Christmas 2016

It seems a shame to have completely skipped over Christmas, since so much of it was so nice, so here's a little recap.

One of my very favorite moments of the whole Christmas season was sitting at the piano one day playing Christmas songs while my sweet E sang along.  I also had a very peaceful, Christmasy-feeling hour sitting on the couch watching my happy kids play after having our Nova Scotia Christmas with Steve's parents.

We spent two weeks in Tennessee over Christmas.  We flew in the hopes that I would still like my husband and children by the end of the trip.  A road trip seemed beyond my capacity this year, so we booked cheapish tickets, spent the night in a hotel the night before and left before dawn one December morning.

Kids Waiting for Christmas Dinner

There have never been so many cookies in my mother's house ever.  They just kept coming.  There were three or four tins of homemade cookies open at any given time and when one tin ran out, another miraculously appeared.  The kids could hardly believe their good luck.

We visited Dollywood and I have never seen E so pleased.  She loves riding in a 'bee plane.'  I rode the Scrambler with The Bairn, teaching me that I am very old.  I felt quite sick afterwards and was pretty happy that Steve wanted to go on the bumper cars with him.

My brother and his family joined us a few days after Christmas and we ate very tasty BBQ with them.

He was up first on Christmas morning.

We almost all got sick.  My mom took The Bairn to church without me one week, because I was too sick and reported that it was all fine, but during the sacrament service, The Bairn informed everyone that he was not thinking about Jesus, he was thinking about a duck.

E also extra loved the children's museum.

Easter 2016

Happy Easter!

Friday we dyed Easter eggs.  This is the first year that this activity lasted longer than 5 minutes.  The following morning, Ellen chose one of her pink eggs to eat for breakfast and chomped straight into it, shell and all.

Yesterday we did Easter baskets after naps.  The Bairn is sporting some super post-nap hair here.  The kids only got one sweet treat in their baskets--a kinder egg for each of them--which they immediately devoured.

This was also the first year I attempted to recreate the bunny cakes we always had growing up.  I made mine with  a carrot cake, though, so the soft cream cheese icing didn't make for a very pretty bunny.  Also I couldn't find jelly beans at the grocery store (!?), so the eyes and nose are wrong, but we chomped that bunny right up.  Delicious.

Today we hunted for Easter eggs in the house and ate our Easter feast.  I pulled the china out and used candles, which is how we demonstrate to the kids that we are having a fancy time.

I threw them into bed almost immediately after supper, both because we ate a bit late and because Fancy Times send them over the edge.

Easter Egg Hunt (Or So They Say)

I took the kids to the town Easter egg hunt today.  The plastic eggs were in a roped off area of the park and each child was allowed to find five eggs of a certain color and then turn them in for a treat bag.  The eggs (hundreds of eggs) were just tossed on the ground in a wide open field.  The Bairn found all of his eggs within 30 seconds.  It took Ellen a full minute to find hers.  There were approximately one billion people there, because the hunt wasn't divided into age groups, so it was difficult to find parking and I had to pull a pie out of the oven early to get there on time.  It was pretty much the lamest thing ever, but The Bairn still gave it his full support and reported that it was the best.  He's very enthusiastic about life.

And a Happy New Year

We finished Christmas celebrations by taking a family trip to Halifax on Monday evening.  We ate at a Vietnamese restaurant where The Bairn spent the whole time trying to talk to the guys working in the kitchen by calling softly to them from his seat at the counter and motioning to the pictures of smoothies on the wall to try to send a preschool message that his mother would not allow him to buy a $4 smoothie (or anything, he was eating crackers and cheese out of Tupperware) but to please bring him one anyway.

We stayed in a hotel that night, which may have been the most thrilling thing to happen to the children all year.  They sat in the lobby with their feet sticking straight off the armchairs while The Bairn engaged a middle-aged couple in a conversation about where the air ducts were directing all the air in the hotel, and Ellen almost lost her mind (quietly) over the Christmas decorations.  We swam in the pool and watched TV and then slept almost not at all, because The Bairn was scared of the dark and Steve and I took turns snoring and waking one another up.  We enjoyed our free hot breakfast anyway and dragged the kids off to a couple of stores and to the children's science center before eating Chinese pastries and allowing the kids to pass out almost immediately on the car ride home.

On New Year's Eve, we invited a family with a little boy The Bairn's age over for fondue and snacks.  It was another thrilling event for our children.  The Bairn took endless joy in sneaking marshmallows (for the chocolate fondue) off the table until he ate too much, told me he thought he needed a vomit bowl, and had a major meltdown following the confiscation of his hammer (hammer confiscation = unrelated to marshmallows.  Probably.).  We counted down the new year around 7 pm and dragged The Bairn off to bed shortly thereafter while he was gearing up for another meltdown.  He finds the holidays a bit much.

Christmas Sunday in a sweet dress and vintage pants that don't fit.

Christmas Pictures

We're still Christmas-ing it up today and tomorrow, but here are some pictures from the past few days.

This is actually a picture from early in the month when we put our tree up.  The kids were really good about not bothering the ornaments this year, even though Ellen is in love with the jumping jack George Washington and has to talk to him occasionally and make him jump up and down.

Christmas morning - Daddy is helping Ellen put her new hair clips in her hair.  Most of our Christmas morning photos are really bad, both because we couldn't find our camera and because it was Christmas morning so no one was groomed and Steve took lots of pictures of me looking pregnant.  Ellen most loved the bubble wrap we gave her and the wooden box that the kids' new blocks came in.  She calls the box her 'nest.'

We used our real china for supper for the first time.  It was much fancier than normal, although we need a tablecloth that fits our new table and a water pitcher that's not a brown, plastic affair from the 1970s.  The kids were really really into the Christmas crackers, but it took a lot of explaining to get them to drop the idea that there was anything edible about them.

The weather was in the 50s last week, so we went to the park to see the waterfalls on Boxing Day.

We like taking Daddy to the park with us.

Then the next day we got a massive snow storm.  I took the kids out for a nighttime snow adventure, which they think is very fancy, since they're not usually allowed to play outside after dark.

American Thanksgiving 2015

We don't really celebrate American Thanksgiving, but I roasted a chicken today (both as a nod to all the turkeys in the ovens of my homeland and because we have 30 whole chickens in the freezer) and ate it with mashed potatoes and over-salted cornbread stuffing and cranberry sauce. Steve left the house around 8:00 this morning and won't be back until after I'm in bed, so I ate my fake Thanksgiving meal with one child who would only eat the green beans (he opens them and eats the inside and leaves the 'pods') and one child who stood on her seat and howled for more mashed potatoes every time her mouth and bowl were empty at the same time.

 After supper, I got out the Christmas decorations to make sure the kids were really out of their minds excited right before bedtime. The Bairn became super attached to the advent Christmas tree. He selected a location for it and then dragged it away from his sobbing sister and draped his body across it so no one could move it from its correct location until Christmas day. Ellen lost the Baby Jesus from one of the nativity sets (we found him on the workbench), she and The Bairn both draped garlands all over the place, and I managed to wrest the stockings away from them and hang them on the stairs, even though The Bairn is also seriously in love with Steve's (it has a train).

This year on Thanksgiving, I'm very grateful that both my children still nap and that they nap at the same time.  It's a gift.

Also, I'm thankful that Ellen (aka I Always Have Pneumonia Face) has access to 24-hour health care.  She's been to the walk-in clinic twice this week and the ER three times.  She loves the hospital bracelets.

This is what she looks like when she's sick.  She's snuggling a unicorn costume that she refused to let me put away.

Today she seems to be doing much better and she's been sashaying around the house, swinging her arms and wiggling her hips when she walks.  I love the way she walks. She and The Bairn also very enthusiastically helped me clean toilets.  I really love how much they love to help.  Also, I love that The Bairn must always sleep with Chicky Bick (hand puppet) and Baby Bick (finger puppet) on his pillow.  And that he likes me to smell his breath after I brush his teeth to see if he's fully freshened.  And that both kids say, "You. look. maaaahvelous," but it comes out "maaaahbelous" from Ellen.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Remember, Remember the 5th of November

We haven't celebrated Bonfire Night (Guy Fawkes Day) since we left the UK, but some British friends invited us over for their party last night.

When we arrived, the effigy was lying on a table in the yard and several men were tying him down, which The Bairn found fascinating and necessitated a little history lesson.

Me: A long time ago there was a man who tried to blow up an important building.

The Bairn: What do you mean he tried to blow it up?

Me: He tried to make the building explode.

The Bairn: Are you talking about dynamite?!

The Bairn was really, briefly, thrilled with this holiday--dynamite, hot chocolate, a little man.

He was not so much a fan of the fire.

Oh, and there were traditional carved neeps (turnips) hanging around the yard.  The roots make creepy beards.

This is What Easter Looked Like

It snowed on Easter, but we still used the flower-shaped gelatin mold, because we were full of hope that one day it would stop.  (I think it has now.)  This jellied thing, by the way, is a new addition to our Easter feast and it's the best thing we've discovered in years.  It's a savory mustard ring to eat with the ham.  Steve got the recipe from a friend who got it from her husband's grandmother and it is so unexpectedly good.

I colored eggs with the kids on Saturday.  It took approximately two minutes start to finish and two of the eight eggs were cracked before they made it to the refrigerator.  The Bairn got to wear his art smock (read: ugly old shirt of Steve's), though, and I introduced him to this little ditty: Don't knock my smock or I'll clean your clock.  It was the highlight of his day even though he didn't understand why the clocks needed to be cleaned.

We hid plastic Easter eggs on Sunday.  I only put raisins and peanuts and stickers in them, but The Bairn still went crazy.

He liked his bucket.

He wore it as a hat.

I made Easter bunny rolls for breakfast.  They were really huge and marked the beginning of my descent into a month of wearing fat pants.

Ellen wore these great leggings, which took my mind off the snow.

The Old Year

2014

Successes

• Steve started his own business.
• The Bairn potty-trained.
• Ellen learned practically everything she knows, including how to walk and how to snatch toys from The Bairn's pile and then run.
• I was not pregnant for one single day of the year.
• We made friends this year.  Each of us made at least one new friend.  The kind of friend who invites you to her house for parties.  Except for Steve.  His new friend invites him over to his ex-military bunker.   (Steve loves it.)
• This is the best picture taken of me and Steve in years.  

Lessons Learned

• Brussels sprouts are best steamed.  Trying to fancy them up with cranberries and nuts and so on is almost always a mistake.
• The Bairn is happiest in a tree.
• At least one person in our family will always be sick at Christmastime.
• Eating lucy cats (lussekater or Swedish saffron rolls) with my children on St. Lucia Day is the best possible thing to do in December.  The Bairn keeps asking when we're making the next batch.

Happy New Year!

Christmas-ing It Up

We decorated the house last week and got out the nativity for the kids.  It makes Steve very nervous when they touch it, even though I purchased it specifically for that purpose.

Shepherds taste delicious.

This week we brought home a Christmas tree. When we got home, Ellen dressed herself up in some warmer gear.  She loves wearing gloves and hats.

She even kept her hat on for the eating of the Christmas tree-shaped fruit snack before standing awe-struck in front of the tree for a bit.

It's a Jolly Holiday with Ellen (and The Bairn)

Our Christmas festivities began two weeks ago, because Canada doesn't have any holidays after November 11 to prevent Christmas creep.  We took the kids to the Santa Claus parade in town.  This year I knew to bundle them in snowsuits AND to bring a thermos of hot chocolate.  They sat together in the double stroller and The Bairn requested that I hold his hand while he watched the floats in awe. When the parade was over, he asked, "Where are those clowns and trucks going?  Let's follow those clowns and trucks!"

Ellen only has about five words and an additional five signs, but she still manages to be quite clear in her communication.  Here was her take on the parade (with a bit of padding by me):


Before the parade began:

Out [of this stroller]!
Out!
Out!
Out!


After the parade began:

More [delightful animals and dancing gingerbread folk]!
More!
More!
More!

The First Halloween

The Bairn was a puppy for Halloween. It was the first year we celebrated the holiday with him.

Ellen has a weird relationship with his costume.

I didn't dress Ellen up, but I did stuff her sweet feet in the pumpkin slippers when we went to town that day and when we went out trick-or-treating.

Just before we were heading out the door in the evening, The Bairn asked me what I was going to be for Halloween.  Um, well . . .   He decided that I should be a kitty, so I blacked my nose with mascara and we headed out.  We visited the two neighbours we know well and then headed down the street behind us.  The Bairn was most interested in inspecting all of the Halloween decorations and in a dog dressed as a bumble bee (he was very concerned about the dog's flight abilities).

When we got home, Ellen carried around one of the many, many bags of cheese puffs we collected; The Bairn ate one of the granola bars ("fenilla bars") he received; and Steve handed out candy to the four children who made their way to the door.

It was a good first Halloween for The Bairn.

Baby's First Canada Day

It is that very special week in our family. The week in which we celebrate both Canada Day and America Day.  We went down to the consulate and applied for Baby E's US citizenship last week, so here's hoping her report of birth abroad comes through by Friday so she can eat some cherry pie with the Americans.

This morning we headed to Pugwash for our Canada Day celebrations.  Steve's parents and aunt and uncle and a couple of family friends were there trying to talk to Ellen.  This is the face she gives them.  She is not friendly.

The first two years we took The Bairn to the Pugwash parade, he absolutely wailed when the emergency vehicles came by.  They are very loud.  So this year, I advised him to cover his ears.  Which he did for the entire parade.  (I really love how Ellen is considering the rusk in this picture.)

The Bairn only removed his hands from his ears long enough to eat a lollipop.

Pugwash has a strong Scottish heritage (the street signs are even in English and Gaelic), so there's always highland dancing and highland games (but the games are called something else).  The Bairn was very taken with the dancing and practiced spinning with his arms raised. 

Steve bought mason jars from a yard sale, which is his favorite thing to do.

And I ate a fish taco, even though a taco is the least Canadian food of them all. 

Pancake Day

I never ever celebrated Shrove Tuesday until I married Steve, but in the Commonwealth it's known as Pancake Day and our family does love pancakes.

Tonight we'll be eating Steve's friend Jenika's grandma's wheat berry blender pancakes.  They are my favorite pancake these days.  Steve makes all the pancakes in our house, because I can't resist the urge to give them a little pat/whack with the spatula when I flip them and apparently that practice ruins them.

Jenika's Grandma's Blender Pancakes

3/4 cups whole kernel wheat (wheat berries; nothing else works)
1 cup milk
1 t salt
1 t baking soda
2 t baking powder
1-2 t sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil

• Place wheat in blender and add milk.  Start on low and work quickly up to high.  Process for exactly 4 minutes.
• Add remaining ingredients to the blender and process for 30 seconds longer.
• The original recipe says "if batter is thin, you may add up to 1/4 cup flour," but Jenika says she's never had to do that and I don't think Steve has either.
• We're told that they taste best if made on an electric griddle set at 350, but we don't have one, so we always just cook them in a skillet.

Notes from Jenika: The only problem I've ever had with these was over-blending the batter. If you over-blend, it loses its texture. These are hearty pancakes. All of the wheat should have been blended up, but you don't want the batter overly runny.

The blended wheat does "settle," so before I pour each batch of pancakes I give it a stir with a rubber spatula (don't re-blend with the blender) so that the ingredients stay evenly distributed.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Steve and I have almost no set traditions in our own little family.  For example, we still haven't decided how we want to celebrate Christmas.  This year we were going to follow Steve's preferred Christmas tradition (Christmas dinner on Christmas day), but then we all got sick, clearly a sign that we were about to celebrate Christmas all. wrong. Let that be a lesson to Steve.

Pretty much our only real tradition that we do faithfully is to make Valentine cookies and deliver them on Valentine's Day.  I make them with the heart-shaped cookie cutters Steve welded for me our first Christmas and then we deliver them to people we suspect would not get any Valentines otherwise.

This year The Bairn helped me make the cookies, by which I mean he licked the paddle after I mixed the dough, carried the cookie cutters to the table for me, helped cut out a few cookies, and then, while my back was turned, lunged across the table and started peeling the raw cookies off the cookie sheet and shoving them in his mouth.  As I dragged him away and buckled him safely in his little child seat at the table, he yelled, "Need a little heart!  Need a little heart!"

He's not invited to help me decorate them.

Christmas is Canceled

I spent yesterday evening at the walk-in clinic to check out a persistent sore throat and earache.  The doctor looked at my ear and throat and told me that my ear is in perfect health but that I have a serious throat infection called peritonsillar cellulitis.  "I'm surprised you're not in more pain," he commented.  I'm in plenty of pain, thanks.
The doctor prescribed the heavy duty drugs (as compared to the Ibuprofen my GP suggested when I went to see him about it almost two weeks ago) which will kill the infection and create an abscess that will have to be drained at the emergency room.

MBC: What symptoms should I be looking for to know when I should go to the hospital?

Doctor: Oh, the pain will drive you there.

Super.

That's supposed to happen about two days after I started taking the medication, so that should be about . . . Christmas Day. 

Super.

We decided to put off our Christmas meals, since I can't eat solid foods very well and because Steve developed a sore throat yesterday (although he's not getting as much sympathy as he would like, since he doesn't have the illness that killed Elizabeth the First like some of us do).

But Merry Christmas to the rest of you!

Old MacDonald's Stable

I'm at a bit of a loss when it comes to explaining Christmas to The Bairn.  We started out the season by reading Christmas in the Barn, a lovely nativity story by Margaret Wise Brown that The Bairn and I both really like.  But then Santa showed up and I didn't know what to say about him.  I'm not anti-Santa, but we haven't made any decisions about our stance on Santa--whether he's just a fun Christmas figure or if we play the Santa Claus is Coming and Bringing Gifts! game.  We took The Bairn to see Santa at the local market and we took him to the Santa Claus parade and we have a stuffed Santa Claus.  The other day I heard The Bairn giving stuffed Santa Claus the sacrament.  It's one of his favorite games.  He sings a song and says a prayer and begs some bread that he can eat on the couch and, on this particular day, he involved Santa in the religious rites going down in our living room and I was a tiny bit distressed by the unholy mashup of sacred and Santa at Christmas.

My parents have a nativity set they bought in Germany 45 years ago that is perfect for children because the pieces are made of molded rubber.  I really wanted one for The Bairn, because I have such fond memories of my parents' set and because I thought it would at least give Jesus an equal presence in our home during Christmas, so I was thrilled when I found this similar set (it even has one leg broken off the manger like Mom and Dad's!) on eBay a couple of weeks ago.  It arrived yesterday and The Bairn is very taken with it.  He plays with it just the way my siblings and I played with ours.  I thought to myself, "Good.  Now we can talk about the meaning of Christmas and there will be something concrete The Bairn can associate with the story."  I showed him all the pieces and as he played I heard him murmuring about Joseph and Mary and then humming a little song and then singing right out loud, "Old MacDonald had a wiseman . . ."

A Jolly Happy Soul

The Bairn is a right jolly elf.  He loves absolutely everything about Christmas.  He spent all morning pretending to be Suzy Goose from Petr Horáček's Suzy Goose and the Christmas Star while I read the book over and over and over again.

We started the season at the town's Christmas parade back in November, where I had a major Canadian parenting fail (probably because I'm not Canadian; I don't know what Steve's excuse is).  I didn't dress The Bairn warmly enough for the bitter wind.  All the other little kids were dressed in snow pants.  The Bairn has snow pants, but I didn't know they were necessary in non-snow environments.  I wanted to take him and his frosty legs home after we saw our friends on our church's float, but Steve was intent on seeing Santa, who rides at the very end of the parade, so we stayed, even though The Bairn looked like this.

Last week we bought a Christmas tree and wreath.  Conveniently, the farm next door to us sells both those items at Christmastime, so we just walked down the road a short way and Steve hefted the tree up onto his shoulder and carried it home.  Steve's mom was visiting, and she took this picture of us that night.  The tree is to the left of us.  note to self: Next year take family snapshot IN FRONT of the tree.

Last night we made my traditional Christmas spritz cookies and they were an utter failure.  I blame the country of Canada for selling its butter in pound increments instead of in convenient stick form.  I did not take any photos of them, but here's a picture of my baby, who looks a lot like an elf.  This post would be better if she would let me set her down while I type this.

Thanksgiving 2

Because we celebrate both American and Canadian Thanksgiving, we sometimes get a little bit holiday dinnered out. This year I decided to skip a full American Thanksgiving in favor of a pie night. I made three pies and each couple we invited also supplied a pie, including a British meat pie from my English friend and her Scottish boyfriend.

These are the three I made.

The one on the left is a Nantucket Cranberry Pie (made with cranberries from just down the road!).  It's pretty much the easiest pie I know how to make and is delicious.

The pie on the top right is the Shaker Lemon Pie we always make.  I've discovered that the key to this pie is to make it well in advance.  It tastes better the longer it sits.

And the bottom right pie was a new pie for us, a Salty Honey Pie.  It tastes a bit like a pecan pie without the nuts and was the favorite of all the pies there.

Playboop and Homeschool and Thanksgiving and All That

The Bairn attends a very fine play group run by our local parent resource center. He calls it 'playboop' and he loves it truly.  This week it was cancelled because Canadian Thanksgiving was on Monday.  This was my 5th Thanksgiving with the Canadians and I believe I have finally come to accept all the pickles that must be present at the event.  My favorite part is still the rolls, though, which are the rolls my mom makes for our holidays and which came to us through the Ashland, Kentucky Relief Society Cookbook.  Here is one in my hand being photographed and one in The Bairn's hand being devoured.  When I gave the first one to The Bairn, he crooned, "Oh, soft.  Kiss," and proceeded to caress it.  They deserve the love.
 

Anyway, since The Bairn missed playboop, I took him out to a corn maze with the homeschoolers today.  Obviously we are not homeschoolers since The Bairn is too young for school, but my friend homeschools and she invites us out to activities that she thinks we'll enjoy.  The Bairn enjoyed this particular outing a lot, since it involved pigs, goats, tractors, pumpkins, and running through giant tires.  I enjoyed it because homeschool parents are very happy to validate my current sleeping practices (tossing The Bairn into our bed so that I actually get to stay in my bed and sleep at night, except when I have to get up 50 times anyway because I'm pregnant and my legs feel like detachable Barbie legs that are going to pop off my body and need to be stretched at unfortunate times, like 1:00 am, 2:00 am, and 3:00 am each night).  Naturally, they also validated a number of homeschool stereotypes.

Steve and I occasionally talk about the ideal educational experience for our children and we always end up with the same conclusion that we don't love the public education system but we also don't want to homeschool, largely because we all know some weird homeschooling family with kids named things like Javelin Bird who aren't allowed to use butter knives to spread their butter because knives promote violence, and we always think, Which came first?  The homeschooling or the weirdness?

Steve is a big fan of the Small School model.  I am a big fan of eating cookie dough and not worrying about it too much.

Speaking of cookie dough . . .