Our Family Christmas

 Due to holiday travel plans, we had our family Christmas on December 20th, which was also our 15th wedding anniversary: double the celebrating! We loved the freedom of choosing our own day to celebrate Christmas, and we loved having Christmas early. We have tried different ways to celebrate Christmas in the past, but we've never simply moved the date and kept everything else the same like we did this year. It was awesome! No calendar will control us! Haha. The kids started calling it "Fake Christmas," but that sounded bad so I told them to call it "our family Christmas" instead, and thankfully the name caught on quickly. 

Sunday December 19th, was officially our family Christmas Eve. After enjoying the lovely inspiring Christmas music program at church, we began our own family Christmas Eve celebrations. It was the perfect follow-up after a festive spiritual Christmas-y church service.

White Stuff

White stuff from our week: gift wrapping, snow, braces, school, cookies, church, and a little more snow.

Monday, December 13th: I wrapped the first four gifts of the season today! Let's just say I'm out of practice, and I was never a very good wrapper to begin with. The struggle is real.

Tuesday, December 14th: Jay got braces today! They are only on his top teeth so far; he will get brackets on the bottom teeth next month. Signing the paperwork for braces was like getting a mortgage! Jay and I both had to initial next to practically every sentence on multiple pages.

The Couch

We got a new couch last week! It was time. It had been time for years. Our former couch was ten years old and so dead. The springs in the cushions were all sprung and wonky from years of performing double duty as a trampoline. It was a budget Costco couch floor model, so it had already seen plenty of wear before we even bought it back when Rose was a baby. There were only one and a half semi-comfortable seats on the entire couch, and they were always hotly contested before family movie nights. Everyone else just had to sit on the floor, sit on the old Ikea chair, or sit on the pointy springs till their gluteus muscles either rebelled or fell asleep. 

November Books

I read 14 books in November. 

Amber, Jay, and Rose

 Ah, motherhood. The refiner's fire of refiner's fires. I started this as a simple post to share a few of Amber's recent antics, but then it morphed into other introspective motherly musings. That's what I love about writing-- I start with one idea and then my fingers take it from there and tell me what's really on my mind. To quote Flannery O'Connor, "I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say." Classic introvert communication style and thought processing! Anyways, first up are five of Amber's latest antics, followed by some things I love about my kids and the journey of motherhood.

The 7-hour Christmas Tree and the 25 minute Parade

Per family tradition, we headed west to the mountains to find our Christmas tree on the day after Thanksgiving. It was an 80 minute drive to our favorite tree finding spot in the central Cascades just east of White Pass. Our friends the Kannely family joined us again this year, which is always fun. We hiked about a half mile up a forest service road before striking out into the forest to find the perfect mountain Christmas tree.  It wasn't very cold or snowy this year, so our hike was quick and quite easy compared to scrambling through deep snow like we've done in the past. We didn't even bring our sled.

Thanksgiving

 We kept all of our favorite traditions this Thanksgiving: pre-Thanksgiving leftovers all week, family turkey trot, pie first, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving lunch, and Thanksgiving dinner with the White family in Grandview. Since we always go to Jeff's parents' house for Thursday Thanksgiving dinner, we like to make our own turkey, taters, etc. before Thanksgiving and enjoy the leftovers all week leading up to Thanksgiving. So that's what we did. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I cooked up a massive feast that lasted us seven days. I made three pies, baked yams and apples, bacon green beans, cranberry orange sauce, rolls, and gravy. Jeff spatchcocked the turkey and mashed the potatoes. Jeff, Jay, and Rose peeled the potatoes. Amber and Rose helped with the rolls. 

Weekly Log

Our week was relatively calm and bland, unless you count some major weather swings, from 67 degrees and 25mph steady winds at the beginning of the week to 33 degrees and thick fog by the end. Here are a few journal clips to track the passage of another week, because the everyday-ness is still worth recording, even when it seems unremarkable in the moment.

A pretty pastel sky at sunset/moonrise, with a V of birds flying across the middle. My phone wouldn't bring the moon into sharper focus, but it was a lovely view out my bedroom window.

October Books

October was on the lean side of my usual literary consumption. The busyness of cross country season already feels so far away, it's strange that just three weeks ago, we were in the thick of it. Remembering the books I read during that time is an intriguing window into busy-Shaina-brain, because I was working hard to make time for my own restful non-running pursuits, and these are the books I chose to fill that precious limited time:

Momstalgia

Momstalgia is a word found only in the New Shaina Dictionary, a few entries north of Wedventure. Momstalgia [mom-stal-ja] refers to the feeling moms get when an event, location, or activity triggers a memory from her kids' past and she realizes how big and old they are, how fast they are growing, and how little time she has left with them at home. Momstalgia hit me unexpectedly when I took Rose and Amber on a "temple walk" on Saturday afternoon after our trip to Costco and before we attended the cousins' BMX race. We weren't there for more than 15 or 20 minutes, but as I walked around the outside of the temple with my daughters, the wave of Momstalgia washed over me.

Ribbons, Relay, Ride

Weekly photo album and journal clips because it's easier than writing a summary:

Saturday, November 6th: The girls participated in the Sunn Valley Piano Teachers Association Ribbon Festival at the church this afternoon. Amber played one song, and Rose played three, and they were given one ribbon per song. They also each entered a music-themed piece of artwork to earn an extra ribbon apiece, and Amber played a rhythm game at the festival to get her third ribbon. They were both quite proud of their ribbons. I was happy to catch up with an old friend from our previous ward while we sat through the long list of hesitant young musicians.

November 4th

Amber has been counting down to her birthday for the past six months. Almost every day, she asked Alexa "how many days till fernember fourth?" and the digital assistant Alexa wouldn't understand what she said, so we'd explain how to say November again and eventually she'd get her birthday countdown out of Alexa. At last, Amber's day arrived, and she was vibrating with excitement and smiling her jack-o-lantern smile so wide with the knowledge that it was HER day.

Since I shared the November 4th birth date with both a good friend in high school and my college roomie, and now with my own daughter, it has rarely been my very own day. I like to think that as I get older, I am getting [marginally] better at sharing and at finding ways to take care of myself and make my birthday feel special. Last year I felt the need to celebrate my birthday on a completely different day than Amber, but this year that didn't feel as necessary. Actually, it just felt too tiring for me to select and stake my claim on November 3rd or 5th, decide how I wanted to celebrate, and then remind my family about it over and over. Instead, I took a sandwich approach to the day: Amber/Shaina/Amber. Amber was the bread, and I was the filling. We did Amber celebrations before and after school, and I did my own celebrations in the middle of the day. It worked, mostly.