Croak

Last night was my book club's annual Christmas meeting. I drank a couple of peppermint drinks and ate way, way too many cookies.

So I was thinking the vaguely aches and pains I was feeling this morning were a combined sugar/alcohol hangover.

But then, around the time I was bustling the kids out the door through the rain to my car, I realized my voice had devolved to some sort of peculiar croak -- less like a sound emerging from a living being and more like the grind of shifting tectonic plates. Which makes me wonder if I've caught whatever it is that's making Alex cough and hack lately. Whee. Whatever it is, my eyeballs ache if I have to roll them more than about 45 degrees off center, and my neck is complaining about picking up the extra slack, so I expect today will be fun.

The bit where I don't want any food at all, though -- not even coffee -- that's probably from the cookies. I'll nurse a mug or two of tea and see if that helps.

Hooky

I was at work for all of about an hour yesterday -- I wrote up my journal entry, did a little administrative paperwork that has to be done every Monday, talked to my staff to make sure things were in hand and that the schedule hadn't changed, and then I decided to play hooky for the rest of the day.

I went home and finished making the cookies for my book club meeting tonight; and then I gathered up my stuff and went down to visit KT. We sat and chatted for a few hours about not terribly much -- but it was so nice to just be together and relax.

I left at 3 to make sure I'd have plenty of time to pick Alex up from school, and got home with plenty of time to spare, so I packed up the cookies (now that their frosting was dry) and got dinner started.

We had a nice, quiet dinner, and then after the kids were in bed, Matt went off to Rock Band Night. I tried to write for a while -- I got a few paragraphs done, but I was practically dozing off on the couch, so I got through Penny's 10pm blood sugar check, then fed the cat and went to bed. I'm still kind of sleepy this morning, but hoping that'll wear off when I have some coffee and breakfast.

So in summary: a fairly quiet day. Just what I needed.

Sleepy Moon

Busybusy weekend was good.

I got pictures taken for our family Christmas card, and the card ordered, yay! I wasn't sure what to wear in the picture -- all my Christmas clothes are too big for me. But I finally solved the problem with some ingenuity: a green turtleneck and the red belt from my old maternity sweater draped around my neck like a scarf. (It looked so good that way, I may keep the belt even when I get rid of the sweater!)

KT and Kevin dropped Jess off at our place around 10:30 Saturday, and Matt and I took all three kids in to New Town to see Santa. I love the New Town Santa. They're not usually very busy, so he got to spend lots of time talking with the kids, and posing for pictures. As he came in past me, he asked me sotto voce for their names, and the looks on their faces when he called to them by name was priceless.

And then, despite the cold and rain, the girls wanted to go on the horse-drawn carriage ride. Alex had a blast with that, too, and despite the cold and rain, I'm glad we did it.

We went to Pizza Hut for lunch, and then Penny and Jess played with Ray for most of the afternoon, over at Ray's house and then at our place (after Alex was up from his nap). Three 5-6 year-olds make a lot of noise. Way more than three times the amount of noise one kid makes. It's exponential, or something. Ow.

It took a while to get the girls to sleep Saturday night, but eventually they dropped off. They woke up at 6:56 Sunday morning and even managed to restrain themselves from waking us up for the whole four minutes until 7. (Sort of. Their talking did wake me up, but they were at least trying to be quiet.)

Sunday afternoon, KT and Kevin came back, and Elizabeth came over, and we made moon cookies. Since it was a small group, I thought we'd end at one batch of cookies, but the first batch went so fast, we decided to go ahead and make some more. The second batch, we experimented with using up some whole wheat flour I'd bought for a recipe a while back. We substituted it for half the white flour.

It handled differently (it was very goopy -- but came out of the molds much easier than the all-white-flour batch did) and the cookies had a slightly different texture, but the the wheat flour made the bigger cookies softer and the smaller cookies crunchier -- which is good news for both the soft and crunchy cookie contingencies in the bunch!

After the cookies, we all went out to Peking for dinner, and had a fantastic time.

All in all, it was a great weekend. The kids were amazingly well-behaved and patient despite being in various states of not-enough-sleep, and I got to visit with friends and do fun stuff.

Planny

This weekend is going to be crazy busy. But, I hope, the fun kind of crazy.

Jess is coming up for a sleepover on Saturday. After some consultation with Kevin (who's providing her transportation), we're going to take the kids over to New Town to visit Santa. If the weather's clear enough, we'll also do a carriage ride. (The forecast says it's supposed to rain tomorrow, though, so maybe not. I thought about postponing the whole thing to next weekend, but it's supposed to rain next weekend, too. Bah.) Anyway, Santa is indoors, so that shouldn't be a problem.

If I'm lucky, I'll also manage to get some pictures for our Christmas card then, too. (But I might attempt a family group shot before we go, just to be on the safe side.)

After New Town, the plan is to go to Wasabi for lunch. Yum!

Then the girls can play all afternoon and evening. I have no idea what we're doing for dinner, but it'll probably be something fast and easy. At some point, I need to go shopping for moon cookie ingredients (as well as ingredients for the cookies I'm making for the book club meeting next week). Which means I need to check my spice cabinet and find out what I've already got.

I hope Penny and Jess get some sleep and aren't completely sick of each other by lunchtime, because Jess isn't going home until after the moon cookie party on Sunday. I'm looking forward to it a lot; we've invited some new folks this year, and I think it'll be a lot of fun.

Though after all that, I might just have to take Monday off to recover!

Rocketship Go!

As I was walking Penny up to her school this morning, one of the teachers' aides who helps at the dropoff point each morning greeted us and said, "Penny, did you tell your mom that if we were on a rocketship, you'd be the one who gets to drive?"

"No," Penny said.

"You should tell her about it while you walk up to the school!" the aide enthused.

"In math facts," Penny told me, "I got up to thirteen!"

"Wow, that's great, sweetie!" Penny's class is starting to lean heavily on basic addition right now. We had, in fact, spent most of the drive to drop Alex off at daycare playing an adding game -- entirely at Penny's prompting.

On my way out, the aide asked if Penny had told me about it, and explained a little more: the station she'd been helping with was called "Fast Facts," and the object was to answer the math problem very quickly, without recourse to counting. (When I was in elementary school, we just called it memorization, or knowing your tables, but whatever.) Anyway, a "satisfactory" score required the student to get at least five of them at the chosen speed; Penny got thirteen. And additionally, she was the only one in the class to get so many so fast -- there were a couple of kids who got as high as nine, but no one else broke ten. Thus, Penny being at the very top of the rocketship.

That's my girl.

Advent

So I ran out at lunchtime yesterday and bought presents for Penny and a Santa present for Alex and stocking stuffers for the kids. And I remembered the niece that Matt and I haven't met yet and got some things for her, too.

And I got some candy and magnets and stickers for the advent calendar. I have an advent calendar that's a series of little boxes. I bought it several years ago from Starbuck's, when it had chocolate truffles in the boxes, but now I just refill them each year. The fronts of the boxes have the numbers and little Christmas-y pictures on them, but after you open each, you turn it around to show a partial painting on the back. When it's all done, they make a pretty scene.

Of course, that's only one of my advent calendars. I sort of collect the things, when I find ones that are especially fun or pretty.

One is a wooden puzzle that eventually builds into a Christmas tree. I gave it to my mom back when I was in college -- and almost immediately regretted not buying one for myself, even though I couldn't afford it at the time. A couple of years ago, Mom gave it back to me, saying that Penny and I would enjoy it more than she would. That one and the candy one are the ones I use every single year: we put a piece on the puzzle every morning, and get a candy out of a box every evening.

I have another wooden one that I bought at a craft fair that's a tall skinny Santa with a row penny nails down his front; each day you hang a little wooden heart on the next nail. That one's not up this year because we're missing one of the hearts. It may be gone forever; I should probably just ask my dad or someone else handy to make me a new one.

I have a cloth door-hanger calendar that I keep on my door at work; it's got a series of pockets and a cloth candy cane on a ribbon that you move from pocket to pocket. In other years, I've put peppermint sticks or real candy canes in the pockets and eaten one each day, but I'm trying to be good this year, and once I start eating peppermint, it's hard to stop.

There's one with a series of tiny little books -- put together, the books form a Muppet variation on O. Henry's "Gift of the Magi." (I summarized the story for Penny the other day, as we were getting everything out of storage, and got all choked up. Maybe, if I remember, we'll catch up and make that calendar part of our evening routine.)

And there are a couple of standard paper-door advent calendars lying around, too.

Anyway I loaded up the candy calendar while I was making dinner last night, and had Penny open the first box after dinner. I'd loaded it with one piece of candy each for Penny and Alex, but it's possible that Alex is not ready for the advent calendar notion, because he pitched a wobbly when I wouldn't give him more candy or let him play with the calendar boxes. We'll see how it goes, I guess, but if he doesn't get the hang of it after a few days, then maybe Matt and I will be splitting his share of candy.

Oh, darn.

Thanks

Wow, I kind of fell off the planet for a while there, didn't I? Between the kids getting sick and Matt and I getting sick and Thanksgiving and the preparing for Christmas and the insane twenty-deliverable-day I had for work yesterday, I haven't been doing my blogging.  Let's see if I can sum up, here...

The less said about various sicknesses, the better. Suffice to say, the Uck made its way around our house and gave us a rough few days, but it cleared up in time for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving itself was really quite good. We TiVo'ed the Macy's parade, so I got to watch the whole thing, without commercials, which rocked. (Yes, the nostalgia smacked me hard and I sniffled through most of it.) Alex threw a few tantrums, but that was only to be expected. Penny was fantastic, and the dinner was wonderful. We had a great time, we ate great food, and we were grateful for all the wonderful people and things in our lives.

Friday was Matt's birthday, though since we'd done our big celebration with the family at Thanksgiving, we didn't do much. In fact, he went back down to my parents' house to help my dad clean out the gutters. But I made slow-cook chili and that evening we had Braz and Emma and Sarah over for dinner, and Matt and Braz played with the Lego Star Wars video game Matt's brother had sent him, and a good time was had by all.

Saturday morning, Penny's loose tooth finally gave up the ghost and fell out! Whoo-hoo, her first loose tooth!

That afternoon, I took Penny to Target for a marathon shopping session. I picked out a couple of seasonal shirts for me, and Christmas decorations, and toys for her brother and her friends, and more Christmas decorations, and teacher gifts, and still more Christmas decorations. I spent a ridiculous amount of money, but it was fun and knocked out over half of our holiday shopping in one fell swoop.

We actually put the tree up on Sunday. Alex was fascinated with the whole process, and as many times as I had to tell him not to throw the ornaments and to put them back on the tree, I'm glad I shelled out for some cheap plastic ornaments to hang low on the tree this year. (Though now I think I'm going to have to buy another ornament storage box.).

I actually gave in to a long-standing impulse (is that a contradiction in terms?) and purchased one strand of colored lights to wind into the middle of our tree. It looks just as nice as I'd hoped, though I think a second strand would look even better. But since all the ornaments are on the tree, I'll have to wait on that until next year.

I haven't done the outdoor decorations yet -- we didn't finish the tree until after dark on Sunday -- so that's something I'll do this coming weekend, along with getting our picture for the holiday card, taking the kids to see Santa, and buying ingredients for the moon cookie party Sunday.

Today, my schedule includes a lunchtime run to get presents for Penny (and stuff to put in the advent calendar, and stocking stuffers, and a "Santa" present for Alex) and making arrangements for my office's holiday luncheon.

Christmas is in full swing -- it's a good thing I'm all about the hustle and bustle and domestic goddess-ness of it, this year!