Our family

Our family

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Christmas prep


It is a bad idea for me to receive emails that promise you 100 hundred days of Christmas cookies, as editing the list to a reasonable number of cookies to bake is not my strong point.

I have a house full of cookies, in addition to terribly gaudy and classic Christmas decorations, the largest tree we could stuff into my living room, the requisite Christmas village which apparently had a blizzard of white cotton that will not let up, ans appears to be growing. This of course is on top of the normal accumulations found in a house of eight. Now we have added snow boots, snow pants, a million lonely unmatched gloves (I just created a profile for them on match.com, we'll see what happens).

And now the cookies. A brilliant idea read in a magazine where skinny moms with the skin of 20 year olds give you sage advice on meaningful gifts suckered me into making cookies as teachers gifts. Of course like most of my family endeavors this had to be super sized. I had 15 teachers on the list (2 for each class, 5 outside the classroom teachers) were fortunate enough to receive a tiny bag of crumbled cookies from the sweaty hands of my 5 children. Who needs decent pay or working conditions when you are receiving that kind of gift. Next year it is coffee cards, I will mentally tie my hands behind my back when I pass the magazine rack next Christmas season and a smiling, red-sweater wearing, 16 year old, playing the part of mom on the front cover of Woman's Day tries to convince me that she knows the path to ubermomhood.

Well all of that aside my house is crammed with Christmas spirit and endless Christmas music, and the kids, they are indeed wired and edgy from all of the preparation, but they are also truly enchanted. Yes they are. They are opening Advent calendar doors, Matthew is wrapping presents he created, all are helping to bake, arranging the decorations and creating christmas decorations from construction paper and sparkling glue.

In the mix of all of this is my birthday. I think it may have been 10 years since I had a birthday so good. The kids were ready to party and celebrate something during the long wait till' Christmas. They sang me happy birthday in German. Chris gave me his bag of candy with a sign on it that said "for the poor". Matthew gave me a poster that said "go, team Bo" Even the babies gave me a gift of bath salts! And best of all it SNOWED!

The snow, my birthday and Christmas baking was just one of the most exciting combination these kids can remember. I thought Matthew's little nervous system was going to explode. He LOVES snow.

Oh and lest I forget the 3rd child this year was voted child of the month Cara Sophia! So this was a night out as well. We called her 'student of the month" all week. as in "what would the student of the month like for breakfast?"
When we got back from the ceremony which didn't end until "gasp" 8PM which is beyond late for the three amigos, Cara fall into bed and says 'student of the month is cranky, student of the months feet hurt, student of the month is tired" and she closes her eyes for the night.