I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. As far as I can recall (I believe there was a pomegranate martini and champagne and wine involved in mine so my recollections are hazy at best), ours was wonderful, but now that I think about it a little harder I do believe we did a fair bit more child-threatening than usual over the four-day weekend. The kids are still getting over colds, and I'm trying to give them as much extra patience as I can possibly squeeze out, but when there have been three separate tantrums within 15 minutes of waking up in the morning, I tend to lose it a little bit. I tend to be irritable. I tend to POSSIBLY have these long, elaborate fantasies about dunking the small people's heads into big, delicious, Costco-sized vats of Benadryl.
This year, my children ate absolutely NOTHING for Thanksgiving dinner. They refused it all, except for dinner rolls. No ham, no turkey. No green beans, no pie, NO MASHED POTATOES. I think they each had a roll and then a chocolate chip cookie after dinner and that's it. I am so done with the picky eating, but I feel like making a big deal out of it gives them all this extra desire to Fight The Power and make it into an even bigger fight, which I will probably lose if we're around company, so I just let them eat or not eat and forget it. I just cannot believe they won't try mashed potatoes. WON'T EVEN TRY THEM. It actually offends me. What is not to like about mashed potatoes? I have explained, in great detail, what they are, and what goes in them, and how we all like all those things when they're NOT in mashed potatoes, like butter, we like butter on toast, don't we, and how it should make sense that we would like butter IN the mashed potatoes and how we really like the insides of French fries, right, and THAT IS WHAT MASHED POTATOES ARE WHERE IS THE BENADRYL ALREADY FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY.
I felt like we really enjoyed Thanksgiving this year without rushing to start on the Christmas stuff and I'm so glad we did. It is becoming more and more obvious that my children are going to be VERY INTO Christmas this year (I would never have predicted this given our Christmas history) and I would have definitely run out of Christmas spirit if I'd started too early. They are really excited about their Advent calendars (of which we have ELEVENTY BILLION) and Asher made sure I knew that he wanted to do his tomorrow BEFORE school, not AFTER school. My mom already decorated her house and put up her trees, and the kids were mesmerized by the ornaments and the decorations and Lucy spends all her time over there wandering from one representation of the baby Jesus to another. She can take you on an entire Baby Jesus Tour of my parents' downstairs, and find exactly where each one is. When you take this tour, you must remember to lean in and pay very close attention and study each baby Jesus carefully, and say something like, “OHHHH, yes, there's baby Jesus!” or you will have to take the tour AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN until you get it right. It may also be requested of you to hug and kiss the baby Jesus. GO ALONG WITH THIS IDEA, PLEASE.
I've started mapping out my Advent activities that go in the little envelopes and I am pretty sure I am going to try blogging about it each day. Nothing crazy or spectacular – probably just a photo and a blurb addressing our progress; maybe a link to a website where I got a particular idea or a comment the kids made during the process. And I LOVED Pippi's idea of making it into a little book at the end of the season and looking through it together next year, but I am 79 percent sure I'm going to run out of steam by the end of the month. Anyway, if you're planning on doing this too, please please PLEASE advertise it (and your blog address) in the comments! I would love to follow along and, uh, totally steal your ideas. Wait, no, I meant see your beautiful children for 24 days straight. Yes. Yes. That's it. Crap, I always mess that up.


