We rang in the New Year with a stomach bug

Initially we thought it was D-boy (sniff sniff no longer D-baby) having drunk too much salinated pool water at the Y, but 48 hours later, ~N~ wiped out. After staying up until 3.30 am to help him, I had to go to sleep. An hour after P-daddy switched off with me, I started going. At least the flu itself is FAST– literally 24 hours– but I am weak and sore today. Now, we wait for ~G~ and P-daddy to fall. Hopefully they won’t, but I sure wasn’t expecting what I got, either. My brilliant daughter has followed my instructions and is hydrating herself to the nth just in case.

I will choose to celebrate this as a New year’s purge. We’re quite literally shedding the old, and opening ourselves to the new. And I got to lose all my holiday overindulgence along the way.

Our First White Christmas!

It snowed on Christmas Day here. While P-daddy thought it was nice, the rest of us were enthralled. It’s such a huge cultural thing here in the states to “dream of a white Christmas.” Coming from the South, well, needless to say it has never happened for the children and me. The kids and I enjoyed it immensely, and girlie even built a Christmas snowman with her Daddy by scraping all the snow out of the yard.

Merry Christmas to All!

and may your cookies be tastier than ours……

Happy Solstice

We enjoyed a wonderful celebration with our friends.

Nothing went as planned, pretty much….nothing! The cookies didn’t turn out, the food didn’t all arrive at the same time, and it rained alllll day so we didn’t do the tree for the animals.

BUT we had fun! Much laughter, and love.

But we did have 14 children opening Christmas gifts at one time. That was impressive. And then we sang Happy Birthday to and shared cake with the Solstice child, who turned three that day.

This is us prepping, earlier that day:

Literacy is Good….and Funny

~G~ has really been feeling her oats lately with writing. She writes us notes all the time, knowing how much we love to read them. We get many of them at bedtime, asking us to sleep with her, or to let her stay up, etc etc. That’s what I thought this one was going to be.

P-daddy had installed the new shelves in the school room and ~G~ was helping em put the supplies back up. We’d gone along at a steady clip when I realized it was way past her bedtime, and I sent her on, telling her I knew how tired SHE was because I was about to drop myself. We had a solstice gathering the next day and I knew we’d all be exhausted; she needed to sleep.

About ten minutes after I sent her to bed, in comes this note, careening to the floor:

I want to be with you. You’ll never make it without me.

I burst out laughing, and told her “You know, you’re right. But we’re both still going to bed.”

Warming up for the Solstice

Yesterday we had a very calm day planned- I was potentially meeting up with the C-family while we ran a joyful Christmas errand, but then we were going to work on hanging shelves in the school room so as to get the boxes OFF THE FLOOR. I want them up for the kids, but hey yeah, the Solstice is coming and it would be more hospitable to not have people box-diving.

So my life is a sit-com and it didn’t work out that way. But we had fun anyway. We ended up with the C-family here, with another friend of ours and her two boys joining us later. She’d thought the Solstice pot luck was yesterday instead of the coming Saturday, so she’d worked her butt off on her fabulous dish and had called to apologize for being late. “Late? What?”

So we said “Hey! Let’s have a party anyway!”

And so we did.

I love Yuletime.

Lil Bit of Baking

I am really looking forward to Christmas being over.

I am not sick of Christmas decor or music, not stressed out by the gifts (much) but I can feel SAD creeping in. Unlike last year, I am not without electricity or warmth, and this year I have last year’s depression episode to warn me. I am seeing the crankiness and carb-loading for what it is. I will win. It doesn’t make much sense to me anyway, because I LIKE the changes in the seasons. I LIKE the dark, and I know it’s transitory. But my body, whoo boy, my body doesn’t like it. The spectrum light bulbs really do help, but they don’t fix it.

But anyway, I associate Christmas with the Solstice, and I will love it love it love it when the days begin to lengthen again.

Today my pasty white children and I baked pumpkin bread and roasted pumpkin seeds. They actually ate their healthy dinner of sauteed chicken and wild rice pilaf. I suppose having pumpkin bread considered as a vegetable side dish will help speed matters along there.

~G~ drew out an artistic design for her big blank wall in her room. I think it’s fabulous, and if we can pull it off, she’ll have a rockin accent wall. I am definitely going to support her in this endeavor.

Speaking of ~G~, massive trauma today. Her surviving crab is hanging out of his shell. I hear Monty Python as I type this, regrettably, but I do have to note he’s not dead yet. So he’s either dying or he’s molting. In the spirit of optimism, we returned him to his dark coconut shell house and shored him up with food and water. She got two crabs from Santa last year, and she has really taken very good care of them. One passed this summer,and she buried it under a rose bush. It would be most unfortunate to lose Flower so close to his birthday. She’s planned a party for him, complete with wrapped gifts tucked under the tree. She made him a stocking out of felt and and has it hanging alongside ours. I feel terrible for her, really do.

Here is where I blog about our first gingerbread house

~G~ especially loved the marzipan characters.

Look at the window. This is one o’clock in the afternoon, and it is not raining.

Hands Hands Hands

Our little architect

The Bluest Eyes….

Doulapunk gave me the head’s up that the kit at Trader Joe’s is clean this year, (thank you!) so we used that one. It’s a little kit but it was perfect for our first venture.

The problem is that the children have every intention of consuming the entire endeavor. Amongst themselves, quite amiably, they have decided who gets what part and every few hours or so go sit and stare longingly at it, admiring it’s every detail.

I am not sure exactly what I thought would happen when we built a house made of cookies, but here’s where we are!

Do you eat your gingerbread houses?

What do Hobbits read for Christmas?

Hearth-and-home day

The Christmas tree is sparkling, the fire is going in the hearth and I have pumpkins roasting in the oven.

We’ve spent the week enjoying both the season and the break from some of our classes.

We enjoyed Santa’s early visit to our neighborhood, where he gave the kids candy canes and took G’s letter. We’ve made cookies, and we decorated the house inside last Thursday, before meeting some friends for playtime at the human habitrail. Unfortunately, despite my repeated admonitions otherwise, G kissed her crab beneath the mistletoe and spent a day and a half puking from the couch. She rallied from that in time to go find a tree at a neighborhood tree farm, where me met this really awesome woman. I won’t bore anyone with all of their commonalities to our family, but let’s just we were saddened to see the big giant for-sale sign in their yard.

I went out alone to enjoy that evening with a woman’s night out at a friend’s house. She had real food, real wine, real coffee and we had a gift exchange. It was almost jarring to just be ~L~ for a while, and to use my beadwork. I even regifted the ball-warmer purse I have been holding on to for two years. I stayed out until after midnight, which is freakishly unusual for me. That definitely supports the idea that I need that! Much fun! Yet it didn’t stop! The very next day G had a party for a friend of hers at the Y. It was so exciting for G to have a girls-only event, and the little girl actually liked G’s present, so I was happy too. It could have gone either way, as G made a felt doll out of Popsicle sticks! (One of her gifts for Christmas is going to be a huge supply of her bendy dolls materials, because she’s completely out.)

Today I had planned as an inside-laundry-let’s be quiet-and-recuperate-day. Alas I am out of oatmeal and dishtabs. I am tired of a week of handwashing our dishes. Spoiled ~L~ is taking on Costco after the pumpkins are done.