A real Christmas miracle - a good picture with Santa!

When she was smaller, Anna was terrified of strangers, especially men with facial hair and people dressed up in costumes.  Since a mall Santa Claus has all of those characteristics, I never really had it in me to torture the child publicly and try to force her to sit in Santa's lap.  When Lizzie came along, Anna was only 2 and a half and still had the same fears.  While Lizzie appeared to be pretty fearless pretty quickly, I couldn't take one kid to see Santa and not the other.  So Santa has never really been part of our holiday tradition.

Then today, on a whim, I decided that we should go.  I had taken Lizzie to Regency Square with me earlier in the day, and there had been no line for Santa at all.  The mall had been pretty much empty, and that's when it occurred me to me that we should try it this year.  So, after picking Anna up from preschool, the whole family headed out around 4pm.  (Well, headed out after Daddy put a hat on Anna guaranteed to generate static electricity and make her hair stick up, and spoilsport Mommy made her take it off and sent evil looks in Daddy's direction.) 

When we were out of the driveway, Anna realized she had left her two princess dolls in the house.  We were committed at this point, however, and I wasn't going to go back to the house for two dolls.  I regretted this about 5 minutes later when I found myself threatening to turn the van around and not going to see Santa at all due to the crying and whining emanating from the back seat.  Anna finally calmed down about the time I got worked up at seeing the traffic around Regency.  The mall was no longer empty.

After negotiating through a maze of lumbering SUVs and small darting cars, I backed into a parking space and we headed inside.  We waited in line for about 30 minutes.  There was a Polar Express theme, which was actually nice and distracted the girls, especially when it got to the part where they could make the train whistle blow.  Then we walked through an enormous snow globe where we were attacked by large flakes of "snow" that made my kids look like they had bad cases of dandruff.  Why do you put something like that almost immediately before a kid is going to take a picture?  Throughout the line, Lizzie would periodically get confused and grab the leg of the guy in front of us, or attempt to squeeze through a crack in the display to escape into the mall.  Miraculously, we ended up at the front of the line with both kids in a decent mood (and without dandruff).

When it was our turn, Lizzie smiled at Santa and tried to speed walk right by him.  However, continuing the miracle theme, Lizzie let me sit her on Santa's lap, Anna leaned against him, and getting the perfect picture only took two tries!

Afterward we celebrated by picking up an ice cream cake at the Baskin Robbins in the food court, and then headed home through the insanity of the parking lot (where some guy did a very illegal manuever right in front of me and there was actually a cop there to see it and pull him over - another miracle!), and actually made it home by 5:45.  And speaking of the cake, we haven't eaten it yet, so you can guess what I'm going to do right now :)

What do you mean, it snowed?

On Monday 12/13 we got our first snow of the season!  Of course, it was entirely unexpected and I was entirely unprepared.  I checked the weather forecast before I went to bed Sunday night, and there was no mention of snow at all.  I woke up Monday morning, puttered around a bit getting ready, and didn't actually look out a window until 8:30am.  When I did, I saw a nice blanket of snow, had some sort of verbal reaction, and the girls came running to see.  They were so excited... and then they were so upset when I told them they couldn't go play in it yet because they didn't have boots.

So, figuring better late than never, I piled them into the van and off we went to find boots.  I knew KMart and WalMart did not have boots in Lizzie's size because I had looked before, and Kohl's disappointed me with loads of kid fashion boots and no real wet weather boots to speak of.  We ended up at Saxon shoes, and while spending more than anticipated, all three of us walked out with new boots, and the girls tested them in every puddle and pile of snow they could find between the store and the van.

Back at home the snow adventure had to be delayed a little longer - Anna has dance on Mondays, so they had to eat lunch, go to dance, come back, change clothes, wonder why it was taking me so long to let out the extra cloth in last year's snowsuits (great LL Bean feature, but plan for it to take a few minutes when you get around to doing it), then pile into their snowsuits, coats, hats, gloves, boots... and finally they were out the door!

And yes, it looks like I dressed them for the arctic when there was just less than an inch of snow outside, but I learned my lesson last year about kids, snow, and wet clothes.  At least they could both move all limbs without looking like the kid in A Christmas Story!

They had a ton of fun outside, throwing snowballs, making snow angels (which turned into "grass angels" pretty quickly, since there was so little snow), and making a "snowgirl". 

Afterwards we came inside, warmed up in the living room, and had some hot chocolate (really just warm chocolate for the girls), and talked about all the stories we were going to tell Daddy when he got home.  And while they were a tad overdressed for the outdoor experience, at least I know we're prepared if it really does snow again this season!

Family bingo - it's not about the presents, it's about the game!

Sunday evening we hosted the 2010 Goodman Family Christmas Bingo party!  This is a Goodman family tradition that is taken very seriously - Seth's family is quite competitive.  After dinner, and after celebrating our nephew's December birthday, we get down to business.  Seth's dad is the bingo caller, and this family is never as quiet as when everyone is actively listening to the numbers being called.  Seriously, you could hear a pin drop in a room of 17 people.  (In addition to the pin, you could also hear the screaming of the younger kids upstairs as they played some kind of princess-tea-party-thomas-the-train-monster tag - but I digress.)

The competition is between family units.  My mom came from Charlottesville to join the fun.  Each family brings three gifts, and each time a family wins a game they can go pick a gift.  At the end of 15 games, the person with the most wins gets the trophy.  Oh yes, there's a trophy.  I told you this family takes their bingo seriously!

This year's game was a momentous ocassion for two reasons: 1) we hosted the entire extended Goodman family in our new house (and they all fit!), and 2) for the first time ever, Seth and I won the trophy!  With my mom's help of course :)

Now, of course there's been plenty of smack talk that we possibly cheated, since we were keeping score, or that something was rigged in our favor, but I have to point out that there is a precedent for the hosting family to win the trophy, even several years in a row (<cough> Josh!), AND my score keeping was being moderated by other family members.  I also need to point out that Seth and I have never won, so it was high time for the trophy to come home with us!!

So here we are, basking in the glory of throwing a successful party and emerging victorious from a furious bingo session.  Maybe we'll host it again next year :)

Gingerbread Village of Doom

I'm pretty sure I haven't made a gingerbread house since I was a kid, and so it seemed like an awesome idea to get a gingerbread house kit when we were raiding Michael's for deals two Saturdays ago.  You could get one big house, a village, a gingerbread tree, or a gingerbread man.  Anna chose the village.  Next time, I'll know better.

So we decided to do the village today as a fun afternoon activity.  You should know that 1) I don't bake or decorate cakes or pastries, and 2) I am not an artsy person.

To start, you had to prepare the icing from a mix they provided, just adding water.  They said to use a mixer on low for a minute, then medium for two more minutes until the icing was the consistency of toothpaste.  I had the mixer on low for all of five seconds, and my kitchen counter was subsequently covered in icing mix powder.  It apparently likes to float.  After trying it in a larger bowl thinking that would help, I gave up and mixed it by hand.  I should have taken a picture, but I was covered in powder and wasn't really thinking about it at the time.

Next, we had to assemble the houses.  First, I would like to point out that the pictures on the box are larger than the actual houses.  Mix icing, a 4 year old, a 2 year old, and tiny gingerbread pieces, and you might be able to imagine the chaos that ensued.  The gingerbread pieces were in five sheets (one for each building) that you had to snap apart.  There was also no guide to which pieces were roof or sides, therefore our chapel has a "skylight" on one side because the wall doesn't reach the roof, and the icing had set on most of the pieces before I figured that out.  And at this point, I was almost ready to quit and make Seth finish it with them when he got home!

You will also notice on the box that not all of the icing is white.  Some is green and some is red.  Some coloring packets were included, and you were supposed to mix some icing and the colors in separate bowls for use in decorating.  Considering the state of my kitchen, my kids, and my sanity, I decided to skip that step.

The final step was the decorating, and this was actually the best part.  Gum drops, gum drop trees, and sprinkles were included.  Anna wanted to decorate the doors like they had done on the box.  That ended after one door because those colored dots are, in fact, round sprinkles.  If you have ever tried to place tiny sprinkles one by one, you can guess why we stopped :)  Lizzie wanted to drop sprinkles on "snow" roofs and pick the colors of the gum drops.  So while ours don't really look as fancy as the ones on the box, I think they turned out pretty well, although I don't think any of them meet building codes.  If we do this next year, though, we will get one big house, not five little ones!

Toy Lift 2010

The girls and I spent the weekend of Dec 3 - 5 in Charlottesville for two good reasons: Grandma wanted quality time with her girls, and I was volunteering at the Toy Lift. For those of you who don't know what the Toy Lift is, you can learn a little bit more here, but suffice it to say I have been involved since 1997, when Dad asked me to come help box toys for kids on a December Saturday that turned out to be 80-some degrees. I got my service fraternity involved the next year, and I think I've only missed one or two years since then. (Side note: I was happy to see APO represent again this year - you can recognize the APOers either by their sweartshirts, or jeans covered in paint!) Dad was on the board for a while, and was very involved with it. It took a lot out of him each year, but he kept going back because he loved helping kids, and he especially loved making sure kids got bikes.

I think he would have been proud of us this year. We filled wish lists for 3600 kids across Albemarle, Charlottesville, Orange, Green, and Buckingham. Over the years the system has evolved, and this year was the most efficient I've seen it. There were some awesome volunteers, including some high school students who were doing community service for a course they were taking, and ended up doing much more than their required 10 hours and coming back the next day for more because they loved doing it so much. Toy Lift is something that sucks you in - you get started, and before you know it you've spent over 2 hours checking and labeling boxes but it only feels like it has been 20 minutes. And you just keep coming back for more. I hope it is something I can get Anna and Lizzie involved in when they get older, to help teach them the joy of giving back, and to give them a connection to their Granddaddy. You can see pictures from this year, and from the first snow of the year, in our December Picasa album.