Life in the hutch

Our 25 days of Christmas (which I will likely post a lot about this month) is going really well.  In addition to lighting the Christmas lights for the first time, we’ve written letters to Santa, decorated the family room, bought and donated toys to Toy Mountain, baked shortbreads, and made a gingerbread house.  The lils have really gotten into it too.  Woo walked into the house on friday and asked “do we have a christmas activity for today?”  They have both asked at least once a day ever since. I love how easily this has become a daily event for us!

I, however, have not fully thought this through.  The activities have been great fun, especially for Woo and Goose, but the last couple have focused on baking, and sweet treats.  The shortbreads that we made are delicious, and reminded me that I have ABSOLUTELY no will power when it comes to shortbread.  Their buttery, sugary goodness with a cherry on top is completely irresistible.  I think that I have eaten at least 18 cookies out of the six dozen cookies that we made today alone!  I am scared, because we need to make more for our guests arriving in a couple of weeks.  This is not going to end well for my waistline!

Today’s activity was a gingerbread house.  I caved and bought the kit from Loblaws, as I have never successfully made one from scratch, they always fall down under the weight of the icing.  I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that I start decorating too soon.  I did not want that to happen to their first gingerbread house, so kit we bought.

We set to it after “nap”*, when only the three of us were home. This was a tactical error, as it meant that I was helping both of them, catching the candies that were dropping all over the floor (those little sugar balls are hard to hold on to, apparently), and trying to take pictures.  There was no one to watch the candy eating, either.  I think that they were pretty good about it, but they very rarely get candy, so they were pretty crazy by the end.  Woo only put the icing bag in his mouth once. I am pretty sure I caught him before he ate too much!

We did settle in to a good routine after the initial excitement, and both lils were very keen on their decorating.  They each did one tree, and half of the roof. It took about an hour, and both wanted to do another tomorrow.  They ran around like crazy people for about an hour after dinner, and then both crashed pretty quickly.  Here is our finished product.  There are a few more pictures on my flickr stream.

*no one napped today, which is not the norm for Goose.  This may have contributed to the early crash.*

There have been so many things that I have said that I would never do like my mom over my life.  Some of them have held true, but many of them fell by the wayside when I had children, and saw that sometimes, just maybe, her approach might work.  I’ll deny that I do it, but do it anyways.  I am very certain that these last few nights at dinner have been quite unlike anything that she ever did with my siblings and I growing up.

Woo and Goose are generally good eaters, but they like to direct how and when they will eat certain foods.  Unless we offer pasta or smoked salmon.  Then they will eat more than we could ever dream of making.  If they balk at what we offer, we ask them to try, and failing that, we let them pass on certain things.  I wouldn’t like it if someone was telling me what I had to eat at many meals.  Actually, that is why I cook, so I can tell everyone else what to eat!

We do monitor what they snub, and take steps to correct if we notice that they have gone, lets say a month a few days or so, without eating meat or fruit.  Lately it has been veggies, and both are on strike.  They pick everything out, even the stuff that they love.   So we need to get creative.

We were eating broccoli earlier this week and I got Goose to start talking with a bunch of broccoli sticking out of her mouth, replacing her teeth.  She giggled and giggled and when asked, sucked the broccoli in and CHOMPED! it. We tried again, and Willy and Woo joined in.  All of us talking and laughing, and then CHOMP!, eating our broccoli.  All at the same time.  A whole head of broccoli disappeared in moments!

My mom would be scandalized. It worked again tonight, so I am willing to live with a little bit of talking with your mouth full and chewing with the mouth open if the veggies go in without a fight!

I am so excited that December has started, for this year, thanks to Andrea from a peek inside the fishbowl, we will be celebrating the countdown to Christmas with a month full of family friendly, holiday themed activities!!  If you click on the picture above, it will take you to Andrea’s post, where she talks the 25 days of Christmas that her family has been doing for four years.  The idea is a twist on the modern tradition of candy or toy filled advent calendars.  I loved the idea as soon as I read the post, and knew that we had to do it.  Planning to start our countdown is what helped push me through November.

For me, December is typically a really busy month.   I know that I have fallen guilty to losing sight of the big picture, and getting caught up in the frantic prep to the holidays pretty much every year of my adult life.  Now that we have children, I want the holidays to be more than just a race to the finish line.  I hope that this will help us all to slow down and enjoy the times, and reflect on what Christmas really means to us.  I also hope that it becomes a new tradition for the family.

We are very thankful for our happiness, health, and home.  We also know that others are not as fortunate, so we have tried to incorporate a number of activities that can both help out those less fortunate in our community, and teach the children about helping those in need, and giving back to their community. I think these are the activities that excite me the most about this process.

I am woefully ill-prepared for the unveiling of each day’s activity.  Sadly, there is no advent-type calendar for us, or even a master list that can tell us where we are going and when.  We know what was on for today, and what we’ll be doing for the next few days.  By the weekend, I hope to be more organized, but if not, we’ll roll with it.   Suffice to say that there will be letters to Santa, Christmas Carols and Stories, decorating, baking, viewing Christmas lights, indoor and outdoor fun, and lots of quality time spent together.

Today is day one.  When the lils got home from gymnastics tonight we turned the outdoor Christmas lights on.  It was cold and rainy and they were hungry, so it didn’t go over as well as it could have.  They do like the lights, and I know that they will enjoy turning them on every day now, so we will build from this!!

Anyone else celebrating the 25 days of Christmas?

I am struggling to find the time to write the things that I am getting paid to write at the moment, so I’ve been neglecting the hutch this week! I don’t want to lose any of my eight readers, so I stole this from Finola, in the hopes that you’ll keep coming back for a few days of otherwise empty pages. 🙂

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed below.  Please note – this is apparently a modified list, the original list can be found http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml.  I only discovered this after I went through the list below.  Time is short,  or else I’d do the original list.

I’ve bolded those books I’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones istarted but didn’t finish or read an excerpt of.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (reading this to Woo now)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I cannot believe how I got to this place.  Everything is spinning right now, and I am completely out of control.  As much as I love the challenge and opportunity that I have in writing this course, I am completely freaked out by the curve balls that have come my way in the last few weeks. I have to get this done, but I don’t know how I will. I need to work faster, and better, but I am not.  I need to sleep, but I can’t.  I’ve lost the ability to just get it done, and now is not a good time.

As I was getting in to bed the other night, I was whining to Willy about all the things that I am trying to get done, all the new things that keep piling on top, and how some things are just falling by the wayside.  I knew that Movember was going to be a crazy month at the outset, but an injured hubby, a couple of sick lil ones and a few other unexpected twists, and I am now more behind than when I started.  I am at the stage where I know that it is not possible to get all the things I want to get done, so I start to eliminate the unnecessary steps.

As my whine faded away and we started to discuss our plans for the next week or so, I noted that there was no way that I would be wearing a skirt to any of the “dress up” occasions we have in the near future, as there is just no time to shave my legs.  Willy paused and then asked, somewhat incredulously,  “so, you’re keeping the leg beard?”  Leg beard is what my children call any trace of hair on my legs.  It usually comes from Woo, when he is cuddled in bed with me and rubs his feet on my legs.  It tickles, and he tells me to shave my “leg beard”!!  Figuring that Willy is not a big fan, I chose this opportunity to let him know that this is my contribution to Movember, so he better get used to it – there are ten more days in the month!  This really is all about men’s health issues, and has nothing to do with buying time in this strapped month, truly!

Willy is REALLY participating in Movember this year, and is sporting a pretty impressive porn star ‘stache to go along with it.  He is a little slow on the fundraising, so if you are looking for someone to support, you can donate to him at http://ca.movember.com/mospace/731026/.

You are two today. TWO.    I cannot believe how fast it has gone by, how quickly you have grown to be such a wonderful little girl.  I also cannot believe that you are only two, because you are such a wonderful little girl.  Every time I look at you, I see that you have grown more.  It amazes me how much you continue to change everyday. You are truly a pleasure from the moment that you start singing when you wake up, to when you gently fall to sleep each night.

It pleases me so the way you attack everything you do with every ounce of your being and a smile on your face.  You demonstrate your love for us all so freely, with hugs and kisses, especially for your brother. I love that you love him so, and want to be with him all the time.  He loves you too, you know, even if he beats on you occasionally.  That will stop soon, now that you are so capable of defending yourself.

This year you mastered walking, talking, singing, dancing, and jumping.  Now you run instead of walking, and rarely sit still.  When you do, there is always a book nearby, or one of your babies, who you take such good care of.  During the year, you went from about 40 words to about 440, with more being added every day.  You have all of your teeth, and grew NINE inches this year, standing a smidge under three feet tall.  What has blossomed the most, though, is your personality. It is full of love, consideration for others, joy, humour, and a little bit of minx. The little person that you are becoming is such an amazing person.  I cannot wait to see what this year brings.

Happy Birthday little Goosie!  I love you very much!!!!
first birthday

happy girl in Jamaica, January 2010

needing some support post-nap, March 2010

wandering after Woo at Hog’s Back, April 2010

singing her ABC’s, May 2010

pulling leaves from my plants, June 2010

cool cat, July 2010

the little golfer, August 2010

wondering what is outside through the skylight, August 2010

talking to Cookie, September 2010

fun in the leaves, October 2010