Cousins (once removed)

The kids were so excited to go visit Rosie and Austin and their kids! Due to some over-scheduling on Rachel's part (she's an in-demand kind of girl!) we could only stay for one night (Sunday, December 28 to Monday, December 29), but it was so fun! 

They have a great playroom upstairs. The kids love to get out all the toys at once. 

Christmas, Christmas! Read all about it!

Here are my two little up-early cuties waiting for their grown up siblings to get up so we can do Christmas (note the hairbrush on the desk):

Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve Andrew made tamales and fried green chili burritos, a tradition carried over from his growing up years. It's a time intensive project and a dish intensive project and somehow years ago I made the deal with Andrew that if he was going to whip up phenomenal feasts like this he would also be the one to clean the kitchen and he has not gone back on that deal! 

(I'm rather fond of one-pot meals, myself, and am very lucky that Andrew does so much of the cooking and kitchen stuff). 

Aw, damp! (and other Christmas stories)

It's December 27 and it's 70°F out (21°C). Phoebe put on her swimsuit and asked if we could go to the pool (which we couldn't do because they close the pools for the winter here—like, why tho?). She played outside in her swimsuit all day long. 

Bog-standard cookies

This is a cookie that Phoebe made for Rachel. Underneath it all is a bell-shaped gingerbread cookie. On top of it is a whole bunch of leftover birthday icing and some candies (and a goldfish cracker) arranged to look like a landscape of sorts—some earth (with a worm), a stream (with a bridge and fish). 

It. Is. A. Masterpiece.

Gingerbread houses

Our house has been a flurry of activity lately. Monday night was gingerbread houses. 

Benjamin actually had swimming practice, so we had planned to get started the minute he arrived home. He ended up coming home much earlier than anticipated because although I remembered to mark which days he still had practice I forgot to note the time change. Since the younger groups don't gave practice, his practice started earlier. So he caught the tail end of his practice and then arrived back at home to decorate houses.

Rachel and Miriam had a bunch of friends over to play games, so they sneaked off to the basement. 

And Phoebe dove right in when Andrew and I were in the middle of setting things out. She opened a container of icing (left over from her birthday), got a knife out, and started smearing icing onto her graham cracker house and plunking candies down. By the time we caught her she was well on her way to making her vision come to life.

Matching jammies!

Last year I was looking for some article of clothing for someone after Christmas when I came across these Christmas pyjamas that were super on clearance. I bought a set for each of the kids...except Rachel...because I know she doesn't love matching with everyone. But when I told Rachel about it she all but started crying and was like, "I'm still your kid even though I'm moving out!" 

As luck would have it, I was able to get one more matching set! 

We pulled them out last night to celebrate having all our kids home for the holidays. Phoebe was thrilled to be matching with all her sisters (and to coordinate with her brothers)!

Here's Alexander and Phoebe hugging on the floor after she tackled him with much enthusiasm:

Christmas at the nursing home

This afternoon we went to a local nursing home (The Addison of Sandy Springs) with some homeschool friends to give a lunchtime performance. The little(r) kids and I sang "Little Baby in a Manger," which I taught the kids in primary...but we really only focused on the first verse so I needed my phone to keep the other verses straight.

The kids sang this song for stake conference (like, all the youth and primary kids in the stake, thus the reason I scrambled a bit to teach our primary at least the first verse and chorus—because it hadn't been on my list of songs to teach originally). It was fun to get to sing it with them since I missed out on hearing them at stake conference.

O Christmas Tree

On Tuesday morning before I left for the airport we...did a lot of things, honestly, because I was trying to get in another "good" school day before I crossed my fingers and left my kids with a list of things to do...but, before I left for the airport on Tuesday we...decorated the Christmas tree!

It used to be the case that my tree would be overburdened with ornaments on the bottom half, but now that so many of my children are trying to prove how tall they are...it actually gets decorated fairly evenly all over without my having to do too much reshuffling (even with Phoebe cramming as much as she can on the lower branches):

First Ever "Christmas in February" Concert!

We have certainly been slacking off with formal piano lessons this semester but last semester we were on top of things! We had nearly weekly lessons and were so prepared at Christmas that Alexander was playing the piano every chance he got...and yet somehow we never sat down to do a little recital. 

Oh, his sisters had their fair share of performances. We attended and performed at concerts and at church. We sang songs around the piano at Grandpa and Darla's house. We sang songs around our own piano. 

And yet Alexander and I never recorded our Christmas duets.

Alexander has been very good at self-directed piano study the past couple of months. He's moving through his book and learning songs. We have impromptu lessons (where someone will hear him making a mistake while practicing and will run in to intervene because we all know these primer songs forwards and backwards, having been through them ourselves...and then over and over again with each child...) but so far nothing formal. He's been pleased with his progress, and yet...he's been hanging onto his Christmas books.

All the other Christmas books have been filed away on the shelf until the next season, but his Christmas books have remained in rotation because we still needed to film our duets!

First it was okay because it wasn't Christmas yet. And then it was only Boxing Day. And then it was just that liminal space between Christmas and the New Year. And then it was still Christmas somewhere because Three Kings Day (Epiphany) was still coming up, and Orthodox Christmas. And then...the semester started...but it was all snowy outside and that was kind of Christmassy. And then we were a month post-Christmas...and then...well...we're more than two months post-Christmas and it's beginning to feel like we're putting things off.

Alexander even asked Daddy to buy a special cord we could plug into the piano so that we could record from the piano to our device, cutting out any potential Phoebe noises. And the cord came. And then it was, "Oh, we have to learn how to use it first..."

A few of our favourite things

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).

Christmas Train and Christmas Stockings

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:

Silly Rachel stories

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?!"

Family call

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:

We didn't play any games (I think we're planning on doing that later this week), but we did get to chat with one another. Phoebe and Ireland got the same Bluey grocery cart and cash register (and were both thrilled with them). Allen and Brady both decided to shave their heads. Kelline and Allen were both technically at work (Allen driving Uber...but on a break while talking to us...and Kelli waiting in her hotel room in Wyoming for her shift to start). We had little kids filtering in and out of three different screens and some cats curiously visiting in a couple of others. 

All in all it was a wonderful visit! 

Our Best Year: The Phillips Family

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. 

Somehow or other it came just the same...

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. 

Live nativity (and other things)

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.

Christmas activity of the day #2 and #3

We had our ward Christmas party this evening. It was our first time attending a Christmas party ever in this ward. 

We didn't have one in 2019 because our ward was so new that we just "couldn't even" (as the kids say, though I would say that we "prolly" should have). There was no party in 2020 due to COVID (good call, honestly). And then I found this in an email from 2021 that states: "We held our first annual [redacted] Ward Christmas party with an exciting 'Service Swap' on Saturday followed by a Relief Society social on Sunday."

Our family was refraining from superfluous social gatherings throughout 2021 and 2022, which I'll admit did put a damper in our social life. But to our credit, I was (1) in a high risk pregnancy in 2021 and (2) had an infant in 2022 and (3) COVID was still, like, raging and (4) my kids enjoy, like, getting pneumonia and stuff anyway so I oddly feel like being sick for 90% of the year isn't very fun so with COVID in the mix it (crowds of people) just didn't seem like a thing I really wanted to deal with.

Phoebe has never gone to nursery. And we joke that it's because she's stubborn (oh, she's stubborn...we're not joking about that part!) but I'm honestly not broken up about it at all because the idea of sending her to nursery where germs are swapped like Pokemon cards is, like, not at all appealing to me. 

Anyway, totally our bad for not attending the ward Christmas party in 2021...or 2022...or...2023...well, we sent our teenagers to help babysit in 2023 (because that is what the teenagers evidently do at the ward Christmas party)...and we finally dragged our sorry behinds to the party this year. We're low-key social pariahs in the ward. We wear mask (to cover our piranha-esque teeth, of course) and lurk on the outskirts of the action. Afraid we might bite (or something), people are pretty good about steering clear.

Georgia Festival of Trees: Christmas Brick Challenge

"There! I'm finished!" Benjamin declared. "Bare minimum—I get third place."

We told him that it was the experience of completing the challenge that was important, not winning. And he was satisfied with that because he honestly made a fantastic creation. 

It had two houses, decorated inside and out, a mountain with a cave inside, a fishing pond, a cozy fire, a snowball fight...it had just about everything imaginable. He originally named it "Christmas Truce" after the story of the Christmas Truce during WWI because the two warring groups in Star Wars are cooperating in this scene. Benjamin can tell you what the warring groups are...

On Christmas Day in the Morning

Our children aren't very early risers, so the big kids were more or less content to sleep in until Phoebe woke up. All the kids slept in the basement—which featured its own festive tree this year—so after she woke up we all went downstairs to get everybody. 

Here are Miriam and Benjamin, just waking up: