And Breathe...

We just got back yesterday from our holiday fun in Texas.  It was a 24 hour drive each way and totally worth every public restroom with four daughters along the way.  I love Clark's family.  I love their cooking.  The trip was wonderful except for the part where I had to leave a shoelace out of my shoe in the woods off an exit ramp in Louisiana.  I will NOT tell you the details but I will tell you it had something to do with an emergency potty stop.  Because of this emergency potty stop, I no longer like Louisiana.  But I do love holidays in Texas.
I missed my own family horribly this holiday season.  And I will continue to miss them as I sit on New Year's Eve wishing that my Dad was running up and down the street with a pot and spoon yelling "Oklahoma!" over and over again.
The suitcases are unpacked.  The laundry is all done and put away.  My office smells like saliva.  I don't know what else I can wipe down with a Clorox.  It stinks bad.
I want to write all about Christmas and I will soon.  But I am overwhelmed by the fact that my sister has 45 new posts since I last checked anything on the computer.  45?! How can I compete with that? I won't.  I will just enjoy others for a while.
Happy New Year.  Go get yourself a pan and a spoon and just have fun!

Santa Lucia and other Christmas festive-ness.

Back on December 13th we had cinnamon rolls, homemade ones.  I made a crown too when I couldn't stand the thought that I had made homemade cinnamon rolls for Lucia Day and then had nothing for my oldest daughter whose glory and privilege it is to be Lucia, didn't have something to wear on her head.  If I was smart, I would have asked my parents to send me the real deal like my sister did...but I am not and I didn't so we had this lovely little number.  It works.  It was made with a love for the holiday, a love for the culture and a love for my daughter who loves this kind of thing.  Isn't she a pretty Lucia? (PS I still would like the real deal because I love felt as much as the next girl but a real crown that really lights up is pretty awesome too...and this baptism dress won't fit Haley forever.)

 I have been doing lots of cooking and baking....and eating.  And Hazel, being the lucky at-home-all-by-herself-during-the-day kind of daughter, got to lick lots of beaters.

 Clark and I (but mostly Clark) worked on the most awesome Christmas present ever.

 He is amazing and talented and I love him.  I will tell you what that most awesome Christmas present ever is in just a sec.  I have to tell you about the other stuff first.

 We celebrated our "Faux Spo" Christmas.  Since we are going back to the homeland for the holidays and had extreme guilt over leaving Spencer and Sho for our first Christmas here we celebrated early.  "Christmas Eve" was Friday night and "Christmas morning" was Saturday.  All the appropriate food was served.

Here are Clark and I breaking in the new most awesome Christmas gift ever the night before we gave it to the girls.  I think we are going to have fun with this.

 Sho drew the intro on the second most awesome Christmas gift ever. What kid doesn't LOVE a chalkboard? We had one growing up and it was a total fave.

 Tada!!! Introducing, the Funky Butterflies of Washington, DC.  Funky Butterflies was the name the girls gave their Wii Rock Band name a couple of years ago and it has stuck.  They are the Funky Butterflies...they  travel, just in case you were wondering.  They can do concerts anywhere.  So Clark built them a stage and we got them a karaoke machine and they were in love and have spent every spare second down in the basement.  We had to give it to them early because obviously, this wouldn't have fit in the good ole mini van.  I wish I could show you the video of Hazel as the back up dancer.  But I am kind of glad that I am not going to share it.  So funny, so kind of inappropriate for the internet.

 These people.  Do you know how much I love them and how helpful and fun they are and how wonderful it is to live near family again? It is.

 We went and saw the lights at the temple.  They are amazing and incredible.  And it was cold.  And Abby was miserable but you know what? She didn't complain.  She was just quietly cold and hungry but didn't say a thing and it made me love her and appreciate being there with my family.

 I love these people.

Merry Christmas everyone and happy holidays and just really, Happy Everything!

Making the yuletide gay and stuff.

The beginning of each week starts slowly but by the end we are in a flurry of activity and heavily into our lists of things to do.  November flew by so fast I am trying my hardest to savor every moment of December and make it fun.  Sometimes I get sidetracked by how busy things are and trying to keep all the balls in the air but I forget what a fun time of year this is for the kids.
We went to our church Christmas party....I have always thought that the visit by Santa at a church party was kind of, ironic.  But Santa and I had the same shoes on so I guess I didn't mind so much.

I sat there and watched all the kids take a turn and wondered, does anyone enjoy sitting on Santa's lap?  Because 99% of them try really hard not to make eye contact.  They simply know that they have to answer a couple of token questions in order to receive the candy cane.

And then I realized that we don't typically do the Santa thing.  In all honesty, this was the last time that my kids sat on Santa's lap.  You wanna guess who that is? It's Haley.  Do you see the picture above where her legs are now solidly touching the floor?  It's been a while.  The problem is that my kids can't seem to decide if they believe in him or not.  I really really hate when they ask me questions about it because I cannot look them in the face and perpetuate such a ridiculous lie even though I know it is fun and magical and all that.  We do the meta-conversations about it...."Is Santa real?" "Well, what do you think?" kind of deal.  I just can't do it.  Plus,  not to be too prideful and all that, but do I really want some fictional person to get the credit for a gift that was well thought out and planned for? The answer is no, I do not.  I want all the credit.  "Yeah, I know you.  I love you.  I make you happy with material things."  (On a complete side note: I love Christmas.  I love the season.  I love all the remembering the birth of Christ and I have no problem keeping that sacred and special and separate from the fact that I also really love celebrating the very commercial part of Christmas.  I mean, the fact that we celebrate this pagan rooted holiday not at the actual time of Christ's birth says that we somewhat support the commercial, secular side of it, right?  We find a good balance I think.)

And then we danced around a Scandinavian Christmas tree.  Spencer and Sho went with us to a Scandinavian celebration of Santa Lucia Day.  I have such nostalgic memories of this as a child.  Listening to the program this year gave me a lump in my throat as I remember singing these songs and being in such awe at how special and beautiful it was.  When I was little I remember the feeling of wanting so badly to be Lucia in her beautiful white dress with red sash and the crown of candles. Having my parents in Sweden right now has reawakened a deep desire to be connected with this line of our family.  We have such amazing heritage on both sides (Clark's and mine) from Sweden.  We have members of our ancestry that played such an enormous role in where and how our lives are now.  It is rich and beautiful and fun and I hurt to think that these traditions could die with my generation and in my own little family because I am one more generation removed from it.  How fast do you think I could pick up Swedish? My brother tried to teach me once and all I remember is how to say "I can drive a car but I cannot drive a house."  But even dancing around this tree with my girls I remembered some of the songs enough to sing along and at the very least to feel a part of something wonderful and important and fun.
Mo and Dad, aren't you proud? I danced around and acted like a frog with no ears and no tail, and a pig with ears and a tail. (And I was hot and had to apologize to the stranger whose hand I was holding for being sweaty.)  I remembered enough to tell the girls about the Tompten sneaking around and the table and eating food.  But I especially liked the songs where we were acting out 'who know's what' and pointing at each other and stuff.  Good Swedish times.

 It was so beautiful.  Maybe later I will post about our own celebration of Lucia Day (which is today, December 13th.) I made cinnamon roles and improvised my own crown out of felt.  It'll do.

 And with that we are enjoying the Christmas season...being near some family, a pile of firewood outside, candy cane hot chocolate (thanks Amy!) lots of bare feet and one shiny bald head.

The stockings were hung from the chimney with care...

Finally.  Big fat check off my list....now back to our regularly scheduled chore-ness, laundry, dishes, bathing children, that kind of thing.

I opted to keep them simple, in order to actual complete them all in the same year.  I figure I can easily go back and add embellishments (rick rack, ribbon, embroidered names, etc.) in the future if I want to.  But they are done and they are real stockings that we can actually put things in because they are all fancy and lined, thanks to Megan's special skype/online tutorial.  Happy Birthday Megan!!!!! by the way.
 And while we are at it, you can go ahead and tell me that I have a shocking lack of talent in the holiday-decorating-department.  It has never been my cup of tea, as it were, to purchase "temporary" decorations that I have to put up, and then take down just weeks later.  It's another weakness, just like my disdain for making fancy birthday cakes.  I love holidays, I am just a lazy decorator.  But I am getting better and making more of an effort, really I am.

And I have added a couple other projects that I have done in the last week or two here.

I'm taking this day.

Every so often, the perfect kind of day comes along.  The house is clean, the laundry is caught up and I have nothing on the calendar.  I take those days.  It is my day to stay in sweatpants (because it is wicked cold outside) and do projects to my little heart's content while Hazel sits on the couch and watches Mickey Mouse Clubhouse as long as her little brain can stand it, come in for a snuggle and a snack and move on to something else.  Here is what the goal for today is:

Finish stockings (I am so tired of our cheapy little felt stockings that I made a few years ago...it's time for the real deal.)

Christmas cards.  Printed.  Ready to be assembled, stuffed into envelopes and sent on their merry way.
What I didn't take a picture of is my leftover Pei Wei in the fridge...I can't wait for lunch, or maybe even a late morning snack.

And what I also didn't take a picture of is the offending headlamp for which I am about to tell you a most disturbing story. (Headlamp: think coal miner.)
So a couple of nights ago I woke up at about 3am, because that's what I do.  I look around to make sure that nothing in particular woke me up and then go back to sleep.  However, this particular morning I looked over to the dresser and was suddenly staring into the glaring light of Clark's headlamp...why a headlamp on the dresser you ask? I really have no idea.  Probably for the same reasons that I have a sock on top of the TV and a rock tumbler on the fridge.  Don't ask me those kinds of questions, you are interrupting the story.
The main question that I would like to ask, naturally is, who turned on the headlamp at 3am?  There were no children in our room and Clark was sleeping like a rock...though he confessed the next morning to also having woken up and seeing it on.  And it definitely was NOT on when we went to bed.
Please, I am begging you for an explanation.  It doesn't even have to be a real one...just one that is somewhat plausible.  Otherwise I will be sleeping between as many people as I can fit in my bed until further notice.  Once, I made the mistake of watching a show on the paranormal (I can't even watch commercials for that kind of thing without being freaked out for a month) and saw a story about a house with ghosts that apparently liked to make all their picture frames crooked.  MY PICTURE FRAMES ARE CROOKED TOO!!! And as likely as it is that the pounding of little feet on the floor and the regular slamming of doors both in fun and anger (by kids, not adults) is the culprit, I still worry that maybe we have ghosts that just want to irritate and scare me.
The headlamp has been hidden in Clark's nightstand until further explanation.

Oh, hold on....Mickey Mouse is over and Hazel needs her snuggle and some bunny snacks.....and while I'm at it, I might as well break for some dark chocolate covered pomegranate.

 I also had to take a picture of us and squeeze her face, obviously.
 There.  All better.

And now I would like to transition into "Why Clark and I have decided to hate Fall until further notice" which could also be called "I used to like oak trees" or "$#&*((*"...all titles of which Clark threw out for me to use while we were working and he saw me taking pictures and knew that it was blog worthy...as soon as the soreness wore off and I could use my limbs again.
Last Saturday we spent 6, SIX hours raking and clearing leaves.  I was sore for three days following.  I seem to recall expressing a love of our trees a couple of months ago.  I take it back...I take it all back.  At least until Spring.

You see, people that live in areas with lots of trees (ie VA) have awesome tools that they lend their neighbors who aren't prepared with that kind of thing.  Though we had the backpack blower and this amazing industrial blower thing, we still carted about 20 tarps FULL of leaves back into the woods.  Which is also what people here do.  There are waaaay too  many leaves to bag them.  WAY too many.  Did you catch that? THERE ARE A LOT OF FREAKING LEAVES PEOPLE!! But the good news is we can see the ground again in most of the yard and we have ruled out dead squirrel to explain the smell that we sometimes detect when walking up the front walk.  There apparently was nothing dead in the front bed (at least nothing where we could see.) And because the back yard is so big, we only did the front half because the second half was daunting, and we never go there, and there was too much, and it was getting dark, and I couldn't move my arms anymore.
The End.

In Memory of Turkey Day

The tiny bit of OCD in me just can't let it get too far into December (seriously, where did November go? It flew, FLEW by.) without documenting Thanksgiving.  We drove down to see some good friends of ours in southern VA. 
So now instead of being 11 hours away, we are only 3 (technically speaking, and without any traffic.)
Before I get into our weekend festivities however, I wanted to clue you in to a couple of priceless bits of wisdom that I have discovered about traveling with children.

#1 I have discovered the earplug.  Oh.  My.  Goodness.  It actually made the trip, dare I say, enjoyable? All it did was put my daughters' voices at a more tolerable level.  I could still hear them and address their "needs" but didn't have to endure the part of the trip where they get bored and pretend to be Velociraptors.

#2 Take the opportunity to plug in each of your children at some point during the trip.  Forget the roadside bingo for a spell and take a nap yourself while they all get sucked into Beyonce music videos and preschool games on the iphone.

#3 Plug in your husband too, if at all possible.  It keeps him AND you entertained.

#4 The all purpose bucket/can.  It can catch garbage, emergency tinkle and barf...and it has.  Worth it's weight in gold.  And I have become slightly addicted to the little garbage bags from the baby section at Target.  Perfect.

#5 Flavored sunflower seeds.  The keep us all entertained and create the illusion of actually eating so the kids don't complain every 8.3 minutes that they are starving to death.  Just make sure you bring some cups to spit the shells into or else you will chug the water bottles you  have too quickly (thus creating a need for the emergency tinkle bucket.) You might also end up throwing them out the window and getting them stuck to the windows on the side of the car.  And that is disgusting.

#6 The broken DVD player.  It's ghetto, but that's how we roll Baby.  It actually still works, it just hangs by it's wires from the ceiling.  We are going to have to do something about that before we drive 8 million miles home to Texas for Christmas.  It is so much easier to tell the kids "how many movies left" until we get there instead of using actual measurements of time.  "Hey, we are only two Alice in Wonderlands, one Neverending Story and three episodes of Charlie and Lola away kids!"

We met the Millers when we lived in VA several years ago and just can't get rid of them, or rather, they can't get rid of us.  We like them, a lot.  They have become our travel buddies (we have done a cruise to Cozamel and a trip to Costa Rica...where to next you ask? We have a running list.)  We have a lot of fun with them and we adore their kids.  So Thanksgiving was a blast and they were very generous to invite our family of 6 to crash in their beautiful home--especially considering that Laurie just had a baby 5 weeks prior!  We kicked their oldest out of her room and she left us a welcome note and goodies.

 Hazel hit it off with Mark and the ding dongs...hmmm Mike, I think I know why she liked you so much.  Hostess can buy love from anyone.

 And I hit it off with Laurie's gi-normous bottle of sanitizer.  Dreamy.

 And now is the part where I tell you that I am a loser because I was so busy taking pictures of enormous bottles of sanitizer that this is the only picture that I got of our lovely hostess and her amazing spread on Thanksgiving.  She truly has a talent for hostessing, organization and cleanliness.  It's one of the many reasons that I love her so.

 But look, I had enough presence of mind to take a picture of my food.
I am a dork.  It's kind of weakness in my family.  We take pictures of food.  So sue us.

 And then we made them stay up late every night to play with us.  I wish I could say that my Nertz skills from Costa Rica carried over...but I think I have lost my lucky streak (or maybe I just let them win so they would like me.)

 We even went to one of our favorite parks from when we lived there and I tried to take pictures in the semi-dark.  I also beat both Clark and Mike AND ten year old Ben in a foot race.  OK, so maybe I got a little bit of a head start but I ran more than 10 yards and didn't throw up.  I get points for that.  I would share the video of it with you but as it turns out, I look like a total goober when I run.  Why didn't anyone tell me in high school?

Thank you for letting us snuggle baby Ellie and for feeding us bacon and for playing games and eating and just hanging out!
Thank you Millers for having us!!!