b) it is supposed to be antiseptic to some level. I sometimes add in something else for kicks; this past time, instead of my usual lavender or rosemary, I used peppermint oil and now everything I spray smells like toothpaste.
• We like red wine, but we don't like spending great quantities of money on red wine. Rob is sort of a fan of Tim Ferriss and last month saw this post about how to hyper-aerate your wine to make it better. You know how red wine is supposed to breathe for a long time in a decanter before you drink it? To expose a lot of surface area of the wine to the air, thus making it better? Doing this hyper-aeration thing is like taking that to a logical extreme. The way we do it is to pour a whole bottle of wine into my batter bowl and then put the immersion blender in it and run it for, I don't know, 60 seconds or so-- lots of wine getting exposed to lots of air in a very short time. We did a double-blind taste test (this involved two of Violet's opaque sippy cups) and it totally made a difference; the un-blendered wine tasted flat and bland in comparison. Yummier wine on the cheap!