Thanks Grammie for the great idea! This is fun!!
. . .but my mother does.
My mom gave me a great idea to entertain Lily. I put a big sheet in the kitchen and let her play in a container of rice. . .and beans. I buried things in the pile of bulk grain to let her dig for treasure. She LOVED it. At one point she was all the way inside the container. Typical.
I guess she could be a LITTLE more excited about her stroller. . .
Christmas Eve. Amy let her kids open one present so she had one for Lily too. So nice! She loves her Hello Kitty marker set. She thinks it is make-up (she doesn't know the caps come off, luckily)
This is in Hana when Chris's family was here in November.
We had a great Christmas this year. Amy and I both didn't like the idea of ham or turkey for Christmas Eve dinner so when she suggested Mexican I said "what about 'Christmas Around The World'". I think more dinners should have pretentious titles. Well, we did it and it is the first of many many more to come. Here is our menu:
Thai green curry (Amy)
Asian lettuce wraps (Amy)
Quinoa and couscous salad (Amy)
North African lamb kebobs (Meg). . .I was thinking Kwanzaa
Saffron Breakfast Bread (Meg) for Scandinavia's St. Lucia Day
Latke and Caramelized Onion and Apple Chutney (Meg) for Hannukah. . .thank you Claudia for the idea for the latke.
It was so good and so fun to try new recipes and have such a random assortment. Lily, who typically will eat NO meat, ate more lamb than I did! I guess I should make it more often (that was my first attempt at lamb).
The missionaries from Amy's ward joined us and we roped them into participating in the nativity. The costumes the kids came up with were classic.
Christmas morning was a little anticlimactic. I had stayed up arranging the few gifts on Lily's chair and strung lights around them and the stockings which I had laid out on the couch. Chris got Lily up and then I sat waiting with the video camera to capture her reaction to the display. As she walked in, I got one half-hearted 'oh' in response to the lights and then she marched right past the lights, right past the gifts, right past me and into the kitchen. She started banging on the pantry and signing 'cereal'. I guess the girl has her priorities down. Food first. Presents later.
Sunday morning I woke up with Lily (technically, she woke me up) at our usual not so bright hour of 5:15 am. We made breakfast, cleaned it up, got dressed and started making bread. Thanks to a new miracle Rx I now have the energy of a normal person and can do normal things. Or anything. It is nice. Unfortunately, 'normal things' were not on the calendar that day.
I need to back up. We have been having mystery killings on our small cabinet in our kitchen/living room. Tiny, black, gnat-like insects are found dead everyday just on top of the waist high, white cabinet. I only find about 5 or 6 a day so it is no problem to just wipe them up and move on, but it is mysterious non-the-less. Why the cabinet? Why not the floor just in front or behind it? Where do they come from? The answer came a few days ago when I saw one of them alive. It flew right through the screen on the window just to the left of the cabinet. Interesting. I hypothesized that they came in at night or early morning, probably attracted to the light in our house and probably breeding in the grass, which is wet from all the rain we have been getting. Sadly, I think my hypothesis was correct.
I say 'sadly' because as we (Lily and myself) were making bread I noticed that aforementioned window had been left open all night. I thought "dang it! Bugs'll be gettin' in again!" sure enough there were about 10-15 bugs dead as doornails on the cabinet top. Easily twice as many as any other day. I don't know if it was fate, or a six sense or a lone gnatty bug strayed from the herd flying past my head that caught my eye that caused me to look up. Looking back I would say it is karma. Karma for what I am not sure, but for something bad. Something very, very bad that I have done. Something so bad it may have happened in a past life. Perhaps I was once a factory owner in the midwest who owned one of those horse meat slaughter houses or maybe I never recycled. All I know is that I did look up, and when I did I saw karma all over the ceiling and tops of the walls around my little cottage. Hundreds of thousands of little gnatty nasties were clinging to the orange peel texture. Most of them were congregating right around a recessed light that loomed right above, you guessed it, the cabinet. Every once in a while a bug would get a wild hair and go kamakaze right into the hot light where it would fry and then fall right on top of. . .wait for it. . .the cabinet. Mystery solved.
I went into super-human, adrenaline-fueled, exterminator mode. I grabbed the vacuum and flew onto the cabinet top (and by 'flew' I, of course, mean clambered awkwardly as to not bend my knees) and started sucking the suckers into my bagless. Lily starts screaming bloody murder even though they were way too small to bleed. A bit of an overreaction on her part if you as me. I run to the bedroom where I had intended to let Chris sleep off his ten mile scout hike from the previous day. I throw the baby (and by "throw" I mean gently but urgently place) at him instructing him to 'take her somewhere because we are invaded!' and continue my rampage.
One and a half hours later and three rounds around the 350 square feet that is my kitchen/living room all of the bugs I can see are gone. I have vacuumed the ceiling, walls and crevices, the drapes, the corners the windows and, let's not forget, the cabinet. I have moved all the furniture including the armoire, couch and (I can't help myself) the cabinet. After that I spend another hour and a half mopping, rearranging furniture, vacuuming more bugs and vowing to never, ever open another window again even if it means breathing oxygen through nasal cannula.
On the upside, I love the new furniture arrangement. I have never done it this way before and even though it sort of makes the place look smaller, I like the seperation of kitchen and living room and Lily play area. It is nice to have everything in it's place. The table is in the kitchen, the couch is in the living room (so is the cabinet), the baby's kitchen is in her corner. And the bugs? The bugs are outside. And in the vacuum.
May the plague of the gnatty natsties never befall your home.
Happy Holidays!
"I guess I kinda lost control, becuase in the middle of the play I ran up and lit the evil puppet villain on fire. No, I didn't. Just kidding. I just said that to help illustrate one of the human emotions, which is freaking out. Another emotion is greed, as when you kill someone for money, or something like that. Another emotion is generosity, as when you pay someone double what he paid for his stupid puppet." ~Jack Handy
Lily is recovering, finally! Here is a little clip of her first venture outside after the bad flu. It is also her first go at the slide I got her for Christmas at a yard sale. So far she has found all of her gifts. I had put one in the closet, one under the bed and one in the garage and she found them all on her own. I thought they didn't start that until middle school! I even re-hid one of them (in what I thought was a much better spot) and she found it again. Little sneak!
You can see that she is still a little weak and grouchy here but since then has gotten even better and is now a pro at the slide (which I think will remain un-hidden, she doesn't know when Christmas is anyhow!).
I would also like to mention that the Christmas Ornaments Broken By Lily Tally is up to seven. And we don't have a tree.
