Cookies!

As mentioned briefly in the previous post, this year, I decided to host a cookie exchange. Well, sorta.

I did decided to host a cookie exchange, with the idea of inviting some of the other kindergarten moms to come while the kids were at school. And then, as the holidays approached, I realized I hadn't done anything about setting up such an exchange and it was getting late. I decided it probably just wasn't going to happen.

And then, one day, my friend Julie called. She has this funny (and rather compelling) way of suggesting that you take something on. Fortunately, she's also good at helping out once she's got you convinced. "Do you like baking cookies?" she said.

Turns out, she'd also been thinking about a cookie exchange, but didn't want to host it. Since I'd already been not-quite-planning to host that exact same thing, it was easy to spur me into action. The guest list got longer. We added a few second grade moms and moms from the other kindergarten classes. It got big...and in the end, I think there was just one person who didn't show up, when we'd been advised to count on just half of our 20 people being there.

And it was fun! There were so many yummy cookies. Everyone made their own, as requested in the invitation and the dining room table quickly became a beautiful array of the yummiest cookies ever.In the kitchen, we'd put together a pretty good spread of coffee, tea, apple cider, mini quiches, holiday breads, munchies and fruit.Websites advertise cookie exchanges as a great way to stock up on different kinds of cookies for all your holiday entertaining needs. Really? Because our cookies were gone within a week...long, long before any more holiday entertaining was done!I wonder if maybe this will become a new tradition of mine too. Could be...

A Hunting We Will Go...

The weekend following the grand photo shoot was devoted to finding the perfect Christmas tree and getting it up and decorated. This was, of course, an imperative because I was hosting a holiday cookie exchange party on Monday morning. Because I'm crazy. I am.

This year, we set off on our own to find a tree, with Gram and Grandpa deciding that they were having a hard enough time readjusting to life and a tree just wasn't necessary for them this year. I think they missed it though. Here's hoping they're feeling up to the trip next year.

We tried a new Christmas tree farm in the local mountains. Turns out, this was it's last year of operation, so we won't be trying it again, but it was a successful trip nonetheless.We found a suitable, mostly symmetrical too-tall tree that Daddy cut down and we hoisted with great effort onto the top of the mommymobile, where Daddy spent the next half hour securing it, while I sent Mam off on several very important missions to collect pine cones.Although we'd managed to get yet another 12-13-foot tree, the trip home was uneventful and our tree was up and decorated the same day.Since then, we've entertained a lot of questions about how we got that tree in the house, how we got it home, how we decorated it, how long it took to put the lights on. I think we must've had more guests over than in previous years, because this sort of tree has been a regular in this house since we moved here 4-1/2 years ago. Tall ceilings are fun. We haven't had to be all that careful about the size tree we've chosen. We have yet to max out the room, but there'll doubtlessly be a first time. Just wasn't this year.

With the tree up and other decorations adoring the fireplace, there was time to build a nice, toasty fire and get a few holiday-worthy photos. What a fun time of year it is when you have a couple of little kids!Nothing says "Christmas" quite like reading a book next to the fire and a giant glittery tree.

Back from the Holiday Trenches

Happy holidays! Oh my, how very long it's been and how many blog posts have passed me by. I'll have to go consult my photo library (into which I just uploaded about 300 photos) to figure out where I left off and where I need to start.

O.K...so I just realized I forgot to upload a couple of photos to my last post. They were cute. You should check it out. And before I move on, a quick update on my dad, who seems to be doing much better now. A friend reported to me that he says he's feeling about 60%. That doesn't sound great to me, but his ailments have now taken a back seat to Gram's complications with a tooth implant. She's now the one in constant pain. I know it's miserable for her, but at least it doesn't feel so life-threatening.

Now on with the updates... Tradition in our household holds that the weekend after Thanksgiving is time for our Christmas photos. We take them ourselves and only include the kids since we generally don't consider ourselves photo-worthy. Of course, Daddy's lost so much weight this year that he really might be worth a Christmas photo! But I digress.

If I've got your address, you probably saw some of the best photos from our little adventure in the yard, but there were a lot of them, so here are some of the other good ones and a few out takes.

Sniffle, Sniffle, Cough, Cough

I really couldn't tell you where the time goes between posts. I know I meant to blog about Thanksgiving, but I caught a cold right about the big day and it's not gone yet. It started as a teeny little innocent, mild cold and turned into a monsterous sinus-clogging doozy. I'm still keeping Daddy up if I sleep in the same room, so it's the guest room for me.

It was supposed to be a fun Thanksgiving because Aunt Karen and SPENCER! were driving up from San Diego for the week. Our dad (mine and Aunt Karen's) had lung surgery the Thursday before Thanksgiving, but that was supposed to be minor. He'd be in overnight and that was it.

Then, Aunt Karen caught a cold much nastier than the one I've been dealing with and although it was almost over by the time she got here, her cough was still horrible-sounding and she was banned from the hospital. And, all of the kids were already banned from the hospital for being the germy little vectors that they always are...and in hopes of curbing the H1N1 virus that so many people are worried about right now.

Of course, grandpa's surgery ended up being far more complicated that he'd been led to believe. Although the "anomalies" they removed were benign, his recovery was and continues to be a nightmare. Turns out, they removed a 9cm x 3cm portion of his lung...much more than he'd expected...and left him with a chest tube sticking out of his side, which was something he only learned about a day before the surgery. After 4 days in the hospital, which included this very cute moment:...they let him go home, but with the chest tube still in there to vent any air leaking from his lung into his chest cavity.

Of course, he's my dad. Once upon a time, he ran marathons. Now, he has to settle for jogging and coaching Smunch's baseball team, but sitting still to "recuperate" is not one of his skills. He was discharged on Monday, went to work on Tuesday (still with a chest tube!) and Wednesday. Played catch with Gavin and bocce ball with all the grandkids. By Thanksgiving Day, he was in pain. Smunch spent some time with him, lying on the bed and watching football.And although his surgery and its complications made Thanksgiving a little more meaningful to all of us, he felt too bad to eat. Before dessert, he was on the phone to the doctor (who was probably none too pleased to have his own holiday interrupted), who told him to take another pain pill and take it easy. He took another percoset and was happier and downed a bunch of pie. But before long, he was back in his room lying down again.

For me, and doubtlessly, my mom and sister, it put a pretty big damper on the holiday mood. It's truly unpleasant to watch someone doubled over in pain. The kids didn't seem to notice, fortunately. I'm glad they didn't feel as freaked out as I did!By 10 o'clock that night, my dad was in the ER and by morning, he'd been readmitted to the hospital for another 4 days. They released him again on Monday...now with a fever replacing the chest tube. He's still in pain, he still has a fever. It's been a week. I'm now banned from seeing him because my own cold is so rotten.

It's hard to know just what to think. My dad, who always recovered from everything so quickly, suddenly seems very fragile. I'm painfully aware that a big turn for the worse could be right around the corner, and ever so hopeful that my feeling of dread is for naught.

The Crappy Weekend

The weekend started off innocently enough. Smunch had an 8:30 soccer game on Saturday. The team played well...for that particular team. They didn't lose, but it will still be merciful when the season ends next weekend.They didn't win either. They tied 1-1. Yet again, Smunch played goalie for a quarter. I barely watched.He seems so small out there. And often the empty field in front of him and the offensive plowing towards him seemed pretty daunting. But he's not that fragile. He's a decent goalie. And the one time he's been scored on (which was not this weekend), he didn't seem to care, even though the ball went right between his legs. That didn't happen Saturday. He made a bunch of saves and did just fine during a quarter when he saw a lot of action.Mam, meanwhile, has befriended the little brother of the most "problematic" of Smunch's teammates. Fortunately, the little brother (who is the middle of three brothers) is very friendly, fairly nice and loves to play with Mam, despite being a year younger. The moment they spot each other is always the best moment of the game or practice. It also happens that they get to hang out while their brothers take swim class on Mondays.This little guy calls me "Ryder". I'm not sure exactly why. I think he asked once and I must've said "Mrs. Ryder" and that's how he interpreted it. It cracks me up. I don't plan to correct him.

It was a cold and cloudy morning, but a successful game, by our standards. The beginning to the crappy part of our weekend was just around the corner, however.

After the game, Mam took off for yet another Pump It Up party while Smunch had one of his teammates come home with him for a playdate. His playdate is a super nice kid who is on his team, in his Cub Scout den and in his second grade class. They needed to go distribute door hangers for the Boy Scouts' annual food drive, so I left all that to Daddy.

When Mam and I got home, Smuch and his friend were just getting back from their scout duties. They'd had a good time and had played nicely and quietly together. It's amazing what a nice, quiet friend will do for our kid's disposition! But by 1 o'clock, things were starting to go south. I'm not sure why. Maybe Smunch got up too early, maybe he wasn't feeling well, maybe he's just weird, but you could feel the hyper and wound-up chid coming out. Daddy is good at spotting this stuff early and made the executive decision to have our playdate picked up. It was a good choice.

Smunch's friend left and he and Mam went out to play with some of the neighborhood kids out in the street. That was fine, but Smunch had to be warned a couple of times not to mess with his sister. When she finally came in saying that he was trying to knock her off her bike, Daddy went out there and made him come in and go to his room.

I don't think any child would be overjoyed with that news, but Smunch was livid. From the other end of the house I could hear the massive racket he was making in his room. It sounded like he was throwing things around and screaming. Maybe that was part of it. The truth didn't come out 'til hours later. He'd been in his room, hitting his forehead on his bed frame. He'd hit himself so hard that a big, bumpy bruise was coming up from his hairline to the top of his nose. I don't know if I've felt more alarmed in recent memory. "I was punishing myself," he said. If only he knew how that kind of crap punishes the fragile psyche of mommies.

That wasn't the end of the crap, of course. Mam had disappeared off into one of our neighbors houses and I had to go fetch her for her own soccer game...the last of the season. She came home relatively willingly. She loves soccer after all. But she forgot her bike and had to go back for it. I waited, hairbrush and hairspray in hand. And I waited some more, until I stomped over to the door to find out where the heck she'd gone.

There she was, with her bike in the floor between our two vehicles...the mommymobile and the Daddysmidlifecrisis...just standing there. There are only a couple of feet between the van and the car. The kids never take their bikes between them, for good reason. The mommymobile has had more than its share of child-caused vandalism. It was rear ended about a month ago and although the damage was minimal, I used it as an excuse to have the whole side of the van repaired and repainted. I have a great body shop. It looked brand new again (at least on those panels that they did). I got it back last week. And this week...?

You guessed it. This week, it is now scratched all the way down the side by a little girl's bike handle, or fender or something. I was pissed. I made her cry. I made this sweet little thing cry. I'm not proud of that, but it almost seemed necessary at the time. Seriously, why did I bother getting all those dings repaired. I must be an idiot. Unless I was going to adopt my children out, there was no logical reason to try and make the mommymobile prettier or less embarrassing to drive.

Mam had recovered by the time we left for her game. It was another rip roaring success.I'm going to miss this team of little girls. They changed so much over the season.Mam no longer stands out as the star. Now they all know what they're doing. Mam scored once, but her teammates scored three or four more times. They know what they're doing...just in time to forget it all for next year.

There was a pizza party to celebrate and medals were awarded to all of the girls. Both of our two wonderful coaches had something really nice to say about each player. I give these guys a lot of kudos. It's got to be hard to coach "beehive soccer" and they did a fantastic job.

And so the evening ended with us hanging Mam's new medal from a shelf in her room and sending the kids off to sleep.

Daddy wasn't feeling so great, so we got in the jacuzzi tub for a little bit, then went to sleep.

He was up again a couple of hours later and I could hear a torrent of rushing water. What?? I went and looked outside to see if there was a broken pipe or something. Nothing. It was the bathtub in the hall. Turns out, Daddy had woken up with a raging fever. Not wanting to bother me, Daddy had gone to put himself in the hall bathtub. Of course, neither of us knew that it's crazy loud in our room when you do that.

I got up and went to sleep in another room. I couldn't go back to sleep. And I finally heard Daddy get out of the bathroom. I heard him go back to our room, notice I wasn't there and then head for the room where I was. He opened the door and I uncharitably said,"What do you want now??? He sounded irritated at my tone and said he needed to tell me something, then rambled on about how the cats had peed in the bathtub and we'd both bathed in watered down urine and that he was itchy and hot.

What??? I just wanted to sleep. I didn't question him, I let him go. He doesn't remember this conversation. Apparently that fever was BAD! And he's still sick. I'm quite sure he has the flu. Could be H1N1 ("the swine flu") or more of garden variety, but he's been looking green and staying in bed all day.

Tomorrow's Monday. I think I'm looking forward to it.

Prizes

Late last week, my prizes arrived from the San Francisco Giants. They didn't have any Tim Lincecum signed baseballs to give away...or at least that's what they told me...so we made do with a ball autographed by Matt Cain, the Giants' other pitching ace.

(AP Photo/ George Nikitin)

(No, his signature isn't worth nearly as much.) They also threw in a couple of "extras".

But let's back up. Because the real gift came a few days after Halloween when it was announced that on the day prior to Halloween, our adored Mr. Lincecum was stopped for speeding in his Mercedes on the way up to see his dad up in Washington state. That might not have been so newsworthy (it was hardly newsworthy anyway) if the officer hadn't been smacked in the face with the stench of marijuana and made The Freak had over his little stash and his pipe.

(AP Photo/Tony Avelar)

Now, I have to admit that I don't care a lot about Timmy's personal habits. I hear he doesn't shower very often either. I doubt I'd find that appealing. He was not charged with driving while intoxicated. Either he gave the officer and autograph and got out of that one or he really wasn't. It was 8:30 in the morning, after all. But who knows. There's certainly a contingent out there that says, "Duh, of course Timmy's a stoner."

I don't know. I don't really care. BUT, there's never a time when I care more about that sort of stuff more than when Smunch picks up the sports page in the morning. Like most second graders, he can read and a headline that says, San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum faces pot charges in Washington is bound to peak his interest more than just a little. It meant a long, drawn out conversation about drugs and why Timmy made a big mistake. I resent having to have that conversation first thing in the morning. I can't help it. Timmy, do what you want, but please keep your newsworthiness to your pitching.

So, when my package from San Francisco arrived with a grey, knit beanie hat in it, I immediately dubbed it the "stoner beanie". You'll see why if you take a look at the picture below, which Daddy took last year at FanFest.Mine looks just like this, except with a little SF logo on the front. And I look just like Timmy when I wear it.Now all I need is some weed...oh, and a Mercedes to go with it.

And the Winner is...

ME!!!So I worked really hard on this pumpkin carving...mostly just to see if I could pull it off. I could point to all kinds of things that went horribly wrong, including how the whole face fell out on Sunday afternoon (bummer, I wanted to light it up again!). Plenty of things weren't quite how I'd planned, but it still turned out pretty cool.

Because one person asked and because I think it would be cool to preserve this information for posterity, I'll go into some details about this award-winning carving. I started out by choosing an online photo of "The Freak" that I thought would work for my purposes. I chose this one:I cropped it so that only Timmy's face showed and then ran it through Photoshop's "Cutout" filter that made it look something like this:I used that as my template, but it lost some detail, so I had Daddy go back and find me an appropriately sized SF logo for the cap and I added the white of his eyes, which you could see in the original photo.

I used a pin to poke the outlines into the pumpkin, through the paper. I started carving with a Dremel, with a small router bit attached. It kinda worked. At least it gave me a specific depth to carve to. After carving the brightest bits to that depth (the deepest it could go through a 1-inch+ thick rind) and just scraping the skin off the things I wanted to get less light from...that taking a mere several hours...I determined that no light was going to get through that and used a plain ol' knife to cut out the thin parts entirely, then used the Dremel to drill the other parts deeper.

I cut a circle around the outside just so the cap would show up. Unfortunately, I didn't quite think that through all the way. Cutting too far was going to make the face fall out, so I only got part way and ended up with sort of a lightning bolt edge on one side. By then, the pizza had arrived for dinner, so I took a break.

I wanted to write "Beware of the Freak" around the outside, but trick-or-treaters were already starting to come to the door and I was worried that if I tried to cut too much, I'd end up breaking all the delicate stuff I'd already done. Still, I thought the "Freak" aspect was particularly apropos, considering "The Freak" is one of Tim Lincecum's nicknames and because it was Halloween. So, I settled for "Freak". And this is what I ended up with:It looks like it took a lot of work, but it hardly looks like it'd be impressive. i was pretty psyched when I first checked it out with a candle inside. Totally worth the effort!

As mentioned in the previous post, I submitted it to the San Francisco Giants pumpkin carving contest. For all I know, no one else bothered to enter. I mean, the Giants' season has been over for weeks now. I can't even tell you what I was doing poking around on their website, where I noticed the contest ad.

I enter the occasional contest here and there, but I never win. So imagine my surprise when I got this e-mail from the Giants' Marketing and Entertainment Manager:

Stacey,

Congratulations, you are the winner of our Pumpkin Carving contest! You have won a player autographed baseball. If you can please reply all to this e-mail and provide your address we can get this out to you as soon as possible.

Congratulations once again and awesome job, your “Freak” pumpkin is very impressive!

Joe

Huh. Imagine that! We'll have to see how that whole "autographed baseball" thing turns out!

Halloween - The Real Deal

After having more than a week of Halloween already, it was almost a surprise to find the main event suddenly upon us like the boogey man. I'd managed to buy a couple of creepy window hangings and Daddy and I strung some cobwebs across the front of the house. That meant yesterday was a mad rush of carving pumpkins and finishing up decorations before setting off for an evening of candy collection.Oh, and soccer, of course.

We had a lazy morning at home. Since I had some undeniably ridiculous plans for pumpkin carving, that was probably a poor plan, but I was still trying to talk Mam out of the large pumpkin she'd selected weeks earlier. She'd selected two others in the meantime and I needed a really big one for my planned carving.

I set the kids to work carving their own pumpkins. Mam had carved her little pumpkin from the farm trip a couple of days earlier, but we still had two others. While I helped them out with their pumpkins, I finally got permission to start on my own. They were long done before I'd really even started.I'd only just started cutting as Daddy starting shoveling lunch at the kids in preparation for Smunch's post-lunchtime soccer game. Not to be completely distracted by my mental illness, I left the house shortly after the rest of the family to see the soccer game. Smunch's team won, 1-0, a fairly unusual event. Just their second win of the season. Smunch was playing great by the end of the game, but it took a while for him to warm up.

We went home. I spent another 45 minutes working on my pumpkin, then putting Mam's ponytails in and spraying them in place for her soccer game. I'd made only a little progress before we had to leave again. Another fun game for Mam, putting her goal total for the season at 22, I think. They also won (6-2), although they don't technically keep score.

I'd planned to make soup for dinner, but we ordered pizza instead, in the interest of my completing my pumpkin before midnight. Daddy called our favorite pizza place. They said we could pick up our pizza in 2 hours. Two hours??? We opted for some Round Table instead.

And Daddy got the kids dressed. Mam still had her ponytails in, but it turned out to be a cute addition to her costume. The knocks started coming and it soon appeared that we probably hadn't bought enough candy this year. Our neighborhood was buzzing with activity. It was great, but unexpected. Still, just because our neighborhood was buzzing, didn't mean our dark, narrow cul-de-sac was all that busy. In the end, although I came home and raided some bags of candy the kids had collected at a Cub Scout event earlier in the week, I think we probably had just enough candy in the first place.

We left a bowl of candy at the door and took the kids around the neighborhood for an hour or so...until they decided their pumpkin baskets were too heavy to carry anymore.They returned home happy with their Halloween.As I put them to bed. They both told me what a great time they'd had. Worth all that harried silliness.

Smunch was the sweetest of all. "Mom," he said. "I love your pumpkin." A boy after my own heart.

[Entered in the SF Giants Pumpkin Carving Contest]

Or was I after his?