Monday, December 09, 2013

Let it SNOW (please!)

Did I already tell you Paul tried to eat one of the salt dough ornaments? He did. It was so funny - he came upstairs like "LIZ, why are those cookies so HARD and so SALTY?" It took me five minutes to answer because I was laughing so hard.

But honestly, that's what you GET when you don't LISTEN.

The big girls had a two hour delay this morning - perfect since we were out so late last night - and it's not looking like tomorrow is going to be a school day. It's going to start snowing at 6am and go all day. I have two extremely excited girls...and a baby who is along for the ride. She's excited; she just doesn't know it yet.

We're looking forward to breaking in the snow pants and snow boots we bought like three months ago. =)

And we are looking forward to making our first batch of gingerbread people! The dough is made and chilling in the refrigerator right now! I use this recipe from Martha (with 1.5x the cinnamon) and we'll decorate our little dudes and chicks with this icing. Some of the finished folks are going to the meat counter guys at Wegmans who gave us a bunch of new foam trays to use for Bree's holiday party.* Some are being frozen for use with our annual gingerbread house we'll make on the 23rd. And the rest we will eat on our hot chocolate and cookies break from playing in the snow tomorrow!

What sounds like sweetness on my part is really just strategy. If I keep them occupied ALL DAY and wear them out....but only to a certain point, any more than the magic moment and all is lost....the fighting will be minimized. I read this article last week that helped so much - I read that I'm not alone with the sibling fighting being the most frustrating part of parenting. It's so awful, y'all, I can't take it. So I try to avoid it by any means necessary, and if me freezing in the snow and them being able to look forward to cookies, then man, so be it. We may even (gasp) watch a movie. I know.

*Before you, and you know who you are, get all offended and puffy about me saying "holiday party" and not "Christmas party," I would like to remind you of two things:

1) My children go to a wonderful public school in a wonderfully diverse area, where at least a third of Bree's 24-kid kindergarten class is of a religion other than Christian, and they celebrate either Hannukah or Diwali. And I mean, they truly celebrate those holidays. There are several kids in her class who get presents on December 25, but don't attend church and don't observe it as a Christian holiday; they just go with the flow because in America (as in most Western places), Christmas is a cultural holiday. So yeah, we celebrate all the holidays at school because not everyone celebrates Christmas and we're not missionaries, nor are we inconsiderate jerks.

2) I happen to capital-L LOVE the fact that my girls get to spend a large chunk of their day with people who are being raised with different faith systems. We have had some amazing conversations about the differences and similarities between how their friends' families and our family observe our faiths, about how there's not one "right" way to do things, and about how our job here is to learn to love each other and to do the best we can to understand and seek God.


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