Oh Holiday

Our neighbors the Dostals celebrated Christmas early as they were leaving to go home to Germany for the holidays. They got this cool little car and they have been good to share. They were riding around the other day and I had this flash forward and could see my kids loading into real cars with their friends and driving away and it was scary. I am hoping they can hone their ability to see what is going on around them and look at what is in front of them well before that time comes. For right now I am glad this car goes really slow. My kids usually spend a lot of time each day outside playing with Stella, Philena and

Arthur. When they are gone we really miss them, and their toys. We hope they are having a wonderful holiday in Germany.

I was feeling like I was getting my feet underneath me in the race towards Christmas and then yesterday I realized-I need to clean my house. I will confess right now that the most likely scenario is the bathrooms get cleaned, all the "stuff" gets thrown in boxes and tucked in closets to be forgotten and I pray that my family is so overcome with the Christmas spirit they don't realize that they don't have clean clothes. My kids are appreciating the fact that the hot chocolate has been flowing freely, bed times have been forgotten and that I have to have the TV on to keep Tanner from crying 70% of the time.

A treasure from Saturday:

Heidi as we were heading out the door to drive to the post office and send Christmas cards:

"Put your shoes on, we're going in."

early morning with Tanner

Tanner has been up since 5am. Today is the first day of winter break. I was hoping for a little sleeping in. My hopes were in vain. He is playing here in the box sent by Grandma Karen. It was filled with gifts for Christmas, but as is always the case it is the box that is just as interesting to 2 year olds. If you notice strange marks on his cheeks that is fingernail polish-he applied it himself. Boys without sisters don't have these problems. Girls without brothers don't have to keep their polish under lock and key. Last night the girls were pretending to tap dance. Tanner was wearing a pair of purple dress up shoes to tap as well. He took them off for a moment and Heidi put them on and he got really mad because she had on his shoes.


So, this is what I was doing while Tanner was playing this morning. It looks good. Looks can be decieving. I have been toying with the idea of making orange marmalade, which I love. Oranges are just starting to ripen here and I thought I would take advantage of excess citrus. As I searched for recipes I found that most marmalade is made with Seville oranges, which are bitter. I had the thought that perhaps the oranges from my ornamental orange tree would make good marmalade. I found a recipe online and started last night. The process is intriguing and I was really excited until I added the sugar, tasted my brew and realized it was really nasty. I left it on the stove and thought I would see if I could salvage it this morning. So before heating to 220F I added more sugar, pinapple juice and some orange juice concentrate. I was feeling pretty confident so I heated it up, added some vanilla at the end and then laddled some on my oatmeal. That was an hour ago. My mouth is still burning from the bitterness. It is a weird feeling. The oranges I used were probably not completely ripe, but I am not sure if that is the reason for my failure. I was hoping to make this for neighbor gifts. If I do I will have to get sweet oranges. I am also thinking I might need to wait until the oranges are more ripe-which foils my Christmas gift plans. I would do the traditional baking thing, but I burned out my mixer. I could do things the old fashioned way-bowl and a wooden spoon, but it is more fun with power tools.

Gingerbread weekend

Our favorite Christmas tradition is making gingerbread houses.

Long ago we gave up on the actual baking of the gingerbread and converted to cardboard. Reed is particularly good at creating our cardboard framework and it is a good creative outlet for his inner architect.

Here are the specs of the finished product. This house is 13" by 15" at the base and the tallest tower stands at 25" with the sugar cube spire. It required 8 lbs of powdered sugar, 18 egg whites and a lot of candy-2 tins of Schulze candy, 3 bags of M&M's, a box of sugar cubes, 6 packages of Necco candies, two bags of starlight mints, marshmallows, goldfish, smarties, gumballs, licorice, peeps snowmen and trees. Towards the end the kids were all rummaging through their caches of candy to finish the project.

It was Gingerbread house weekend for us. If the girls look tired it is because this was around 10pm after 4 hours of decorating.

Our girls at last were educated on the origins of Schulze candy. It technically is old fashioned hard candy (which my girls admitted to searching on the tin for the name "schulze"). When Reed was young his maternal grandfather passed away and his grandmother in later years remmaried to a man whose last name was Schulze. Turns out he would buy the grandkids a tin of old fashioned candy every christmas, and hence the name. There are rules surrounding the Schulze candy-none can go to waste, so every piece has to be incorporated into the house. The main use of the Schulze candy is the creation of a Schulze tree, which is made entirely of candy and royal icing all stacked together. At the end of the yule tide season when the house meets its ultimate fate-being beat to sugar dust and cardboard bits with any object that could be used with the verb "bludgeon" the tree is pitched in the air and if the physics line up, shatters into a spray of candy exploding off the end of a bat. Yea, its cool. After we finished the first question Heidi asked was "when can we hit it?"

The origins of these traditions are probably worth repeating, but another time.

New tools for my bag of tricks...

Tanner is doing great. The NP that saw us manipulated his elbow back into place, and Tanner cried a lot which made me feel awful for halfing to be there in the first place. She wasn't sure if it was back in so she left the room for a minute (I thought to get the doctor and go through the whole process again) and came back with a lollipop. She held down Tanners right arm and then held the lollipop up in the air and asked him to reach for it. He did, a sign that all is well. It was a cool trick.

For my second trick...Tonight was our ward Christmas party. We had the Dostals with us as well as Molly's friend Breelyn who are not members. The girls singing group was doing a number. So we went and ate-with little kids running around everywhere. And then we sat through a program-with kids running everywhere. And then we helped clean up with more kids running through dinner scraps that were left on the floor. It was really chaotic. And I can't help but think to myself, is chaos an effective conversion tool? Can you feel the spirit when you can't hear the person next to you to have a conversation? Hmmm....

The doctor will see you now

I have been reading Ramona Quimby age 8 to Molly. Night before last we just happened to be reading a chapter about Ramona throwing up in school. I was 3 paragraphs short of finishing the chapter when Heidi sat up and started to cry saying she needed to throw up. She had been complaining of a sore tummy. I asked her if she wanted to go to the bathroom, or if she wanted a towel, but she did not and eventually when to sleep. Now, my kids throw up enough that when they say they need to throw up, they know what they are talking about. When I went into the girls room yesterday morning I was greeted with a foul smell. Heidi had thrown up in the night and was now sleeping in vomit encrusted bedding. She must have sat up to throw up and then lay back down, because there was emesis all over the floor. I will now note that the last thing Heidi ate was blackberries, so the stain had a wonderful pink/red hue to it. I was supposed to take Molly and Zoe to the doctor for annual checkups yesterday, but I didn't know how sick Heidi was, and to be honest I couldn't wake her up, so I called and cancelled and sent the girls to school to explain to their teachers to disregard the e-mail I had sent regarding their now non- existant doctor appointments. The carpet cleaners came around 1pm and the stain came out. As a bonus the rest of my carpet looks a lot better.
So I rescheduled Molly and Zoe's Dr. appointments, and then had to reschedule Heidi's appointment for today because they switched preschool and then as I was shopping for a gift for the gift exchange at the office Christmas party Tanner managed to dead weight himself while I was holding his left had and he has a dislocated his elbow, so he is going to the doctor today as well, 30 min before Heidi's appt. Curiously enough it was less than 50 yards away from where we were when he did this the first time.
I am not a very good shopper. Perhaps that is the reason why the holidays cause a bit of panic in me. Can I give my kids a gift certificate that says "This is good for one co-pay to be used to resolve any health related drama in the coming year"?
It is time to load up to go to the doctor.

my two bits

Two things.
One, yesterday Bro. Butler from the bishopric came up to me and pulled something out of his pocket for me. It was a Chinese Yuan. Turns out one of my girls tried to use Chinese currency to pay their tithing. Interestingly, I had audited their contributions and removed other foreign currency, so this one must have slipped by me.
Two, this morning instead of sugar on my cream of wheat I put egg nog. It was fabulous. I love the holidays.