The House

This year the girls and Spitz took over decorating the table we bought at the church Christmas dinner. All the tables at the dinner have a host or hostess that is given a list of items needed for the dinner (candles, salad tongs, etc) and told to gat the table ready at certain times. It makes for a beautiful fellowship hall, and the morning before the dinner, everyone tours looking at all the fabulous decorations. Each table is a work of art created by the individual hosts. Some go all out and have fancy china and little gifts, maybe place cards or candy. Others just buy paper plates and make sure all the necessary silverware is set on the table. But the combination of all the different approaches is wonderful.
For the last few years, I've decorated our table (some years we've sat with our Sunday school class and members volunteered to do the tables; recently we've invited enough family along that we needed our own table). Some years, I've gone all out, but the clean up at the end of the night is extensive when you are hauling home big glass pitchers and tons of china. So, other years, I've done simpler, but tried to still be creative on the decorating. This year, Spitz informed me it was his turn.
The trip to the party store was fraught with arguments. We should not have done it just before dinner; that's the worst time of day for moods. But we finally settled on a blue-green table cloth, red plates, clear cups, red candles, all covered with silver snowflakes. We found an extra touch in some streamer-like snowflake decorations to hang from the ceiling (never seen anyone else hang something from the ceiling - we had to stand out!). We also grabbed enough candy to decorate the centerpiece.
Now, Spitz doesn't do things like this halfway. They decided on a gingerbread house, but we didn't go buy one of those kits with the rock hard gingerbread walls already baked. No. Every inch of this house was homemade. He found recipes on the internet. He sought out powdered, pasteurized egg whites to make the icing hard enough to stand, but still edible. They used Andes mints to give the roof shingles (yummy!). Gum drops were supposed to look like lights. They even made some tree and people shaped cookies to set around the house. It was a work of art.
And at the end of the dinner, we ate it! (-:

Christmas Parties!

Ooops, went a week with no update! That's ... bad. d-:

I didn't get around to posting last week because we were just plumb busy. Had to clean the house to host a Christmas party Friday night for our Sunday school class. We ordered up some Cuban food from Havana Rumba for a change and heated some spiced cider. It was the first party where the kids outnumbered the adults - the basement playroom was a bit crazy. Okay, it was insane down there. We should have given the 2 babysitters hazard pay. Everyone seemed to enjoy the night. The white elephant gift exchange was fun. We ended up with a new toilet seat. Woot!

Oh, and another reason we were busy last week was my birthday. I turned 34 on Thursday. Spitz took the day off work to be with me; no alone time because we have an 11-month-old, but a nice day. We ended it with dinner at an Italian restaurant and a trip to Cold Stone Creamery, my favorite ice cream. It threw the girls for a loop that I had no cake with candles, but I don't really need leftover cake around the house anyway.

Sunday night, we had the annual Christmas dinner at church. I'll have to tell you all about our table tomorrow. I'm heading to bed now.

Simultaneous Oh!

Do other married people earn points in their marriage? (Ooooh, after my title, that sounds really bad! O.O ) My husband and I occasionally use the phrase, "Oh, you earned husband points .." for buying dark chocolate or "Do I get wife points for that?" when I have more socks clean just when he runs out. A good parenting move (diffusing a fight at just the right moment, etc.) also is said to earn "Daddy points" or "Mommy points."

Saturday, just after we'd put the kids to bed, Spitz came up behind me and announced, "You got serious wife points today!"

At first I had no idea what he was talking about. He had just been the one putting the older two girls to bed, and I couldn't think of what on earth I'd done.... Then he reminded me of the conversation I'd had with his mother at dinner. "You said 'simultaneous orgasm' to my mother; and I kind of trapped you into it!!"

I'm reading a Christian marriage book called Sexual Intimacy in Marriage. I borrowed it from a friend who bought a whole stack of books at a weekend marriage enrichment getaway. It's been written by a psychiatrist and family counselor and has some very interesting real-life stories of misconceptions about sex and common issues married couples have. Yada, yada, yada; this is not a racy kind of book at all. I was reading a list of common problems out of the book aloud to Spitz and one was talking about a false expectation a particular couple got from their premarital counseling that screwed them up (that's a technical term, of course) for years. My mother-in-law is an ordained Disciples of Christ minister and mentioned that she was meeting someone for premarital counseling.

Spitz made some crack about being careful about what she told them about sex.... I can't even remember how it happened exactly, but all of a sudden, I was stuck telling my mother-in-law that some example couple in a book had gotten the inaccurate impression from their pastor that sex "should" involve simultaneous orgasm.

But, I admit, I could not bring myself to look at her when I said it. I probably lost a few points for that. (-;

Lost Monday

Yesterday, if it wasn't attached to me or screwed down, I lost it.

First, I opened a notice from the bank that said I'd made a deposit that was missing one of the checks listed. (I'd love to say I know without a doubt this was bank error, but I remember seeing Rose pull that deposit out of my purse and grabbing it back from her.)

Then I was preparing to go to the grocery store, had just had the list in my hand, but as I headed for the door discovered it was gone. A quick scouring of the house did successfully find it, but the coupons for Kroger did not turn up until dinner time last night.

When I got to the store, lugged the baby, the 4-year-old, and the re-usable grocery bags in, the list was no where to be found. It never did resurface that time.

Ruth 4.6 had worn in her coat and new pink gloves because it was freezing and snowing outside. Just inside the door, she stripped them off again. I told her to put the gloves into her pockets, but she shivered and decided to wear them. Five minutes later, she pulled them off and tossed them into the bottom of the cart. I moved them and tucked them into her coat as I filled the cart with food. We were almost through the store, just had produce left to go, when I realized that she was entertaining her baby sister (who was laughing uproariously!) by smacking herself in the face with her coat. It was so cute that I had not immediately realized that she'd dumped off the gloves by picking up the coat. One glove was danging just barely on the edge of the cart below Ruth's seat. The other was.... LOST. We walked all through that store searching for that glove. It's a bright pink glove; it should have been easy to spot, but we never did. I finally gave up because I was running short on time to pick May up from school.

As we went through the checkout line, I heard someone say, "I found it!" I looked around fully expecting to see the store employee approaching us with a bright pink glove (not a rational expectation as we hadn't told anyone we were looking for it *shrug*). But no, he was approaching me with a little white baby sock in his hand. He'd been walking around the store looking at baby feet. Rose had lost a sock, and I'd never even noticed it.