christmas break, part 2

Now that January is almost over, let's pick up where we left off in documenting Christmas break.  When we last chatted, I gave a rundown of Christmas itself, but went no further, which is really a shame, because the very next day began with dissecting some owl pellets.  I know I really should have included that in the post about our Christmas festivities, but you have to draw the line somewhere, you know?

So, let's kick it off with some photos of owl poop.  I put a dissection kit in each of the younger boys' stockings, and when they first discovered them they were underwhelmed.  I think they just asked to open them up and get started because they were bored and they wanted to get it over with.  But once they got going, they really enjoyed finding the little bones and bits of fur inside of each one.  Trust in the power of the poop, boys.  I knew it would rope you in.

Because it was still relatively warm out once they were done, and they were still bored, I had them build some garage shelving for me.  Our garage is completely out of control - it's a verrrrrry narrow two-car garage, but we keep everything out there, and it shows.  Shelving and organization always takes a lot of time to accomplish in a new house because it is so expensive, but I was able to find a set of metal shelving on sale over the holidays and I was getting itchy to impose some order.  So I set the boys to assembling the shelves, and in the afternoon Atticus and Todd removed some cabinetry from the wall to make room and we got a little organization accomplished, though I'll do a more thorough job when spring comes.

Todd had the week off between Christmas and New Years, so he got to spend some extra fun time with the kids.  A friend at church gave the girls a big bag of hand-me-down nail polish, so they got some manicure time with their daddy!  He put on music and they had a great time picking out colors and getting their nails done.

The Saturday after Christmas, we had my family down for Cousin Christmas, although that was kind of a misnomer this year because the cousins themselves weren't feeling well and were unable to come.  So it was just us and my parents, but we made a wonderful day of it.  

We had appetizers and treats set out instead of a fancy meal, and I know I say it every time, but that's the way to do things extended gatherings.

We opened gifts and we were all thrilled!  I love looking back through gift-opening photos to see what faces were captured in the moment.

A cute shirt

A friendship bracelet kit

Piano music by her favorite composer

A Skillet CD

A box of craft supplies

The best gift: an adorable little Bean

Dining room furniture for the dollhouse

Living room furniture for the dollhouse

Cracking open the music book

The babies got matching (foldable!) high chairs - so now they sit with us at dinner time!

After Cousin Christmas, we celebrated New Years Eve (which I strangely don't have photos of?) with a cheeseboard and our traditional year-end sharing of artwork and poetry created to honor the growth and memories we made through the year.

Then it was a quiet stretch of waiting until Epiphany.  We continued to play Christmas music and dress in Christmas jammies, we left up the trees and the decorations, we drank hot cocoa and watched Christmas movies.  (And the big girls stayed up late one night to watch the last Harry Potter, which isn't exactly a Christmas movie...but I guess is not not a Christmas movie?)  

Monday, January 6 was Epiphany, and was supposed to be our first day back to school, but we had a major falling of snow, and I desperately needed time to get Christmas decorations taken down and put away, so we delayed our full relaunch until the 8th.  

On Epiphany, Todd walked to Walmart through the very deep snow to get the few fresh items I needed for our cheeseboard, including an angel food cake for our King Cake because I didn't have it in me to bake it myself this year.  I just put a dry bean in the bottom of the prebaked cake and called it good.  Penelope found the bean in her piece and was Queenie Beanie for the evening!

The next day the kids spent much of the day playing in the snow while I took down the Christmas trees and finished boxing everything up.  

A crime appears to have happened here.

It's all fun and games until someone has to deal with all the snow gear

Atticus helped me get all the Christmas boxes back up in the attic, where we discovered the whole north side of the roof was wet on the underside and some of the stuff stored up there was getting wet.  Not a favorite feeling.  We moved everything to where it would stay dry, and we're still trying to decide what to do about the roof.  It was new in 2020, it shouldn't be leaking.

On Wednesday, we jumped back into our school week with Table Time and Family Read Aloud - we're reading Farmer Boy and we were so excited to spend time with Almanzo again after our break!  Juni is allowed to stay up from nap during our reading time, so once the twins were up from their naps, all the kids were gathered except Oey.  It was quite the full audience.

On Friday afternoon, after our school work was finished, we invited a couple of families to come play in the snow with us, and between the three of us moms, there were 20 children here!

Not exactly a dramatic sledding hill, but that didn't deter them from trying.

  

After everyone left and I began to work on drying the snow gear, I discovered the heating element on the dryer was dead again.  We had only replaced it two months prior!  But we bought the part on Amazon, so maybe it's just crappy workmanship, or maybe the dryer vent could use a good cleaning (which I'll do now that the weather has warmed up a bit).  I went in to talk to the local appliance store owner, who is really helpful and knowledgeable, but the official Speed Queen parts would take a while to come in, so I just went ahead and purchased another quick-shipping Amazon part so we could get the dryer up and running again sooner.  But I'm thinking I will also still order the Speed Queen factory part so that when the inevitable occurs again I'll have the part on hand to do the job right.

Either way, we went a few sunny, warm, snowy days without any way to dry the wet snow gear, so the kids were housebound.  Luckily Atticus' nice gloves dried out enough for him to take to work the following morning.  We were about a week without a dryer, and it was rough.  BUT! As I shared last week, Todd did get it fixed before we all fell sick, so I was able to catch up on all the laundry before life got hairy again!

And that is pretty much the full story of our time after Christmas!  There are only a couple other items of note: first, Callista celebrated her half-birthday.

Second, Finneas got Rocco a Hulk Hogan action figure for Christmas, and it has launched them into a new phase of being super into WWE.  They wanted to buy a toy wrestling ring, but when they discovered it was over $30, they got creative and made an even better one themselves out of some boxes and toilet paper rolls.

They used their Christmas money to buy a couple more little wrestlers and have spent a lot of time "in the ring."  And also, this happened. 

Boys are weird.

Life around here is never dull.

ho-ho-how late is too late to blog about Christmas?

Well, friends.  It is January 17.  It has been a hot minute since I last blogged, and Christmas seems like a very, very distant memory.  Isn't it crazy how quickly we mentally move on?  Like as soon as the new year hits, all of history is erased and we've all just been born or something.  

I was glad to close the Christmas chapter this year, as it felt a little harder to juggle it all than in years past.  In actuality, it was a really, really wonderful Christmas, probably one of the best I can remember.  (Multiples of us literally cried tears of joy Christmas morning.  It was that good.) It was just hard-won, that's all.

But!  I don't want to completely move on before documenting it, so even though I'm literally almost a month late, here we go!  In this post, we'll just cover Christmas, and then the next post, in which I'll move on from there, will hopefully not be another month in the making.

In the week leading up to Christmas, I had a couple of last-minute sewing projects to tackle.  First, I wanted to make the babies some Christmas jammies.  Last year, I bought all the kids some really nice jammies from Lands End that were just absolutely perfect, and as I try to buy pajamas a bit oversized to start, they all miraculously still fit all the kids this year!  (Rocco's were a little bit highwater, but that's actually a welcome sign that he's getting taller - he's remained kind of dormant for a while.)  So all I needed was to get a couple of pairs for the babies, but when I went to order them, they'd been discontinued.  So I found a bathrobe in the same pattern on clearance and decided to make my own.

At first, I thought I'd make little sleep sacks for them, but as that involved sewing in zippers and I am, at best, a wonkadonk seamstress, that sounded a bit outside of my ability.  But I found a very simple, free sewing pattern online for baby pants, and I'm so glad that's the direction I went because A) they turned out absolutely adorable, and B) they were absolutely infuriating to make, so I'm glad they weren't more complicated.  (Have I ever shared with you that I do not remember a single sewing project I've undertaken that didn't leave me muttering expletives under my breath?  Sewing and swearing are just a couple letters different for a reason.)

I also made it a goal to sew the babies' stockings.  All of our stockings are handmade, and I think I had planned to sew a baby stocking last year when I was pregnant, but this was the first time we didn't know the gender in advance so I decided to put it off until this year.  Which is probably a good thing, since I ended up with TWO babies and would have still needed to pull out the sewing machine this year anyway.  

Unfortunately, the stocking project didn't end up getting entirely finished.  First of all, we no longer have a nearby craft store, so my fabric choices were limited to what I already had on hand.  Digging scrap fabric out and making decisions took way longer than it should have.  Also, I'd lost the handmade pattern I'd used for all the previous stockings, so I had to troubleshoot a new one.  Lastly, the sewing machine was beginning to get the better of me and I was thisclose to burning the house down.  So I got Knox's done late Christmas Eve night, and used an extra one that I'd made when Juni was a baby for Eulalie.  There's always next year to finish a simple project that is now only three years in the making, right?

Anyway.  Luckily, I didn't only spend Christmas Eve sewing and cussing.  We also did some other fun stuff.

Christmas Eve breakfast is always one of the best meals of the year.

In the evening, we had a cheeseboard, then opened and donned Christmas jammies (yes, I wrapped them even though everyone knew they were just last years' repeats) and watched the Nativity Story, as we do every year.  Then the kids all had a slumber party in the boys' bedroom, as they do every year.  This was Oey's first year joining in, and she had a blast.  They all actually slept pretty well, except when Atticus woke up barfing at 3:00 a.m., and then Juni started yelling at 4:00 a.m. because she lost her first tooth.  Luckily, everyone went back to sleep easily and even slept late Christmas morning! Poor Atticus felt pretty miserable all through the day though.

When everyone got up the next morning, the first order of the day was opening stockings and seeing the babies in all their Christmas-jammied glory.  (Almost without fail, babies and toddlers pee or poop on their jammies overnight on Christmas.  It's a fixed law of the universe.  So I learned long ago to not dress them in the cute stuff until the morning-of.)

My other set of twins.

Then we took a break to eat breakfast and build up our strength for the day ahead.

After breakfast, the kids opened their gifts from us.  We do it a little differently each year, but this year they all got only one gift under the tree, but I tried really hard to pick something they would each really, really love.  This is where the photos get so good!

Oey got a Bitty Baby

Juni got a ballet dress and ballet shoes.  She started crying and yelled, "I've been waiting for this present my whole life!"

She was crying so hard.  It was surprising how emotional she was!  So of course I cried too.

Callista got a tea set that was mine when I was younger.

She also cried!  We were all just a bunch of bawl babies.

Ope, Oey needed to take a second to nurse her new baby.

Atticus got a gun cleaning kit

The younger boys got vintage G. I. Joes and a bunch of their gear and clothing and guns and accessories inside of some ammo cans.

Penelope got Todd some Cuban cigars, and Atticus and I bought him a cigar case.

Lolo and Penelope each got some small furniture...

...to go in their "new" dollhouse.  My great-grandpa built this for me when I was thirteen and I thought it was time to pass it down!  (Please ignore my cluttery food room - the dollhouse was too big to put under the tree so we had to hide it in here.)

More crying.  It was quite the emotional day!

After that, they played with their new things for a while until we ate lunch.  I made my grandma's potato soup recipe, which was perfect.

After lunch, the babies were up from nap so they got to open all their presents.

The big boys were generous with their new things and Knox found himself wielding some kind of miniature artillery.

Then after the babies went back down, we all headed downstairs and the kids all opened their gifts from each other.  This is quite the ordeal as it involves over a hundred presents!

Avatar, from Atticus

World War Z, from Penelope

Airsoft guns, from Atticus

Cowgirl boots, again from Atticus  

(This was the first year Atticus had money from working a "big boy" job, and he really enjoyed buying gifts with his newly increased weath!)

After that, everyone played together and relaxed, and Todd smoked one of his new Cubans, until our fancy dinner of ham and cheesy potatoes and asparagus.  (We didn't take photos because ham under overhead lighting after dark is just horrible.)

And that was our Christmas.  Truly a gift in itself.  I have had such a fun time going back through these photos just to post the blog... and I take back what I said.  I'm not glad Christmas is over.  TAKE ME BAAAAACK TO CHRISSSTMASSSS.