It's 1.1.11 (how cool is that?) and just like last New Year's day and the year before that, I chose a word to embody what I want to focus on this year. Last year's word was SIMPLIFY, and it worked wonders around our home. I purged like there was no tomorrow; stuff, our brimming schedules, more stuff, my tendency to overcommit, even more stuff. Frankly, it's amazing we have any stuff left!
In the absence of all the STUFF, came an amazing sense of PEACE just as I'd hoped it would. And God got in on the act too, tossing us the opportunity to move to Illinois and REALLY get rid of the unnecessaries in our lives. Start from scratch, even, in many ways. I love it when He lets you know you're on the right track!
For 2011, now that we've cleared our home and our minds and hearts of all that stuff clutter, I want to bring my focus back on the quality of the lives we're leading. That's why my word for the year is (drumroll please...)
I spent our plane ride back to Massachusetts this past week scrawling a multiple-pronged plan to nurture our minds, bodies and spirits in the coming months. And I found the most wonderful quote to exemplify the plan.
"Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream" Lao Tzu
More on that next week though, because the number one thing I need to force myself to do this year is to get more sleep - and since it's 1:30am, I'm already behind!
It was so much fun decorating for the holidays this year. One of my favorite things to do is sneak out after Christmas and snap up decorations for pennies at all the post-holiday sales. But I could never really indulge until now, because our house in Pembroke was so small that it would easily get overwhelmed. Christmas morning last year was the toughest ever, because there just wasn't room for the five of us and the presents Santa had left. There's only so much that an 11'x14' living room can handle!
But not this year!! This year our house is so wonderfully open and spread out that everything fit perfectly and there was room for a few new ideas too! I haven't managed to take pictures of everything, but these are a few (dozen) of my favorite things...
These candy colored ornament topiaries from Target are on their last legs, but I still love them so much! (Marc loathes them, but luckily he loves me, so he leaves them alone) I stuck them in the urns by the front door like always.
Lucky for me, Target also sells a garland that matches the topiaries, so I bought two of them and wrapped them around a wreath, with a glittery green ribbon as a finishing touch. The candy colors make my heart happy!
I hung three of these little wreaths from the lights on the garage. I saw it on a neighbor's house and loved the look so I took the idea and ran with it!
This is one of my all time favorite posessions. I'd lusted after one like it in Exposures catalog that cost hundreds of dollars, but knew I'd never be able to spend that kind of money on something so frivolous. Then one day I was walking through Michaels and on a clearance table, there were two of these for 50% off! I paid less than $100 for both and practically wept to the woman at the register about my good fortune.
One went to my mother that year for Christmas, and the other has sat in a box until now, because I never had enough room to display it! This year, it went right in the center of the dining room table, with some favorite pictures from our family tree inside the frames.
Clockwise from top left are my paternal grandmother, Mary Josephine Sulllivan Egan circa 1940 with my father and his brother Tom in her lap; Jack at Christmas circa 2005; my father-in-law Philip Henry Mallett circa 1953(?) on his tricycle in Revere (Jack still maintains that this is a picture of him, the resemblance is so uncanny); my nieces Corey Elizabeth and Abigail Veronica circa 2000.
It took some gumption, but I finally hung this mirror by myself one day a few weeks ago. And a gilded garland was just what it needed to spiff it up for the holidays.
This is the 7 foot slim tree that graced our living room last year because it was all that would fit. This year I put it up as a second tree in the dining room to shine through the front bay window. I decided it would henceforth be our "Massachusetts" tree and that we would put our few cherished Massachusetts ornaments on it, adding to it each year. This year's addition was something I'd seen in a catalog years ago, and that my heart needed to have here in our new home ... It's a handpainted ornament of our house on Edgewater Drive from Personal Creations.
We had so many Christmas cards this year that I ran out of clothespins! I'd started this way of displaying cards a few years back because of the lack of space in our old house. Now I have more space, but I still love the way it looks to have all those wonderful, holiday wishes and beautiful,smiling-faced pictures draped on long strands of ribbon. The stairs were the perfect spot!
These incredible lighted garlands were a housewarming/Christmas gift from my parents.
They go up the entire length of the stairs and are so beautiful I want to leave them up all year!!
The kids had such fun cutting snowflakes out of paper. I did the folding and the marking, and they did the cutting - even Ben! I used dental floss to hang them from the ceiling and love the magical way it looks. You could decorate an entire house with these and nothing else, made out of whatever scraps of paper you have on hand - newspaper, printer paper, construction paper - the possibilities are endless!
Some potpourri laced with glittered pinecones from our holiday craftiness last year. It made the whole kitchen smell delicious! And it's sitting on some supercheap felt placemats I scored at Homegoods - they were two dollars each and I was so sad there were only two!
I love Santas!
This one is a baking Santa from Michael's after-Christmas sale two years ago, and he's perfect in my kitchen.
I think he gave us good luck with all our baking this year!
I don't have a good picture of our entire living room tree (yet), but I did manage to catch a quick shot of this beautiful "new home" ornament that my brother and sister in law gave us to help celebrate our first Christmas in Illinois.
It was a magical one for sure, made even more so by celebrating with all our family and new friends in Illinois, and now a trip back to Massachusetts to celebrate with all our family and lifelong friends.
I don't know when I'll be forced to take everything down, but I'm thinking there's nothing wrong with a Valentine's Tree, or maybe a Saint Patrick's Day tree?
I had an epiphany tonight! My mudroom is totally lacking functionality. I need more wall space for cubbies and hooks, but all I have is this ginormous closet with double sliding doors. There was a time in my life when I would have given my eye teeth for a closet like this, when I lived in a house with no storage...but then that house GOT storage and now I'm a big fat snob about it. Our new house could pretty much kick the can of our old house, and yet I sit here stewing while trying to devise solutions to storage problems that drive my sanity to the movies.
So back to the mudroom. I tuck ideas away as I find them, so that someday, when I can put them to use, I have them available. The trick is to REMEMBER them when the time is right. And an idea I bookmarked back in 2008 appeared in my mind tonight. And the TIME is RIGHT!!!
The idea is this gorgeous closet redo by Wendy from the Shabby Nest blog. And if I didn't have a plane to catch in a few hours, I would be tearing the doors of my closet right now.
Now that I've got the idea in my head, rampant Googling has begun! There are others out there, and I will find them, and then I will take all their good ideas and morph them in to a sanity saver for 2011.
I'm still not sure quite how I talked myself into it, but I know without a doubt it was all my own doing. I offered the kids a bunch of different options for fun things to do on Christmas Eve Eve, and no sooner had "We could go visit Santa Claus..." come out of my mouth when they were on it like nobody's business!
My neighbor Kris told me that the BEST Santa, the REAL Santa (not a "helper elf" Santa) was at Von Maur in the Yorktown Mall. And sure enough, stationed right outside Von Maur, there he was...and apparently, he was no well kept secret, because the line was formidable. But the children were not to be deterred.
We tried to wait it out, going on a train ride, playing in the play area, eating lunch in the food court. My thinking was that once "naptime" hit around 1pm, the line would die down. No such luck. We procrastinators are a desperate and hardy bunch, and no one was leaving. So we got in line, and I figured we'd see how fast we moved and go from there. Initially, we covered half the distance to Santa in a half hour, so by my math, we had another half hour to go. I think Santa may have taken a lunch break though, because for a solid 45 minutes, the line did not move. one. INCH.
I suggested that we should really go home a few times, but each time, all three of them would look at me like I'd just spoken Cantonese, and Ben would yell "But Mama, I have to give Santa a HUG!!!" The child was going to give Santa a hug if he had to take me out to do it - so by golly, we waited our turn.
Was it worth it?
I have to say YES. To see their faces, all three of them, just BEAM as they excitedly climbed on Santa's lap, with no one too shy or afraid to enjoy the moment they had waited so patiently for, was just MAGICAL. Ben ran right up and high fived him, then jumped on his lap and hugged him as tightly as he could. Molly just smiled ear to ear the entire time. And Jack was his charming self with his "Merry Christmas Santa! Ho! Ho! Ho! Oh wait, that's YOUR line, har har!"
And despite being the last in line before Santa's well deserved break to feed the reindeer, he did not rush the kids one bit - it was as if we were his first visitors of the day. He laughed with them, hugged them, asked each of them to remind him what it was they were wishing for, and reminded them that he'd be coming to our house tomorrow night after they fell asleep. I actually started to feel guilty that we were taking too much time, so after a few minutes, I shooed the kids off his lap and they hugged and high fived their goodbyes.
They were all smitten, and floating on air for the rest of the day. Because we had found him. The REAL Santa!! Right there in Yorktown Shopping Center in Lombard!
And we have the evidence to prove it...
It's a good thing I have the magical memory in my heart, because this picture didn't quite capture it! Jack was trying to counteract his auto-blink response to camera flash. So every time they took the picture, he'd open his eyes as wide as he could to make sure they stayed open during the shot.
Always thinking, that one!
After weeks of planning and prep, The Mallett Family Holiday Open House was a fabulous success! I judge this based on a number of analytical points, specifically;
No one cried
No one died
Only one head injury was suffered, it was minor, and it was to one of my own offspring
Everyone smiled the whole time, including Marc and I
The only 'work' Marc and I had to do was greet, mingle and pour a few drinks
Cleanup duty went swimmingly
Everyone is looking forward to doing it again next year!
My one regret is that I didn't manage to document it photographically as well as I wanted to. I tried, I really tried. I wanted to go around before our guests arrived and do a video home tour while the place looked as perfect as it ever will. But I was running behind (nothing new there!), and our first guests were incredibly punctual and, well, this is the best I could do with my broken flip camera. I hope you don't get too dizzy.
Also - I've decided I need Invisalign. 18 months of braces, followed by 6 years of retainers at night and the buggers are going all wonky on me now??? What's up with that? People should just start calling me Snaggletooth.
But I digress - here is "Frank" now that we've gotten a few months to pretty him up and decorate for the holidays. Enjoy!
And Part 2...
Here are a few photos as the day went on...
Ben and Daddy hanging out before the onslaught
Guests arrive! Brody is smitten with the kids table in the play room
The cheese balls were the most sought after munchie by a landslide. I just bought them because I needed the container for a project I'm working on. And because they are filled with cheesy goodness.
Goldfish! Can't ever have enough of those can you? Wish they had a holiday assortment of red and green though - would have thought their product department would have been on that already.
Yes, my sense of humor is about the same level as my kindergartener. And I LIKE IT!
This is Ben's buddy Jeffrey, and his shirt pretty much says it all.
This is Molly's buddy Julia. She's Jeffrey's sister. It was really spiffy of their family to have a child the exact age as each one of mine. All J names too, easy to remember. You'll never guess what Jack's buddy's name is.
The first wave hits. Not too hard - which is why we have a picture. When the second wave hit, it was a tsunami. No pictures of that because I was too busy opening and shutting the door and saying hello!
The day he stops wanting to wear a tie of his own free choice, I will be so sad. It's so trademark Jack.
I decided to have a 'Signature Cocktail' instead of a stocked bar. We had wine and beer, but there were going to be too many kids around to have a 'pour your own mixed drink' bonanza going on. So I tweaked a Martha Stewart recipe for a "Candy Cane Cocktail" using White Creme de Menthe, Vanilla Vodka and Cranberry Juice. It was pretty tasty! The paper straws were on clearance at the Crate and Barrel Outlet - there was no way I was leaving without them! (and they're hot pink too, but you can't tell!)
Two little helpers opening the door for guests.
I don't know if it's a midwest thing, or a Kinloch thing, or what, but it is an AWESOME THING that it is socially EXPECTED that everyone take their shoes/boots off at the door. I didn't even need to vacuum the next day! At one point, there were so many boots on the rug that you could barely open the door. Again - tusnami - no pictures.
These girls didn't have fun at ALL.
Peyton and Sabrina are two girls from the neighborhood - grade 4 and 1 respectively. They took Molly under their wing, and while the party was winding down, went around to every room the kids had played in and picked up. And I'm not talking 'picked up' in heavy air quotes, like I would use if my kids did it. I'm talking picked UP, as in made beds, put away the 5 thousand legos that the boys had dumped all over Jack's floor, left me virtually nothing to do, picked up. I wanted to kiss them!! Not only for the work they saved me, but even more, for setting such an amazing example for Molly.
Clockwise from Molly, this is Chelsea, our neighbor, and Olivia and Sophia, two of Molly's kindergarten classmates. They had a ton of fun together!
I told Jack and his buddies that there was no Wii allowed until the party was over. At 5pm SHARP, the begging started. And no sooner had the telltale Wii startup song come on when every boy in the house (and a completely entranced Miss N.) were drawn to the TV like moths to a flame!
Life is beyond miraculous, as evidenced by the season we are celebrating, but also by the little miracles that happen in our own lives. How else could I explain meeting someone online in a pregnancy forum while expecting Ben, with me living in Pembroke and she in Japan, and that we would not only become dear friends, but that we would serendipitously end up living 20 minutes from each other in Illinois??
God is so cool like that.
I saw these little lollipops (suckers if you're from Illinois) at Dollar Tree (I was shopping for bribes, but that's for another post another day). They came six to a pack - that's less than 20 cents each!! They had ten packs and I bought them all (big spender, I know!) without having a real reason. On the eve of the party I was hoping a favor idea would fall into my lap, and voila! More serendipity.
We had guests linger until nearly 8 o'clock, and when the last goodbye was said, it wasn't 15 minutes before everyone was in pajamas and this picture was taken.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
Postscript: In the time it has taken me to upload and process those two silly video clips, I could have written a 5,000 word essay on Open Houses, or possibly saved the world or something...but you get what you get! I hope you enjoyed the tour - consider this an invitation to join us for the second annual Open House, already in the planning stages for next year!
This was really cute at 8am...especially Ben's wiggly bum in the background grooving to the music...the party is still going at 6pm and mommy may need some Tylenol for the headache that is developing!
Thank you for always keeping me on my toes out here in Chicagoland. I am happy to report that I am making progress on my patience training and coping ability.
This morning's lesson, where I got up early to get to the Macy's furniture gallery in Oak Brook, only to get lost seventeen times, drive around in circles, and finally find my way...only to realize that the 7am store opening quoted on their phone line and web site was incorrect, and they really don't open for another fortyfive minutes...
...that was a good one!! Thanks for putting a Starbucks on the way. I needed it.
Molly's Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Verdun, is focusing her writing lessons on helping the children to become confident and comfortable in putting pencil to paper and writing down what they sound out. They have learned all the letters of the alphabet, and all of the basic sounds that those letters make. So when they want to write something down, they have the tools they need to begin spelling them out - phonetically. Apparently, Molly is one of her most confident writers - she loves writing!
Decoding what she writes can be a challenge though, as you have to train yourself to READ phonetically! Molly takes her phonics rules VERY seriously and writes words exactly as she says them.
She brought home the most adorable worksheet today. It said
Molly
OBSERVATION OF ICE
ICE IS slipree ICE IS dripain ICE IS isee ICE IS hard ICE IS sefroo
Did you get it??? Ice is slippery...dripping...icey, hard...and my personal favorite, SEE THROUGH!!!!
This is the time of year that a mother's mind starts melting from all the thinking that needs to be done for the holidays. There are gifts to be gotten!! And not just for my the three kids (and Marc!) - there are godchildren, friends, neighbors, cousins, sisters, brothers, parents, and all the other folks we cherish and want to spoil a little around the holidays too.
And then there's the ubiquitous question of "What would the children like for Christmas?" Frankly, it's a blessing that anyone even cares enough to ask what the kids might like - I remember many Christmases when I'd open up gifts from far away relatives and think "Really? Gym socks? Really? A comb?"
No kid worth their salt would turn away ANY gift no matter how odd, but sometimes I wondered if the giver even knew who they were giving to, or maybe just bought 50 pairs of gym socks on sale and ran with it as a theme that year!
Anyhow, I'm doing my best to come up with great ideas for everyone, while still saving a few of the best ones for Santa. And because I know all these fabulous gift-givers are readers of this blog, I figured this is a fantastic place to list them! I learned my lesson with Ben's birthday when I just listed a few ideas and he got multiples of them...so this time I'm splitting it up by gift giver. If you want to borrow an idea from someone else's list, do so at your own peril!
AUNTIE KATIE Molly would adore a larger tea set as she has outrgrown her tiny, child sized ones. Jack would be over the moon with the magic kid we talked about last month. Ben - The Bat Cave by Fisher Price. He's been begging for it!
AUNTIE PATRICE Molly would go bananas for a ribbon stick like the one her friend Emma has. This one from Amazon.com looks really durable. Jack would have a blast with the Kids' Paper Airplane Book by Ken Blackburn and Jeff Lammers. This one is special because it includes the paper needed to make the planes and he'll have a blast using it when we visit after Christmas Ben would love a set of squeeze planes from the HearthSong catalog so he can fly planes like Jack.
NANA AND PAPA Molly would lose her mind if you got her the Fur Real Friends Parrot Seriously, she might faint. Jack would love a new game for his Nintendo DSi. Maybe Lego Harry Potter? Ben would play for hours with this Happyland Martian Moonhouse that goes with the Liftoff Rocket he got for his birthday.
NANNIE AND GRAY You wanted some general ideas to run with so here are a few: Ben: Zhu Zhu Pets/Backyardigans/Superhero stuff Molly: Zhu Zhu Pets/Webkinz/Polly Pocket Jack: Zhu Zhu Pets/Nintendo DSi/Harry Potter or Percy Jackson books/Itunes gift card
Molly wears a size 5, Jack a size 8 shirt and size 7 pants, and Ben is in a 3T all around. And as a caution, Bratz dolls/Barbie Dolls and weapons (water pistols, nerf guns, plastic swords, and yes, even light sabers) will mysteriously disappear at the earliest opportunity after the holidays. I know it won't make me popular, but I never was popular anyway, so why start now!
So hey, while we're at it, what do YOU want for Christmas? If there's something on your wish list, I would LOVE to know about it! I'll be shopping my little fingers to the bone this week on the internet, so if you're on my gift list, expect a surprise in the mail soon!
Yesterday was the first day of Advent. The kids had such fun counting down the days to Thanksgiving with Jack's awesome homemade paper chain, that I thought surely, THIS will be the year that an Advent calendar would work for us!
I try so hard to help my kids overcome the mass market hysteria that is in their faces every day, and instead, to prepare their minds and hearts to celebrate the true meaning of the season - the birth of our Lord! But to be honest, it ain't easy.
I've tried to use many different types of advent calendars in my quest - the key word being TRIED. The year Jack was three, I used an advent wreath and found out that candles and toddlersdon't mix. All he wanted to do was blow out the candle "again" and "again" and "AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN!!!!" until he was a shrieking mess on the floor and I was ready to chuck the wreath out the window. We've also tried the cheapo, piece-of-chocolate-behind-a-cardboard-door kind too. These are great if you only have one child...with more children it quickly becomes an exercise in hysteria as Jesus is forgotten during the fight to the death over a sliver of chocolate. I spent a small fortune on an Usborne Advent book last year that had a figure to pop out each day for 25 days, eventually helping your children build an entire nativitiy set. But the figures didn't fit in their stands well and much weeping and gnashing of teeth ensued.
When baby Jesus is hurled across the room by a child screaming "Why won't He STAND UP!!!???"
...that's when you know the message is not quite getting across.
But this year? THIS year might be "it". I think I may have struck on something that will become a family tradition as well as our own personal advent calendar.
For eight years, since Jack was first born, we've been accumulating Christmas story books. Mostly from my mom and me as it seems neither of us can walk by a well-illustrated children's book without it leaping into our hands and insisting on coming home with us. Rudolph has also helped build our library as he's been bringing a book and pajamas to the children on Christmas Eve for the last four years!
With my idea hat on, I spent a half hour the other day with some coordinated wrapping paper from Target, and wrapped up the whole lot of them! Then I used some fancy labels I got for pennies at Office Depot to put the numbers 1-23 on each of the books
Currently, our library includes juuuuust enough books to cover us from the 1st through the 23rd, leaving Christmas Eve for Rudolph. Thank goodness for the Jan Brett Treasury that includes 7 stories - we're milking that one for all it's worth!
I put the books in numerical order in a metal beverage tub and covered the ugly label on the tub with a dolled up sign using leftovers from Ben's birthday presents.
The only books I consciously rigged to fall on certain days were the first book and the last. The LAST book, of course, is The Night Before Christmas! But the first one is one that I picked up last week at Borders - I thought it was the perfect way to engage the kids in thinking about the Christmas Story.
The illustrations in this book are phenomenal, and they have the added bonus of changing as you turn the page, much like those billboards that act like vertical blinds. Molly is enchanted, especially with the illustration of the angel who came to tell Mary and Joseph about Jesus.
Tonight was night number two, and our story was one of my favorites from when I was a little girl. "Mr. Willowby's Christmas Tree" Molly and Ben loved the story of the tree that just won't fit properly, so the top gets chopped off and thrown out, to be found by someone else who chops the top off and throws it out...and so on and so forth until the teeny tiny tip of the tree ends up with the mice who live in the wall behind Mr. Willowby's grand and tall tree.
Yesterday afternoon I walked outside to get the kids off the bus and immediately said out loud "Feels like snow!" You don't spend 30+ winters in New England (four of them in Maine) without knowing in your bones what snow feels like, and sure enough, by the time I got to the bus stop, the flurries were coming down! They only lasted a half hour, and barely dusted the ground, but Molly came home from school, took off her coat, put on a new, heavier coat, a hat, mittens and boots and said "Okay Mama, I'm ready to go build a snowman now!!"
On the way to the bus this morning, we had even heavier flurries, and every time I'd turn around to make sure Molly was following behind me, sure enough, she was lagging behind inspecting snowflakes, or eating them, or picking up leaves with snowflakes on them, or dancing her happy snowflake dance (which is pretty much just the happy everything dance she does every day, but with snow falling).
Jack scratched up enough to make the first snowball of the season, for which my back provided target practice.
And Ben, well, he liked it a whole bunch too! But he said "Mama, this wind is CHILLY! Get me home to my house and let's have some hot CHOC-OH-LIT!"
