It remains a mystery how the octave of Christmas can feel so relaxed and calm, yet also toward the end feel like an exhausting flurry of frenetic activity. Honestly, it's a 24-hour-a-day job just to keep a large family alive, fed, and with clean clothing, so adding anything on top of that, be it homeschooling or Christmas or outings, means that something has got to "give." It's a lot of love and beauty and good times, but it's also a lot of . . . OH MY. Stress, tears, mess, and noise.
Lessons learned over this Christmas break were that no, one cannot decide that going to Dollywood would be fun and call to book a mountain cabin ("I'm sorry, sir, you need to call in October."), nor can one simply write on one's own calendar to go visit the Biltmore during Christmas because it turns out the Biltmore staff actually maintain their own calendar of reservations, which is what counts, and one needs to call days or weeks ahead to get into the house or it books up. So, lessons learned.
1. Giving Thanks
Each morning, I gathered the children around me to write thank you notes. It takes us up to two weeks after Christmas, but we should get through them all!
2. Artwork
Other activities with pencil and paper this week involved doing much artwork!
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| Fairy by Margaret, age 6 |
The children read in a magazine that it was seeking submissions of drawings of rocket ships, so they decided to create and enter their own drawings.
3. Hosting
We did host a little Christmas music jam, so that involved cleaning up from Christmas and spiffing things up.That afternoon, I was doing cleaning chores indoors when a certain young man with his eyes alert to 'neighborhood hoodlums' rushed in to inform me that his big sisters had dragged a neighbor's Christmas tree (discarded on the 26th of December), hauled it to our house, and were attempting to make our home more festive for our guests coming in a few hours.
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| Barefoot in 40-degree weather is how we roll around here |
I decided this was all a result of my reading aloud annually "A Christmas Tree for Lydia" and encouraged them to decorate the tree with cranberries and ribbon. It was quite festive.
4. Grandparents
Chris' parents came for a quick overnight visit, bringing along our 18-year-old niece, herself visiting from Texas!
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| Breakfast at the diner |
After breakfast at our favorite dinner, Pop-Pops, Daddy, and John went shooting at a range . . .
. . . while I enjoyed quieter pursuits, like reading under the tree.
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| "Poems Every Catholic Should Know" |
5. School Planning
On Friday, I experienced what is becoming my traditional crying spell over How I Can't Homeschool the Children and Chris took the children on what is becoming his annual trip to Lazy-5 Ranch for a few hours so I could start-but-not-finish school planning. It's a good trip for a dad because the children are all strapped in, down to the two-year-old, but they think it's such a fun time.
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| School planning with a baby asleep in my arms |
6. Gingerbread Houses
The children built gingerbread houses: two of foam and one of candy (and all from kits). I bustled around the house doing chores, merely observing the building or negotiating architectural disputes (and Daddy did a lot of the latter)
7. Big Boy
Thomas may be hanging out in his infant brother's crib . . .
. . . but at two-and-a-half years old, he's a Bigger Boy every day! One of my favorite Christmas "gifts" was that Thomas potty trained over the Christmas break. He was so easy and so accomplished that if he had been my first baby, I'd have developed a swelled head and paraded around with certainty about How to Potty Train a Child. But the reality is that I've now had two toddlers--one girl, one boy--who essentially potty trained themselves and three--one girl, two boys--who were brutally hard, and they were all in mixed up order.
Anyway, moms of a large family know what exciting freedom it is to have only one (and not two or three) in diapers!
For more 7 Quick Takes Friday, check out This Ain't the Lyceum (which is back online).
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