I've been a bad blogger lately - or more accurately - an absent blogger. It's been a tough couple of months in the candie household. My mother-in-law was hospitalized on Halloween - only a week after she cooked a huge feast for my daughter's 17th birthday. In retrospect, the request for my daughter for a special dinner of lebanamo perhaps was foresight on her part. Normally, my daughter wants a H U G E party with all her friends and my fried chicken. I feel she's too old now for those types of parties so she asked if her grandmother would cook her favorite arabic dish with the whole family in attendance. It's almost rare these days to get all of them together - there's always some type of drama and a family owned business to run. The last time the entire family were in the same place as at a wedding 3 years ago. So Sitty cooked and cooked and almost every aunt and uncle and cousin came to the house to feast. Unfortunately, it as the last time the whole family would eat together. A week later she was hospitalized and on Thanksgiving she passed away. The week leading up to Thanksgiving, we spent many hours in the ICU waiting room hoping for a miracle that never came. Just as my family gathered in front of our turkey - my mother, my sister, my two neices and my two children - we got a phone call that it was time to come say good-bye at the hospital.
Even though my mother-in-law didn't see eye to eye for most of my marriage, every Thanksgiving, I'm going to be grateful for that wonderful family feast she prepared for my daughter. And I'm going to be grateful for the fact that even though, legally, I'm not a Lama anymore, I'm still part of the family.
So my knitting and my blogging have been on the back burner this past months and I'm sooooooo ready for 2007 to be over and I'm hoping and praying for a better 2008.
