On Christmas Preparations and Large, Well-Timed Projects

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I know, you've all been dying to find out if I finished Margaret's birthday peg dolls in time for Christmas.

Well worry no more!

Her favorite book is our copy of Little Red Riding Hood written and illustrated by Trina Hyman--please don't get some other Red Riding Hood picture book.  This is the best one.  The illustrations are amazing and I based the dolls off of them.  Obviously.  And if you're buying books you probably want to grab St. George and the Dragon too, also illustrated by Hyman.  It's perfection.

Those pegs were the only handmade Christmas gift I managed this year, besides stringing some beads on floral wire to decorate a dollhouse Christmas tree and making some tiny Christmas packages to go underneath it.  Margaret's getting a new dollhouse this year from my sister after an altercation between Christopher and the Chipmunk House in which he came out the victor.  I'm probably a wee bit more excited about setting it up and decorating it for Christmas tomorrow than a respectable adult should be, but what can you do?  My peg painting did inspire David to create his own peg doll gift set involving several Ninjago characters as well as hand drawn and then wood-burned backdrops on some scrap wood we had from our attic renovations.  Of course those painting sessions are what led to the toddler-in-the-white-acrylic-paint fiasco from my last post.  I'm going to say it was worth it though, for him to be so excited to create a gift for his brother.

Also we're now practicing the art of putting away our art supplies when we are not using them.

Once the crafting was all done, we finished up the Christmas cookie baking with the pièce de résistance of our annual cookie baking endeavors--the rolled sugar cookies.  Not my favorite of all Christmas cookies to eat, but the children's favorite by far--to make and to eat.  Probably because they pile them a half inch thick with extra sugar.  I mean decorations.  I'm not even sure how John managed to eat the one he stuck full sized peppermints to, but he did.  He's dedicated to his craft.

As usual I attempted to sneak in as many plain frosted stars as I could manage so that adults might actually want to ingest them.  Because unlike the children,  I'm boring.

Tomorrow we've got regular Christmas Eve things to do like decorating the tree and heading off to mass and wrapping all the presents that I probably should have already wrapped.  We've also got some un-Christmas Eve-ish things to accomplish like finishing moving all of our displaced furniture into their final places now that the boys attic bedroom is finally finished and we can get all of the rooms put together the way we had planned them.  Nothing like squeezing some ridiculously time consuming and stressful tasks into your last minute Christmas preparations.  I really want the house settled before we bring all the new Christmas goodies into the mix on Tuesday so hopefully we can get it all done.  That or I can pray for the grace to have a good attitude about leaving the house a partial mess even though it makes me feel more than a little bit crazy.  Hopefully we can get most of it done and I'll only need to pray for a little bit of grace to get me through the extra Christmas mess pilled on top of furniture rearranging mess.

I like things tidy.  It's a gift...and a curse.

Well, here's to the last day of Advent!   May it be productive--but not frantic :)

Merry almost Christmas!

On Adventing with a Toddler

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I can't believe it's a week until Christmas.  I always try to get as much as possible done before Advent begins, but even with all the Christmas cookies baked and presents bought I've still not accomplished everything I need to.  I've got a set of Little Red Riding Hood peg dolls that I promised Margaret for her birthday (!!) that need to actually be painted if they're going to be done in time for Christmas.  Secret crafting is so hard when you have a new baby and you're tired and you just want to go to bed by eight when the kids do.

I've gotten some of our decorations out but not everything because (1) Christopher is a complete rampage-er of all breakable things and this house doesn't have many high shelves/out of reach places  so I haven't put out anything glass or delicate and (2) I just don't seem to have the energy to figure out decoration placement for this one year of Christmas.  I'm not sure why I had the energy to hang a gallery wall going up our staircase knowing we'll be moving again next summer while I can't find the inner strength to figure out where to hang greenery, but there it is.  Maybe it's the lack of a fireplace that's eating away at my subconscious and destroying my desire to decorate.  Why would someone build a house in Vermont with no fireplace?  Where will the stockings go?  Is it appropriate to lock your two year old in a dog cage--just until the decorations come down?  I don't have the mental energy to deal with these burning questions.  We did hang popcorn on the tree this weekend and Christopher seems to think it's a special treat I've provided  solely for his snacking pleasure and has been nibbling it whenever I'm not looking.  I'm not sure how the ornaments will fare once they go up on Christmas Eve, but it's not looking promising.

I thought we might have actually turned a corner the other day when I went into the playroom and found him stacking blocks into towers on the back of his cars instead of throwing them.  Maybe he's a creator of things now and not just a destroyer?  Today he stole a raw egg from the fridge, snuck it upstairs into my bedroom, and then smashed it on the floor.

Perhaps he isn't quite past his urge for mayhem just yet.

We're on our last week of school before we break for Christmas and the kids are pretty much over it, but I'm powering through because we had to take off a couple weeks for the baby and I am incapable of homeschooling into June.  We've been working on some Christmas-y songs and poetry so it's still festive.  I also realized this year that I seriously need to sort through my Christmas book box.  We have two baskets and an overflow pile and it's a little of out of hand.  Sorry Christmastime for Thomas, but I think your time has come...and gone.

Also, looking at that picture of one of our book baskets I need to do some remedial dusting lessons with the kids.

When I haven't been avoiding crafting things I should be crafting, I've been attempting to finish off several books I've had sitting around partially read before the end of the year.  I got a bit distracted when Ginny mentioned a Miss Read Christmas book that she's reading and I checked my library to see if they had it here.  They didn't so I grabbed Village Christmas instead as the next best option and it was perfection.  It's a short story about two spinster sisters dealing with new neighbors who have entirely too many children for the sisters' standards.  Since it is a Christmas story it obviously ends well and everyone ends up loving all the children and even hope for more.  Being *that* family in town I really appreciated the whole thing.  The Miss Read books feel like British Mitford books so if you're into those and looking for some more light reading you'll probably enjoy them. 

Update:  Since I wrote this a certain two year old has pulled all the popcorn off the bottom of the tree, broken three nutcrackers, dumped out a tube of white acrylic paint, and I'm pretty sure I'm cancelling the rest of the weeks lessons.  Getting caught up with my reading stack while drinking hot chocolate and protecting the gifts I already wrapped counts as creating an environment of learning and intellectual pursuits, right?  Soak it up kids.

How is your Advent going so far?  Hopefully it's involving less spilled paint than mine :)

On a White Thanksgiving

We knew coming here that Vermont would be cold in the winter, but I wasn't prepared for how cold it would be in the fall.  Luckily I had the kids collect leaves before the snow came and took them all out so we were still able to wax a bunch.  I might not have been able to enjoy them outside but they've been beautifying our sun room for weeks.  We even used some to make a bit of a thankfullness tree for a centerpiece on our Thanksgiving table so I was feeling pretty accomplished that day.

We ended up having ten kids and five adults over, which was much better than just cooking dinner for ourselves.  There's nothing worse than slaving all week in the kitchen to prepare a feast that's over in ten minutes after the children nibble some plain turkey and a roll and declare themselves full.  Having experienced both, having the extra adults around to linger over the meal and chat is definitely the better way to go.

I know what you're thinking, "it's Advent, why are we discussing your Thanksgiving from last month?"  Well, I have kind of a lot of children and I'm behind on pretty much every nonessential thing on my to-do list.  At least my November pictures are very wintery?

On Babies and Deep Thoughts

  

These pictures are all old, well not that old, but old by newborn standards.  Timothy isn't even three months yet and I'm already having to pull out the next size up clothes.  Knowing how fast this baby time flies by you'd think I'd have taken more pictures but alas, he's got sixth child problems.  Also, he's afraid of my camera and wrinkles up his little forehead every time it approaches so there's that. 

Ever since his birth I've been mulling over this quote from Lucy Maud Montgomery's journal (that I read in her biography) after the birth of her eldest son.  It may be a little morbid to pair it with baptism pictures, but I'm just going to leave it right here anyway:

"As I hold little Punch's dear body in my arms I am lost in wonder--and awe--and terror--when I realize that everybody was once a baby just like this.  All the great men, all the good men, all the wicked men of history.  Napoleon was once a chubby baby, kicking on his nurse's lap--Caesar once smacked his lips over his mother's milk as does my mannie--Milton once squirmed with colic--Shakespeare cried in the night when he grew hungry.  Yes, and--horrible thought--Nero once looked up with just such dear, star-like innocent eyes and Judas cooed to himself with the same sweet noises and vocables--Nay, even that wondrous Person...even He was once a white, dimple-fisted, waxen-faced little creature like this, cuddled in his mother's arms and drawing his life from her breast.  What a terrible thing it is to be a mother--almost as terrible as it is beautiful!  Oh, mothers of Caesar and Judas and Jesus, what did you dream of when you held your babies against your beating heart.  Of nothing but sweetness and goodness and holiness perhaps.  Yet one of the children was a Caesar--and one was a Judas--and one a Messiah! (December 1, 1912)" (pg 574)

Terrible and beautiful indeed.

   

On Halloween and All Saints

Halloween felt like such a whirlwind this year.  We had a town trunk-or-treat the Saturday before Halloween (in the snow), trick-or-treating on actual Halloween (in the rain), and then an All Saints Day party (on All Souls Day which wasn't exactly liturgically correct but certainly more convenient being Friday and all).   The kids had so much fun and have been hyped up on candy and excitement for an entire week straight.  I on the other hand am pretty much done. 

This year we bought back most of their candy from them offering first $1 per 4 oz. of candy and then $20 outright for anyone willing to turn over the entirety of their haul.  We've gotten rid of a lot of candy this way and used the first batch to give back out to trick-or-treaters, but there is still so much candy.   I think it's having candy babies on top of the fridge. 

We were invited to the All Saints Day party by another parishioner from our church, whom I only knew because she brought food over when Timothy was born.  It was really nice to get out and chat with people from church and judging from her bookshelves, I think we may be kindred spirits.  Also, I was able to repurpose the kids' Halloween costumes into saints which pretty much makes me an all-star Catholic Halloween mom.  Or lazy. 

Let's go with all-star.

Since we already had two dragons Christopher naturally went as St. George.  And as Margaret insisted on being St. Margaret--she became St. Margaret of Antioch who burst out of a dragon's belly wielding a crucifix (princess dress plus crucifix, done and done)--no basic St. Margarets of Scottland here.  John's costume was the best though, we just subbed his wizard hat for Chris' graduation cap, used his belt and some cardboard to make a medallion, and presto--St. Thomas Moore.  And to think Chris wanted to get rid of that cap.  "Never going to have a reason to use it again" indeed.

Well, now that all of our October birthdays and costume crafting sessions are over, I can get focused on Thanksgiving and Advent preparations.  They're coming up fast!