We spent the better part of last week making merry. Trips to visit various family members, the opening of many presents and eating of much food... Christmas at its best. I posted several photos to Flickr (link on the right sidebar) but I have been shutter-happy this month and hit my upload quota, and though I'm thinking of upgrading to a pro account, I am not going to pay to do so when there are only three days left in the year. So the photos abruptly stop midway through Christmas day, but yes, I think you get the point.I also have reams of video to go through, etc. All this memory-keeping sure is keeping me busy. I actually started making a little book of some of our holiday activities, the same way I did last year, but I just plain ran out of steam. The single photo per event and limited amount of space to say anything about it was cramping my style this year. And then a couple days ago, I decided to whip up a little Blurb book to summarize our holidays, and it was done in a night - all 48 pages of it. We made a few Blurb books as Christmas gifts, and they turned out well, and are so easy to make. Just waiting for a coupon code to come along now before I upload it and print it. I'll link it here when it goes live.
After Christmas wound down, we spent a kid-free afternoon in Windsor, picking up a few needed items during Boxing Week sales, finding a rug we could both agree on for the dining room during a lucky trip to Homesense, having a yummy lunch at Cora's and then seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which I figured would probably not be to Chad's taste, but I thought the allure of Brad Pitt would make him agreeable to the idea). I bawled during the entire last hour of the movie, but the two hours before that were pretty slow at times. Chad found all three hours to be slow.
Yesterday we were supposed to head out of town to our last family get-together for Christmas 2008, but we had that wicked wind storm pass through here. We woke up sometime after 4 a.m. to what sounded like a freight train running past the house. Nope, just the wind - which they clocked over 100 km/hr at the airport. It was strong enough that it collapsed half of the house that is going up next to us right now (at the framing stage right now), and the construction debris was whipping around our yard like missiles. The portajohn landed a few feet away from our north wall. Our neighbour came out to rig up a stake for his 20-foot evergreen tree, which had started to uproot, and several people in our neighbourhood lost chunks of their roofs. Mallory was up too, and since we all lost several hours of sleep and there was a travel advisory on the weather channel, and we already had one crazy drive this holiday season that lasted much longer than expected - I didn't want what was already going to be a six-hour round-trip to be any longer - we decided to stay home for the day. So here we sit, with a full tank of gas and a pan full of uneaten dessert and some gifts that never got opened. But at least we are in one piece.
The tree has been packed up, the stockings and garland and lights cleared off the mantle, and we are still working at getting the last of the holiday sugar cookies out of the house (a tough job, but I have volunteered to look after it). Looking forward to some new beginnings on January 1st.
It's a little kit with all the components necessary to make 36 foam puppets-on-a-popsicle-stick: 9 each of a reindeer, snowman, gingerbread man and penguin. Liam started out by stating that he was going to make one of each. The pieces were all pre-cut, the googly eyes and pom poms came in the kit, and it was easy enough for him to tackle on his own. (Mallory tried too, with limited success, and she didn't really want my help.... eventually, she wandered back over to the Legos.)
Liam can be a little too generous with the glue.
Well, the boy is now on a personal quest to make all 36 puppets in the box. There is something about the gluing and the assembly of these puppets that he is just enamoured with. Before he went to bed on Wednesday night, he told me that he was going to assemble 3 more puppets while I cooked dinner on Thursday and a fourth after dinner. Unfortunately for him, all I did for dinner on Thursday night was heat up a can of soup, cut up some vegetables and plate some cheese and crackers - i.e. dinner did not take as long to cook as he'd hoped. No worries; he got right back to it after we had eaten. Right now there are about thirty sticky, messy popsicle stick characters and puddles of dried-up glue scattered all across the kitchen island, and I am not allowed to put them away or clean it up until the last few are finished and laid out there as well. Let's hope this all happens in a timely fashion, because I've been reduced to doing my kitchen prep work on a tiny section of the outside counter now, and my patience is starting to wear thin. There may not be anything more extravagant than a can of soup for days to come unless the situation is resolved soon.
We're in the thick of it now, this Christmas season, having reached the point of multiple holiday-related activities per week (and sometimes multiple activities per day - more on that later.) We had our children's party on Saturday. I took Friday off work - partly to prep for the party, partly just to spend a day home with the kids, and it was a wonderful day. There is just something so delicious about knowing that the rest of the world is continuing on without you and you are off doing your own thing. We went to to the grocery store for supplies, but aside from that one trip, we just puttered around the house. The backhoe was hard at work next door and about ten dump trucks of fill were delivered - that was entertainment enough for Liam (who kept running up to his bedroom, since the window there gives him a bird's eye view of all the activity) and Mallory (who discovered that she has the perfect vantage point from her seat at the kitchen table: "Backhoe! Backhoe!") It was snowing softly and we were decorating cupcakes and setting up the dining room with table cloths and paper plates; the preparation really was almost as much fun as the party.
The final party tally was 11 kids under the age of 4 - and we survived! As much as I have loved our new house up to this point, admired the new colours and patterns and coziness they lend, enjoyed the new space and conveniences - none of it has made me as happy as being able to have this party. We would never have attempted something like it in our old house, and I am so glad that we can do it now. Liam was so excited to have all his friends come over. He talked about it all day Saturday after they cleared out - who enjoyed the crafts and who just wanted to play with his toys in the playroom instead, who ate almost nothing at lunch and who decorated the most cookies... it was priceless.
We did do a craft - decorating little foam Christmas trees with stickers. I had a couple of other craft projects lined up and was worried that even that wouldn't last long enough to keep the kids entertained, but we never even got to them. Note to self: Liam loves doing little projects like this, but not all kids do... keep it simple next time. The kids don't need a lot of structure to be entertained!
The other activity we did get around to was decorating cookies. Liam helped me bake and freeze all these cookies last weekend and he was so, so proud when we took them out of the freezer and let everyone decorate a few. 
This here is Mallory's handiwork...
... and Liam's. You can always tell his work by following the jelly bean trail. :)
Cousins Henry and Thomas came all the way from Toronto for the party, and spent the night with us. Henry and Liam are finally becoming little buddies - it's fun to watch.
After the party, Chad and I both took a nap - we needed it! We'll be vacuuming little red and green sprinkles off the floors well into January I think, and the kitchen took the better part of the afternoon to clean up, but it was worth the effort. I hope this becomes an annual thing for us. Thank you to everyone who braved the snow and came out to our party. It meant so much to us to have you there!
