Holiday Traditions: Book Advent

Once again we are counting down to Christmas in books. I described our book advent calendar, for which I wrap up one (or more) books for each day from Dec 1-24, last year. I label each package, which is wrapped in some plain green newsprint-type paper (which is used for putting under hardwood floors--gotta love living with a carpenter--not sure if this stuff is available at your average hardware store or not, but if it is you should totally invest in a roll; this is the third year we've wrapped 24 books with the same roll, as well as other presents here and there, and at least part of the roll is under our floor), with the date (so the Hanukkah book comes out on Hanukkah, and the Night Before Christmas comes out the Night Before Christmas) and the name of kid who is to open it, to prevent fistfights (one hopes).

This year I created another undercover crate (more Flower Fairies!) to hold the wrapped books---from there I suppose they'll move to the open bookshelf and get read more than once, perhaps.

I was up late Monday night attempting to wrap 24 books/book pairs without tape (because of my anti-plastic shtick, I haven't bought tape all year--the irony is that my husband was sitting at the computer estimating how much it would cost to fill his customers' houses with plastic--have I never mentioned this is what he does for a living? Kinda makes my roll of tape seem insignificant, but it's the principle of the thing) when I realized I could go to bed with only about half of them wrapped--I had 24 days in which to finish after all--and who would notice? Of course immediately upon getting up, E began pawing through the books, causing the red yarn I had used to hold the paper on to slip off some of the packages, and noted, "I don't have the most!" and when Z got up, he did the same, asking, "Is this all of them." Damn preschool, why did they have to teach them how to count?

At bedtime when it was E's turn to open the first book, Z had a huge crying fit and I threatened to unwrap them all myself and forget the whole thing. Do you ever wonder if, despite your best intentions, you do more harm than good and should just sit your kids in front of the TV with a big bag of Doritos?

Usually family or friends give each kid an advent calendar (or more), but this year they didn't. I briefly considered looking for one when I was out on Sunday, but then I reasoned I'd have to buy three (taking turns can be really really hard sometimes), and I just didn't feel like adding one more disposable thing to my life right now. I saw some kits at the fabric store for making little pocket wall hanging calendars, which I might consider doing in the future, but that still leaves the problem of one or three? As well as what to put in the pockets? I want to get away from the idea of this time of year being about stuff, so I definitely don't want to give a gift (or even a piece of candy) to my kids every day for the 24 days leading up to the biggest greedy day of them all. Maybe putting a piece of our winter village in each pocket, which I saw here last year (I think we actually have an old felt pocket calendar that was C's growing up that I could use)...or maybe we can just be content with our book advent.

Noticing

I was going to title this post "Blue Monday" because, once again, I was feeling sad about yesterday being one of my last days home with the boys. Then I realized how much more aware and appreciative I was of the little moments in the day in a way that I never was when our Mondays stretched out before us into infinity--the heat from the fire, bread dough rising, wearing jammies until bus pickup time, reading and snuggling on the couch, sneaking away to sew, splashing in puddles, the feel of a tiny hand in mine as we walked, even the obnoxious sound of a four-year-old "playing" the recorder. Each moment seemed to seep into my consciousness, keeping me in the here-and-now, not focusing on "in a couple weeks" or "remember when?" It was a delicious feeling and something I think I've been searching for for years. I hope I can keep it with me for a while.

Thankfulness

Feeling gratitude isn't my strong point, so it's nice to be reminded to do so once a year. Growing up, Thanksgiving was about creating the perfect meal served at exactly 2 p.m. at my grandmother's dining room table, with her jumping up every five seconds, followed by the male members of the family retiring to watch football and the females (who spent two days cooking the meal) retiring to the kitchen to wash dishes (by hand of course, since leaded crystal and Grandma's china couldn't go in the dishwasher). Usually someone had a big meltdown at the dinner table, thanks to all of the built-up holiday stress. At least once it was me.

So I am very thankful that we spent Thanksgiving with friends--a more relaxing and pleasant holiday would be hard to imagine.

I'm thankful for the little woodland-to-ocean walk (this is our friends' neighborhood!!) we took the boys on the next day :

(E and Z loved this little "gnome throne" cut from a tree stump)

and for boys who love to dig in sand, even when it's misting and their mama is freezing,

I'm thankful for cute little stores with fantastic finds (these are from Under the Dogwood Tree and Lilac Lily, both in Southwest Harbor):

Although I'm not thankful that I lost my Noro spiral hat (instant Karma, I suppose, for participating in Black Friday and only buying stuff for me).

I'm thankful for going to a wonderful yoga class Friday night that resulted in my shoulder not hurting for the first time in months (followed by fondue for dinner--yum!).

I'm thankful for a little knitting time, both with my friend and on the drive home that allowed me to make one silly gnome hat (two more to go!)

Key Hooks

I've been wanting to do this "woodworking" project from The Playgroup Handbook for some time, but had kind of forgotten about it until the Family Art Coat Hooks project from Handmade Home reminded me. We don't need coat hooks in our home (at least we don't have wall space for any more coat hooks), but I did need a place to keep my car key which I am always losing.

We got to work last week. C cut some of his vast collection of scrap wood into appropriate sizes, and I set the boys up with sandpaper.

When it came down to painting, it became a bit of a struggle--I had a certain outcome in mind, which the boys were not privy to (I had no photograph to show them) and Z really protested painting his block of wood only one color. I felt kind of witchy for sticking to my guns, but I did not want just a mud-colored block of wood hanging on my wall.

They then drew pictures on paper and I Mod Podged them onto the wood while the kids were outside (just to make that part go more smoothly). I would recommend using crayons rather than colored pencils, which smeared and faded a bit from the glue.

It took me a few days to get to the hardware store to buy cup hooks. When I finally had them in hand, I screwed them in and backed them out before handing them over to the boys, so they would have the satisfaction of doing it themselves.

The Handmade Home recommends looking around your home and making things you actually need. I needed a key holder, but only one key holder (I only have one key--C leaves his in his car). But now I have two. Here's E's hanging in the mudroom by the front door:

Z's (which I haven't hung up yet because I only had one picture hanger for the back) will go in the sunroom by the back door. I'll have to think of something to hang from it!

Despite the power struggles over artistic license, E and Z had a lot of fun making these and now have plans to make one for almost everyone they know. I guess I better get to the hardware store for more hooks and picture hangers!

Mice and Big Life Changes

We have a mouse. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a friend whose old farm house had become infested with mice while they were on vacation and had said, "Oh NO, we would NEVER get mice. Our house is too TIGHT!" I wish I could learn to keep my ginormous mouth shut, because the VERY NEXT DAY, no joke, I found little piles of sunflower seed shells on a Rubbermaid container in the basement. One of the boys had left the basement door open all night on two occasions last month (I guess we're lucky a moose or bobcat didn't move in). I hoped that the rodent came in one night and left the second night. I held firm to that belief until yesterday when I was vacuuming the kitchen and saw the little bugger scamper from underneath the blue hutch and under the fridge. After a bit of barely-suppressed shrieking and whimpering, E and I tried to chase it out from under the refrigerator so I could trap it in a plastic container (I actually thought this would work). Finally we gave up because the space under the fridge is so small, and the mouse is very wily. Instead I went in search of our live trap, which I found outside with at least one mummified rodent corpse in residence, along with a shed snake skin (no snake). I extracted the corpse (while clinging to the hope that it was just a wad of rotten leaves), filled the trap with bird seed and cheese (hoping to mask the smell of DEATH) and set it near the refrigerator, hoping to hear it go off any second so I could ferry the mouse as far away from the house as possible, set it free and move on. No such luck (yet!)

Later in the day, I finally gave up on cleaning and E and Z and I went to the neighbor's field, where we played Nature Quest for a little while (this actually proved more do-able than I expected, for a little while) and the boys ran around on the grass, kicking a little basket ball around. I sad on the hill in the sun, feeling a profound sadness. Things are about to change in our lives and our cozy little routine--effectively my time home with the boys will be cut in half in a couple of weeks and it's breaking my heart. I so often feel like I missed out on M's four-year-old year because of having twinfants, and then he was off to school and becoming his own person--there was no going back. I dread cutting off our cuddly couch mornings and lazy jammie days and missing out on watching them running around in a field. I dread replacing all that with two more days of get up, get moving, hurry, hurry, hurry. But it's a move that I hope will make me happier and more satisfied professionally, and maybe some of that will translate to home.

I wish I could craft some kind of metaphor with the mouse under the fridge and the end of the world as we know it, but nothing's coming to me just now. The mouse is just looking for a cozy place out of the elements with all the free crumbs it can eat. I just want it all.

Kid Art

Several months ago, I bought three blank canvasses in the hopes that my kids would create some fabulous artwork to adorn my walls. I got the idea from the speech pathologist who evaluated the twins (twice). Her whole office was decorated with canvasses painted by the kids in her clientelle, and they looked really cool.

I finally got around to this one afternoon a couple of weeks ago after M came home from school. It was warm and sunny out, and E and Z were sitting at their little picnic table on the deck drawing in their notebooks. Since everyone was already focused on art, I thought it would be a good time to introduce this project. I gathered the supplies, carefully choosing paints in the palette I wanted, finding old T-shirts to cover their clothes (and covering myself and the entire kitchen in blue paint when I squeezed too hard and a plug of dried paint burst out followed by half the paint tube--I had neglected to cover myself in an old T-shirt, and to put the paint on trays outside!).

M quickly dashed off an airplane--the only thing in his artistic repertoire at this time. E came over and joined us, applying beautiful swirls of color, until he got tired, or annoyed with me moving the canvas around to keep his sleeves out, and smeared together the colors at the end. Z came in at this time, swirled all the paints together from the start and made a muddy blob on the canvas (the irony is that I had just been watching him very intently copy a pair of airplanes that M had drawn, and thought to myself that he might be an artistic prodigy...thank you my little Zen master for setting me straight!)

So I'm ashamed to admit I was a little disappointed in the results, and left the canvasses piled on a corner of our counter for a few weeks, until last week I noticed C was piling things on top of them and they were going to get wrecked. I took another look at them and decided that I really did love them after all. Picassos? No. Rembrant? Un-uh. Not even Jackson Pollocks. But they are colorful, fabulous bits of NOW in my children's lives. And they have a new home.

Feeling Novembrish

November has traditionally not been my favorite month, but this year it's been so mild and sunny, it's really starting to endear itself to me.

We've been busy doing all those Novembery kind of things one does:

Saying adios to Halloween (that would be our compost bin; and those wreaths? Ghosts of Christmas past...we like to hang onto our holiday memories):

Raking leaves. Even though we live right in the woods, we don't get a lot of leaves on our "lawn." The only tree we have in the lawn is an oak, which hangs onto its leaves until the end of the season. It's grown quite a bit since M was small and I remember raking a tiny pile of leaves about 2 ft. by 3 ft. and maybe six inches deep, and he tried to jump in it and bury himself in the leaves. It was really quite pathetic (I never did get the leaves loaded into the wheelbarrow and moved to the compost bin, so I'm sure they'll have redistributed themselves around the yard by the time I get home Sunday). I remember raking the leaves of the elderly couple who lived next door to us when I was a kid (my parents would send us over, but Mrs. Lambert usually rewarded us with a dollar or a candy cane--from last Christmas). Our neighbors have tractor-pulled leaf vacuum, so my kids won't ever have this experience (I'm sure they're relieved since the neighbors have about 30 acres).

I've been making more Mama Bags for gift-giving:

Which is one reason why I have stacks and stacks of "to-be-read" that I can't seem to get to:

Maybe I should put a freeze on my Interlibrary Loans for the months of November and December:

Trying to figure out ways to use winter produce. We're down to apples and cranberries for fresh fruits (I do buy bananas in the winter, and the occasional pomegranate and of course citrus later on, but generally try to stay as local as reasonable). I made a single head of cabbage into: four cole slaws (two with mayo; two with balsamic vinaigrette); braised cabbage; Russian cabbage soup. With leftovers of everything.

I added this little Indian doll, which I have from my own childhood, to our nature table--probably not the right kind of Indian for Thanksgiving (looks kind of Plains to me...and also came from Hallmark, so probably not terribly authentic no matter what), but I don't have much in the way of Thanksgiving decorations.

Our Christmas cactus is blooming ahead of schedule. Its blooms aren't exactly autumnal, but it's pretty and this year I actually thought to bring it into the house instead of leaving it out in the sunroom where we wouldn't notice it as much. The tablecloth is one of two autumney cloths I bought at TJ Maxx last month for super cheap.

Best of all, I'm getting away for the weekend for what has become an annual late-fall trek to Western Mass to visit dear friends. And I'm feeling immense gratitude that my husband is not a deer hunter so that I don't spend my Saturdays in November as a hunting widow. Thanks C!