Hide all of the stuff! It’s snooping season!
I saw it happening in slow-motion but I couldn’t stop it. He was out of his booster seat and catapulting over the back seat of the van. I grabbed for his ankle and missed. There was a squeal. It was too late.
He’d seen one of his Christmas gifts.
It was my fault, of course, to have left Christmas toys — not even in a bag — in the trunk area of our minivan. But the kids never look back there! It’s usually just a jumble of napkins and fruit snack wrappers and strollers I refuse to sell — even though our youngest is three and a half — because they’re handy for loading up with shopping bags and coats when we walk through the mall.
I’d taken advantage of a Black Friday deal and stashed the gift — a remote-control car — in the back of the van until I could smuggle it into the house. I never expected I’d toss a couple of balloon swords in the back after leaving a birthday party, and that our five-year-old would dive for the balloons as soon as the van had come to a full and complete stop.
It was bad — although it was a wee bit entertaining to see his emotions shoot up and down so quickly. A remote-control car! (Excitement) It’s mine, I know it! (Sheer joy) What do you mean it’s for Christmas?! (Panic) I can’t have it RIGHT NOW?! (Terror) BUT OH PLEASE I WANT IT SO MUCH! (Agony)
The whole ordeal was so fast that hot tears were rushing down his cheeks about 15 seconds after he spotted the toy. I almost — almost — gave it to him because I felt so guilty. But it wasn’t even mine to give (I’d bought it for my sister to give him) so I held strong. No, it’s a Christmas gift. I’m sorry you saw it. You will open it on Christmas morning and you will love it so much. I promise.
He ran inside crying over the injustice that was his five-year-old life, and I hastily threw a blanket over the toy (and the other toy with it that was for his sister).
I felt badly that he’d discovered a gift by mistake because I hated when that happened to me as a kid. I’d see an unwrapped gift in my mom’s closet and be mad at myself for even going in there. I wanted to know, but I didn’t! I wanted to be surprised, but I also liked knowing what I getting. It was … confusing.
Both of our kids have been eagerly peeking into our master closet (a.k.a. Gift Central) in the hopes of spotting their Christmas gifts. They’ve also been begging me to put the gifts under the tree right now (ha!) and pleading for permission to wrap each other’s gifts — um, I wasn’t born yesterday, you adorable little blabbermouths.
But my neighbour says her daughter, who is almost five, won’t go near the basement these days because that’s where her gifts are being stored. She wants to be surprised and she doesn’t want to risk spotting something. How mature, I thought while moving my own shopping bags up to the highest shelf (kids + step-stools).
I think some kids are natural snoopers and others really, truly don’t want their surprises to be ruined. Mine are the former, unfortunately, but I can’t blame them. Christmas is exciting and they have practically zero concept of time.
At least their curiosity is going to nudge me to start wrapping early!
Sixty-five thousand
I hit 65,000 words today on my novel (in my novel?) and it feels … it feels like everything.
Fifty thousand words felt like a huge accomplishment — was it really just 12 days ago? — but now at 65,057 words I feel like I’m getting into actual full-length-novel territory after a lifetime of writing (and discarding) “novellas.”
I’m still getting 1,000+ words down each morning, before the sun rises (as do the kids), but some days I don’t track my progress because I’m hopping from chapter to chapter tying up loose ends, adding in references, switcherooing the order of words, happenings, whole segments of the plot.
I’m getting close to finishing the writing and moving onto the editing, which I suspect is going to be harder but maybe it will be easier? Who knows? I’ve only really gotten to this stage once and it didn’t feel like this. It felt like good writing at the time, but what the hell did I know in 2009?
Will I think this writing is bad someday?
Possibly, but it just feels … different.
DIY pedestal photo frames
Whenever I’m in the frame aisle of a store, I turn into one of those fist-shaking seniors who complain about the high prices. Thirty dollars for that?! Frames used to be reasonably priced back in my day!
But wait, let me put my cane down and tell you what I did about it.
This project actually began months ago, back in the sunny summer mornings of traipsing around yard sales. Oh, how our family loves yard sales! I buy so many items that it usually takes me most of the fall and winter to remake everything, and that’s exactly how I like it.
This past summer, one of the items on my hope-to-find list was a set of candlesticks. I knew I could buy them at the craft store or the Dollar Store, but they were always more than I wanted to pay.
I spotted this black ceramic trio at a yard sale 10 minutes from our house and snapped them up like I’d discovered a rare treasure. They were not priced, and the lady said I could have all three for a dollar. Happily, I dropped a loonie into her palm and thanked her.
The lady next to me commented that they’d look really nice with some new candles in them, but I said, “Oh no, these are actually going to be picture frames.” Well, those ladies looked at me like I was crazy. I tried to explain what I meant, but I don’t think they got it — hopefully they are reading now!
When I got home from yard saleing, I dug through my bin of old photo frames and picked out three flimsy metal ones I’d bought years ago at the drugstore. I needed something nice and lightweight, and these were so plain I didn’t mind sacrificing them. I spread a tarp on the lawn and misted everything — frames and candlesticks — with two coats of pale turquoise spray paint (Krylon’s Blue Ocean Breeze.)
Then I took the pieces inside once they were dry and promptly forgot about them for three months.
Continue reading in my weekly DIY column, My Handmade Home …
Making a point to Power Hour
(Sidebar: Gretchen Rubin, one of my favourite authors, invented the Power Hour to tackle annoying tasks that could be done at any time and therefore she kept putting off. In theory, I should probably use this time to do tasks like addressing cards and de-cluttering closets. But in this very chaotic stage of life, basic house-tidying is probably more necessary.)
But you know, God forbid I learned from that and KEPT IT UP.
I, of course, missed my Thursday Power Hour. But! I kept the following Tuesday Power Hour and even took a couple actual photos to document one of the (many) messes I cleaned up.
I’d done a sewing marathon on Sunday afternoon, kind-of-not-really tidied it up so we could eat dinner there on Sunday evening, and then resumed the mess on Monday while I sewed a new dress for C to wear to her special day at preschool on Tuesday.
So by Tuesday morning, this is exactly what our dining room looked like. It was bad.
I whipped around making piles and then ran up and down both flights of stairs putting everything away. That’s essentially tidying up in a nutshell: piles + running.
Here’s how it looked when I was done …
Ahhhhhh.
Not only did I get rid of all of the crap that didn’t belong (like my frigging serger, which really NEVER belongs in a dining room — even in this house), but I also removed some of the decor. With all of the Christmas stuff right next-door in the living room, it was just … too … much.
I tucked photo frames away and even removed my cool “Give us this day our daily bread” platter that I bought at the thrift store recently because it reminded me of my beloved LIW (Laura Ingalls Wilder). With all of the Christmas chaos, it feels good to have an empty-ish space.
(I also tidied the kitchen and the stairs — mounts of crap waiting to find its home — during Tuesday’s Power Hour, but didn’t stop for photos).
As always, I feel super inspired after a Power Hour but then lose steam, so I’m hoping actually posting about it makes me follow through with regular ones. By scheduling specific times to run around like a maniac doing quick-tidies and putting crap away that would otherwise sit around, I suppose the idea is that I’ll be less chicken-with-my-head-cut-off the rest of the time.
At least, that would be nice!
Tell me! Do you Power Hour? If you want to start, what kinds of tasks would you like to tackle?
Advent Calendars: The Agony and The Ecstasy
I am always relieved when December arrives.
Not because the holidays are coming or because it’s socially acceptable to turn on the outdoor Christmas lights, but because my children will FINALLY stop harassing me every morning about whether or not it’s time to start their advent calendars.
It’s my fault, really, because I always buy their calendars by mid-November — afraid the stores will somehow all run out of those $1.99 rectangles of cardboard containing 15 cents worth of pale tasteless chocolate.
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| A younger C with far less hair (pretty sure this year’s calendar is identical though) |
(Spoiler alert: Those calendars are available well into December, so I should probably learn from my annual mistake and buy next year’s calendars on Nov. 30, 2016.)
Yes, it’s true. I’m the Pinterest Queen, yet we buy those cheap cardboard calendars printed with cartoon characters. People think I’m going to be gluing sequins on adorable tin buckets or blasting little boxes with spray paint or cutting the numbers 1-25 out of glittery cardstock.
Nope, sorry. I grew up punching open those little cardboard doors to find a tiny chocolate shaped like Barbie’s head — my kids are happily doing the same. It’s tradition.
Continue reading in my weekly parenting column, “The Mom Scene.”
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