Christmas 2015

A totally unprecedented Christmas this year!

Hush's family was having a reunion in AZ and I am too pregnant to travel so he took Betty Lou with him to see that side of the family. Knowing they'd be gone I didn't want to have Christmas without all the children together so I talked Houdini into taking MJS for the holiday. That left me alone at home for 24 hours of relaxation! 

Of course we did our own family Christmas before everybody left and that was a great success. And it's been pretty difficult to be away from my tiny baby. I think I've only spent maybe two nights away from her in the past. The big kids and I miss her terribly and worry constantly, but all of her proof of life's have come back positive.  Hush is taking good care of her.

Baby girl has a consistent reaction to Santa: please get me out of here.

Christmas morning alone in my clean house reading my book, 35 weeks pregnant.  Once in a lifetime occurrence for me. I am never alone. I have forgotten what I do when I'm alone. Turns out, it's jobs.  This week I organized:

Linen closet

Hairbow drawer

Bathroom drawers

Nursery set up

Game shelves

Mimi's closet

All of the toys

Mimi's drawers

Silas' drawers

Lego area

Piano area

Bills

I'm hyper project girl. It was like spring cleaning and nesting all rolled into one.  I love when the clean out/throw away hormones hit.

The week leading up to Christmas looked like this:

M8, J7, S5, BL15 mon. BL would like to quit Santa's lap, please.

Amazon pulled this fast one. It was delivered right around dinner and guess who was the first to the door? Mimi. I tried to tell her it was for homeless kids but she didn't buy it. Eventually I caved and not only did I tell her we'd bought it for her because she has been such an excellent helper this year and totally earned it, but I let her open it and set it all up days before Christmas.  She was thrilled!

On Sunday evening Hush and I surprised the kids with "Fake Christmas Eve".  We had a fancy ham dinner with martinelli's and then went on a drive to look at the Christmas lights.  While we were out the kids spotted Santa's reindeer and became convinced that even though it was fake Christmas maybe Santa would come early.

At home we did our Christmas Eve program including the nativity, Christmas songs charades, a few Christmas stories, birthday cake for Jesus and then "Twas the Night Before Fake Christmas".  It was just our little family (little is relative, there were six of us) and it was super chill because there was no actual Christmas stress.  I loved celebrating the holiday this way!

The holy family.

Wise men presenting baby Jesus gifts.

Crèche 

Hush likes events to look iconic so he demanded a mug to gesticulate, dad glasses and slippers and to have the children sitting by the fire while he read Twas the Night Before Christmas.  I enjoy his anachronistic little tableaux.

Then we did the Christmas Eve routine with cookies and carrots and a note and the parents staying up far later than anticipated.

And Santa DID come!  This was the best stairs shot I could get.

One gift highlight were the sumo bumper boppers. Fun to crash into one another.

Present highlights:  Silas got a bike, Jude got tons of Legos, Mimi got the bedding set and alarm clock she wanted, Lou got tons of balls, Hush got a meditation seat, I got a megaphone.

And BL scavenged chocolate from all of the stockings which landed her in the bath.

Helmets absolutely required for those things.  They lasted about 6 hours. 

And Grandma Pam sent some homemade jammies that match her cousins.

Kids at the condo with Dx and his gf and her family. Battleship battles begin.

My favorite toy is Structures. Just 200 pine planks that you can build into anything. Teaches kids about balance and architecture, kinda like blocks kinda like Legos you can reuse indefinitely.

November to Remember

November was a pretty idyllic fall.  There were leaves, some early snow, delicious Thanksgiving, and Pam's DCMT show.  That was the order of events in real life, but the pictures below are all out of order and I cannot be bothered to rearrange them in this rather restrictive publishing format.  

Highlights of November included a make-it-up-as-you-go-along family competition, reading by the fire, making food together taking advantage of the fall produce, and having a child prodigy take some family pictures (included herein are the outtakes, taken by me).

We spent the week of Thanksgiving in CA and Hush joined us on Wednesday and eventually drove us all back home.  So that's the context for the disordered pictures.

Seward Street Slides adventure in SF.  They are fast!

When we arrived in CA Jude was sick and very contagious so he had to be fully covered in order to play with cousins.  He's better now.  The md said it was "not strep" but gave him antibiotics anyway and they worked.  Who knows.

7+ months pregnant and wearing my most comfy clothes.  Shirt says "Rizzo's Got a Bun in the Oven."  Hair is a pale purple tinted color achieved by bleach and then a purple toner.  

Betty Lou is in her storage phase which is one of my favorites.  14 month olds like to see how many things they can carry in their arms.  It's funny.

Jude, 7, is a reading machine.  We reserve his favorite books in the library and he reads them in a night.  If I don't go down there and turn off his light he will read all night long.

In SF on the Mosaic stairs.  Beautiful installation, amazing views.  Add it to your must visit SF activities.

Rock Challenge

I mentioned the Family Competition.  Some times in Utah it's too cold to play at the park or go on a hike but it's not raining and you want to be outside somehow or another on a Sunday afternoon.  This Sunday I invented a Competition wherein the three big kids did challenges that Hush and I made up.  The challenges included singing the most lyrics to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, being the fastest through an obstacle course, answering trivia, shotgunning a Root beer, sticking your face/hands in the snow for the longest time possible, and building a rock tower using the most rocks.  The winner was rewarded with a UnBirthday cake and allowed to boss everybody around for the rest of the night.  Mimi and Si tied.

Freezing hands challenge

Snowface challenge

Mimi won for duration and artistic rendering of her own face.

Mimi made this whole Blue Apron meal by herself because I was too tired to stand up.  I love cooking with her!

This is my new uniform.  All the info you need, right there.  All pregnant women need one.

Lou is the fall queen.

Babies in sweaters kill me.  She looks like a tiny baby elf!

Sometimes I get bored planning meals so I just use all the produce in the fridge to serve to my omnivores.  The best way I've found to get them to eat anything is by closed eyes taste tests where they guess what color tomato it is or what type of vegetable.  

On the Friday after Thanksgiving I very unwisely planned a family car trip to the great Sequoias over in Marin.  It took us over an hour to get there and then there was absolutely no parking.  I had to let Hush out with the kids to do a run through of the trees for 20 minutes while I circled.  Then we piled back in the car, drove through Sausalito, drove over the GG bridge and finally unloaded again at Ocean Beach.  Jude met with tragedy at Ocean beach so we called Cam and Alex to meet us in the Haight to give Jude some dry clothing.  He refused it and we marched up and down Haight Street looking for replacement clothes and finding nothing.  We were then assaulted by the local color: a naked dude wearing a Santa hat covering his unmentionables kept sauntering by.  I normally have no problem with nudity but nudity for shock purposes bugs me.  Mimi was sure alarmed.
Remember next time: don't spend the whole day in the car the day before a roadtrip back to Utah.  Dumb me.  Bad planning.

Family activity that landed us at Ocean Beach.  You can imagine how this ended.

With Jude wiping out and getting drenched by freezing ocean water.  Hilarious!  He didn't think so.

Bowling on Thanksgiving, as per tradition.

BL sitting in the big red chair at Grandpa's house.  I use this chair to gauge my children's growth.

Silas has been having a hard time learning how to smile on command. 

One of Si's practice smiles.  He rolls his top lip under.  Still cute.

Three soon to be middle children on the Mosaic stairs.

Re: You being blog blocked

Note. When I took my blog entirely offline for a few months the notice read something to the effect of "You are not invited to read this blog." My friends read that as "you are locked out bc Nor secretly hates you and there are fun things happening that you are missing. Also she's writing mean stuff about you." Neither of these things were true and blogger needs to let me alter the "away" message. Nobody could read it.

 

I read too many horror stories about children and was trying to protect them from the big bad world. For now I'm just going to make sure they are infected with a highly deadly communicable disease that will only transmit to those who wish them ill or try to harm them. They are also microchipped and heavily armed. So stay away bad guys! Unclean unclean!

👆🏿unrelated last year's Christmas card.

Names. Round Five.

Well, here we are again.  Round five in the pick the perfect name game.  I would like to say it gets easier every time but it absolutely does not.  It just gets harder.  Every child's name choice weighs on me for the nine months leading up to the birth and continuing through the next 90 years of life afterward.  (Btw, this post will be interspersed with pictures from Halloween because I feel like it.)

Glittering up my sparkling daughter.

I've posted before about my naming standards, many of which I have broken for one reason or another but still are a pretty good guide for me while I name babies.  I often forget when I name a kid where I will be when I get to name another one, how my name choices will effect my future name choices.
You can see why I sweat it so much.  I love names.  I love thinking about how names were chosen and why.  I love to hear how people put them together.  I have found that I gravitate toward people who have named their children well, but maybe that has more to do with education levels, socioeconomics and common culture.

Jude wanted to be Cousin It.  I made this epic creation out of a tiki umbrella and a tomato cage.  

So I've compiled some advice based on my experiences in naming.  I've made some mistakes with some of my name choices, but overall I am proud of my naming.  I wish I had thought of a few of these things before I named my first baby (although I would have named her Miranda, nonetheless).  I might have saved her middle name for another kid because it's such a beautiful name.
I have one friend who has as many kids as I do and shares a lot of the same naming expectations.  She was marveling that this was our ninth time through the name reel together.  I also include some of the reasoning developed with my sisters in our consultations while naming 18 children.  We aren't perfect namers but we have experience and the perspective of how our naming efforts have paid off as credentials.
Naming is a big deal.  Take it seriously.

Some information for neophyte namers.

1.  The first name is a biggie.  So are all the others, but the first name sets the trend from which you can't significantly deviate.  I recommend picking a name that has some out there nicknames.  I wanted to call my firstborn Mimi but that isn't weighty enough.  Mimi is a nickname for Miriam but I wanted a Shakespeare name so named her Miranda instead.

Mimi and her buddy Lorelai in a rad astronaut costume

2.  If you're picking a genre make sure that there are a lot of other names that work with that genre.  Shakespeare has lots of names I like but not all of the characters are worth being a namesake.  I can't name a kid MacBeth.  But there are plenty in that group that I still like: Juliet, Ariel, Cassio, Orlando, Helena.  Some of the characters I absolutely love have kinda hard names: Desdemona, Mercutio, Thaisa, Hermia, Hero, Portia, Cordelia etc.  Then some names are great names and horrible characters: Tybalt, Regan, Lucretia, Cressida, Iago.

Church Trunk or Treat

3.  Expand your genre.  If you name your kid Arrow (love that name) that gives you a pretty big genre of naturey word names: Posey, Birdie, Phoenix could all be siblings.  But from Arrow you could also expand your genre to all word names and siblings could be Honor, Sunshine, Bay, Kismet.  I like that category.  But I've boxed myself out of it to some degree.  Similar with Bible names.  You name one kid Daniel he can't have a sibling named Adonai.  But he doesn't only have to have siblings Peter, Paul and Mary.  You can do other Bible associations: Eden, Lydia, Abigail, Amos, Asa, Canaan.  It might be a severe departure from Daniel but at least they'd make sense as a group.

Halloween = Treats.  BL 13 months

4. Play it safe and take a risk.  You're naming this kid at least two names so you have some wiggle room to play around.  If like me you're not brave enough to name your kid Ophelia but really love the name throw it in as a middle name.  Betty Lou's middle name is Ophelia.  If she feels like Betty or LouLou don't suit her as an adult she has a weighty name in the middle she can use.  Don't waste this opportunity with a filler name: Lee, May, Belle, Ann, Rose, James.  I've discovered that I love my risk names even better than my relatively safe names.

Silas wanted to be the Blob.  This is what we came up with.  Also mistaken for a fart cloud.

5.  Don't blow all the good names at once.  I could easily have used Mimi's middle name Giselle for a first name.  I would like Willa to be an option but I've already used William.  You generally know from the beginning of your very first pregnancy what names you could maybe use and what names are just too far out there for your kid's first name.  Willa was an option, so was Willow, now neither are usable for me.

Halloween parade, M 3rd grade.

6.  Plan ahead with starting letters by picking the name you like the very most from that letter.  Even if names are totally different naming siblings with the same first letter always sounds singsongy and repetitive, unless you're planning to call them by a nickname that doesn't start with that letter (Elizabeth called Beth could have sister Eleanor).  I won't use Bianca, Bowie, Jonah nor Milo even though I love those names.

Unicorn faction.  Baby 5 six months in utero.  At Hush's office trick or treat.

7.  Also plan ahead with overall name sounds.  Silas can't have a brother named Miles.  Jude can't have a brother named Hugh.

8.  I am on the fence about family names.  They are safe except for when the family member you named your kid after disappeared when said kid was three days old.  It was of no import to me to be named after an aunt I hardly knew.  But my sister was named after another aunt who had no daughters and lavished Ellie with fancy things.  All of my kids have family names that connect them to the other generations so I definitely use inherited names but I don't think it's absolutely necessary.  It's a tradition in my family.

Dear Halloween party hosts, please don't serve my kids messy food that will ruin their costumes the first time they wear them.

9.  Do your homework.  No baby is born into a vacuum and there is so much information out there about trends.  You have a golden opportunity when you name a baby to start them on the path toward their identity.  I can't imagine what a different person I'd be had my mom named me from the top ten names the year I was born.  Can you see me as a #1 Jennifer? #2 Jessica or #3 Amanda?  The top five girl names of 2014 were Sophia, Emma, Olivia, Ava and Isabella.  Boys names in 2014 were Jackson, Aiden, Liam, Lucas and Noah.  Chances are I'm offending a significant number of you but you had fair warning as most of these names have also been in the top 10 for the last five years.  On the other hand, some people don't mind having popular names.  Maybe they were one of three Jennys in their class in elementary school and enjoyed the instant name gang and want to pass that on to their kids.  I can dig that, as long as you're aware of what you're doing.

Now if you can believe it there are still some wonderful names available for baby number 5.  My favorite naming resources are www.babynamewizard.com  Please check to see how the name you're considering is rising or falling in popularity.  Nymbler also helps you avoid uber popular names. www.nymbler.com.  www.ohbabynames.com is also a great site that tells you all the associations/famous people with the name.

BUT WHAT IF I SCREW IT UP???