On the back of this card there is copper
this will intrigue the eye of a shopper.
on the front of this card there is silver
this will definitely bewilder.
however these things are as common as mold
for to me you are as precious as gold.
{Poem by Maggie and flower pot by Bjørn. Yes, I did cry}
"Mark this one down as a GREAT family Movie! I give it four and a half stars!" -- That's what Maggie exclaimed when everyone was done cheering at the end of the The Flight Before Christmas
We've been getting into the holiday spirit withe the classics: Rudolph and Frosty, and have a bunch more in our DVR queue, and to be honest... they're really feeling dated and I can tell the kids just don't get as excited as I want them to be. You can't force this stuff, y'know -- though I'll readily admit to trying in spite of my best intentions.
Thursday night I popped this one into the player with low expectations. Me, Tomas, the kids (who are ten, eight, and three years old), and my mom all settled in for Movie Night. It drew us all in right from the start and we were all enthralled to follow Nico's quest to find his birth father, who is one of Santa's famous reindeers who hooked up with the mom one Christmas (a mature theme that none of my kids caught onto). The production quality is incredible & the characters well developed; not that my kids cared about that one bit, what they loved was the adventure, and they got plenty of that. This movie might be a bit scary for more sensitive kids, but mine were happy to snuggle in with the nearest grown-up when the wolves were on-screen.
Tor, who is three, keeps handing me the box & asking to watch it again. I'm thinking once a day is enough, right?
It's taken me a little while to get here, but I'm finally starting to feel that familiar excitement at the holiday season. Maggie asked for a Christmas craft she could do yesterday and I drew a big old blank. The best I could do was to suggest a paper chain garland. The good news is that she decided she could work with that and we now have cheery green and red garland that's about twenty feet long as of this writing. Bjørn got busy with twisting green and red pipe -cleaners, so we also have a number of candy canes hanging about now, too.
Knowing that this is just the start of it all, so I figured I'd do myself a favor & gather our crafts from the past few years to find projects I could recycle and repackage for the Holidays this year. Hope you find this list helpful, too!
I'm extra pleased that the majority of these projects use recycled or found objects -- here's to a happy, and eco-aware, holiday season :-)
We went for a walk to the (chilly) beach yesterday with friends visiting from California and happened upon a family setting up their Christmas photo. I was fair to bursting with curiosity to see what they were up to when they piled out of their car & the mom was carrying what looked like a ball, but oh-so-carefully that it had to be something quite wonderful. And it was wonderful! She had sprayed adhesive on a soccer ball & attached raisins, some dried plums, and a carrot to make a cheery face. Once at the beach she sprinkled on a layer of sand for the perfect effect, and added the requisite happy hat and scarf.
Isn't this great? I wish I'd thought of it myself!
Maggie, Tor, my Mom and I went on a little shopping spree to MIchael's yesterday and I was in heaven (except for having to chase Tor around as much as I did). Our local Michael's just had a massive makeover so it was extra incredible to browse the aisles & discover all sorts of pretty things & to let my imagination run free for a bit.
I loaded up on craft-room necessities like bottles for glitter, silver beads, and some shelving to help gain control over our piles of craft paper. But the BEST purchase by far was this lovely Martha Stewart kit to make your own Christmas Village for $12 & change. It comes with a church, four lovely houses, six trees and a happy snow-man. The house here is JUST like ours & even has the door to the kitchen on the side like ours and the one window above it.
Maggie spent a good two hours building and decorating her village as soon as we got home, and this morning has been busy making people to live in it, including our entire family and Loki, our cat.
This set is so special with Maggie's embellishments that I know it will get packed away carefully & treasured at Christmas-time for a long, long time to come.
This year I'm a bit sad on Diwali because we usually celebrate the Indian festival of lights with our friends Rishi & Meredith, and their two beautiful daughters. Since we're now 3000 miles away, it's not so practical to pop over for a delicious Indian meal & share in this lovely tradition.
Instead, I'll be lighting candles, perhaps doing a craft or two with the kids from years past, and listening to some rocking Bollywood tunes. Oh, and I think I'm also going to have to break out our Indian gear.
Tonight will be SPARKLY in my house.
PS: if you live out on Long Island & know of a good place to grab some Indian food, please let me know! We miss our butter chicken, naan & papadam!!
(great, now I'm maudlin AND hungry!)
In '89-'90 Tomas and I lived in Paris for a short while. We rented my brother's apartment in the 2eme & lived off of odd jobs and our savings. We drank cheap red wine, ate baguette & rotisserie chicken, read the Herald Tribune, and explored the city on foot. It was lovely, but we found that all the friends we made were foreigners, not Parisians, so after a while when our cash ran out decided to settle back in NYC.
While we were in Paris we went to see Batman the weekend it premiered there. I remember how excited we were to be going to see an American movie (funny, since we hadn't been in France all that terribly long). We bought our 'billets' & a snack and settled in to watch in the darkened theater. It took a nano-second for us to realize the expensive-for-us mistake we'd made. It was in VF -- Version Française! What was supposed to be a dark movie turned into a bit of a screwball comedy for us as we giggled through the silly translations & even more absurd voice overs. "I am Batman" became "Je suis Batman" -- just say it out loud with gravitas and you'll fall into the giggles, too.
All this is a long way to segue to Tor's latest obsession (aside from that t-shirt he's been wearing for a few weeks now): Super Heros!
He's finally at the age where he can articulate his desires very clearly (and loudly), and this year has pronounced that he wants to be Batman for Halloween.
After a bit of wrestling with & cussing at my sewing machine (really a matter of me remembering how to fill & insert the bobbin correctly), I was able to construct a basic hat for the costume out of two sheets of black felt that had been intended for a Halloween craft. I used Maggie as my head model as Tor was napping.
Once he woke up I forced him to put the hat on so I could pin it in place, then take it of so I could sew, then try it on again ... repeated many times over. The cape is stolen from Bjørn's Darth Vader costume that he wore a few years back.
The last part of the costume should be arriving in the mail mid-week from Amazon
The added bonus here, aside from having super-cute 100% cotton PJs added to his wardrobe, is that it's a two-for-one deal -- Tomas and I made a Superman costume for Bjørn when he was two, and all we have left is the cape with the emblem Tomas appliquéd.
Now all I need to do is teach Tor to yell "Je suis Batman!" instead of "I Batman, ROAR!" :-)
I have no idea where the time has gone. Really, it's just flown past me in a blur of moments. So much so that I'm quite speechless over this milestone.
My darling Maggie is ten today.
To celebrate, she had three friends over for a sleepover last night. They chattered, and giggled, and whispered until two in the morning. They composed songs about young love (!!), and played hide and seek. They played truth without the dare because dares are so embarrassing.
They ate home made pizzas of their own designs, and Petit Fours of Maggie's.
Our version of Petit Fours is very easy; I just chilled a devil's food cake long enough that it was firm enough to cut smoothly. Cut out heart shapes with a cookie cutter (and made cake balls with the left-overs), then we drizzled icing and sprinkled our decorations. I love easy.
