What is today, the fifth day of Christmas? With all the activity around here and the family coming and going, I’m having a hard time keeping track of the days of the week, much less the date or anything else. It’s been a whirlwind of activity, even counting the day I stayed in my pajamas in front of the fireplace until two in the afternoon.
Today is the official Christmas baking day at the Williams house. Rush helped me all morning and is now exhausted and taking an early nap. So far we just have dough chilling in the freezer for Santa’s Whiskers, the buttery cherry, pecan, coconut cookies I discovered last year in the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, and cheese crackers, a recipe from the cookbook my sister-in-law Kim made for me for Christmas last year. Not cookies, but I ambitiously added it to the menu around 4 AM when I was watching tv.
Ah, I love our Christmas tree this year. I could just sit and stare at it for hours, or lay under it and snooze with the cats. Sometimes Rush will walk in the living room, turn on the tree lights, then throw his arms back, clearly amazed that something so awesome is in our house. I feel the same way.
This year I took an idea from Martha Stewart’s Good Things and made a Christmas card holder with clothespins, wrapping paper, and Mod Podge. The cards were hanging from some really cool paper ribbon that I found at the dollar store, but the cats have made it their nightly goal to sabotage the ribbon. After fixing it every morning after breakfast, I’m finally adapting it: no more hanging ribbons. It’s still a decoration that I love.
My friend Kellaura shares my love of 80’s Christmas crafts, so she came up with the idea of making salt dough ornaments from a recipe in the December 1985 edition of Gourmet magazine. We spent all day Sunday making ornaments, listening to –mostly bad- Christmas music (we need to delete some of that from our computer, or at least make a playlist of music we want to listen to), drinking hot Dr. Pepper and eating cookies. Regarding the Christmas music, Trent texted me earlier to let me know that NPR has it’s streaming Christmas music again this year. We found it so late last year, but now that I know it’s back, we’ll be listening.
Anyway, getting back to the salt dough, it was exactly the kind of December day that I dream about all year. Last year we were so busy remodeling our kitchen, a horrible plan for December, that we didn’t get a lot of time to leisurely make ornaments. Trent and Nick made a few, then moved on to hang out in the backyard, but I think Kellaura and I could have sat at the table decorating with seeds and beans all day.
Not every picture could make the Williams family Christmas card this year, but that doesn’t mean that we didn’t get quite a few interesting shots…
The sand in the hair picture:
The listening to the ocean in a shell picture:
We're getting our Christmas tree tonight! I can't wait to get it up and decorated. I really and truly love wrapping Christmas presents, so although I've wrapped a few I've been rationing and waiting for the tree to go up so I can really create a mood. Plus all our ornaments have been sitting in boxes in the kitchen all week, so it will be nice to get those out of the way. Just a few more hours...!
We can’t really go into any details, but we’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to finish all our handmade gifts…
We’re “almost” done. I think. We’re constantly evaluating where we are on our handmade list. Trent and I were recently discussing the fact that we each have productive times during the day and it would be so nice if we could really harvest that time. He feels ready to go early in the morning and can accomplish a list of things, while I usually have to spend the first hour or two of my day zoning out. However, when Trent is asleep at 9:30 PM, I’m just gearing up. On Friday night I was on my way to bed when I stopped by the craft room and made this wee bunny for my neighbor’s baby shower. That’s 12:54 AM.
I bet Rush would like the house decorated as well. Maybe we’ll work on that a little this afternoon. Here he is checking out our platter supply…getting ready for Christmas entertaining?
The Christmas sweets are really starting to appear. I went to a “treat exchange” on Saturday, so now that we have a bag full of chocolate covered everything. I’ve been unsuccessfully trying not to eat too many red velvet cream cheese brownies and limiting my hot chocolate intake. Rush has become a huge fan of hot chocolate, and as we discovered last night, hot (decaf) tea with lemon honey. There’s a cookie exchange this weekend, so although I haven’t baked any Christmas cookies yet, I will be starting by the end of the week.
I just got this cute picture of Rush’s cousin Trinity reading him a bedtime story over Thanksgiving. Cute! And Snuggly!
Trent and I went on a date tonight and I learned a valuable lesson: if you normally order a combo plate with one cheese enchilada, upgrading to a combo with a cheese enchilada and a queso covered cheese enchilada is not necessarily a good idea, especially if you also ordered a large queso as an appetizer. It was queso overload. Delicious queso overload, but still…wow. I walked off approximately one drop of cheese finishing up Christmas shopping at Target after dinner.
Trent and I were on the Barbie aisle picking out our Angel Tree gift and I was retelling the story of my favorite Barbie of all time, the Peaches and Cream Barbie, which I specifically remember my Uncle Niel giving to me in 1985. She had a fabulous peach chiffon ball gown skirt with a white shinny bodice and a fluffy peach boa. You just can’t find ball gowns for Barbies these days; it’s all sequined cocktail dresses. I was reminiscing away, when I saw it – the 1985 Edition reissue of the Peaches and Cream Barbie. It was amazing. But also $45, so I’m sticking with the memory.
We’re halfway through the first week of Advent and I have yet to dig our Advent wreath out of wherever it is hidden among the Christmas decorations in our garage, but our new Advent calendar is finished and hanging in the kitchen! As I finished the border on Sunday night, I was so glad I started back in August.
I had a lot of inspiration: most obviously the Advent calendar Kate made last year, the sequined Christmas stockings and projects my mom and sister make, and Gran’s stash of sequins and beads (which I used). Like most of my projects I just went a step at a time, working out the plan as I went. I constructed the inlaid pockets based on an Advent calendar I saw here, but as our computer was blitzing out and wouldn’t open Adobe files as it was time to sew the pockets, I just went from a general memory of having previously looked at the tutorial rather than following it. I needed pockets big enough to hold candy for –God willing- multiple children as our family grows. 
So the Advent calendar is up, check. The next step is either finding the Advent wreath or gathering the last of the pumpkins and putting them outside. After that I’m expecting things to start moving pretty quickly. December is typically a fast month anyway and to quote Charlotte’s Web "Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.” We’re waiting for both.
I’m thankful for a great overall Thanksgiving, for family and food and cooler weather.
I’m thankful that Trent, Rush and I avoided getting the stomach bug that half Trent’s family had (sorry nieces and nephews, I know you can’t be thankful for that this year...)
I’m thankful for getting to spend time with my cousin Per, who I don’t get to see nearly enough.
I’m thankful for Trent, Rush, and our new baby.
(Agh, who else has to go for a weigh-in at the doctor’s office a few days after Thanksgiving?!)
Thank you God for all these blessings. And thank you that Trent’s mom baby-sat for us so we could go see Harry Potter 7 part 1. And thank you that my mom and I found two huge boxes of donuts and bagels at Kroger for $1 each. Amen.
If you were ever searching for the recipe for the most perfect, delicious chocolate chip cookies, your search is over. I found it. Surprise – it’s the recipe on the package of Kroger brand semi-sweet chocolate chips. I ate a million cookies a day until yesterday, when the supply was finally depleted.
Rush enjoyed them as well and when he says “cookie” he says it with real meaning, similar to Cookie Monster. He learned to dip cookies in milk and really, really liked drinking milk out of a glass. Not a sippy cup or a plastic cup, but a glass. We’re trying to teach him good manners and apparently he’s embracing it. I’m anticipating that he will expect his milk in a champagne flute during the holidays.
Sometimes I look around our house and there are piles of stuff on every available surface. Right now at least some of the piles are useful or productive and not just stacks of junk mail and pliers and magazines and vitamins and pumpkin seeds in a Ziploc (actual contents of our kitchen counter right now, thankfully not pictured). I just remind myself that I never promised anyone a spotless home, nor did I ever even imply that it would happen, even slightly. Sometimes I have to remind Trent that when we started dating I was living with Kim, my potluck roommate during my freshman year of college who matched my level of messiness, so it’s not like I tricked him.
Trent often makes fun of me for my nightstand, which is full of useful things. That’s the only box of Kleenex in the house that he hasn’t hidden in a cabinet somewhere. In Trent’s mind, only old people have Kleenex around their homes, so he takes any boxes he sees and hides them. That one has slipped past his radar so far. I find it useful to have all my stuff out: The Night Offices for all those times when I’m awake from 3-5 or 4-6 AM, which has been my standard this pregnancy; a baby name book because we’re still working on that; magazines and the BCP, obviously; and Atlas Shrugged, which split in half when I dropped it on the floor at Whataburger the other day. It’s actually made it a lot more manageable to only have to hold 500 pages at a time.
In terms of piles of productivity, here’s my cardboard box of Christmas presents, in pieces, and other various projects. I could also go to the garage and take a picture of Trent’s pile of Christmas presents in pieces, but for obvious reasons I can’t show any pictures of end results yet. I keep adding layer after layer to my box; who knows what’s on the bottom. At least it’s contained, to an extent. There are similar bags of half finished craft projects around the house…
We had a fun visit from our friends the Harrises last week. They have two girls, so Rush got a sneak-peek of what it’s like to have a sibling for a few days. We spent a lot of time outside, so on Friday morning, Elizabeth and I took the kids out to a park near our house to feed the ducks.
Rush mainly wanted to hand-feed the ducks and it took awhile to get him to throw the bread to them. At that point he had also decided to start eating the bread. Yum.
We had a great visit with the Harrises, but Rush did end up spending Saturday with what we refer to as “a case of the Caseys.” That’s when you get so worn out that you spend all day barfing and sleeping. It doesn’t happen to everyone, or probably even that many people at all, but knowing my sister Casey for the past 27 years I’ve seen it enough times to recognize it. I think the stretch from Halloween weekend through the time change and last week were just compounded exhaustion for him. I’m pretty sure he’s back to normal now, but we will be trying to stay as low-key as possible for the next few days.
One of the greatest developmental milestones we have reached is Rush being able to stand on a kitchen chair and help cook. If he ever opens a restaurant or becomes a famous chef, he can tell interviewers that he has been cooking since he was one. I have to be careful to only say “Do you want to help me cook dinner?” if I actually mean it, because he’ll start dragging a chair across the room.
I like how he’s presenting the illusion that he’s eating it. He’s a great actor.
I was really smug about it when he was a baby and would eat any baby food we put in front of him. Now we’re in the stage where we offer him vegetables over and over again and serve him whatever we’re eating, knowing that sometimes he’ll eat it and sometimes he’ll give us crazy looks. He’s pretty consistent about loving salad though. The other day I neglected to put some on his plate during dinner and he was really offended.
Rush cooking with me is generally easier than letting him have free reign downstairs. Because we’re hosting Christmas this year and I’ll be nine months pregnant, I was testing out a potential Christmas dinner recipe the other night. Maybe I should have read every detail of the recipe before I started, but typically recipes from Everyday Food are pretty simple, so I just scanned it. I missed the part that said "whisk sauce continually for ten minutes until it boils and thickens.” I wouldn’t normally attempt a recipe like that anyway, and certainly not with a 19 month old who can open the pantry by himself. Rush was great at entertaining himself through the long process of making the recipe, but in the end everything in the house two feet and below was on the floor.
Maybe cooking is something he’ll always enjoy and he can cook dinner when he’s older…
