C's Date with Mom and Dad

For Christmas this year, we gave each of the boys a date with mom and dad. We'll pick activities for the little ones and the older boys get to pick their own...within reason. Today, we had our first date and C was the lucky guy. We went to the Children's Museum and it was so much fun pretending to be the parents of one child...and so easy! Mom was just arm candy as C had eyes only for Daddy whom he pulled around every-which-way and Tim obliged every time. C was in heaven! Here are a few pictures from our adventure.

Fishing.

Water fun

Holidays 2009

M with one of his favorite gifts from this year: Transformers Devastator! It's definitely a boy thing.The way to G's heart is through some Bionicles. He loves them!

If you look carefully and can discern the different shades of white, you can see the fort on the left and the arch on the right. So much fun!

S playing cookie keep away with Grandma Joni. Everyone loves Aunt Suzie's sugar cookies!

C hanging with Papa Wayne eating a sugar cookie. The sugar intake yesterday was most impressive as was the crash that followed. Yikes!

It's not over yet for us but we've had a lot of fun so far. We had about 12 inches of snow from the 23rd through the 25th and on the 24th, it was the good, sticky, good-for-building kind. So...we built a fort and an arch. The arch went over the 14 foot slide in the backyard and then the boys took their ice sleds and went down the slide, through the arch and then through the fort. So cool. The 25th was half rain and half snow so our creations of the previous day were collapsed for the most part and are now frozen but the boys are dreaming of the impending re-build! We did end up having to cancel our trip to my Grandma's house due to the weather but had fun tucking in with my sister and brother-in-law on Christmas Eve followed by a relaxing Christmas Day where we got up, did stockings, had french toast for breakfast and then did gifts after that. Later in the day, we went to Tim's mom's house and celebrated there for a few days. It was lovely.

After a very busy week of baking and preparing, it's been really nice to have some great down-time with the family and we're looking forward to yet another week of it. Love it! We don't plan to get back to school until the 2nd week in January and my rule of thumb is that our decorations have to be down before we go back to school so we'll be working on that next week and then will make our grand entrance back into reality. ((sigh)) Such is life! I do feel truly blessed to have such great flexibility in our schedule. It makes for far less stress, much more time to enjoy and more time to do the things we want to do. Life is good. Above are a few pics from our past few days.

Winter Solstice 2009

Happy Solstice! This is my favorite Holiday I think. Several years ago, we claimed it as our own since we always have several Christmas celebrations to attend and we really wanted something that was ours. Celebrating the natural change of seasons resonates with both Tim and me so we chose the Solstice. We have a little ritual that we do each Solstice Eve where we eat dinner by candlelight, talk about what we're grateful for from the past year and make a wish or set an intention for the coming year. Then, we go outside and set off fireworks! We also do a bunch of crafts including decorating gingerbread (a traditional Solstice food), making a winter mobile with decorations that we make, stringing popcorn and cranberries and decorating a tree outside with that and oranges and birdseed to feed the animals, we go see Holiday lights, read Solstice stories and just tuck in as a family. I love it and I have fun each year coming up with something a little different than last year. Last night, we had apple relay races which were very fun! Today is our crafting day and we're going to decorate cookies, read our stories and do a bunch of crafts as well as go carolling. In the busy-ness of this season, it just feels good to have something that is all our own and is a quiet spot in the middle of the traveling and everything else. I also like the connection to nature and the deep connection to history. People have been honoring and celebrating the Sostice for thousands of years in different ways and in different cultures and beliefs so there's something very primal about honoring something with such a long and varied history. With the world being such a crazy place sometimes and humans making such an impact on everything, there's something very powerful in knowing that the natural order of things remains constant and predictable. It helps to put into perspective the little things that we worry over or give power to. At the end of the day, the Earth keeps spinning, the orbits of the planets keep going and the change of seasons can be marked every 3 months without fail. It's nice to have that to come back to.

Happy Solstice everyone!

Baking and Cooking

Here's a list of things I have baked or cooked in the last week:

Peanut Butter Star Cookies (the boys helped with this)
Lace Cookies
Puppy Chow
Peanut Butter Balls (the boys did most of this)
Spritz Cookies (they suck)
Sugar Cookies for the Festivitrees that we're putting together today
Shortbread drizzled with chocolate
Pretzels drizzeled with chocolate
Pretzels dipped in caramel and then rolled in a bunch of goodness
Toffee (Jen did this, I can't take credit but it was in my kitchen and I watched)
Church Windows
Friendship Soup mixes in a jar (22)
Cornbread Mixes in a jar (22)
Gingerbread (decided to forego the house and burned one pan after accusing Tim of turning off the timer when it was really me but we still have PLENTY)
Hot Cocoa Mix (3 LARGE batches that were bagged up for gifts)
Peppermint Meringues (which browned because the directions said to bake at 300 for an hour which is clearly way too long for that temperature which I discovered after consulting many other recipes after ours browned...grrr)
16, 1/2 pints of Chokecherry Syrup canned (spilled 4, 1/2 pints on the stove when it just erupted over the side of the pan. Tim cleaned it up...what a saint!)
Solstice Wishing Bread
Cocktail Buffalo Meatballs
Cocktail Sausages in BBQ Sauce
Sundried Tomato Pate
Crostini
Sundried Tomato and Roasted Red Pepper Bruschetta
Baked Brie wrapped in Puff Pastry
Double batch of my spaghetti sauce (with 2lbs of pasta - not homemade)
Horseradish-crusted steak roulade stuffed with roasted red peppers and provolone (Jen did the dirty work on this too)

The only thing I have left to do today is to make and can Peach Salsa.

Why all the baking? Well, for the second year in a row my friend Jen and I have made a bunch of goodies which we give to various people in our lives. Everyone loved it last year so we decided to do it again this year. We have a blast figuring out what we're going to make and how we're going to package everything. This year, we cut it tight on time and if my mom hadn't happened to be here and jumped in to help, we would have had to pull at least one all-nighter. Thanks mom! I also had to make some goodies just for our family and Tim's birthday was Friday. He likes Peanut Butter Balls for his birthday in lieu of a cake. I also did a sit-down dinner for 16 on his birthday and Jen came over and helped with that as well. Again, we probably wouldn't have made it if Matt and Angella hadn't shown up early and been willing to jump in and help. Thanks guys!

All-in-all, it was a great week. But I'm done now. I'm ready to relax and enjoy my family and the season with no more big baking or cooking projects...for a few days.

Seasons Eatings!

Card List

It's time to write our Holiday letter and get it ready to send out. I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that it's traditional to send them out the week between Christmas and New Years and I use that tidbit to at first procrastinate and then one year I finally decided to just make that my own little tradition. Some people like to be the first, we have one family member who always sends it in January or February after the big rush and me, I like to do it in that "in between" week. So today, I started looking at the mailing list. It has stayed much the same for many years but there are always a few additions and a few deletions and a few address changes. This year, I had to remove both of Tim's grandmothers who passed away this year. Last year, I did the same for my grandmother. That was tough. I still haven't deleted them from my Contacts list. I just can't bring myself to do it.

I do enjoy writing a Holiday letter. We usually send out a photo too. It was much easier wrangling 2 kids into a photo and now that there's 4, we just take what we can get. Thankfully, someone got smart and started offering those cards where you can put more than one photo onto the card. I think it must have been a mom who was sick and tired of trying to get all of her kids to sit still, smile and look at the camera all at the same time.

Tim couldn't care less about this little tradition of mine. He dutifully reads the letter after I've written it and get me the addresses that I request but other than that, he'll have nothing to do with it. I read all of the letters we receive and look over all of the pictures marveling at how much everyone has grown or what has been done over the past year. If there are letters or pictures from good friends of his, I point them out and he reads them and looks at them but this is my thing and he does his part well when asked.

This Holiday card and letter thing is quite the deal. We have one friend who keeps a list of those they've sent them to each year and who reciprocated and if they don't get one back for a couple years in a row, they're off the list. Some take the time to be very witty or creative with their letters. Some just send a photo. Some just send a card. Some just send a letter. Some send a letter, card and photo. It's fun to see the variety and yes, I save them all. I put them all into our scrapbook for the year and it's fun to go back and look at them every now and then. I figure that it will be something that will really be enjoyed 25-30 years from now. We'll have a big snowy day with nothing to do and we'll end up looking at old albums by the fire and it will be fun. Sounds nice.

So for me, thank you to all who send us Holiday cards, letters and photos. I love all of them and look forward to getting them each year. I'll strive to keep my letter to 1 page and will probably go through several re-writes to achieve it and one of these days soon, I'll wrestle the boys into some decent clothes and make them sit for a photo.

Here's to enjoying the process!

D-Term

D-Term has officially begun in our house. Some institutions have J-Term in January where you can take a month-long intensive class between semesters. It's kind of the same idea but we do it homeschool style. Yesterday, D-term officially began. Our first lesson was in Logistics Management. It involved 4 kids in the crawl space figuring out how to get all of the Holiday decorations out without breaking anything, missing anything or bonking any heads on the low ceiling. From there, it turned into how to get everything upstairs, again unbroken, and distributed to the rooms in which they will be unpacked. The third portion involves actually unpacking the boxes and distributing the decorations around the house while the children bounce up and down asking repeatedly "when can we do the tree? When can we do the tree? When can we do the tree?" The evening ended with cultural studies in our first viewing of the "classic" Holiday film "ELF". And there was popcorn. Other classes planned for this D-term include: Gingerbread Baking 101 followed by Gingerbread House Assembly which is a 200 level class involving royal icing and lots of candy; Gift Making - part of the Art and Chemistry departments; Gift Bag Sewing and Tag Making; Popcorn and Cranberry stringing; Ornament Making; Holiday Light Viewing; and How to Enjoy your Holidays without going Crazy! This last class mainly involves letting go of all non-essential duties (such as math) and focusing on making memories with your kids. That's my favorite class of D-term.

Happy Holidays!