Merry Christmas!!

 

 

place cards by Joy

before Christmas vigil Mass

Christmas Eve

Unfortunately, I forgot my camera at all other Christmas gatherings.  Suffice it to say we had a great time with both sides of the family!!  We are truly blessed. 

Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real: Mid-Advent

I think there's a bit of all 4 categories (P,H, F, R) in each of today's photo selections!

Nutcracker rehearsal!  I love the smiling faces in the background (and the main subjects!).  The shows are this weekend!  Sold out!  

These little snuggle bugs.  Yoyo is often the first responder when Crash wakes up in the morning.  

Our Jesse Tree!  

This child cannot resist building with Legos.  Technically he's not supposed to bring them downstairs, because... you know...  Choking hazards...  But he's so proud of what he made he has to show me right away.  

This is where we normally hang stockings.  But there's a certain someone in the house who would, for sure, pull them down with the heavy stocking holder crashing onto his head.  Therefore...

...stockings are here this year.  Santa take note.  See the wadded up shirt on the bench?  Yeah, that's the very real part.

More real.  Lots of evidence of homeschooling in our dining room.  I am determined to decorate with nutcrackers, nevertheless!

This is our homemade tree. That is, 95%of the ornaments are homemade.  The angel?  Not so much.  Basically, everybody but me has a serious dislike of this angel, which I picked up a few years ago because she is lighted.  My husband thinks the real angels in heaven might actually be offended by this representation.  But, Joy had pity on her and stuck her right up there.  :)

Linking up with Like Mother, Like Daughter today!!!

Scrambled

This is your brain:

This is  your brain on motherhood:

(fried...but in the best way!)


 

Clearly, we have too much going on right now...

Saturday morning, I was so proud of myself.  Lunches for 2 children with all-day ballet activities done the night before.  Rides for those 2 kids arranged.  Everybody up and out early.  Other 3 kids ready to go in time for Yo-yo's first confession (including fancy curled hair for yo-yo's Nutcracker rehearsal later in the afternoon).

We arrived at church on time.  Small miracle. 

And there was nobody there. 

Did I have the time wrong?  Well, sitting in church for an hour would certainly be of benefit, so we waited. 

Finally, 45 minutes later, Yo-yo's CCD (Sunday School) teacher came in for an unrelated reason and confirmed that we were off.  By a week.

We made it through the rest of the day, including having the girls' friends over in the evening, shuttling Kid118 to and from a birthday party, and remembering to make a salad for a funeral dinner the next day. 

Sunday morning, we got out the door, I remembered the salad, and we were only 10 minutes late for CCD (which is only slightly problematic because Daddy and I teach the 9th and 10th graders - thank Goodness they're mature enough to hang out while I get my act together).  Daddy was working.  I couldn't find an ice scraper, so used my ingenuity (haha) and scraped the van window at the last minute with a Tupperware lid. 

After Mass, dropped the boys off with my parents for my nephew's basketball game and picked up my niece.  Went home and had some afternoon down time, went grocery shopping, picked up one child who was ready to come home, and got everybody ready again for an event we'd been planning on for several weeks. 

At our local 4H fairgrounds, there is a Christmas in the Country event each year.  This time, our little club decorated a tree for the contest.  Voting is by money dropped in a jar next to your tree.  I wanted to make sure ours had at least a couple bucks in it. 

We bundled up, loaded in the car, and drove 30 minutes to an empty parking lot. 

I was off again.  By 24 hours.  See how I'm improving? 

Oh well!  Hope you have a blessed and unscrambled week!!

:)

Ups and Downs

Well, after a week of eating rice, poor Joy was sick on the couch for 3 days.  So much for adding that food back into her life.  On the bright side, we can try corn in a couple weeks after her system has calmed down.

We're looking forward to a peaceful Thanksgiving at home tomorrow.  We had hoped my parents-in-law might be able to join us, but they've had a rough year health-wise, so it's just us.  On the menu: Irish stew, Caesar salad, broccoli (Crash's favorite), and chocolate quinoa cake.   Friday we head to my parents for the traditional Thanksgiving fare.  Can't wait to see everybody!

Giving thanks for something big that's happened with my husband's schedule.  After my announcement about Joy's diet, which turned out to be a big flop, I'm hesitant to write this down, but... For the next several months, at least, Daddy has NO MORE NIGHT CALL!!!  His latest evening will be 7:00pm.  This is something of an experiment, so hopefully the new arrangement will work out just great for everybody.

And, we're all getting super-excited about the upcoming Nutcracker.  We are loving our new ballet school!!   The first in-studio dress rehearsal was last Saturday, and by all reports, it went really well!! Tonight, the kids will promote the show at our city's downtown Light Up Night by wearing their costumes and smiling big to sell tickets.  :). Half the seats to each show are donated to local service organizations such as the Rescue Mission, Big Brothers Big Sisters, etc.

Hope you and yours have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!

The Joy of Bread!

After 9 long months, our highly-allergic kid received some good news Monday!  We saw her allergist who cleared her to re-introduce rice!  That means...   BREAD!!!   

So far, her tummy seems to be handling this just fine-thanks be to God!

I like to bake bread for our family but haven't done so since Joy was diagnosed.  The smell of baking bread, I felt, would be torturous for a little someone who couldn't have any.  Now that she can have her own version, I'm excited to get back kneading and rising!  

In 6 weeks, if all continues to go well, she can have corn, too!  Yay!  

Happy Halloween 2014

 I snapped a few shots on their way out the door for trick or treating.  Daddy was kind enough to brave the weather.  Crash and I stayed home. 

 This year's lineup:  Brutus Buckeye, Frankenstein's Monster, Dora the Explorer, a spider, and a Neanderthal. 

Closer up...

This photo makes it appear sunny outside.  I assure you, it was not.

As a matter of fact, it was snowing.  No joke.

And, for tomorrow, Happy All Saints' Day!! 

Just Because

Little Readers

Nurturing a love of reading in our kids is totally worth all the library fines!!  My favorite part of each day is reading aloud to everybody.  Love the series on this topic at this lovely blog.  Worth a click!!

We are currently loving Hilda Van Stockum.  We've read  Pegeen, and are in the thick of The Cottage at Bantry Bay.  My Irish accent is terrible, but keep trying I will do.  Arra.

Many thanks to the ladies at Like Mother, Like Daughter for the book suggestions!  Love their Library Project!!

Also, because we spend at very least one hour in the car every day, we picked up Shoeless Joe Jackson and Me on audiobook from the library.  What a great book full of history - baseball and otherwise!! 

Have a happy day!! 

Heard in Our House

Yoyo:  daddy, if I just wanna have a bunch of kids and be a mommy, do I have to go to college?
Dad:  I think it would be a good idea.
Yoyo:  oh, dang it.

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Kid118:  going to the library and checking out books without returning any is like eating bread when you're constipated.

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Crash, from his high chair, to his siblings whom I am always correcting during meals:  you guys!  Sit down!

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Spike, after dropping his water bottle under his wheelchair:  I laid a water bottle!

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Joy....  Ok, this isn't something she said, but it's too sweet to leave undocumented:  she spent her Barnes and noble birthday gift card to buy a copy of jan Brett's The Mitten for Crash.  He loves it and loves his big sissy.  He often cries when I drop her off places.

Have a great rest of the week!

Vacation Times Two

I'm rewinding a couple months... forgive me.  I can hardly remember what day/season/year it is, let alone gather the wherewithal to keep the blog up to date with the family's current events. 

Anyway, for posterity, let the record show that we took 2 vacations in the course of a month. 

First, In August, we went about 3 hours north to the shores of Lake Michigan.  This has been a summer tradition for the past four years.  I could easily spend a month there... probably more.  The beaches are so pretty, we can walk to so many fun places, and, best of all... no sharks in the water!!  It's a wee bit colder than Florida waters, but, seriously, the kids do not care.  Much. 

And there you have all the pictures I took on that trip before my camera died. 

Exactly 3 weeks later, we went south.  This time, the trip was 12-13 hours on the road each way.  A bit more painful, but we've been wanting to hit Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown for several years now for their homeschool days.  They have some crazy good deals going on for that event and also several extra classes available.  Joy took a class in the print shop with Grandma, and the three middles and I participated in 'the Life of a Soldier."  Lots of fun. 

It rained a couple days, so we did the Virginia Living History Museum.  Really great.  Pada, Eustace, and 3 adventurous kids walked outside through their trails in a serious downpour to witness bald eagles, deer, foxes, coyotes, and a bunch of other wildlife I can't remember because I wasn't brave enough to go with them. 

We had a great time with my parents on both trips.  They even carted our whiniest child to Virginia for us.  God bless them. 

On trip number 2, I took exactly zero pictures with my camera.  I do have a few on my phone, I think, so I'll work on getting those onto this computer sometime in the next decade. 

Garden Report

So.  This garden of ours.  I'm not sure exactly what we did right this year, but it has been great fun to reap a bountiful harvest. 

We did do a couple of things differently.  I read an article about small space gardening (even though we actually have plenty of space) which advocated planting veggies and flowers in an intermingled fashion, sticking plants in and around each other rather than in rows.  I gave it a try.  The author of that article probably meant that a gardener should plan what each plant would look like in maturity when sticking stuff in the ground, which I did sort of and sort of not. 

Basically, I planted plants and seeds with an idea of how big things would get based on how our garden has done over the past decade.  Which is to say, I expected at least half the plants to get eaten by deer and/or rabbits, another third or so to either dry up during a drought or get choked by weeds or who knows what.  We've never had a majority of plants survive the growing season. 

What a difference this year.  I planted marigolds anywhere I had a little bare patch and covered the beets (which always seem to be the first plants eaten by animals) with a garden tent.  The only plants that were not successful were the kale.  They were growing just fine, but we had a wee Japanese beetle problem, and by 'wee' I mean it was like a plague.  So, not much kale for us.  Who cares? you might be thinking, but I have my kids brainwashed to think that kale chips are a treat. 

 

 

We also added garden manure pellets at the beginning of the summer, and the weather was primo.  Not super hot, not super wet.

Possibly the most exciting development has been the pumpkin patch.  It has long been my dream to plant pumpkins (aim for the stars, right?).  We actually tried once before and had a yield of exactly one small, wimpy gourd.  Check out our results this year:

This is about half of our yield.  Jack-o-lanterns for everybody!!  Plus the neighbors!  Just kidding.  I'm not sharing.  :)  In the foreground above, you'll also notice the remains of a fairy garden house constructed by Joy.

We also have tons, and I mean tons, of spaghetti squash and butternut squash.  Makes me happy.  Our green peppers and cucumbers did pretty darn well, too. 

So, this is the 2014 summary of our little plot of agriculture.  It may always be remembered as the year Mom actually kept the garden alive.