what's up weekly. (T-minus six days, people.)

What's up, party people!  It's the final countdown to Christmas!

Last Sunday was the Christmas feast at church, so we spent Saturday prepping.  I made cheesy potatoes, a salad, and green beans to take.  Penelope made some fudge to give as gifts to her friends.  Penelope and Callista also performed piano pieces at the Merry Making portion of Sunday, so they spent time on Saturday practicing.

We also spent time reading old Christmas blog posts from when the kids were little.  (Rocco must've been documented doing something funny.)  After that, we watched Rudolph.  (Have I mentioned that during Advent, we only watch Christmas movies and TV?)

Monday was also OPHELIA'S BIRTHDAY!  SHE IS FOUR!

Oh, Oey.  How we love you.  You are so full of life, and so funny and smart.  You are independent and hold your own.  You love playing with trains.  You named your stuffed dragon, Big the Giant, which I think is just so funny.  You tell fart jokes.  (Well, mainly you just say things like, "YOU'RE a fawt.  This bread is a fawt."  You know your audience.)  You are maybe too affectionate with the babies.  (Is there really any such thing as TOO affectionate?  To ask the babies, the answer is a resounding, "YES.")  You're starting to LOVE imagination games.   You're wild and feral and sweet and spicy.  They should name a perfume after you.  I'd buy that.  

She requested pancakes for breakfast, peanut butter sandwiches for lunch (NO JELLY for this one.  She doesn't like jelly...?  Why would someone not want jelly?!) and macaroni and cheese for dinner.  After dinner, we watched Polar Express, which we always pause at the "hot chocolate" scene so we can come upstairs and drink hot chocolate.

The next day was Wednesday, and you know what that means: Table Time!  Maps, math, memory work.  You know the drill.  After lunch we read some of Evangeline and a few chapters in Watership Down.

And that brings me to last night.  I've plugged in the chicken lamp in my room to get a little red light therapy before bedtime.  If anything, it gives my eyeballs a rest from the blue lights and the God-awful LEDs that are everywhere.  I'm hoping it will help with my sleep patterns, which is really why I'm using it.  My sleep has been so awful lately, for no discernible reason, and I desperately need it to go back to normal!  They say red light at night can help with that, as well as with hormone balance, so we'll see.

Inception: I am putting a photo of me writing this post INTO this post.   Does red light cancel out active blue light exposure?  Can I pretend it does if it really doesn't?

Okay.  Now to just get through today.  Today is our last day before a three-week break for Christmas!  I'm so excited!  I was a little worried that I was waiting so late in December before breaking, but I think this is actually really perfect.  We won't start back to school until January 12!  So I'll have time to celebrate all twelve days of Christmas, and then put the decorations away after Epiphany, without it conflicting with other responsibilities.  I have some reading goals I'm hoping to meet over break, and I think after Christmas will be better than trying to utilize time before.  (Who am I kidding; after Christmas the kids and I will all be on a sugar crash, and I will be sick of stepping on pine needles, and fed up with Christmas music, all of which don't exactly foster ideal internal or external conditions under which to expect myself to read anything other than the back of the Tylenol bottle for dosing information.  But here's to untethered optimism.)

what's up weekly.

LOOK AT ME!  TWO WEEKS OF BLOG POSTS IN A ROW! It's a Christmas miracle.

Last Friday was Atticus' birthday, and it was a nice day.  He's very lowkey and doesn't like to be the center of attention, so he made very simple meal requests - frozen waffles and sausage links for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, and Domino's pizza for dinner.  We all gave him gifts after dinner and then we watched Home Alone.

Breakfast and the Happy Birthday song from Yo Gabba Gabba to kick off birthday morning.

Oey was so excited to give him a bag full of leftover Halloween candy.

After the kids went to bed, I set out the Dutch shoes and filled them (ahem, I mean St. Nicholas filled them) with treats for the morning.  When the kids came upstairs for breakfast, they discovered that St. Nick had left them a note on the Christmas tree, and they got to take their shoes to the breakfast table with them.  They had cookies and a piece of candy with their breakfast.

Cookies for breakfast?!  This Santa Baby approves.

Surprisingly, the Dutch cookies don't contain eggs, so Knox could enjoy them with us!  They do contain dairy, but he has been doing really well with that lately, so we only need to watch out for eggs now.

Hmm.  Cookies?  For breakfast?  This Santa Baby is skeptical.

Lolo reading the note from St. Nick.

A Parliament of Nicks, getting into a fist fight over who is the real one.  You can take the Nick out of Nicea, but you can't take the Nicea out of the Nick. 

Still skeptical, but willing to hear you out on the cookie thing.

Later that morning, I took some fire cider that I made to our church's Maker's Market to sell.  My goal was to sell enough to recoup my costs, so that the fire cider we kept back for our own use this winter would be free for us.  So I made extra, invested in nice bottles and labels, and sold at least what I was hoping to sell.  It was my first foray into literally anything entrepreneurial, so it felt good that it was a success!

Later that afternoon, I finally got Christmas lights on the downstairs tree, so it's feeling much more festive than it was.  I even pulled out Todd's and my ornaments to decorate with - we always pull out the kids' ornaments for the upstairs tree, and I just put generic matching ornaments on the downstairs tree.  I do get ornaments for us each year, but we never actually end up putting them on the tree.  (The plan is to have a decent stock of our own ornaments from each year, so that when the kids take their ornaments with them into their own families, we'll still have something of our own to mark the Christmases of these years.)  It was fun seeing all the old ornaments - a good number of them are from our first Christmas!

Lights (mostly) on, but ornaments not up yet.

In the evening, we had a cheeseboard and watched Miracle on 34th Street.

He had a fat face, and a round little belly, that shook when he toddled, like a bowl full of jelly.

CHEESE!

Since then, we've pushed ahead with normal life.  We're kind of white-knuckling it through school until Christmas break, which will be SO WELCOME.  

Also this week, I finally went grocery shopping for the first time in almost six weeks.  It was wild.  Not only was I stocking up again after a long stretch of not refilling the pantry, but the next four weeks (which is my usual grocery stretch) will include four cheeseboards, Oey's birthday, the Christmas feast at church, Christmas Eve, Christmas, Cousin Christmas, New Year's Eve, and Epiphany.  We'll have dinner guests at least twice.  It took me dayzzzz just to menu plan.  BUT! It's done, we have food in the house again, and I even did afternoon school with the kids after getting home and putting everything away.  Whew!  It was a day.  While I was gone, the kids pulled out the Christmas wreaths and hung them up on the front of the house for me.

Wednesday night, Knox woke up in the night with a really nasty diaper, so I changed him and put him back to bed.  In the morning, he woke up with another really atrocious diaper, and Eulalie woke up covered in her own puke.  So that was the main event yesterday: comforting the babies while they didn't feel good and wouldn't eat anything other than Cheerios, washing sheets, and battening down the hatches for the potential spread of the tummy bug.  Laurelai was also sick, though not puking, and spent the afternoon sleeping.  So wish us luck as we head into the weekend.

Sick toddlers don't like to be put down, so that's when I bust out the Twin Tactical Rig (professional trademark).  TWO KOALA BABIES?! Yes, please.  I just love these babies so much.

Today's plans include finishing up the week's reading, going to the library, doing science lab with Finneas, and helping Penelope with some baking projects.  

Happy weekend from Beans!

what's up weekly: I don't even know what day it is; here is some news from the semi-recent past.

Oh, good Lord.  How long has it been since I last posted?  I don't know.  What all has happened since then?  I don't know.  How long do I have to write this before getting too sleepy and just giving up?  I don't know.  Let's try our luck and find out.

It has been a while since I last posted; I think we had a week left of school before Thanksgiving break when I last wrote.  So some stuff probably happened that week, but I can't be sure.  I do know that Todd was gone on a work trip that entire week, so it was just me and the kids here, and Todd in Tennessee, and everyone bummed out about the whole arrangement. We're all really glad he's home.

I do know we got Stumpi moved back inside after she spent the summer outside on the deck.  Atticus built her a new little house and she loves it.  Ignore how nasty her water plate is - she does this every day.  She likes to swim in it and drag the dirt into the water.  Someone needs to enroll her in a health class.

The kids were excited to have her back inside.

Then we were on break.  I spent the first couple of days helping the kids deep clean their rooms, which was no small feat.  It had gotten bad down there.  They are typically responsible for making their beds each day, and vacuuming and dusting occasionally, but the accumulation of random crap and the closet situation was all pretty dire.  Organization is a learned skill, and it was time for another lesson in how to get eyes on everything you own and make a few decisions.  Another lesson in Trash Is Trash: Not Everything is a Treasure.  The kids were more or less eager learners, and I have to say they did a really good job purging.  The big girls got rid of FOUR kitchen trash bags worth of stuff. 

That week I also got the house cleaned in preparations for guests and we went to Home Depot and got our basement Christmas tree.

I also started brining the turkey midweek.  This is a sad story, so buckle up.  

I was gifted a beautiful, but huge, homegrown turkey by a friend.  Seriously, it was twenty-five or thirty pounds.  It was too big to fit in the roaster, and too big to fit in the oven.  I had Atticus spatchcock it for me to get it down to a more manageable size, and then I dry brined it.

Cutting out the backbone

See?  Huge.

The day of Thanksgiving was just a series of unfortunate events with the turkey.  It took longer than expected, in part because I must not have gotten the meat thermometer-ing right.  Long story short, the turkey turned out dry and sad and was served later than planned.  It all kind of put a damper on the whole day, to be honest.

Luckily there were other things going on to take my mind off my disappointment.  We had family here, and the kids had a blast playing with their cousins.  (Unfortunately, my sister and my nephew couldn't make it because he was sick, but the rest of her family and my parents all came.)

The kids helped to set the tables

They husked some Indian corn for decorations

My sister sent down some lunchtime charcuterie

We had a kids' table and an adults' table this year

I have had a hard time mentally bouncing back from Thanksgiving break.  We are out of groceries, I have stayed in my pajamas and forgotten to put on makeup all week.  I just don't have any "oomph."  I don't know if it's because break was a full week and I'm still recovering, or if it's because we're in that weird no-mans-land between Thanksgiving and Christmas where everything feels a bit floaty and surreal.  Maybe it's because we had a massive cold front blow in right after Thanksgiving and the change in pressure or temperature or something is messing with me.  I'm also wondering if my hormones are still a bit off since weaning the babies.  I'm not sure.  I'm just not really myself, and I don't have any fire in me.

This week we were back to school, and we started our second term.  It seems that when I planned the year, I must have kind of front-loaded the work, so this term seems like it's going to be a bit gentler than last.  I have felt overwhelmed by juggling school and babies during the morning stretch, but this week the big kids have watched them for about an hour in the middle of the morning so that I can concentrate on reading to some of the younger kids, and that has made a huge difference.

This week, we started Two Gentlemen of Verona during our big group read aloud time.  If you'll notice, I am actually dressed here!  Although Mt. St. Laundry hasn't been dealt with in a week...

We started the week with fresh snowfall, so it's been a week of snow gear and boots, which definitely added to the chaos, but also made everything so warm and cozy.  We kept the fire going, and the Christmas music playing, and the tree lighted all day.

Between the snow and the jammies, things were actually really cozy and sweet.

Speaking of the tree, we got our big living room tree on Saturday.  It was so easy this year.  We drove out to the tree farm in the drizzling rain, so when we got out there, things were muddy and wet but not busy.  (You have no idea to what lengths I will go to ensure places are not busy when I get there.  Half my mental energy is spent calculating how to avoid peak times of public human activity.  Traffic?  No.  Lines at Walmart?  No.  Standing behind maximum numbers of idiots at Aldi who park their carts in the dead center of the aisle so you can't get around them?  No.  YOLO, and I'm not going to spend my time squirming my way around strangers.  In a perfect world, only people I know would exist, and even they would only show up sometimes.)

ANYWAY.  I was telling you about Christmas tree shopping.  We got there, tromped through the mud, found the precut trees of the correct height, decided between the best two, and tromped back to the van.  It was a little interesting trying to get the tree in the van, since our cargo area is directly behind the front seats, rather than at the back.  It took some finagling, and Knox was thoroughly freaked out by the presence of the tree, but we made it in the end, and it only took an hour to get there and back. 

Yes, Penelope is in a t-shirt.  She marches to the beat of her own drum.

The boys got the big tree in the house and set up.  (The only thing better than having a teenage son is having two teenage sons.)

Finneas got the little tree prepped for the downstairs stand, and the boys got it all situated.

Then I strung the lights on the upstairs tree.  It looked really amazing... until the very first strand shorted out and I had to unstring the entire 9.5-foot tree just to get to figure out where the problem was and have Todd and Atticus change the fuses, and then I restrung the entire tree the next day before the kids put their ornaments on.  (For reference, this tree uses ten strings of lights.  Needless to say, I'm Christmased out already, so the downstairs tree has no lights or ornaments on it yet even though we bought it before Thanksgiving.)

Outfit 1: stringing the tree

Outfit 2: unstringing the tree

Outfit 3: restringing the tree

We decorated it on Sunday, and the kids have gradually put up room decorations.  

A photo of taking a photo.  Inception.

Like Mother, Like Rocco.

We finished up the last few ornaments in the daylight the next day.

New day, new pajamas.

The boys always do some kind of "battlefield Christmas" with all their G. I. Joes set out on their dresser.  I think they also put up a small tree.  The little girls strung colored lights and set up a small tree.  And the big girls made paper snowflakes and strung fairy lights and white streamers all around their room in addition to setting up their own little tree.  Everyone is feeling festive and decorative and seasonal.  I'm getting there.

The Joes, all thinking of their families at Christmastime.

I will say, I have most of my Christmas shopping done, which feels great.  Todd and I also took the kids to Dollar Tree last week to get their gifts for one another.  So most of the gifting has been accomplished and I should be able to just relax into Advent and enjoy it.  If I can only rouse myself a bit.

As for today.  Today is Atticus' birthday.  He's seventeen.  I just... can't.  I just don't even know how to think about that.  The time goes so slowly and so quickly.  I'm so proud of the young man he is.  He is a hard and cheerful worker.  He is always striving to jump in and meet the expectations of the next stage of life.  He is servant-hearted and is often found meeting needs around the house without being asked.  He's great with babies.  He's an amazing artist.  He is good at speaking encouragement into his younger siblings and is actively pursuing growth in the area of generosity toward them.  He's getting so close to the next chapter of his life, and I'm excited for him.