Post-Mid-Holiday Insanity Update

With thanks to the artist.

Just a quick check in with you, lovely readers, to wish you again Happy Holidays and to share a few highlights of our chaotic season so far:

1. SI loves nothing more about the holidays than lighting the candles.  To the point where, if she is not able to light the candles, the sight of them will throw her into a fit.
2. After a nice first-night discussion with M about the story of Channukah, new family traditions have been established.  The most important of which is the Ceremonial Watching of the orginial Star Wars Trilogy.  More on that later.
3. My children are officially obsessed with Muppets.  No, we still haven't seen the new movie.
4. Our trip to Minnesota did not involve any major car troubles, not did it involve a great deal of misery.  The worst things that happened were my children picking up really nasty colds from Grandpa, and me not being able to eat junk food in a house utterly filled to the brim with Grandma's indescribably amazing Christmas sweets.
5. Thanks to Aunt Engineer's gifts, my children are now able to jump up and down and shout, "I LOVE MONEY!"  My inner socialist pinko is weeping.

It's the last night of Channukah tonight, and after another round of candles and gelt and dreidle (and maybe even latkes) we get prepared for our trip to the east- up to Guppy Lake for a belated Channukah and a New Year's celebration with Aunt Genocide, Poppa, and Grandmommy.

And then I promise you a ton of photo spam that will melt you into puddles of, "OMG such cute monkeys with their little slippers and microphones and pretty dresses and what on earth is THAT?"

And just in case you haven't been subjected to enough holiday cheer, a super-fun Channukah song, my FAVORITE Channukah song, and one of my favorite artists singing my favorite Christmas carol.







See you on the other side of the New Year!

Santa on Sunday, Menorahs on Tuesday

The girls meet Santa

I've frequently found myself realizing that parenthood is a series of lessons about how you are just plain not the most important person in your life.

Yes, marriage is a similar series of lessons.  But nothing compares to parenthood in this respect.

And it's not just about your own nuclear family.  It's about your larger family- your friends, the people you surround yourself with.

Santa with a scotch and a stogie

I suppose what I'm getting at is that very few of our friends have children.  And, like many adults in their mid-20s, our friends have largely made the choice either not to have children at all or to wait until later to get started.

But that doesn't mean that there are parts of having kids around that they don't really want to get in on.

Take Santa, for example.  When M and I were first married, our friends B&K offered to be our kids' personal Santa and Mrs. Claus.  I had every intention of making them keep their words.

Apparently, so did they.  Last year the girls were still too young to have any sort of idea what was happening, but this year they were deemed old enough.

B&K became BK&K Inc. (this is another story for another time).  B&K's resident elf made the costumes (including her own elf costume) and the three of them came over yesterday to introduce the girls to Santa Claus.

As you can imagine, the girls were initially terrified.  But unlike those awkward mall Santa moments, our kids had the fortune of being the ONLY children present.  What's more, they were home.  Santa, Mrs. Claus, and the elf knew what they liked and had presents for them.  And most importantly, Mommy and Daddy were obviously friends of these weirdos in costume.

It took about an hour, but by the end of it SI and DD were totally crazy about Santa and Mrs. Claus.  It only took about ten minutes for them to decide the elf was awesome.

BK&K

I had a blast.

I know, I'm a bad Jew, right?  But the fact of the matter is that M is Christian, and the girls are going to grow up with Christmas, as well as Easter, as important annual events.  I don't think that having annual traditions for things like Santa Claus is exactly going to undermine the lessons of Hebrew school or Sabbath on Friday nights.

And even more important than that, some of our best friends in the whole world want to do this for our kids.  They want to spend the next two decades dressing up, visiting with our family, and treating our children like the most important people in the world.

And they have competition.  Our friends D&A, who plan on never having children of their own, also want to take turns playing Santa and Mrs. Claus.  It looks like we might even have dueling Santas a few years, which is fine with me.  BK&K and D&A are some of our favorite people, and they're around as much as we can have them.  It won't be long before SI and DD (and also Baby X) figure out that Santa is a game that grown-ups like to play, and that really they're doing US a favor by playing along.  Which, frankly, seems to me like pretty much the healthiest way I can think of to keep them from the heartbreak of being lied to about something as important as Christmas.

SI and Santa

So now they're pretty excited about Santa.  They don't think he's going to bring them presents, they think he's the awesome bearded dude who hands out candy canes and likes his scotch neat.  They think Mrs. Claus reads picture books, and that they elves play fun games with sleigh bells.

As occasionally anti-Christmas as I can be (I'm no Scrooge, but I do think that no 1 day holiday deserves a full three months of saturation), I can't deny how much my heart melted when SI asked Santa to help her put her own sleigh bell on the tree.

Santa for the weekend, and now Channukah starts tomorrow.  As they absolutely LOVE candles, I'm optimistic that they'll be at least as enthusiastic about Channukah as they are about Christmas.  This year, anyway.

And more than anything else, they have a better bead on these holidays than anyone else I know.  Yes, they love opening presents.  They love the snowflake stocking hooks on the mantle, they love the stockings, they love watching "The Grinch," and exclaiming over the "pretty lights" on the Christmas tree.  They love the Channukah gelt, they love the menorahs, which we've gone ahead and lit candles on a few times.

DD and Santa

But ever since we started talking about Christmas and Channukah, they've started every morning the same way.  "See Grandma?  See Grandpa?  See Grandmommy?  See Poppa?"

"Yes, my sweet little monkeys.  We'll see Grandma and Grandpa this week for Christmas.  We'll see Grandmommy and Poppa next week for Channukah."

"Yay!  Too much fun!"

Indeed.  Too much fun.  :)

Halloween, Take One

DD, Poppa, me, and SI heading home with candy!

I wanted to be the awesome mom that built the coolest homemade costumes.  I wanted to be the mom that rocked out dinosaurs and dreidles and panda bears and stalks of broccoli.

The best laid plans of mice and men, right?

I thought I was kind of wimping out this year.  This year, I made my children ghost costumes.  You see, they LOVE ghosts.  They get very excited about ghosts.  And they love saying "BOO!" and scaring grown-ups.  Or at least, getting grown-ups to pretend they're scared.  So, I made them adorable ghost costumes.

Or so I thought.

It turns out that what I made were horrific torture devices,  contrived only to torment my helpless children with their ghostly terror.

They wouldn't go within four feet of those costumes without throwing a fit.

Halloween came.  Each attempt at turning my adorable children into adorable ghosts failed.  M valiantly tried his own technique, "Do you want to go trick-or-treating?  You have to wear a costume!  Daddy will wear a costume!  Let's go get into your costumes!"

Costumes, they were fine with that.  But not ghost costumes.  While my mother laughed and laughed at my fruitless attempts to wrangle my children into their shrouds, I gave up.  I needed to think fast.  We had little Flamenco dresses for the girls from my parent's last trip to Spain.  "Do you want to be Flamenco dancers?"  "NO!"  I was surprised, but not yet completely sunk.  "Do you want to be ballerinas?"  We had tutus that a friend had given them the previous year.  "NO!"  Well, no type of dancing was to be acceptable.  I glanced at the wall- a friend who worked at the Renaissance Fair had given them super cool fairy wings for their birthday.  "Do you want to be fairies?"  "Yes!  Fairies!"

Fine.

So I put my children in poofy dresses, attached wings to their backs, and stuck these adorable (and perfectly matched) caps made by Grandma onto their heads, and thus were the costumes completed.

My daughters were fairies.  And they went trick-or-treating for the very first time.  And they loved it.

But Halloween isn't over.  We've got a big to-do next weekend as well.  And now?  Now that they've seen lots of other children in Halloween costumes?  Now they want to be robots.

How badly do they want to be robots?  They're watching Wall-E for the FIFTH TIME in about 24 hours.

Let's see if I can put together some robot costumes in three days.  And let's see if they actually wear them.


And now.... pictures!!!

Heading off for some trick-or-treating!

Fairies dancing down the street

SI is one happy fairy!

With DD, that makes TWO happy fairies!

"I just say, 'Trick or Treat,' and they put candy in my bag?  Too easy!"

M (Thor for Halloween) and SI

Daddy and DD

Winning the Holidays

My children found a katydid

This year, I am determined to be on top.

Allow me to rephrase.

I am determined to be on top of something.  Anything at all.  Right now, my whole life is a mess of desperately trying to catch up.  It's a disaster.

So of course, rather than actually put the work into my current projects (like, say, SCHOOL), I am instead determined to be on top of my holidays this year.

To be fair, I pretty much nailed them last year.  We had lovely cards (all hand made by yours truly), we had PERFECT gifts for everyone, and we threw a hell of a holiday party.  Despite toddlers in footy pajamas who refused to go to bed.

Our 2009-2010 Cards

This year, the holidays are mine.  Why?  Because this year, for the first time in my married life, I am making enough money that the holiday spending is all on me.

That is to say, I'm making EXACTLY that much money.  No more, no less.

The money I'm earning by writing at IdeasforWomen.com is officially our holiday reserve fund.

The stakes are high.  The reserve is not so high.  So how am I going to do it?

First of all, I'm going to send out my holiday cards early.  Yeah, I know, that was my plan last year.  But this year I am ON IT!  And I'm going easy on the goods.  Haven't figured out the design yet, but it should be simple.  Simple, but fun.

From our 2008-2009 Holiday Cards

I don't *do* photo cards.  I do art cards.  Last year, I made cards with wintery scenes made of foam and glitter and ink, and individually stamped each darn letter in each of our names.  Oh, AND stamped out all of the addresses.

Because that's how I roll.  I just wish I'd remembered to take a picture.

The year before, I painted a portrait of my daughters, and used the print of that painting as the card front.

The year before that, I created a scene with my newborn babes as Baby New Year.  Didn't turn out perfectly, but it was serviceable.

And the year before that it was an elaborate collage of images of me and M from the entire year.  It was hilarious and awesome.  I even got M in his Thor costume.

Our 2007-2008 Holiday Cards

 Holiday cards are a little complicated when one side of the family is Jewish and the other is Christian.  You can't aim to deliver the cards during either actual holiday- it implies a preference.  Usually I am for New Year's.  This time, I'm aiming for just after Thanksgiving.  That's a fine time for an annual wrap-up, right?

But cards are only one element of the holiday that I'm determined to rock.  The next is the presents.  This is where my new income comes in.  We have a lot of presents to buy.  After all, we celebrate two simultaneous gift giving holidays.  And the way MY family rolls, Channukah means eight days of presents.  You don't skip on celebrating Channukah just because Christmas also falls on that day.  This year, we'll be going to Grandma and Grandpa's church, and then going to my in-laws to light the menorah.

I'm getting all the gifts.  M is totally off the hook.  Lucky him.  :)

So how do I stretch my measly earnings to accomodate the sort of gift giving frenzy I always wished for?  Simple!  It's time to start entering contests like mad.  My grandfather would be proud- he was a contest maniac.

Tickle fight!

Take this one, for example.  Lots of awesome ladies with lots of awesome shops promoting before the holidays.  I'm all about it.  If I can win, great!  Another couple of presents I don't have to pay for!  If I don't, I'm only out a few minutes of my time.

And then, the last hurdle.  The final holiday task that I am determined to crush.

Cookies.

Last year, I only made about two thirds of my planned cookies.  This year, I will start early.  I will freeze cookies.  I will rock cookies.

I just haven't decided which ones just yet.

So there you have it.  Me, determined to be on top of my holiday game.

Granda MADE these sweaters!  So cute!

Too soon to tell whether there's any hope.  But I will tell you this- I've already got my lists.  I'm checking them twice.  And I've got half a dozen pages bookmarked on my browser so that as soon as any item goes on sale, you can bet it's getting shipped post haste to my house to hide out for another two months.

And then...

I will win the holidays.

SuperMommy's Dolmades

See pictures of delicious dolmades at Vegging for Health today!

The night before my husband started chemotherapy, we had a family feast.  My parents, my in-laws, M's aunts and uncles and cousins, and lots of friends came to our little apartment and we feasted.  After all, chemo is supposed to kill your appetite, cause horrific nausea, and in all other ways destroy your enjoyment of food, right?

Well, as it turned out, M's experience with chemo wasn't that bad.  But that feast was epic.  Granda made one of M's childhood favorites- beef stroganoff.  And I made dolmades- the same dish I cooked for M on our first date.

Ever since, M's extended family have remembered those dolmades.  I get asked for the recipe constantly.  When a friend of M's had her end-of-chemo party to celebrate beating her lymphoma, I made another batch for that party.  They're an institution around here.

And now, you can enjoy the delicious grape leaf love.

My recipe for dolmades is up at Vegging for Health!

A SuperMommy Tradition

Enjoy!

Great Lakes, Great Times

Beautiful girls, beautiful place.

Yes, we are back from Michigan.  The Great Lake State.  The wild northern frontier.

I wish we could have stayed longer.

Aunt Genocide joined us, as did an old friend of mine- now a single dad of two truly amazing girls.  The girls?  They utterly fell in love with my kids.  It was pretty much the most awesome vacation situation I could imagine.  Eager, willing, and almost entirely competent babysitters.  In only my kids weren't still in diapers it would have been like something out of a dream.

We played many games, we laughed a great many belly laughs, and I spent an evening reading Stephen King aloud to Aunt Genocide.  It was everything anyone could want from a very, very long weekend away.

Tonight, pictures of the visit in general.  But tomorrow?  And after that?  Pictures of our trips within our trip.  A few excursions away from the cabin off to other amazing places and fun things to do aside from just enjoying each other's company.

So, without further ado, the pictures...

Our one night in Ann Arbor, our hotel came equipped with the world's largest iPod.

Whole worlds of Little People.  The same little people I played with as a kid.  It occurs to me that the record players involved with those toys are completely foreign objects to my children.  I must remedy this.

Even if it rains, vacation is still never ending fun.

Grandmommy picked up these umbrellas and rain coats in Spain.

SI taking over for the Morton's Salt girl.

Happy, happy DD.  And then- off to Dinosaur Gardens!

My parents' cabin is (at least in its oldest components) over 100 years old.  Naturally, it's infested with mice.  And we caught one!  Aunt Genocide, Bell, Frau Troublestuff, and me.

For shame, Frau Troublestuff.

She became the humiliated entertainment of the weekend.  But she did get a lot of Cheerios and string cheese out of it.

Lovely dresses that Grandmommy brought the girls from South Africa.

M does a backflip into Guppy Lake

Bell entertained the girls with a game we called, "Chase the Monster."  In this episode, it involved a lot of jumping.

Collecting rocks to throw in the water.  Grandma taught them that wonderful trick in Minnesota, and I must say it never gets old.

DD: "Look!  I'm going to throw these rocks in the water!"

Sploosh!

Poppa in his favorite condition- on the paddle boat, on the lake, in the middle of a glorious day.

Hannah and SI having a tea party

Nom nom nom!

A great many stories were read.  Hannah, Bell, Grandmommy, Poppa, and of course M and I all took turns.  I think Grandmommy and Poppa may have every single Dr. Seuss book ever written.

Coloring all over the place!

Yours truly, finally freeing Frau Troublestuff.

Becoming Something-or-other....

The best part of my day- coming home and being attacked.

The semester is almost over.  The crazy summer of doom is threatening to wind down.

I am, of course, still too busy to write all the things I'd like.  So instead I'll share these little gems from the last few days...

You see, it was never my plan to be away from my kids every day.  Not until they were in school.  Not until they were grown up enough to WANT to spend most of their day without me.  I wanted to be home, to be with them, until they were in pre-school at least.  It just happened that this summer, that wasn't in the cards.  This summer, I had to focus on school, on making sure that my family can have a better, more comfortable future.  And now, it looks like that's probably going to be the case next semester as well, although to a lesser degree.

Yes, I have to take classes five days a week next semester.  I'm pretty pissed off about it.  Who the hell schedules absolutely mandatory classes for only 50 minutes at 8am three days a week?  What are they thinking?  I swear, the language program at my school is run by sadistic space monkeys with minions of grad students under mind control*.

I don't mind spending my first half hour at home in the foyer.

I have never been the sort of person who hated school.  I LOVED school.  What I hated were the other kids.  Well, I don't realy hate the other kids anymore.  And I don't exactly hate school.  I just hate it enough that on a semi-regular basis I smash my mouse into pieces while screaming my head off at my homework*.  It's really hard to have much love for a place when going there frequently means tearing your screaming children off of your legs as they cling to you, desperate for you to stay and eat breakfast with them, or watch Sesame Street, or read a book...

No, I've got a lot of angst about school these days.  From the pain of just plain going there to the selfish, stupid, incompetent jerks that I'm supposed to be working with on big projects.  Forty page term papers and the like that I have to do myself because places called "Jason's Deli" don't serve beer at four in the afternoon*.  But I digress.

Is she happier to see me, or my hat?

Back to the girls.  This week, my most excellent MIL watched the girls while I went to school.  She drove in from Minnesota to deliver us another hand-me-down (but very fine) car we're purchasing from M's uncle as our Kia is a barely functional death trap*.  She graciously stayed for the week since Our Mary Poppins is on an island somewhere learning how to blow glass.

Usually, I get home, catch up quickly with Our Mary Poppins, and then we say goodbye and she goes about her day.  My MIL has many more super fun details to share.

For example, the first morning that she was on her own with the girls, they expressed a remarkable amount of awareness and acceptance of their lots in life.  As she changed SI's diaper, DD began to babble vaguely, like she does, occasionally spattering in real words.  One of those words was, "Daddy."

Definitely happier to see the hat.

SI perked up a bit at the sound of her father's name, but rather than go looking for him or getting upset that he wasn't around, she responded to DD's diatribe.

"Daddy?  No," she said, shaking her head.  "Mommy?  No," she said, shaking her head sadly.  My MIL responded, "What about Grandma?"  "Ga-ma? Yes," nodding her head.  She could be patient and wait for me to come back.

A few days later, Grandma made the mistake of mentioning me over breakfast.  They kept craning around in their chairs, looking for me.  And once breakfast was over, SI spent the day carrying around my shoes.

How sad is that?

I love coming home

I just want this semester to end so I can spend my time with my girls.  I hate missing breakfasts and bedtimes and hugs and kisses.

I just want to go back to being happy with the sort of mommy I was becoming.





*This statement may not be an exaggeration

The Zoo!

It's been about six months since I just photo-spammed you, hasn't it?

Those of you who follow me on Facebook probably remember a promise that I made you a few days ago.  A promise regarding pictures...

So here they are!  Pictures of our trip to the Lincoln Park Zoo!

My cousin was in town, and her visit overlapped with Grandma and Grandpa.  Family everywhere!

The tiger paced in front of that window for EVER!  We were inches away, and every time he passed, DD jumped!

SI and my cousin

When you're just a munchkin, bronze gorillas are almost better than the real thing.

"Good gorilla!"

Now that SI has tasted the thrill of riding on shoulders, there's no going back.

DD walked all over, just like a big person!

Daddy is so tall!

SI adores her Grandpa!  I think she's trying to feed him her cracker.

So much easier to push the stroller when it's empty!

"Look Mommy!  A duck!"

Time to go home!

She's not sure she's ready to go home yet.  And yes, Grandma is sitting on the floor between the girls' bucket seats.

The girls had gone to the zoo once before, last summer.  Obviously, they have no memory of that occasion.  But  this time was really exciting- they know so many animals!  It was really fun to see them connecting the pictures in their books to real-life creatures.  Unfortunately, we showed up with only 80 minutes of zoo time left.  They actually locked the door to the gorilla house in our faces!  But as M pointed out, the girls are too young to understand and be disappointed.  Thank heavens for small favors!

"The Zoo" is one of those magical places that is always THE zoo, no matter which zoo it is.  You can be going to almost any zoo on earth, and it's always "The Zoo."  Always amazing.  We'll be going back to the Lincoln Park Zoo many times this year, I have no doubt, and probably also the Brookfield Zoo whenever we get a chance.  Zoos and toddlers just go together.  :)