Well, crap

     While I’ve been visiting at the nursing facility, I’ve been crocheting fuzzy lap blankets out of insanely thick yarn. Pencil-thick yarn plus a hook the size of my thumb means I’m making stitches that are more than an inch square, so a 3’x5’ blanket only takes half a day of work. The finished projects are going to go to Liza’s teachers as holiday gifts, and she’s been helping pick out colors for each teacher. We’ve run through the list of her instructors multiple times, and yet ...

     "This is the last one! I can finally retire the giant hook!"

     "Wait, what color did we pick for the art teacher?"

     "Son of a ..." 

     (Gretchen shuffles off to Joann’s for more yarn)

Christmas shopping

"These would be perfect for Grandma!"

Solstice

Last night we visited the nature center for their Solstice celebration.  Things were appropriately festive ...

... and the candlelit hike was fun, even if it was really cold and we didn't see any animals.

The fire looked great until it died down five minutes later ...

... but there were crafts and snacks to keep us occupied.

A few animals dropped by to celebrate with us ...

(whooooo's a little cutie?  the screech owl, that's who)

... and we even got to make our own Yule Log.  While Jason kept an eye on the glitteration of said log, I poked around the center looking for friendly animals to photograph.  My major coup of the evening?  I SAW THE MUDPUPPY FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER!!!!! (and we've been coming here for four years now)

The mudpuppy may be a bit shy, but a bunch of the other animals were out and about, and some even seemed to welcome the camera.  A couple of the snakes even came over to the lens and sniffed all around it (through the glass) as though it was extremely interesting (or smelled like dead mice).  A couple of the residents even smiled for me.

2010 Christmas Concert, or, "The Cute! It Burns!"

Friday night Liza's school had its annual winter concert, complete with performances from grades K-7.  I had expected to have to drag Little Miss Stage Fright there kicking and screaming, but apparently she's gotten over that, at least temporarily.  We actually had problems getting through dinner fast enough to make it to the school on time, because she insisted on telling everyone at the restaurant who spoke to her at all every little detail about why she was dressed up and what they were singing and how she felt about it and on and on and on.  I thought our meal would be cold by the time she shut up long enough for the waitress to serve the food :)

The rest of her class were pumped up, as well.  I have a dozen shots from before the show, and every single one of them looks like this:

Her class was pretty much populated by 40 small taffeta-wearing-or-sweater-vested rubber jackhammers on crack.  I'm not sure what the teachers did between when we left Liza in the band room and when she came on stage - it possibly involved large doses of pharmaceuticals or some sort of mind control - but she and the other kids were all well-behaved at showtime.

(that's the legendary Lewis to the right of Liza in the picture)

Their performance was as cute and earshatteringly awful as you can imagine.

Based on data we collected at the show, I'm pretty sure the ability to carry a tune develops sometime early in second grade - the K's and first graders preferred to just shout theirs at the tops of their little lungs.  And by the time the kids hit second grade, the music teacher is sick of having them shout at her, so she hands them all recorders and they honk in dissonant unison for a couple minutes.

I think my favorite moment of the whole evening was when one of the readers from the second grade announced that her "favorite things" (the theme of the show, and what selected kids from each class wrote and read to the audience) included her dog, her teacher, and her school "because I like to blow things up."

Ah, school concerts.  Next time: earplugs and a fully-charged iPod with a new ebook loaded and ready to go.  Doesn't Jason look like he could have used one or both of those to help him weather the evening?

If Liza looks less than thrilled there, it's probably because it was getting close to 9pm at that point, and we were moments away from bundling the limp-as-a-ragdoll performer into the car and heading home.  Well, actually heading to DQ for a celebratory Blizzard, but who's counting?

Post #1441, in which we are all festive and stuff

Snow!  Real snow!

Seriously!  Snow!  Okay, so it's not much, but it's enough to play around with.

Time to get the trees up, I guess.  Okay, chief, you're in charge of your tree this year.  Get to it.

Meanwhile, I'll deal with the rest of the decorations ... after I have a stiff drink.

Aren't you supposed to be decorating so we don't still have ornaments on your floor in February?  Schnell!

Okay, now help me fluff out the branches on the big tree.

And go outside and hang up all these ornaments on the trees outside.  What do you mean, it's not fun?  This is the holidays, darn it!  Decorate!

Ah, how I've waited for the time when she would actually be able to be useful around the house.  Now, if I could just teach her to make me some brownies and unload the dishwasher, I'd be happy.

My parents' cats are awesome

They're trying to kill my Hex Bug.  They have not succeeded.

My kid is also trying to kill it, but she's killing it with luuuuurve.  Guess what she's getting more of for Christmas ...

Virtual Christmas, part 5: Ho!

And yea, verily, there was much rejoicing with new toys and old friends!

Virtual Christmas, part 4: Behind the scenes

Pirates - you can tell they're pirates because they yell things like "AHOY" and "MATEY" at random intervals - sing taunts to each other to the tune of carols, fire crackles in the hearth, and Playmobil people frolic in a Duplo zoo.

Liza is wearing the same outfit for the second day in a row, and the waistband is now so loose that she gets plumber's butt every time she stands up straight.

Nat King Cole might be playing on the radio while we eat dinner, but only because we've put a moratorium on the Bob Marley CD after hearing it for the 4,000th time this week.

Liza is actually helpful when she assists us with the preparation of the lasagna for dinner tomorrow night. That cottage cheese mixture didn't stir itself, you know.

For the first time ever, Santa's elves didn't assemble all the presents before they got here, so I had to lend some assistance in the late hours of the evening ... and then find a place to stash a trampoline until Christmas morning.

I breathe a sigh of relief when the kid is in bed and asleep, then cringe at the thought that I can no longer threaten her with, "Do you want me to call Santa on his cell phone and tell him that you're doing that? He can turn that sleigh right around and go home if you're bad, you know." Until next December, of course ...

Jason and I debate the merits of "eating all the carrots we left for the reindeer" vs. "nibbling pieces off of the carrots we left for the reindeer," because we know the kid will eventually parse the entire setup, detail by detail. We decide to eat all the carrots, because it's not like Santa was going to haul is soot-covered-fur-clad butt down the chimney again to drop the leftover carrot bits back on the plate once the reindeer were done.

All that's left is to sneak into her room to deposit a present under her tree, then knock myself unconscious so I have some chance of being awake when she storms into our room before the crack of dawn tomorrow. Ho, ho, ho.

Virtual Christmas, part 3: Making Merry

It wouldn't be Christmas without some serious baking going on around here.

This year I decided to use up some leftover Halloween candy to make stained glass cookies. Basically, you crush up hard candy (in our case, Dum-Dum lollipops) and sprinkle them in cut-out holes in whatever sugar cookie recipe you usually use.

In the oven they get all melty and gooey and bubbly, but once they come out and cool down, the sugar hardens into a pretty center.

Honestly, the pretty parts don't taste that great unless you're using expensive candies, but they sure look nice. We did some oversized ones like this to include with the cookies we're giving to neighbors and friends.

As you can see from the background in that picture, we got a bit of snow earlier this week. Not the 2 feet that are keeping my parents stuck on the east coast, but enough that we've had to go outside to play in it almost every day. There isn't enough for a proper snowman, and until recently it hasn't been the right consistency for snowballs, so we've been stuck with snow angels and tromping around aimlessly ... until now:

Of course, it's supposed to start raining soon, and continue through Christmas day, but it was nice to have snow on some days when we had nowhere we needed to go and nothing that had to be done.

Virtual Christmas, part 2: Caroling

We're full service around here - we bring the Christmas carols right to you, and don't even ask for wassail in return!

Virtual Christmas, part 1

Since some (well, actually ALL) of our extended family is unable to join us for Christmas this year, I'm doing the next best thing and bringing our Christmas to them ... online. It's like real Christmas, only with all the really boring parts edited out! Also, virtual cookies are calorie-free, and nobody has to suffer through traveling the entire length of the Pennsylvania Turnpike in order to participate.

Without further ado, I bring you ...

Virtual Christmas, Part 1: Liza's Pre-school Christmas Concert

Best buddies, trying not to look nervous before the show:

The concert, with all the non-Liza parts edited out:

And no, the irony of having my daughter be a "wise man" was not lost on me.

Dang, now why didn't I think of that?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/nerd-tivity-scenes/

I still think the funniest thing is that some of our friends' kids used to use the Playmobil baby Jesus as a purchase at the Playmobil grocery store. I wonder how much a savior costs?

Merry Christmas!

Here's the official Circle of Sock Goodness, as of about 8am this morning. Shortly thereafter we shared a coffeecake that looked like it was born with a horrible deformity and then run over by a truck.

Yeah, that Bundt pan has been nothing but trouble since I bought it. That sucker's headed for Goodwill tomorrow. Good thing the coffeecake tasted better than it looked, or we'd all be in the hospital for food poisoning by now.

Hope everyone had a great day and is looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend!

Christmas Eve

See that? That's the last pair of socks for this year, finished before 8pm on Christmas Eve. So now I have time to wrap the last two presents and make the coffee cake for tomorrow morning and STILL get to bed before midnight. Score!

Hope everyone has a wonderful day!

(I'm done I'm done I'm done I'm done ...)

Can't blog now

Must knit. Only one more pair of socks to go by 12:00 Thursday morning. Whew.

That was a first

This year I decided to bite the bullet and buy an offical Honeybaked Ham for Christmas dinner. We've had imposters in the past, and while they were okay, for some reason I'm convinced that this one will be ambrosial. For what I paid, it had better be.

In order to procure this most crunchy of holiday entrees, I had to drive in the snow for half an hour, at which point I found out that the store was so busy they had police directing traffic for the parking lot. Like, half a dozen cops, with orange cones and "lot full" signs and the largest boom box I've seen in years blaring Christmas carols out into the scrum.

We managed to park at the restaurant next door, and I carried 40 pounds of sleeping preschooler across the icy unshoveled parking lot in 9-degree cold (with a wind chill in the negative teens) to wait in the cattle line they had set up inside the front door. Luckily, there were only a handful of people ahead of me, and they had - no kidding - eight people working to pull hams for customers, plus another four or five on cash registers, so we were out of there before Liza even woke up all the way. I still got to carry a 40-pound kid in one arm and a 10-pound ham in the other, all the way back across the ice.

And this was AFTER the $185 trip to the grocery store, when I purchased the heaviest load of groceries in recorded human history. Start off with a 25-pound bag of rock salt, five pounds of flour and a couple pounds of sugar, and it's all downhill from there. I think I was probably pushing 150 pounds of cart/kid/groceries by the time I got to the register. Let's not do that again, okay?

Doing it right

We've gone out to dinner a couple times this week, and I made sure to drive home a different way each time so we could see different neighbors' lights. Tonight, though, Liza wanted us to go past this house again, because it's "the best one ever!"

Yes, there are strands of lights covering the whole house - including the roof - at 2' intervals.

Personally, I prefer the house in Westlake that has something like 20 different inflatable decorations in their front and side yards ... we're all about the excess when it comes to decorations, at least when someone else is paying the electric bill.

Stepping up

I was busy wrapping Liza's Christmas presents, Liza and Jason were looking for an activity, and I had a tub of cookie dough that needed to be transformed into edible somethings in time for the dance recital tomorrow. Which is why I got to see this today:Daddy-daughter bonding time over mint chocolate chip cookies.

Everybody, on the count of three ... 1, 2, 3, awwwwwwwwwww

Busy holiday-ish day

Yesterday we ventured down to the cultural center of the city to visit the winter fest at the Cleveland Botanical Garden. Long-time readers will remember that Liza and I went there the first summer we lived in Cleveland, but we haven't been back since then.

The festival stuff was mostly inside, with real Christmas trees and a gingerbread house contest that Liza really liked. Here's her favorite, a Japanese pagoda rendered in candy canes.She was also in favor of the storytime they had in the library, where she got to spread Crisco on a toilet paper tube and roll it in birdseed.

She also really liked the glass house, which features stuff from the deserts of Madagascar and the cloud forests of Costa Rica. She was interested to see that the chameleon they had was a different color than the ones at the pet store.

And she was nice enough to stop chasing butterflies long enough for me to take this photo of some orchids in the Costa Rica exhibit.

It was still early when we finished with the gardens, so we hiked across the circle to the natural history museum. We've been there a couple times before, but this time I wanted to drag her back to see the fossils to bolster a discussion we had over dinner earlier this week*. She was fine with being friendly with Steggie II long enough to get the Required Shot.

The fossils were okay, and at least this time we didn't leave the room screaming, but as far as Liza is concerned, a trip to the museum means just one thing: running up and down the hall to the planetarium exhibit about 15 million times.

I don't get it. I mean, yes, there are cool lights on the walls, and black-light circles that light up randomly on the floor, but apparently to a toddler or preschooler, this is Pink Floyd and Christmas all rolled up in one neat bundle. I wish we could get a membership to just the hallway, instead of having to pay for the whole museum, since this is where we spend most of our time.

*Jason and I both read The World Without Us, which is basically a 200-page-long thought experiment on what would happen to the earth if every single person just sort of vanished. Jason and I were talking about megafauna and how one thought is that in order to help the environment we should reintroduce the closest relatives to extinct North American megafauna (like introducing elephants to replace the mammoths that died out tens of thousands of years ago). Liza wanted to know what we were talking about, which led to 10 minutes of explaining how people are sort of messing up the planet, and how some animals aren't around anymore, and how we can learn about the animals that are gone by the fossils they left behind. And the dinosaur hall at the museum has a full mammoth skeleton and things that show the relative size of mammoths and elephants, so it was a logical extension of the conversation. Plus, I like dinosaurs, and it had been a while since I'd visited Lucy.

Because I am the greatest mother in the world

Pros:

• I managed to get her to sit on Santa's lap for the first time ever!


• Without screaming!
  
• And she told him what she wanted for Christmas!


• And she made small talk with him!


• I didn't have to take her to see Santa 14 different times in order to build up a tolerance for bushy white bearded strangers.


• She's the one who suggested we go to the mall so she could talk to Santa today. Wha? Since when?


• We ran errands afterward and several people noticed her dress. She had to tell each of them in detail about visiting Santa and what she said and what he said and how great it was.

Cons:

• Her expression sort of looks like she's visiting Santa Claus, Nightmare Proctologist.


• She wants a Sleeping Beauty dress for Christmas, which is not sitting in a bag in the back of my closet with the rest of her presents (yet).


• Least charismatic Santa in the midwest.


• I did have to prep her for the experience by taking her to look at the Santa near my in-law's house from about 50 feet away, and taking her to look at this Santa once or twice from increasingly closer distances, and time it so that Santa was at lunch when we got there so we had time to wait in line with the other kids and get used to the idea of the Lap of Santa.


• $25 for a CD of the picture so I could post on the blog.


• And I might have kind of told her that if she'd sit on Santa's lap and get a pretty picture taken, I'd let her ride the train at the mall and buy her the $4 folding brush she's been pining for from the Disney Store. So much for that stocking stuffer.

For comparison ... here's 2007's Santa photo from preschool:

And here's 2006's Santa photo from the mall in Lexington:

(sitting on my lap, not Santa's, although it really looks like it's his, doesn't it?)