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We got out for a healthy dose of Vitamin D this afternoon. The kids chose Jones Bridge Park. We've been avoiding that park lately because they've been doing so much construction there, but I figured we could check out the progress. Turns out it's still...undergoing some serious construction.
They're redoing the water drainage in the park to help with erosion, since it's right by the river and the river tends to...eat away at it. I guess. Something like that.
Phoebe has figured out how to take pictures with tablets and phones and things and some of the devices are linked to my account (I don't know how these things work)...so I end up with picture after picture after picture like this on my camera roll:
We opened our gifts days ago and I'm...still talking about it...
We had quite a stormy night last night—on a tornado watch all night long, but no tornadoes for us (thank goodness)—and the morning was absolutely dreary when we woke up. Things were still drizzling when we went to church, but when we came outside after church the sky was a brilliant blue and you'd hardly know it was the end of December!
Zoë was excited to wear her new (with a heel!) shoes to church. She chose to stand with this holly bush behind her (because it's so Christmassy).
Phoebe succeeded on sleeping in the basement on Christmas Eve...but only because Andrew went downstairs to sleep with her. She woke up at 2:00 am buzzing with anticipation and didn't fall back asleep until around 5:00 or so. So we didn't get up particularly early.
Here she is ready to assemble the kids at around 9:20 am:
Everyone got new highlighters in their stocking (except for Phoebe who abuses highlighters). Rachel pulled out her highlighter and fiddled with it for a while before saying, "This button does nothing! How does this highlighter even work?!"
Just this morning my family settled on a time for a Christmas call:
11:00 PM CET (for Patrick in Austria)
5:00 PM EST (for us in Georgia)
4:00 PM CST (for Rosie in Oklahoma)
3:00 PM MST (for everyone else in their various locations: Utah and Wyoming and Alberta and BC)
Abra lives in BC so she would have been at 2:00 PM PST but the region she lives in doesn't observe daylight savings (and hasn't since the 70s), so they're permanently aligned with MST (which means that for half the year they align with MST and the other half they're kind of PDT...but also still just MST)).
But look! We all made it into the very same Zoom room:
Every year I make Andrew a new calendar of family memories to go in his office at work. I started a long time ago when we were young and poor grad students* (now we're old and middle class grad students*...so moving up in the world) and Shutterfly sent an offer for a free calendar. I still wait for those free offers and this year's offer happened to come right in the middle of finals week, basically.
I was swamped with work, but I still managed to churn out a calendar for him.
Were the pictures the most carefully curated? Not remotely, but my motto is that any picture printed out is better than no picture printed out. And I was pleased with myself for crossing one gift off of my long list of gifts to procure.
Then it arrived in the mail and I...noticed I made a huge mistake...but wrapped it up anyway...because what option did I have at that point?!
Andrew was already confused by the wrapping job.
I feel like we have so many more things to do before it could possibly be Christmas and yet...here we are!
The kids were very excited for their sleepover in the basement today and spent all morning getting things ready downstairs. They even set up a little game table for themselves and spent some happy hours playing games together which...was perfect. They don't do that very often and I have spent years encouraging them to do so and they are finally starting to do it.
There's this meme setup that goes "if I ever won the lottery, I wouldn't tell anyone...but there would be signs," and the accompanying picture is...whatever the sign would be.
I feel like this is my kitchen right now, only it's "if my marriage was approaching two decades, I wouldn't tell anyone [or would tell everyone]...but there would be signs." And this would be the accompanying image:
The evening the youth in our ward took a shift as the live nativity for the Giving Machine set up in Alpharetta. I was a bit shocked when they told us that we had an assignment and that we needed to provide six youth because, well, that's just about (but not quite) everybody. But we did manage to more or less fill the necessary roles. We had two young men and four young women show up and they invited the older primary kids to participate as well, so we had three primary children present to bolster our numbers.
This year's newsletter had to wait until finals were over to get started and I did have concerns about whether or not I would finish it in time, but here it is! We've come a long way since I first started writing these things. Miriam wanted to make sure that we took family pictures before she had oral surgery, so we ended up taking them the same day I got my braces. My face was in agony...and Miriam's surgery ended up being postponed (until January 3)...but the pictures turned out alright. And we at least got to cross "taking family pictures" off our list of things to do!
You can download it here or read it after the jump!
Today was our last day of co-op this semester.
On Sunday a few of my ukulele kids (Zoë and three others) joined my primary kids (Zoë and Alexander and three others) to perform Christmas Bells at our stake Christmas Sing-Along evening. That's eight total kids that I managed to pull together. We were small...but mighty.
Then on Monday our co-op group played at a retirement home down the street. It was a little bit chaotic because I had it on my calendar for 3:00 but then the time was changed to 2:00 but somehow I missed that memo. We ended up getting there around 2:30, just in time to have my kids play their pieces on the piano before our ukulele group performed...and then Miriam accompanied the whole group singing a few pieces. We missed everyone else's solos! But, the kids all did just fine.
At the end of the semester the kids are encouraged to give little thank you notes/gifts to their teachers. I crocheted little trees for my kids to give to their teachers, along with a note of gratitude. I got a few chocolate bars and a lovely collection of notes.
It was our 19th anniversary on Monday, so Andrew and I went out to do something fun, just the two of us. That hardly ever happens! Even for anniversaries!
The older four kids went to see Wicked with Grandpa and Darla a couple of weeks ago, and we also wanted to go, so we decided to go see that. A friend had invited me to watch it with her on Tuesday because she had an extra ticket...but Andrew had to go into campus and I didn't feel great about making the girls babysit two nights in a row...so instead Rachel and Miriam went with this friends' family (because they're friends with her oldest daughter). It worked out well.
Anyway, Andrew and I went to watch Wicked. It was my first time in a theater in six years, as far as I can figure. The seats were fancy reclining seats, which was bad news for my perpetual state of exhaustion (I could not stay awake through Dancing Through Life, of all numbers to feel drowsy during), but the theater was freezing and made me long to be at home, curled up on my own couch with a warm, fuzzy blanket.
But it was nice to go out and not have to worry about anyone else's needs for a little while.
When we got home, the kids were all gathered around the table decorating cookies together. They rushed to meet us at the door with their cookies in hand. It was nice to be greeted with such enthusiasm.
A family in our homeschool co-op is actively involved in a rocket club and on Friday they invited us all to come and put rockets together with them. Their friend had a surplus of rockets and was itching to get a group of kids together so he could lure them into the rocket club (I suppose). Whatever the case, I signed us up for three rockets. There were probably 20 or so kids there.
The rocket family (and their rocket-expert friend) talked about rockets briefly before helping everyone put their rockets together. I was surprised by Benjamin's knowledge about rockets. I did not know he knew the answers to all the questions he was answering about rockets...but apparently this was a good activity for him.
I don't have pictures of him putting his rocket together because he was at the "advanced" table with the older kids in the homeschool group. I hung around with Zoë and Alexander, who needed a little more help putting together their rockets.
This morning we went to the stake primary party (to practice our songs for the stake sing-along tomorrow evening), only we drove to the stake center instead of the Lawrenceville building...so we ended up being 15 minutes late to the party.
First of all, I have to commend whichever ward's Christmas party we stumbled into—because the stake center was a hip-hop-happening place! They were having a pancake breakfast (which smelled delicious, but was a sign we were in the wrong place) and they had a cookie decorating station set up (a sign that we were perhaps in the right place) and all sorts of fun things going on. Noticing our confusion (and general not-quite-fitting-in demeanor), someone came up to us and asked us if we meant to be at the ward party or the stake primary party.
The latter!
They invited us to join them, said they'd love to have us, and had plenty of everything to go around...but also pulled up the email about the primary party so they could verify the details for us.
So nice of them...and entirely our bad. We should have read more carefully.
We arrived at the right building fashionably late, but it didn't even matter because—let me tell you—my hat is off to this primary presidency. They plan the sweetest little activities. It honestly doesn't matter if you're 15 minutes late because you've missed nothing. They typically have little rooms set up for the kids to filter through at will. However long the kids are engaged in the activity is how long they're welcome to stay in the room. So if you're late, you just hop in somewhere and start having fun. It works very well! Especially, I think, for a situation like ours where people are sometimes travelling quite a distance to be there...and/or then drive to the wrong building first.
Today they had a little crafting room where the kids put together an ornament of Baby Jesus:
Last night all the kids from Zoë on up went to a game night together, leaving Alexander and Phoebe languishing at home. They fared alright—Alexander wanted to play Switch Sports, so we did that for a while, and then we got into jammies for story time.
Andrew picked up some fuzzy pyjamas for Alexander while he was shopping a few weeks ago, so we gave them to him tonight. Phoebe was distraught because all of her Christmas-themed pyjamas were in the laundry. We finally convinced her to put on her snowmen and hot chocolate pyjamas (made of the same soft velor-type stuff that Alexander's jammies are made out of, but she wasn't quite happy about it and many tears were shed while she was getting dressed, but she agreed to pose for a picture under the tree with Alexander anyway (excuse her red, tear-stained cheeks).
Benjamin needed to make cookies for his youth activity tomorrow. The boys are planning on taking some cookies around to various people, which meant they needed cookies. They asked Rachel if she would make some cookies for them and she said, "No way!" She felt like the boys were perfectly capable of making their own cookies. And she's not wrong!
When we first learned the boys would need cookies (yesterday) we talked about having Benjamin make cake mix cookies since those are so easy. But then I suggested he make spritz cookies because they really aren't much more difficult than cake mix cookies and I...just always want them during Christmas.
Not that I'll get any of this batch..but if you teach a boy to make Christmas cookies...chances are he'll make them again...right?
So Benjamin made spritz cookies this evening, mostly by himself. We mixed by hand because Rachel was cleaning in the kitchen and we didn't want to disturb her...and because I grew up mixing practically everything by hand so I rarely think to use the stand mixer for cookie dough.
Here he is stirring;
