Coming soon to a blog near you…

A collaboration 7 years in the making.

Something New…

I think you all know that I feel that I found Mr. Right when I re-met my husband after originally meeting him as a teenager, but what if I told you that I think I’d also found Mr. Write?

We’d been talking about random joint projects for a while and have collaborated on game ideas and joke telling and all sorts of random hijinks.  Sometime in the next week, I will be posting a link to our hopefully fun new adventure.  It’s going to require some group participation, so I hope you are ready.  

Where the Boys Are

Oh, Connie Francis.  Don’t you just love Connie Francis?

The song, the movie…In the age of #metoo and #timesup it seems important to explore the past to explain not only how we got here, but the emotional consequences of it.  I wasn’t really intending to go here with this post. I’m not going to spend time exploring it further, just offering up pieces of evidence that this has been a long time coming.

 

Knit-ivity Christmas Eve

1 Day Until Christmas…

There are no more cookies.  There are no more candies.  There are no recipes today at all.  Today, I am simply going to show you a wonderful gift that was given to me by my family.  My dear aunties, mom, and grandma all knitted me (and all my siblings and cousins) a Nativity.  My grandpa built the creche.  

When the boys were little, they got to play with this nativity. I used it to tell the story of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem.  I got to the part where “…and in the manger Mary had a baby.” and was interrupted by my oldest correcting me, “No, mom.  Mary had a little lamb.”

Around the time the boys started to get bored by the Nativity, the girl was born.  Her second Christmas, she stared wide-eyed as I got it out.  She looked at it, got a naughty smile on her face and went toward it.  “It’s ok, baby girl, you can play with that.” I said.  She lost the smirk and went to find something else to do.

Every year when I get out this Nativity, I smile.  There are four generations of love wrapped up in it.

Christmas Cookie and Candy Countdown

As a special treat, I thought I would share my cookie/candy plate with you.  Growing up, we had friends that would gift us with an amazing cookie plates every year.  It was never quite Christmas without it.

I think I started making my own Christmas plates around the time I bought my first house.  There were cookies before then, but when I had kids and when I had neighbors that I really liked, it seemed like the right thing to do.

Some years I’ve been really prepared and made dough ahead of time and froze it.  I’d have lists of all the cookies and all temperatures and all the timing and had everything down to a science.  Other years, I am a disorganized mess and barely have anything done before Christmas Eve.  My favorite Christmas memories with my children, however, always involved cookies.

When my husband and I started dating, he came over on a Saturday night.  We packed the boys into the car with their jammies on.  As we started to drive, the sounds of Christmas carols filled the car.  I passed out sippy cups of hot cocoa and cookies.  We drove all over town looking for the best Christmas lights.  The lights were sparse, the air was cold, but the boys got nice and sleepy and went to bed easily when we got home.  It’s never quite Christmas until that happens.  We’ve continued the tradition after our daughter was born. This year, we have a whole new town to explore and lots of new cookie and candy recipes to try out.

8 days until Christmas…