Stuck Inside

Rain. Tons of it. Endless amounts of rain. I actually LOVE rain. But it's starting to get just a tad bit old, even to me. So for your viewing pleasure, a few pictures of how we've been keeping ourselves entertained these last couple of weeks.

We've had playdates. Lots of them. We've played Barbies. We've danced.We've set up some tents in the dining room. (Thanks Aunt Jacque and Uncle Brad, we LOVE them! Scott says next time we visit he's going to bring them and set them up in your dining room so he can show you exactly how much he loves them!)We had our own version of American Idol/So You Think You Can Dance. By the way, Alyssa got a golden ticket! She's goin' to Hollywood. Pretend Hollywood, that is. We've done homework.
We've played some more Barbies. We've rough-housed a bit. We've played school.
We've made monsters.We've climbed the walls. We've danced some more.We 've baked cookies. We've pretended to sleep.We've made weird faces. We've cooked.We've laid down and been covered in clean laundry, straight out of the dryer. I swear these two will drop anything for the thrill of warm laundry. And when it stopped raining, we finally got to play outside!!!
By the way I wrote this post yesterday... We had actual SUNSHINE today! Woo hoo!!!

The Great Gingerbread Village Fiasco of 2009

I was watching two of my friends' kids for a couple of days, so I had a total of five kids ranging from three to eight. Two of them were boys who aren't nearly as impressed with our Barbie collection as the girls usually are. At some point they cried boredom and what did I do? A saner person would have put a movie in the DVD player and pushed PLAY but what did Dione do? She said, “Who wants to build a gingerbread village!?!?!”

The words just came flying out of my mouth before I'd considered the consequences. I thought it would be easy actually. I thought it would be FUN! I had a kit after all. Five adorable little houses for five adorable little kids. FUN!

Five happy little voices were saying, “YAAAAAY!!!” and for that first glorious moment, I was thinking, I ROCK!

And then the fight broke out over who was gonna get which house. No problem. We'd draw numbers to see who got which house. Perfect! This was going to be FUN! Except for the adorable kid who got the stupid house they didn't want. But then, in an incredible act of generosity, adorable kid #2 offered to trade with adorable kid #1... unfortunately kid #2 got stuck with a house with broken pieces... and it went on and on like this. Nobody wanted to put their own house together, so I had five freaking adorable little houses to put together and five adorable children saying, “Make mine first, make mine first!!!”

When one of my friends called to say she was almost home and to let her know when to come pick up her daughter, I said, “Here's what I want you to do. Pull up in front of my house with the engine running... I'll jump in and you FLOOR IT!”

I then explained my gingerbread house insanity. I said, “We haven't even gotten to the decorating part yet but I know how it's gonna go. These kits... the box always says Lots of Icing and Candy but there never is. They don't factor in all the eating that goes on while the frazzled grown-up tries to get four walls to stick together and somehow hold up a roof. Five times. Pretty soon I'm gonna have five adorable kids completely wired on sugar trying to decorate five stupid, stupid adorable little houses and fighting over 14 gumdrops, six red hots and a candy cane to do it. What was I thinking?"My friend said, “I'm in front of your house. Come out here, I have something for you.”

Really? Hmm...Help had arrived. I went skipping out to her car wondering what she could possibly have for me. She started fishing around in her purse as I said, “Whatcha got for me? Ya got valium? Ya got prozac?”

She started laughing. “No, no... it's here, somewhere...”

“Whatcha got for me? Ya got vodka? Ya got a pitcher full of margaritas?”

“No. It's candy.”

“Candy? Oh chocolate? Okay it's not prozac but chocolate can solve a lot.”

“No, no, not chocolate,” she said, and then right before my eyes, she started pulling sealed packages of candy out of her purse. Not just any candy either. This candy was green, red and white. Candy that was born to live on a gingerbread house.

I said, "I swear to you, I'm not judging... But you have gingerbread house candy in your purse, why?"

She explained that a couple of days before she and her daughter had been to a gingerbread house decorating party and this was some of the leftover candy. She said, “Hold on, I think I've got frosting in here."

“Yeah umm. Seriously? Frosting in your purse? I love you. This just another prime example of why we're friends.”

She never did find the frosting. I know. Only a friend of mine could lose frosting in her purse. And it only made what happened twenty minutes later even more funny. I went back into the house to show off all the new candy. “Oh. But it's only to look at, adorable children! No eating!”

So then I went back to building five tiny little stupid houses while five adorable children dipped themselves in sprinkles. When my friend Wendy showed up to pick up Brandon and Jaden, I told her all about my gingerbread village fiasco and then added that you'll never believe what Beth showed up with, "Candy! And not just any candy. The woman was pulling gingerbread-house-decorating-candy out of her purse. Seriously. She even thought she had frosting. Only my friends. Can you imagine?”Of course Wendy responded, “Oh... do you need frosting? Hold on a sec.”

She then went out to her car and popped open her trunk as I stood there, with a you have got to be freakin' kidding me look on my face and, I kid you not, the woman started pulling tubes of frosting out of her trunk. And not just frosting, but a vast assortment of Christmas themed decorative toppings...

“Really? You just happened to have this stuff in your trunk, Wendy?”

She explained that one of the activities at her office party that day had been sugar cookie decorating. They had a lot of stuff left over.

As I watched Wendy drive away, and waved good-bye to Brandon and Jaden, I stood there on my porch, admiring the twinkling lights decorating my neighbors' houses, basking in my own personal Christmas miracle moment. Thinking how lucky I am to have exactly the right friends and family for ME. Always there with exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment. I felt extremely blessed. Then I went back inside and smiled at the three adorable children who remained. Admired the lights on my tree which sat in the midst of my lovely house which looked as though it had been ransacked by angry monkeys.

I smiled at the glittering beauty of my dining room floor, which appeared to be covered with freshly fallen snow... sticky green & red snow, to be exact. I admired the hot pink frosting in my seven year-old's hair and I pried the gummy bears out of my four year old's sticky little hands. I remembered that my adorable husband would be home at any moment and that I had absolutely no clue what we were having for dinner.And I thought to myself that as incredibly lucky as I am to have the friends and family that I have, there's still an opening for a friend who carries a cleaning crew in her van... and one who delivers take-out. Plus I really wouldn't mind that vodka/prozac friend. Email me. PLEASE.

December 2009

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Just sharing some pictures from December. As usual, it was a crazy, busy month. Tons of shopping, decorating, baking, parties and photo book making. Scott and I celebrated our tenth anniversary. We also had Amanda's school sing-a-long and her class party.

Somehow I managed to get ahead of schedule with many things, which is pretty unusual for me. Oh I hear you all snickering... Okay, being ahead of schedule is VERY unusual for me, but somehow I managed it. Most of the gifts were not only bought or made weeks before Christmas but also wrapped and under the tree. I labeled them with a secret code so the girls had no idea who was getting what. Unfortunately it was such a great code that when Christmas morning finally rolled around, even I had no idea who was getting what. Oh look, it's another mystery gift. How exciting!

The biggest thing I managed to check off my list early in the season: visiting Santa. I've mentioned my issues around taking the kids to see Santa before here and here. Love Santa. But I've blown up the going-to-see-Santa experience into something to be dreaded... procrastinated... avoided if humanly possible. I want the girls to see Santa. I want cute photos of them seeing Santa. I just don't want to stand in line with 5,000 impatient children waiting to see Santa. The very idea of it makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Every year I tell myself that we'll go see Santa right after Thanksgiving. Get in early to beat the crowds. But every year I put it off. Last year I put it off so long that we ended up at the mall on Christmas Eve. Mind you, Christmas Eve dinner is pretty much the only event I can be counted on to host at my house every year, so it was an act of total desperation/insanity that made me venture into the mall on Christmas eve afternoon and even consider a visit to Santa. One look at that line of 5,000 impatient children and crabby parents stretching around and around and around and I immediately bribed the girls into leaving. I told them I had gotten a good look at Santa (which I had) and it wasn't the real one anyway. All we had to do was check the online Santa Tracker to know that the REAL Santa was already delivering gifts to good little boys and girls all over the world.

This guy was just one of his helpers. To be more specific, (like I said, I got a good look at him) this was the very helper who had called Alyssa “Booger Baby” the year before. I wasn't waiting in line for that guy. I just wasn't. Well if they had cried or told me I was ruining Christmas I might have considered standing in that line, but luckily they didn't seem to mind much. Do you want to stand in this line for six hours or do you want mommy to buy you something pretty and completely useless? We'll text Santa just to be sure he remembers you...

Don't judge me, people. It had to be done. I had a messy house and company coming. So last year I completely blew it. For the first time in their short little lives they had no Santa visit. I couldn't afford to screw it up this time.

So in November, when my friend Wendy mentioned that there was a holiday open house in a quaint town near us and Santa was going to be there... I was all for it. Mind you that we hadn't even celebrated Thanksgiving yet. I didn't care. I've heard people say it's awful to see Santa so early. Even right after Thanksgiving is too early for them. They say it's like torturing the kids... making them wait so long. PUH-LEEZ... I'm gonna torture the kids anyway. Why not start off the torture with a fun trip to see the jolly old man in red?

You may notice that Amanda's jacket is wet in these photos. That's because right as we left for the event it started raining. Not sprinkling a little but POURING. We were not to be deterred though. So what if we had to wait outside in a little bit of rain? I was going to get to check “Santa visit” off of my list and it wasn't even December! Go me! Luckily the rain seemed to scare a lot of people off. The line we waited in was nowhere nearing 5,000. This year I'm hoping to schedule our visit with Santa before Valentine's Day. Easter at the latest.

With so many of my “must do” items checked off of my list early in the month, like I had always fantasized about.. what did I do? Did I sit back and bask in the joy of the season like I'd always pictured I would do? No. No, I couldn't stand being done. It just doesn't feel like Christmas if I'm not running myself ragged, you know? So I just started adding a bunch of random stuff to the list. Things to do. Parties and parades to attend. Cookies to bake. Crafts to make. My visits to the Martha Stewart website spiked dramatically. Because I had clearly lost it. If it called for popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, paint, glue, glitter or googly eyes, I added it to my list. We made cinnamon dough ornaments that we never got around to painting. We made button wreaths, popsicle stick reindeer, craft foam trees, two advent calendars. I attempted to make this:

See? Those are my cute little gingerbread guys before the tragic accident. Many of them were dismembered. It hurts too much to talk about it.

However the kids and I did successfully make about a zillion of these snowflake button ornaments. Cute huh? Unfortunately, I pretty much forgot to attach them to my gifts as planned. I'm creative but completely disorganized. It's a curse. Then there were the gingerbread houses. That story deserves its very own post.

Anyway it was a fun Christmas. I think we now have more Barbie dolls than ToysRus. That was the only thing Amanda asked Santa to bring her. She finally added a stuffed animal dog and a couple of candy canes to her wish list just so Santa would have options, but for her it was all about the Barbies and Santa came through. Alyssa just wanted a baby doll. She got one that sneezes and runs a fever. Next year maybe she'll specify she'd like a healthy baby doll. Luckily they haven't started dragging out the catalogs and making carefully itemized 6-page wish lists like my brother and I did.

The girls and I spent New Years in Anaheim with my friend Beth. It was an impulsive trip for me. I couldn't resist the idea of Disneyland at Christmastime. Except that we didn't end up going to Disneyland since the weather was horrible, rainy and windy, and we heard the parks were insanely crowded. Bad planning on my part. But we had a great time anyway and we'll be going back to Disneyland again soon. Because if we don't, my children will remind me of it for the rest of my life.

As it is, I'm fairly certain I'll be hearing about it anyway.

Hey Alyssa, remember that Christmas Mommy surprised us with a trip to Disneyland but instead she took us to IHOP and the Dollar Store?