Day in the Life - January 27, 2016

Paul asked me last night when I was going to post another blog post.  I'm behind again, but thought I would start with a little photo project I attempted yesterday after seeing my friend Christina's post.  I tried to take a picture each hour of the day, all day long.  It wasn't always exactly on the hour, but more or less and it gives a decent feel for what a normal day is like around here.

6:00 a.m. - scripture study before the girls wake up.

7:00 a.m. - girls have been awake for half an hour and it's time to eat breakfast.

8:00 a.m. - folding laundry while the girls play in their room (right after breakfast is usually their best independent play period of the day so I try to get stuff done like cleaning or getting ready for the day).

9:00 a.m. - swimming lessons.

10:00 a.m. - at the dance store to pick out ballet shoes and a new leotard for Clara's new jazz/ballet combo class.  It's her second time trying a dance class and we are hoping it goes better than her first experience when she was 3 and hated it.  So far, so good - she has been twice and doing it out of a friend of a friend's house with some girls she knows from church/preschool last year instead of a formal studio seems to be a better fit.

11:00 a.m. - my visiting teachers came over with their kids and the girls had fun playing with them in the toy room while the moms visited out front.  So grateful that the girls are sharing a room now and we have a dedicated play space.

12:00 p.m. - lunch is over and Rose didn't finish everything on her plate.  But she did lick all the guacamole off the other uneaten half of black bean quesadilla and peeled her own banana.  That girl and guacamole.  It's her favorite food.

1:00 p.m. - chopping dark chocolate to prep for tempering, something I'm learning for an upcoming Relief Society activity.

2:00 p.m. - Rose still napping - this was a super risky photo to take since she is such a light sleeper.

3:00 p.m. - chocolate covered strawberries - the result of a successful nap on Rose's part and successful tempering on my part (next up - learn to temper milk and white chocolate, both of which are supposed to be more tempermental than dark chocolate).  The girls enjoyed them as a treat and I divvied the rest out to a couple of friends (you know, after eating more than my own fair share and setting some aside for Paul when he got home).

4:00 p.m. - at the park.  We met up with a friend who needed to return my Whole30 book since she bought her own after deciding she wanted to attempt one in February and chatted for a bit while the kids played on the swings and slides.

5;00 p.m. - Costco run since we were out of fruit, vegetables and milk.  And since it was dinnertime, we just picked up a combo pizza to take home with us.  Rose was feeling particularly amorous and kept hugging me and Clara while we were doing our shopping.  Clara got a little fed up with it.

6:00 p.m. - unloading groceries.  This is one of the girls' favorite chores and it is cute to see them run back and forth, unloading the back of the van for me.  Clara has even gotten so that she will heft the box with 2 gallons of milk and lug it in, grunting under the weight, but proud that she can manage.  I always try to grab the berries and eggs to avoid any disastrous spills.

7:30-ish p.m. - Paul is finally home and it is time for bed (we had time to sneak in a quick game of Crazy 8's with Clara first - she was mad that she lost and we are supposed to have a rematch tonight).  Clara loves this nightgown and is constantly pulling the sheer outer skirt into a tail like this, sometimes securing it with a hair elastic.  I'm not sure why she does it.

I forgot about taking any more pictures after the girls were asleep but the rest of the evening mostly consisted of doing dishes, tidying, watching television, and surfing the internet.

Last of the Christmas Season

I'm trying to get all caught up (a week into January) so here is the last "dump" post of Christmas happenings.  The girls loved their "official" meeting with Santa Claus.  We actually met him 4 different times (ward christmas party, train, for portraits, and in San Francisco), which, yes, was overkill, but I just HAD to take them in their dresses to get portraits done because I love having these every year!  Rose was totally over her Santa fear by this point and was waving and beaming at Santa (who waved back and winked) while we were standing in line.  When it was our turn, she ran straight to him and climbed right up to babble at him.  She was very serious about the whole thing and wouldn't smile for a photo at all, but she was pleased as punch about meeting Santa this time.  And he was such a nice, jolly old man.  I honestly love that there are so many kind old men out there who keep these beards that I would think would be awful and perform this role year after year.  They truly ARE saints, even if they aren't THE Saint Nick.  

Christmas jammies from Grandma Cece.  The girls loved them but were being so silly when we asked to take a picture.

Christmas lights going up in the girls' bedroom.  They loved it.  

I got invited to my first ever Ugly Sweater Christmas Cookie & White Elephant Gift Exchange and it was so much fun!  We each brought 2 dozen cookies, then swapped and this is the tray I ended up with.  I brought Double Lemon Cookies (second from top right).  I loved the snickerdoodles with caramel or something inside (bottom right) and the hot cocoa cookies (second from top left), although honestly everything was delicious!  And I came home home with one of those coloring books for adults, which has been kind of a fun and interesting thing to try out.

Clara came home from preschool every single day with some new Christmas craft.  This angel ornament with her picture was my very favorite.  

Clara's preschool Christmas party was cute.  I am the room mom which means I get to go to all the parties and help, which is cool because parents aren't invited to the Christmas or Valentine's Day parties.  We had a little feast with sandwiches and bags of fruit and juice and cookies and then the kids took turns being Santa and delivering a present to another child and practicing how to say Merry Christmas to each other as a polite holiday greeting.  Then they all opened the presents which were stools/crates that the parents had decorated back in November.

Our ward was split shortly before we moved into it so there are still a lot of strong connections between the two wards.  One of the things that happens for at least Halloween and Christmas is that some of the moms put on these elaborate craft parties.  We missed the Halloween one, but the Christmas one was very cool with a cookie decorating station (the girls went insane over all the sprinkles and I just let them dump as much as they wanted for once in their lives), a cake walk where they could win mini candy canes (Clara won twice, which amazes me because I never have luck with that kind of stuff - better take her to Vegas!), a "snowball fight" with a ridiculous amount of cottonballs, some kind of dance thing (not sure what was happening as I was chatting with some other moms during this one), and a Christmas movie screening (Disney's Prep & Landing).  It was fun and a great way to spend an afternoon chatting with friends and getting to know new people who are in the other ward.

And that's pretty much it for what our December was like this last year.  No wonder I felt exhausted all last month!

Christmas Morning

A few days before Christmas Paul came home from work and mentioned that he had read an article on CNN about how Best Buy was doing a special "trade in your old iphone and get a new 6s for $1" promotion thing.  And since I needed a new phone it made perfect sense.  So I had my brand new phone for about 5 days, which included Christmas Eve and Christmas morning and I used it to snap pictures of moments that were happening instead of using the DSLR, which we just set on a tripod with a timer function set to go off at intervals so that we might end up with maybe a few photos of all of us just enjoying Christmas morning.  

And then 2 days after Christmas my new phone slipped out of my pocket at the park while I was chasing after Rose who was refusing to come to me when it was time to go and the screen shattered.  And then I forgot to back it up before it got wiped and replaced with a new one because I completely spaced that it had Christmas videos on it.  Sooo, we lost the videos of the girls opening the aprons that my mom made for them (which they loved) and of Clara jumping up and down shouting "Santa brought a TRAIN!" or the girls dancing with the stuffed Santa doll on Christmas Eve (so hilarious and something they did most every night leading up to Christmas where Paul would puppeteer Santa into leading the girls in a dance routine full of head banging and booty shaking and they would be practically falling on the ground, helpless with laughter).  

So frustrating and upsetting.  But it was totally my fault for forgetting to back it up again.  

Anyway, so the only images I have from Christmas morning are from the tripod and they are all basically the same except we were moving around the room, etc.  There aren't any good details or faces or what was given or received, but it is better than nothing, I guess.  

We had a wonderful Christmas.  On Christmas Eve we went and had sushi (such a genius idea and might become a tradition for us - it was delicious) and then the Hambys and Ambroses came over and we played bells, ate dessert and more appetizer type food, and chatted.  The girls went right to bed around 9:00 when everybody left and Paul and I got to work putting out presents, wrapping, and assembling.  It took way longer than we had anticipated and we didn't make it to bed until around 1:00 a.m. but the train set that took forever to set up and the ice cream stand were both huge hits.  

We woke up around 6:30-ish, I think, and headed out to the living room around 6:45.  The girls loved the train and it is something we will be able to bring out every year and have around the tree in the weeks leading up to Santa's arrival.  And Rose spent practically all of Christmas day behind the ice cream stand, serving up popsicles, ice cream sandwiches, ice cream cones and sorbet to her family and her dolls.  Clara enjoyed it too, but it is Rose that was over the moon about that particular gift and so far her interest in it is still going strong.  

The girls both got dolls and doll beds (that Paul made for them no less!) and are very happy about them.  Rose just loves her baby doll to death and puts her to sleep so sweetly with kisses and tucking her in under her blanket and singing her "twinkle, twinkle, little star".  Clara loves both her American Girl doll that looks like her, who we named Emily, and her plush Mulan doll from the Disney store that we had to get because she got really specific with Santa about wanting a MULAN doll because she is her "other favorite" (Ariel still reigns almost supreme although Mulan has really shot up there in the ranks for Clara, who tells me on a regular basis that she wishes her eyes were slanty like Mulan's and why aren't they?!).  

The girls received other beautiful presents from grandparents and aunts, like cute new outfits (Clara was especially happy to have outfits to match Emily), a table and chair set for the dolls to sit at, a high chair for "baby" (Rose's doll), and fun new books and games (especially the Sock Monkey game).  

We took our time and finished opening gifts around 10 or so (but that's because we spent a lot of time just playing with things and not opening in between) and then had amazing Belgian Waffles for breakfast using the new belgian waffle maker that Paul and the girls gave me.  If you come to our house to visit anytime soon, there is a good chance this is what you will be eating because man, they are delicious.

Here are the few pictures that we have from Christmas morning.  

Such a good little mama:

Reading a new book, "The Book Who Spoke to the Earth" by Chris Burkard.  It is amazing and maybe my new favorite children's book.  It is about a boy who wanted to find happiness and asked Earth who sent him to all her most beautiful places.  But he only saw shells at the beach or trees in the forests, etc. and has illustrations of each thing.  So then he asked the earth again and she said that he saw but did he really look?  And then he goes back and there are these full, two-page amazing illustrations of the most beautiful scenes where he had been but hadn't stopped to take it all in and appreciate it as a whole.  It is just a great message and beautifully done.  The author is an LDS photographer who travels all over the world taking incredible mag

The umbrellas were such a huge hit.  What kid doesn't love an umbrella?

Every year I make a desk calendar for Paul and our moms with pictures of the girls, so it is never really a surprise, but Paul sure acts like he loves this gift.

Rose manned her ice cream stand vigilantly all morning long.

That orb in Paul's hand is a Perplexus Epic ball.  It is a puzzle game where you have to get a marble around crazy ramps and obstacles (125 of them) and it is impossible.  But so much fun.

The girls both wanted to sit in the little teal chairs that came with the doll table but were too big.  So they pulled over the doll beds and used those as chairs instead.

Both girls loved the aprons my mom made for them.  Rose opened hers first and Clara immediately said that she hoped she got one too and was thrilled when we found her package with her own apron (and a matching one for Emily) a few minutes later.  She has found a reason to wear it almost every day since.

After unwrapping all the gifts and having breakfast, we skyped with family, then spent the day in pajamas and cleaning up and enjoying the new toys and books.  In the evening we went over to Rich & Claudia's house (Paul's aunt and uncle who live just a mile away from us) for Christmas dinner.  It was a beautiful, relaxing, low-key Christmas day.

And here are a few more "before Christmas" things that happened around our house.  Paul spent a few nights in our chilly garage making the doll beds for the girls from some plans he found on the internet.  They turned out so well that I think he is seriously contemplating making actual beds for in our home.  Rose is currently in a toddler bed and will need a twin bed eventually and we have talked for years about getting a new bed, except they are so expensive.  But he has a lot of other projects on his list (finishing caulking the trim and finish work inside the house, build a paneled mirror for me based on one I saw at Pottery Barn that I love but is outrageously priced, etc.).  We'll see what happens, but I do think he enjoyed woodworking.

Ward Christmas Party

I was in charge of the ward Christmas party again this year.  Well, it was the first time in our new ward, but my second time ever being put in charge of a ward Christmas party.  And I was pretty pleased with how it turned out, even though I was completely stressed leading up to it.  My budget was significantly smaller than the first time I did it and I didn't have somebody with decor know-how to delegate that aspect of the party to.  But the ward had a storage shed and a closet that ended up having quite a lot of Christmas things in it that I was able to use decoration wise.  I kept things as simple as I could and did the same BBQ brisket recipe that I used the last time I was in charge of the ward party and bought all the meat in bulk at Costco for $2.38/pound (and got about 100 pounds of meat, which was perfect for the 250 people who showed up since everybody got plenty but there were practically no leftovers).  One of the most stressful parts of this kind of large scale event is knowing how much food you will need and not wanting to be over or under!  Then there were rolls, butter, green beans and glazed carrots.  The rolls were just from Costco but the vegetables and meat were all farmed out to members of the ward who signed up to make them using the same recipe (and supplies) that I provided them with, including spice packets that I prepared beforehand in individual ziploc bags so all they had to do was rub the seasoning onto the meat and then cook it on a low temperature for several hours.

The other thing we did was ask ward members A-L to bring a potato side dish and provided the recipe for Cheesy Potluck Potatoes that Ginny Miller gave me a few years ago.  It is such a great recipe and I debated whether it was pretentious to ask people to make my potato recipe and not leave it open ended, but I was hoping for consistency and the only way to get close to that is to provide the same recipe to everybody.  Most people used it and their potatoes turned out great and everybody said how much they loved them, which made me really glad because I know that the go-to standard at these kind of functions is usually the "funeral potato" dish, but I feel like those so often turn out bland.  The green onions and parboiled chunks of yukon gold potatoes in Ginny Miller's recipe take the cheesy potato dish in a more flavorful direction, in my opinion.  Anyway, we also asked families M-Z to bring a dessert that was chocolate, mint, or both, again hoping for a sort of consistent dessert table by giving guidance while still leaving it open to interpretation.  This was the one area where my planning fell short - we didn't have nearly enough dessert.  I don't know if alphabetically our ward is just front-loaded or what, but the dessert went super fast.  Next time I think I would take a similar approach but supplement by asking a few specific families to bring additional dessert as backup, even just something like trays of mint brownies that would make up for any shortage of dessert.  But the table sure looked pretty in dark chocolate cookies and brownies or frosted white cupcakes and peppermint striped goodies.  So the dessert table looked every bit as beautiful as things tasted.

For this particular ward building, we maxed out the tables and chairs by using every single one that was under the stage and it just met our need with the approximately 250 people who came.  I didn't do a "themed" dinner or anything and just went with red and white alternating plastic table cloths using rolls of plastic covering instead of individual table cloths (so glad we went this route).  Then down the white tables we laid clippings of pine branches that I picked up for free from a local Christmas tree lot and those electric flickering candles  that you can get at Costco.  For the red tables, we laid red and silver ornaments and small packages and baubles that were in a couple of boxes in the storage sheds.  They weren't fancy or complicated as table decor goes, but they were free and prettied things up quite nicely, I thought.  Then for the stage I used 2 rolls of wide sparkly mesh stuff to gussy it up and brought my 4 poinsettias (and had 2 from a friend) to go in front of the screen for the program to provide kind of a focal area.  I wish we could have strung lights or hung snowflakes or something overhead but the amount of work and stress involved in that turned out to be just too much.

For the program, we did a silhouette puppet light show that I remembered from my childhood.  When I was little, I remember my dad building a light box for my mom with white fabric and a light behind it that she then used with figures attached to wooden dowels which, when pressed against the fabric with the light shining behind them, created a dark silhouette.  A short, rhyming account of the nativity story was told from both the perspective of the Bible and the Book of Mormon, accompanied by music.  It was something she found in the 1988 Friend magazine and I think she was Primary president at the time and did it for a sharing time.  It was so moving for me that I still remember how beautiful and magical it was, all these years later.  I remember wanting to help with the puppets and asking to perform it over and over, for at least a few years in a row.  So I immediately knew what I wanted to do for a program this time around, only I didn't know if I could make it work on a large scale because my mom's light box was very small.  But then I came up with the idea of using a photography frame and stretching a queen size white sheet across it for a scrim and cutting out much larger shapes by taking the original images to a copy center and having them blown up as cutting guides before sticking them onto really sturdy cardboard and cutting them out with an exacto knife.  Paul was a lifesaver through all of this - not complaining about my vision and instead helping me to figure out how to make it work by pulling out his work lights and setting up frames and doing at least half of the cutting for me.  And when it came to the show he helped out behind stage, directing the puppeteers and filling in as a third puppeteer for the final nativity scene where a few extra hands were needed to hold up all the pieces.  And I chose a few ward members to help with the program as readers (2 adults and 2 children) and just did congregational singing instead of musical numbers.

I wish I had a picture when the program was happening.  We turned off all the lights except for the candles on the table and the twinkly lights lining the stage and with the glowing screen there was plenty of light to see by.  Nobody really knew what was coming and we started with music and the speaking parts but man, as soon as that first silhouette went up, the hall went silent.  I mean, every single primary age kid was riveted to what was happening.  Because it is so different and unusual and low tech and magical and simple all at once!  Since I was up front leading the music during the singing parts, I could watch the audience reacting and I was so pleased with how well it went over.  And it was a good length, I think, at only about 10 minutes, which seemed to fly by.  In fact, I think I should have timed it out beforehand because it probably could have gone on a little bit longer.  Afterwards a friend mentioned that her kids were asking her "how did they do that?" at the same time as another family's kids were asking the same thing and they just told them, "magic".  The link to the program in the original Friend is here:  https://www.lds.org/friend/1988/12/sharing-time-two-witnesses-of-jesus-birth?lang=eng&query=babe.

The ward had a really large and prelit Christmas tree in the shed that just hadn't been brought out, so we unpackaged that and set it up in the overflow seating section where the dessert table was.  I used green tablecloths from the Relief Society Activities cupboard to cover the dinner serving area and red tablecloths from the cupboard for the dessert area, which I then adorned with some large Christmas decorations I brought from home like a glass apothecary jar filled with candy canes, a large white lantern, and some holly berry conical trees that I picked up at Target a couple of years ago.  It was just enough to make it look special and provide a backdrop for the desserts.

I had great help getting things ready to go - from the people who showed up Saturday morning and helped arrange tables and chairs and put out decorations (took about 2 1/2 hours), to the high priests who worked in the kitchen carving brisket as it arrived and serving it from behind the serving tables once the dinner started, to the family who handled the Santa area, letting one family in at a time so that the kids could have a more quiet, personal visit with Mr. Claus.  That is another thing I would change for future years - we started visits with Santa at 5:30, expecting to do dinner at 6:00, but the line was so long that even with short visits we needed more than 30 minutes.  Next year I would start that 45 minutes in advance, or do it afterwards, although personally I think it worked out well to get that out of the way first.

The ward has a Santa costume in the activities cupboard and my visiting teaching companion's husband agreed to be Santa for us.  Another cool thing that we found in the shed was a giganitic wooden fireplace prop that Paul and I carried in (barely - it was really heavy and bulky!) and set up in the primary room, along with another Christmas tree we found in the shed and our stockings from home to create a little backdrop.  Clara did great with Santa, although Rose was not having it.  This was her first Santa experience of the season and she did not want anything to do with him.

I just love this next progression of pictures.  First Rose complains, then throws a fit, then makes the biggest pout ever, and finally resigns herself to whatever she is being forced to deal with, all over the course of about 10 seconds.  She's at an emotional stage right now, lol.

And that was that!  Cleanup went pretty fast with everybody pitching in and it seems like everybody had a good time.  And I am SO glad it is over.