Snow Day

When I saw the weather forecast for Tuesday, I was pretty sure the school(s) would call a snow day. Instead of railing against yet another break in my already shaky December schedule, I decided to embrace it the way I used to when I had an outside-of-the-house job and a snow day could mean a day off for everyone. While grocery shopping Monday, I laid in supplies of cookie ingredients and construction paper. I made plans for puzzles, games, movies, and projects. I visualized every snow day for the last 11 years happening all in one day. While things didn't quite transpire the way I'd envisioned, we had a pretty good—and productive—day.

While the kids would once have raced outside to play in the snow first thing, they are now of an age where they would rather sleep in late (M) or get on the computer first thing. I decided to ignore E and Z's screening and get busy on a project of my own, the supplies for which I bought last holiday season: festive placemats for everyday use during the Christmas season.

Even though our table is well-loved, I like to try to protect what's left of its finish with placemats or tablecloths. I also like to have a nice, attractive table to sit at (this condition does not last long, with homework, bills, mail, crumbs, and various other messes piling up as quickly as I can clear it). I've been so pleased with the bright, festive, machine-washable placemats I made last year that I decided to replicate them, down to the rickrack, in festive reds and greens. So far, I'm quite pleased.

When I finished my project, I rousted two boys off their screens and outside onto their skis, which was a much easier effort than I expected (could it be that they actually like this new activity and might even go out and do it voluntarily some day? Dare I hope?). The anticipated rain had not yet begun, and we had an inch or so of fresh fluff on top of Sunday's snow—not quite enough to shield our skis from gravel in the driveway, so we went off-road into our neighbor's field and then around one loop of our trail in the woods. Z, after laboriously climbing one narrow hill through the trees turned around and skied down it, then repeated the whole process two more times. Fun!

Back inside, we worked on some holiday projects—E made a paper chain to go around part of the living room (to extend one he had begun last week) and Z and I made Scandinavian-style woven paper hearts. Unfortunately I picked a design with five strips, rather than two or three, so the weaving was hard-going, but Z and I each managed to finish one each. The cool thing about both of these projects? They were the boys' ideas, no coercion necessary!

In the afternoon, we settled in for a movie during which I worked on making Christmas ornaments.

We didn't get out a puzzle or play games or go sledding, and I didn't get around to mixing cookie dough until the evening, while I was reheating a dinner of leftovers (that's my idea of cooking—mix cookie dough rather than dinner). But I did get a batch of saffron St. Lucia Day buns made for Wednesday's breakfast (and I managed to not burn them for the first time ever). All-in-all, a pretty good snow day.

Decking

Like in our politics these days—rich/poor, right/left, rational/insane—there is polarization in our house right now, between Holiday Spirit and Grinchy.






Surprisingly, it's the teenager who's been pounding out Christmas carols on the piano since September and asking if it's too early to get out the holiday records and movies yet.




The two 12-year-olds, on the other hand, have complained that it's too early for holiday movies and music (echoing their mother's voice through all of November, ahem). They even declined to do our Christmas Book Countdown for the first time ever (in lieu of the daily picture book, I'm reading them A Christmas Carol, much to their chagrin. But I'm persisting; in today's anti-education climate, it may be the only Dickens they're ever exposed to).



For my point, I've been slow to get the Christmas game on around the house. We went to a wreath-making party Saturday, and I gave my Fiestaware its annual bath and arranged the red and green pieces in prominent positions, but this approach is a bit to subtle for my housemates.

After watching Elf over the weekend (because that is one holiday movie they're always game for), E decided to take over the household decorating himself, Elf-style. He started with a paper chain, but our supply of construction paper was low in the red-and-green department, so he changed gears, and

with a stack of coffee filters, a skein of white yarn, and a roll of scotch tape, he soon scissored and finger-knitted a snowflake garland that sweeps from the living room to the kitchen. 


Even Z got into the act and added some coffee filter art of his own.



I love both the initiative (all I had to do was find yarn and remind him how to finger knit) and the results. Maybe we'll leave the ornament boxes in the basement this year and leave the twins in charge of decorating...

October in Review

October seems to have gotten away from me—there were many things I meant to post about, but somehow never got around to it.


It was a beautiful month, sunny and dry, until it wasn't (more about that in a minute). I got the kids to walk through our woods a few times and we even went on a family hike once (I have mentioned how no one likes to leave the house, haven't I?). Unfortunately, I didn't take along my camera for documentary evidence.

E and Z and I did a Van Gogh art project, with various interpretations of what that meant.

And we all made tie-died t-shirts, which is so much easier now, with squirt-bottles of concentrated dyes, than last time I tried it, 30 years ago, with dipping shirts in and out of buckets of watery Rit.

C and I did our best to wrangle the last of the garden produce. He made several large batches of tomatillo salsa and I boiled or roasted the rest of the tomatillos and froze them for winter cooking.


With the last of the VERY LARGE harvest of chile peppers (jalapeño and habanero), I made hot pepper jellies, hot sauces, roasted and frozen peppers, and dried peppers. That was a lot of peppers.



With the end of the month came a crazy wind-and-rain storm, which knocked power out for most of the state, littered roads with fallen trees and downed power lines, and drove most of the leaves off the trees (though the beech and oak hung on tight).


The upshot for us was NO SCHOOL for this whole week, with power out almost everywhere (except, thank you sun and solar panels and batteries, our house) and roads too hazardous for buses to pass through.

Three people in our house were pretty psyched about this development. I even got into the spirit of it for the first couple of days, playing Snow Day, baking cinnamon rolls and watching movies, but a whole week with a houseful of kids (and no internet) put a serious dent in my work flow.



Despite calls here and there to postpone Halloween until Friday (to which we said "Phooey"), we braved the dark and tree-littered streets to make our usual trick-or-treat rounds.



Our usual hay wagon being unavailable, we made do with C's work truck, which worked out nicely, as grown-ups got to sit inside for once (although it was such a mild night, it wouldn't have been bad to be in a trailer).



The power outages and candle-lit homes made for an extra-spooky Halloween-i-ness, and I think people appreciated a diversion from sitting around in their dark houses, listening to their generators run. And I think the kids appreciated being part of a lower-than-normal turnout that led to even more candy in their buckets than usual.

Weekend Things ~ The Morning After

Back when I was working for The Man, I hated Mondays. I'd wake up Sunday morning, thinking "Ugh, I have to go to work tomorrow." I was destined to be one of those people that die of a heart attack on Sunday night after a lifetime of back-to-work stress. Now that I work for me, Monday is my favorite day. I look forward to reclaiming the peace of a silent house, a reprieve from the "get off your screen" wars. I'm more convinced than ever that the 40-hour work week is inhumane. I'm willing to concede that some people enjoy their jobs and like to work, but even so Mon-Fri, 9-5 is too much. Bring on the national minimum income, I say. This Monday morning, after everyone left for school and the peaceful lull descended, I looked around my house and noticed the signs of a weekend well-spent, though it was a weekend in which the camera didn't come out very much.


The kitchen table: I swear I spent the whole weekend eating: a belated Lunar New Year celebration Saturday with friends (egg rolls, stir fry, tofu, a vaguely Southeast Asian dessert of tropical fruit and coconut milk) and then on Sunday I went on The Table Tour (a walk—not enough snow for skiing or snow-shoeing—around the Arboretum, from table of food to table of food). After two days of eating to repletion I needed to start the day with a bit of a cleanse.



Also on the table: The boys were recently gifted a collection of foreign money, and they spent some time sorting through all the coins Sunday after dinner.

The boys' room: I spent Saturday morning helping the boys deep-clean their room—vacuuming under beds, dusting behind dressers, washing windows. I helped M finish cleaning his closet. He's been working on it for a couple of months. It's been like an archaeology dig, uncovering the layers of M past (I feel like there's an essay in there somewhere). But he'd come to a standstill with one-and-a-half shelves of mementos, bric-a-brac, and dust waiting to be resolved. I held up each item and he decided whether it was to trash, keep, pass on, or store. 

The other side of the closet, however, is a bit of a disaster (despite E's and my efforts on that front a couple of months ago), but I ran out of energy on cleaning before I could tackle that.

My room: Draped over a chair is the result of a little Sunday afternoon sewing—finally making progress on a quilt for Z (thanks to my reading deprivation, I'm forced to find other ways to spend my time).

A shelf in the kitchen: We have a problem in our house which came into sharp relief with the cleaning out M's closet—of a ton of science kits and craft and art kits and kids that spend too much time on screen, not doing projects. So Sunday afternoon, I dragged E and Z off their screens and put them to work making crystals.

My desk: And then E and I started making paper boomerangs. He ran out of time to finish his, but here's where mine landed after a fling around the room.

The living room floor: In another attempt to keep boys off of screens, we've been trying to play more board games around here. When I was a kid, my sister and I played cards and games all the time, but not so these guys, unless there's an adult around directing the activities. We played Pictionary with our friends Saturday night and Taboo—E's favorite—Sunday evening.



The kitchen counter: M has been very into baking lately. He's reached the stage of baking confidence that I don't need to help out except with the occasional bit of advice and making sure we have all the necessary ingredients on hand. One weekend he made chocolate chip cookies three different times. Last week he made chocolate cake and brownies. And Sunday evening he mixed up a batch of banana- chocolate chip muffins.



The sofa: I usually write my morning pages in bed, but when C leaves early for work, like this morning, I get up to help motivate the twins to get out the door, and then curl up in a blanket on the couch to write my Morning Pages. After I finished my breakfast, I came back to this nice scene of morning productivity.

Little Santa Project

I'm not quite sure what the status of Santa is around our house. Over the last few years, E and Z had been making a lot of, "If Santa's real, then how come…" type of noise. My boilerplate response: "Only people who believe in Santa get presents from Santa." Maybe they took this to heart, "how come…" discussion this year, even when I say things like, "It's not too late for Santa to make all your presents back." Or, "Did Santa treat you well this year?" I'm not sure if I'm humoring them or they're humoring me.

Anyway, E brought home a stack of good old dot-matrix printer paper from school on the last day before vacation and this inspired him artistically in a way nothing else has in a long while. He quickly turned out a super-cute Santa drawing that I knew right away I wanted to turn into an embroidery.



I had a bit of unexpected downtime Christmas Eve day (the wonder of being home all day on the 23rd to clean, so that the 24th only entails cooking and setting the table) and again Christmas day (after the guests left) and I stitched up the Santa. E started him off, sewing up the right side of his pants and overalls. I thought it would be cool if he did the whole thing, but one length of floss was enough for him (but he did pull of a serviceable backstitch, which could come in handy some day). After I finished, I framed him up in red fabric and hung him between the front windows by the tree, where he keeps busy making me smile.

For more on how to turn kid art into heirloom embroideries, see this post.

Halloween

Halloween kind of snuck up on me this year.



Maybe that's because October was warm. Or maybe it's because we spent the last two weekends having a Harry Potter marathon. Movie marathons were a big topic of conversation while we were hiking the Colorado Trail this summer, and the only one that appealed to me of the many suggested was HP, so I decided to make it happen. Somehow watching eight 2 1/2 hour movies in a single day seemed like a doable thing back when we were hiking in the mountains. It ended up being spread out over five days (there are certain members of this household who have suggested that it doesn't count as a "marathon"if the movies weren't watched contiguously. That member has been informed he's a party pooper). We started out strong and festive—with gold plates, pumpkin pasties, split pea soup, cauldron cakes, butter beer, Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans. I even wore my academic robe from grad school graduation and wielded a wand. By the end we were eating burritos and miso soup, two foods I'm pretty sure never showed up at Hogwarts.




Or maybe it's because I didn't do much to prepare for it ahead of time, although I did take E and Z to two stores to buy Halloween costumes a couple of weeks ago—a first ever—and, much to my relief, they only ended up choosing a package of vampire fangs and a set of Ninja weapons. The costumes they carry at Target really are hideous.



Sunday night, after we finished The Deathly Hallows, Part II, I realized we hadn't even carved a pumpkin yet.



So the boys got busy after school, with their best bud, carving pumpkins and assembling do-it-yourself costumes from stuff we already had in the house—a skeleton mask (hand-me-down) for Z, and the ninja weapons and several layers of clothes for E (fat ninja). I really am a do-it-yourself kid of mom, as in, "Go do it yourself." So kids that can carve a pumpkin and pull costumes out of the closet are right up my alley.



We took our usual haunted hay ride around the "block" (we determined that we visit 14 houses and it takes us almost 3 hours—because every single house is either a neighbor or a parent of the kids C grew up with 30 years ago, so there is a lot of catching up to do at each one; we came close to but avoided any political skirmishes along the way). For the first year ever, M didn't join us. He had a lot of homework and studying to do. But E and Z didn't show any inclination of slowing down.



I heard Halloween described as the foot on the accelerator that will speed us through Thanksgiving and Christmas and into the New Year, which seems about right. Hang on for the ride!

By the end of the night, E's costume turns into a blanket wrapped around him to keep him warm on the trailer. 

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall

My friend Helene holds a paint night at her art gallery every few months and I've tried to make it every chance I get. It's just fun to slather paint on canvas and drink wine and chat and walk around looking at everyone's creation. This month we painted a snowy scene with a tree and a little house. Right now mine holds the place of honor over our mantel, because I got sick of our Modigliani print last summer and I haven't found a piece of real art that I can afford that will fit there.

The next day after paint night, I got the boys going on a paint project. I'd seen in a coffee shop with art for sale on its walls a picture of birch trees on a solid background and thought "we can do better than that." I picked up some smallish canvasses at the craft store, and gave one to each of the boys (and myself) and we taped strips of masking tape from top to bottom. I then gave them each a palette of paint to represent one of the seasons (purple, white, and blue for winter; red, yellow, orange for fall; dark and light green and yellow for summer; and blue, green, yellow, and pink for spring). I couldn't quite think of how to differentiate colors between summer and spring, and having unrelated colors on a single palette ended up being a mistake, especially since E, who likes to mix his colors into mud, chose spring.

After we painted our backgrounds, we went out for a stomp, looking at birch and aspen trees along the way.

When we got back, we peeled off the tape and added the dark lines (lenticels and branch scars) to the trees.

From left to right: Winter, by M; Spring, by E; Summer, by Mama; Fall by Z.

I absolutely LOVE how they turned out (even E's mud. Spring is, after all, mud season here in Maine). Perhaps I should stop looking in art galleries for a piece of artwork to hang over the mantel and turn instead to my resident artists.