Snippets

I found a small black chandelier with black crystals to hang over the kids play area in the basement.  I tried to find a link for it but apparently it doesn't exist anywhere except in the box in my house. 

  





We got our tree on Tuesday night and now our house smells like Christmas.  Tonight we're going to decorate and I'm going to try to contain my control-freakishness in the midst of three very excited children.

I heard our front door open and close the other night and Sebastian came to me smelling of winter and carrying the cold from outside.  “Mom!” he said.  “It’s winter!  I just checked!” 



 

Ava has a thing with her wrists and ankles.  She rolls up her pants when we’re at home because she doesn’t like feeling her pants brushing against her heels or ankles   She constantly looks like she’s about to go wading.  She also doesn’t like to feel the sleeves of her shirt on her wrists so she rolls those up too.  This has made the process of putting on snow gear rather unbearable.  Every time she’s put on her winter coat she’s cried.  Literally.  And snowpants? When the pants she’s wearing ride up inside and she can feel the elasticized lining on her ankle?  Whoa.

Tristan recently learned how to snap.  The End.
Of my sanity that is.  He worked so hard to learn that he created an unconscious habit.  He gets up from the table after a meal, he snaps.  He heads upstairs to get dressed, he snaps.  He walks towards the bathroom, he snaps.  He reaches for another Ninja Turtle, he snaps.  You ask him a question and while he's thinking about the answer, he snaps.  You tell him something exciting, he snaps.  I sat beside him at dinner the other night and it was a constant snap! snap! snap! in my ear. Oh. my. lord.  This Mama is about to snap!

When we did our baking, Rebecca and I split a quadrupled batch of butter tarts.  Yesterday I realized that in 5 days we’ve gone through half of our double batch and that means I won’t have enough tarts to have one for breakfast everyday between now and New Years.  I already know that I will be starting 2011 like I started 2009.  Just, instead of Burpees you can insert Curves. Today I got an email from Rebecca asking for the recipe.  The butter tarts are disappearing at an alarming rate in her house too.  And she’s not sharing with any kids! Well, I’m not really either.  I keep offering my kids the almond crescents trying to sell them as “moustache cookies”.  It’s not working. I would call those the flop of 2010.  I won’t be making them again.  Today I actually broke down and let my kids each have their own butter tart.  I know.  The generosity is killing me too.  Literally. It’s killing me to share.  Maybe it won’t hurt so much if I have a quadruple batch on hand. 

And this is what my kids are doing right now while I'm writing this.  At their behest I zipped two sleeping bags together so they could make the biggest bed ever, Mom! I wonder how long it will be before someone goes exploring and gets stuck at the bottom.  Did you ever do that as a kid?  It's terrifying.  I'm pretty sure I can trace my adult claustrophobia back to a childhood sleeping bag incident.