I’m in charge of the food for the PTA Christmas meeting next week.

Does anyone know of any good hors d’oeuvres that are bite-sized, don’t require utensils, and don’t require heating?

Suuuuuure, Lynn, some kind of fantasy hors d’oeuvre. Sigh.

I feel like I was a bit cranky in my posts last week, so I just want to emphasize that I think this advent calendar of activities is great. I hope to do it again next year and I’d recommend it to any and all.

The kids are loving it — they rush to the calendar each morning to open the envelope. After the Captain labours hard to read the little strip of paper, he glues it to a collage he’s making of all the activity strips. At first I thought that was kind of silly, but now I like being able to look back at all the things we’ve done. Maybe I’ll let him have a few mementos of some events to add to his artwork.

I’m loving it, too. With the cold weather and all the shopping madness out there, we’re pretty much sticking to home these days, so it’s been wonderful to have a planned activity to do every day. Just a little something different, a little something special, to break up the day and give us something to look forward to.

And there’s more to it, too. Since I’m home with the kids all the time, I think it’s easy to fall into a pattern where I’m busy doing cooking or cleaning or laundry or emailing and not really taking the time to spend with them that I should. The kids really like the fact that no matter what other jobs I have on for the day, there will be a guaranteed time in the afternoon when I’m all theirs, concentrating just on them, spending time just with them. This imposed time to spend with them has made me realize that I could, and should, be doing this more often — setting aside the day-to-day chores, even for a short while every day, to just be a mom and enjoy my kids for a while.

I think it’s definitely made for a special December this year.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to prepare a massive bubble bath for the whole family.

I thought that when I finished with NaBloPoMo, I’d take it easy with the blogging, but I didn’t mean to go totally AWOL. I’ve just been crazy busy with the PTA stuff. I’m running an art program for the school and the learning curve is way steep, plus I’m spending hours and hours photographing and documenting all the art prints that the school owns. It’s a lot of work but actually, it’s kind of nice to have a real project on the go with real deliverables and real deadlines. I’d kind of forgotten how to do work, if you know what I mean, and this is a nice refresher. Not that I’m anxious to like, have a job or anything, but as a sideline, the PTA is a nice diversion.

On the home front we’re busy with our advent activities and it’s going fairly well. Tuesday we put up the tree and the kids had a good time and actually did a pretty good job of not grouping all the decorations on three bottom branches. Plus, so far we’ve only caught Little Miss Sunshine removing ornaments one time, so that’s a pretty good track record. Wednesday we made paper snowflakes to decorate our windows, which was okay. It turned out the cutting of the snowflakes was too tough for my 5 and 4 year old, even using tissue paper, so I wound up cutting out most of the snowflakes and the kids just got to tape them to the windows. I also had some jelly-type window stickers of snowmen I’d bought at the last minute to add to the window decorations, so they put those up too, which pretty much saved the activity.

Yesterday we watched The Sound Of Music, with popcorn and chips. Did you know that movie is FOUR HOURS LONG? I do. Four hours of running commentary — “Now Maria is feeling sad because she thinks the Daddy doesn’t love her. Now the kids are feeling sad because the Baroness doesn’t know how to play ball. That one is Kurt. That one is Liesel. That one is Gretel. That one is Maria. NOW EAT YOUR CHIPS.” — is very tiring. I intended to just watch the songs and also to skip the Nazi bit at the end but the older two kids were surprisingly engrossed, and got really mad when I tried to skip any parts. After the wedding part, I tried to shut off the video and they insisted it could not be the end because they hadn’t seen any credits (my own need to always watch the credits comes back to bite me in the ass!), so I would up giving a mini-lecture on WWII and then talking them through the finale. All this time, Little Miss Sunshine was bored out of her skull and she’s also teething so she basically sat next to me on the couch and provided an ongoing background soundtrack of whining for four hours. FOUR HOURS. Actually, by the end of it, it kind of felt like FOUR DAYS.

Still, now the kids are going around the house singing “So Long, Farewell” and that makes me very happy. Still, next year? SHORTER MOVIE.

Today is a PD day so we’ve already made our rice krispie treats (our planned playdate with the Carl Sagans fell through as the Saganette is very sick with the flu). Now I only have eight hours left to fill! Where was that Sound of Music DVD, again?

We’re off to a bit of a rocky start with our Advent Calendar activities. Yesterday, Gal Smiley showed up in our room at 5 a.m. yesterday wanting to open the first envelope, and if she’s that excited about a little envelope action, I really can’t wait until Christmas morning. We made her go back to bed until 6, but as soon as she was out of bed she was opening up the envelope to see what was inside.

Then, there was a lot of crying when everyone found out we wouldn’t actually be hanging up our stockings, as the slip of paper indicated, until after school. Yipes.

Later that day, the kids and I decorated our mantle and got out a few decorations, then picked out a stocking hanger and hung up our stockings. Captain Jelly Belly declared the whole event to be “very boring.” Way to have the Christmas spirit there, buddy!

This morning the slip of paper said, “Put up the tree.” The Captain said, “That’s boring, too!”

Then I said, “But you love putting up the tree…picking out the decorations, hanging them up, remember?”

And the Captain said, “But it doesn’t say we get to do decorations! It only says to put up the tree!”

Memo for next year: manage expectations better, and be more explicit in the slip directions!

Why don’t any of the Disney Princesses have a mother?

Belle from Beauty And The Beast lives with her father. Mother’s whereabouts: unknown.

Ariel from The Little Mermaid lives with her sisters and her father. Mother’s whereabouts: unknown.

Jasmine from Aladdin lives with her father. Mother’s whereabouts: unknown.

Snow White lives with her father and evil stepmother. Mother’s whereabouts: dead.

Cinderella lives with her evil stepmother. Mother’s whereabouts: dead, and the dad is too.

Aurora from Sleeping Beauty has a mother and a father, but her mother is hardly in the movie at all. Her father makes all the early decisions about spinning wheel burning, and then she goes off to be raised by fairies in the forest.

I’ve never seen Mulan, but wiki says that she does have a mother and a father, although it is her need to protect and honour her father that drives her to run off and join the army.

Gal Smiley has no interest in Disney Princess stuff, but most of her friends do. Until now I’ve kind of been encouraging her to notice the princess stuff, just so she can know what is going on when she visits a friend. Now I’m thinking, hey, wait a minute…how about some positive mother-daughter relationships for a change, Disney? Is it too much to ask for a nice, kind Mommy every now and again?

Perhaps Disney feels that a strong, positive maternal role model would mean that the Princesses in question would have no need to be strong and fight for themselves? That’s lame, Disney, lame.

I’ll have to give this one some thought.

And while I’m thinking about it, what kids’ movies have you seen that do have a positive mother figure?

I got this little quiz from Zoom. I’m not a big one for online quizzes but when it comes to board games, I am weak.

You Are Chinese Checkers

You live a hyper, fast paced life. You rarely ever slow down. You are good at juggling many things at once. You are the ultimate multi-tasker. You enjoy being in a group – in fact the bigger the group, the better. You are an enthusiastic competitor, and you can be a little ruthless when you play games.

I like Chinese Checkers just fine — I had a game as a kid. The description is pretty accurate, except that I really don’t like being in large groups of people. Sad to say, I confess to the ruthless thing. But it’s all in fun! Really!

Really!