The stockings are hung, The Nutcracker is over, the neighbor gifts and cards mostly out, the office party attended. The driveway is shoveled, the last-minute craft is... soaking, the hollowed-out-book completed (shh).
The Lego stuff is everywhere.
The cookies... will happen.
Wishing you a wonderful holiday weekend!
Merry Christmas!
xo
kirsten
Well, we did do all the Halloween things, even if I didn't document them here (this is where my husband will tease me "Then did it really happen?").
The Redhead went as Adam Savage from Mythbusters.
When you are a redhead that already has chunky dark glasses... there's not much you need to do, actually! I stencilled a shirt, bought a hat, and borrowed the jacket.
And who do we have sneaking through this shot? Jamie, of course!
How much do I love that these boys really wanted to be something TOGETHER?
The original plan was to be the TWO Amigos - thwarted when the hats proved hard to find and wouldn't fit my kids' giant noggins anyway. :) But I had it all planned - maybe someday!**
Jamie was easy, too - dress clothes, his brother's old wire-frames (lenses popped out), and a I bought him the beret. We also bought the mustache (which I painted to get closer to the original color). First time working with spirit gum - it worked great!
Here's a shot in case you don't know how spot-on their costumes were.
We even cut Monkey's hair extra short on the sides!
And here's a shot taken because Monkey really wants me to photoshop a huge explosion in the background. That should be easier with a fairly-solid backdrop, right?
Yeah, that hasn't happened yet.
The girl (Totoro) stayed home for the first time this year! She and a friend watched Edward Scissorhands and handed out candy. At first she was kind of bummed to not be going out collecting candy, but she quickly learned that giving out candy is so fun!
And here's our last-minute pumpkins! Squeezed that in inbetween nutcracker rehearsal and dinner - close!
It was a good one. So glad my kids have always like dressing up and being creative on Halloween! I hope that continues for a while! Or forever...
**I had it all planned out - I should post my sketches. But really, whenever they watch The Three Amigos and they say something about 'Sew like the wind!' I always want to make a costume, too! :)
I felt like our mantel needed a little something extra this year. Now that The Redhead is doing better with his Fall Anxiety, we can put up a few more decorations! But no creepy ones! And only two weeks before or later.
I'll take it.
Anyway, a friend of mine has a paper crafting room that is like Disneyland for papercrafters. She has all the toys! So rather than cut out all these letters by hand for the idea I came up with, I asked her to help me with her fancy gizmos.
I just wanted a couple lines from 'This is Halloween' (Nightmare Before Christmas). I was looking for a phrase that could be divided in two (because VISUALLY I knew what I wanted!) and probably picked the wrong one, but that's okay! I love how it looks.
It goes well with our little Nightmare figures on the mantel (but no Oogie-Boogie, he was banished).
I love paper decorations. And sometimes they last. I've had these little dudes hanging up in the kitchen for... I don't know how many years but they've lasted well!
Have a great Halloween! The Girl went to school as Totoro and I will try and get photos of the boys tomorrow - I LOVE their (surprisingly easy) costumes this year! Weirdly The Redhead hasn't had a chance to dress up yet! What are your kids dressing up as?
Again, this girl wanted to dress up for a local anime con, so her costume was done in August - I am very glad of that now!
Last year she was Kiki, and this year wanted to stick with another Studio Ghibli classic character. She went as Totoro!
Like last year, I feel like we struck a good balance between geeky and 'not-too-over-the-top' with wigs and stuff like that. Although the day of we realized she should have been Princess Tutu! That would've been fun - maybe next year.
Her costume base was a dress (nightshirt?) from Target. I appliqued cream knit on top, plus little soot sprites and a little white totoro on the back. There is one soot sprite on her sleeve, too.
Her ears + leaf hat are wool felt, totally made up as I went along, with a little tulle thrown in their for fancy.
She loves it and is excited to wear it again for Halloween!
We ALMOST did Arietty - but somehow ended up here.
Costume 1: done. The boys'... are getting there! :)
My new notebooks came, and while I think I have just enough room in my last one for this weekend, I couldn't resist decorating the front of my next one:
Metallic marker + magnetic poetry stamps. My mom recently found the stamps (brand new) while thrifting (in Seattle - what does your mom bring you back from trips? :) and they're pretty fun.
As I was trying them out, I made a fridge-poetry type of poem very quickly.
It decided to be an Easter poem. Light brown ink is hard to read so here it is:
let this family
enjoy our time together
feel the warm peace
share the gift of hope
come fill our happy home
for we celebrate Easter
Happy Easter!
I sent Monkey out back to see if he could find a four-leaf clover - five-minutes later he came back successful!
We've found them in our yard before, but ON St. Patrick's Day? That's gotta be extra lucky, right?
And these two leprechauns made me laugh playing the flute/whistles their Grandma and Grandpa brought back from Ireland a few years ago.
They were dancing jigs and playing their 'tunes' all the way to their friend's house. Ha!
The pasties will have to wait till tomorrow when I have time to cook, but they are happening!
I didn't plan anything big this year, but everything fell into place last night when I realized we already had a stir fry on the menu, I could throw some decorations up...
...and then we took off to a big celebration. Should have switched lenses so I got some better photos, but it was pretty fun. I'm calling it a win.
Happy Year of the Goat/Sheep/Ram!
(I'm a dragon, what is your chinese zodiak sign?
Well, the rocky road is done, cheeseball is sitting in the fridge, the Girl doesn't need to get dressed up for her NYE dance yet, and the pizza is eaten, so I'll just take a sec and say Hi! Happy New Year! to you. And maybe finish up a couple posts I meant to do earlier. Possibly all rolled into one...
Today I talked my family into taking down the Christmas decorations. The kiddos were extremely reluctant. Now the boxes are hanging out waiting to be taken downstairs again. I did finally purge my stack of old Christmas cards. There were still keepers, to be sure, but most of the stack were recycled, after years of holding onto them in case I came up with a really good craft idea for them. No. I didn't, and it's better this way.
The new CD wallets we ordered arrived today, so I spent a good hour taking DVDs out of cases and organizing the wallets. We already keep most of our movies in wallets (highly recommend!), but we've been realizing how many seasons of shows we have (most bought pre-netflix of course) taking up way too much space. So, with the exception of some special collector boxes, all the TV dvds and movie trilogies got broken down today! It felt pretty good.
I filled two garbage bags full of empty dvd cases! CRAZY. They took up less than 2 of these wallets! Hooray for better organization.
All tucked away. The yellow ribbon designates the more 'family friendly' one (Muppet Show, Cosby, etc). I am still missing some discs... where did they go?
I totally over-analyzed the dvd cases by the way. Some were put together way better than others. Some fell apart so easy (I'm looking at you, Gilmore Girls!), some had the overlapping disc thing that I hate. Some folded, with separate slipcovers, some slipcovers with separate cases for each disc. I decided the best show's case was actually Liberty's Kids. One case, all four discs stuck (stacked!) on one side, with the episodes labeled on each disc! That show may be crazy cheesy (though educational), but man, they did their disc/case design right! And then I remembered we have the complete Seinfeld, whose case is AMAZING and definitely is a keeper. So LK came in second, I guess. And now you know.
On Christmas Eve, the girl and I made some fun ornaments with some wood beads I had hanging around. She watercolored a few of them, then we strung them with baker's twine.
We gave them away, but I think we'll have to make more...
Let's see, what else... Here's a photo of my breakfast. I LOVE when Aaron cooks for us. Which is often, we are lucky. But with him having some time off, we are loving fancy breakfasts, like this dutch baby with blueberries.
Seriously, though, I'm spoiled.
We got four new games for Christmas. Sleeping Queens had been highly recommended, and it is a crowd-pleaser. The Redhead's favorite new game.
Skip-bo is a classic that we somehow didn't have already, so that's been fun. I totally forgot how to play it, and now I realize it's a lot like solitaire!
King of Tokyo is AWESOME. Definitely a winner. So fun. Also I've won a couple games, so that's good.
Tsuro is cool-looking, and takes only a VERY short time to learn how to play. Which I appreciate. Games are relatively short, too.
Finally got some snow! Woo hoo!
Made sure to get out and play in it right away, since the temps dropped the next day and it's just been TOO COLD.
Alright, we've got some games (video and board) to get to before we watch Return of the King (the boys first time, they just finished listening to their dad read it to them!). And someone probably needs help with her hair. Off to celebrate.
Here's to 2015 being amazing.
Last week in Sunday school, I was talking with the 13yos that I teach about favorite Christmas traditions. It was fun to hear how Christmas morning works in their homes. How early can they wake up? Are Santa's gifts wrapped or not? Breakfast first (I can't even) or just get to the presents? Open all at once or taking turns?
Some of the kids had never thought about how other families did things, so it was pretty funny to see some of them flabbergasted at other traditions (Why aren't your gifts wrapped? Why do you have to wait and go down together?)
So. For the record, here's how Christmas Eve/Morning goes down at our house:
Christmas Eve is spent as a family, just hanging out, and maybe preparing some food/treats for the next day. At some point we watch Empire Strikes Back, which has become a Christmas Eve tradition somehow. We have Chinese food for dinner (a throwback to my growing up), often takeout. After dinner we watch The Grinch (animated version of course), open sib gifts, watch The Snowman, and read from the scriptures about Christ's birth. Then the kids are off to bed.
We hang a sheet up at the top of the stairs, simply because of how the house is laid out. One little trip to the bathroom during the night could mean major spoilers.
Aaron and I watch A Christmas Story while we do last-minute wrapping/setting up. We have wrapped most of the gifts and set them under the tree before this point so the kids can ooh and ahh and guess, but we save a couple extra just for the wow/magic of Christmas morning.
On the big day: The kids aren't supposed to wake up before 6:00/7:00ish. But really we are flexible on this, we just don't want kids up super early. No alarms, and no waking up of sibs. This year the girl woke up really early, but waited in her room until 6:30, when she heard the boys get up and come in our rooms.
Santa used to leave stockings at the foot of their beds (idea being that they'd let us sleep in longer - nope!), and they'd bring them in our room and open them on our bed. However, that proved distracting for kiddos who tended to wake up early, so now he leaves them by their door in the hall (as they still like them upstairs). Opening stockings on our bed together has become a fun tradition, and allows us a few minutes for our brains to wake up. :)
Aaron and I brush our teeth*, make sure we have the camera ready, and go downstairs to turn on the Christmas lights/music, while the kids wait in the hall for the go ahead to come down.
Santa leaves his gifts (usually one per kid) unwrapped, laid out on the living room rug. Always in the same place each year (Monkey's farthest to the left). The kids check out their gifts for a bit, then sort the gifts that are under the tree. We do opening one at a time, youngest to oldest. We take breaks as wanted, to play with something, read, eat cinnamon rolls (always - sometimes with scrambled eggs), etc.
The rest of the day is pretty chill, hanging out, building lego, reading, playing new games. Usually we head to the grandparents for dinner. We don't clean up all the way, leaving most gifts out in the living room still, so the next day still feels super Christmasy.
I treasure our little family's traditions. I enjoy having time with this special holiday with JUST US. I think that's really important. I love seeing family and all that too, of course, but my family's traditions are very important to me. I also love that we don't have millions of places to go on the big day, not having lots of extended family around. Before my family moved to the area, we used to just stay home by ourselves all day and watch all the other neighbors cars go in and out of their driveways, as they had Grandma's brunch, and Aunt so-and-so's dinner, and cousin gift exchange and all that to go to. Growing up military meant that we were not used to that at all! We have a good balance, and I like that.
*My dad used to make us WAIT while he got ready (showered!) before going to see the tree/presents. That was torture!
**Wrapping Santa's gifts seems... hard to maintain consistency. Growing up, Santa wrapped gifts in red tissue paper, which you can always find, so I liked that, but this is just what we do. Also easier if you want to have something (playmobil, doll furniture, etc) set up.
Yesterday was a truly lovely day. Happy children spoiled, good food, games, family.
Today will be also lovely, mostly consisting of grazing on leftovers (pretty sure the Redhead had potato chips, rolls and ketchup for breakfast - everyone else had cookies + cinnamon rolls!), playing new games, reading, and hopefully at some point filling our recycling bin to clear a path on the living room floor. Maybe we'll change out of our PJ's. Maybe not.
Our annual new book photo:
Oh, and we got snow. A wonderful Christmas present. So maybe the boys will head out to play around. Or maybe we'll all stay in and be lazy.
I LOVE December 26th.
