Holiday round up

Christmas was two full weeks ago, but it feels like six. Is that just me? It feels like it was a whirlwind holiday, totally sneaking up on me, but now looking back, it was ages ago... We had almost a full week of partying nightly with family, then a short break, then a visit from my folks. It really was a wonderful holiday season, one of the best I can remember.

I've thought of half a dozen posts to write since Christmas, but feel like I can't do that or I'm likely never to get pictures from Christmas posted and the tidbits I want to remember written... I've started this post three or four times but always get pulled away and by the time I come back I just have to delete it and start over. If you're reading this, that means this attempt finally took, and I'm so glad! Hopefully future-me won't find it too difficult to figure out why there's no record of the Christmas celebrations in the December 2014 archives, and will find this post easily enough.

Since I'm guessing most of you read Renee's recap of Christmas Eve already, I'm just going to drop a bunch of photos that I don't think she included, and throw in some commentary along the way, and leave it at that. (For the record, most of the Christmas-week photos - the good ones, anyway - were taken by Tom.) Enjoy!

The first couple pictures are from a spur of the moment whole-family dinner at Sherri's house on the Monday before Christmas. I know when I have several house guests, just finished throwing a formal dinner party for a friend's anniversary the night prior, and am prepping for my biggest party of the year in a few days, my first thought is, "I should invite over a few more families, hopefully with at least 9 kids between them, for dinner tonight. Just for fun." Sherri is amazing.

Rachel terrified everyone in turn with the "sewer pup" finger puppets that live in one of Grandma's kitchen drawers. Is anything as much fun as a drawer full of random cups, spoons, bowls and toys in Grandma's kitchen?

Some of you already saw my beautiful deviled egg platter on Instagram, but I thought I'd share it here as well so I could add more description. Sherri does basically everything for the Christmas Eve party, but a couple things she is willing to farm out. This was my first year on the egg assignment. In my family, we just fill them and leave them plain, or maybe sprinkle a little paprika, but the in-laws have a history of a tangier filling and there are always capers involved, as well as paprika. I figured I'd mix it up a little, so made the standard style with capers you see in the middle. Then there's a ring of my family's standard, with paprika for pretties. The outer ring was a new recipe for Sriracha deviled eggs, because Nathaniel and his brothers (and Renee's boys) are all adventurous with spicy foods. I thought they were all delicious (okay, I didn't eat any of the capers, but the filling was good on that one, when I tested it) and the plate was clean at the end of the night. Success.

Sisters-in-law are the best! Liz arrived moments later to make it even more lively. We missed you, Anna, Leah and April!

You'll notice that I dressed my crew on Christmas Eve in the outfits from Tom and Laura's wedding. Since I totally forgot to attempt a family photo that evening, please refer back to the one in this post. It's way better than I'd have managed anyway.

I love that a couple of my kids are old enough to be nearly autonomous during these big dinners. Here, the girls are making their first course pass at the buffet, though they cheated and went for ham with their fish course (not shocking, since they both skip over the pickled herring and pâté).

Rachel's dinner consisted primarily of pickles.

Nathaniel and Ruth performed "Good King Wenceslas" for the family.

Notice that Marianne is about to flick Ruth in the head. {sigh} Sisters.

I love the look on Peter's face during the gift game the cousins played. He loved being part of the big kid game, even though he didn't know his left from right, so kept mixing things up.

After Christmas Eve at Sherri's there was much elfing to be done at home. I wrapped up my work at about 2am. Nathaniel came to bed much later, as the cd+gs for the little karaoke machine you see pictured in front of the stockings turned out to be more complicated to burn than he'd realized, and Santa had to do some coding to make it work. Oy. I'm glad Santa has mad computer skills. (Also, I wish manufacturers offered more karaoke cds with zero questionable songs on them. You can either get Disney songs - fun, but I like some variety - or pop music with several good songs and then something like Baby Got Back, that I'd rather not give to my kids just yet. If anyone out there has found a great collection of pop songs suitable for kids, let me know!)

On Christmas morning, I sequestered the girls - who jumped out of bed immediately upon the clock ticking to 7:15am - to the kitchen to let Peter sleep a little longer. I gave them juice as a weak consolation... Then Peter joined us and I kept them ALL there while we waited on Nathaniel to finally get out of bed. I'm sure it felt like an eternity to them, but I think it was probably all of 7:25 when they finally were freed to find their gifts.

The gifts from Nathaniel's annual trip with the kids to the Dollar Tree are always one of the most entertaining parts of the morning. The feathery mask was Meg's gift to Marianne.

Marianne and Ruth, testing out the new Karaoke machine that Santa brought for the kids.

Sleepy Rachel, with her new doll, Mali (and one of the crayons Marianne got for her). Mali hasn't replaced Bunny, by any means, but Rachel's a big fan.

The rest of Christmas day was spent eating cinnamon rolls and candy, lying around, playing with toys and taking naps, and then at Sherri's big extended family party hosted by Nathaniel's Uncle Richard. It was a relaxed, lovely sort of Christmas day.

The following day, the adults got a night out! Renee and I had scheduled a night to go out with Tom and Laura, without children, to make sure we got some quality time in with them. We extended the invite to the rest of the adults in the family, since they're all so darned fun, and as it turned out everyone but Liz (work) and Mary (sick) were able to join us!

More sister-in-law fun, this time with sangria instead of champagne. We're flexible like that.

We even stopped at a bar after dinner. We were so "out on the town"! Woohoo! Nathaniel and I don't go out nearly often enough. Tom ordered a captain and coke for me (fond reminiscences of happy hours at the Outback when we all lived in Colorado), and inexplicably told the waitress it was my birthday, so she wished me well when she delivered the drink. Ha! Most of the crowd ordered the bar's specialty, the moscow mule.

Because we are one crazy family that just can't get enough of one another - and because Nathaniel and I were the only ones who had a sitter with time constraints - everyone came back to our place after dinner for tea, coffee, and totally-unnecessary-but-still-consumed snacks.

Meg had given Nathaniel a little tub of blue goo with a spider in it from the Dollar Tree. I have no idea what it was supposed to be... but Nathaniel and Sam played with it for a long, long time that evening. I'm glad we know what to get Sam for his next birthday.

The final family gathering was Nathaniel's birthday dinner the following night, which I hosted. Tom and Laura left town that day, and Liz and Whit were back to work in Omaha, but even a small family party is an affair to remember around here (and we had Sam, Mary and Francis to break up the monotony of our typical Lincoln crew).

Why does the phrase "can we do a silly picture?" always have to be followed immediately by fingers up noses and in ears, mouths and eyes? Yick. Surely there's a more creative "silly" option.

38. It's my annual four months during which I'm married to an older man.

Nathaniel requested gingerbread cake with fresh whipped cream. I used Joy of Cooking's Gingerbread Applesauce Cake, which is always delightful, and I made cinnamon nutmeg whipped cream to top it. The powdered sugar stencil-style numbers were something I thought of literally as the cakes were baking (during dinner, so I could serve them warm - I don't recommend trying to do this often, as it was sort of stressful to get the timing right). I thought the two square cakes, while delicious, were boring to look at. The numbers turned out well, if still a little dull.

That concluded our week of family fun! The following weekend my parents came, but I took almost no photos other than the couple that have shown up on Instagram. They brought the good toys with them - lots of stuff on the kids' Christmas lists that we weren't going to buy ourselves. Like this:

Oh. Wait, no. I totally did NOT ask for that. To quote my emailed list of gift ideas to my mom, under ideas for Rachel, "a ride on/push toy, maybe?... we prefer something simple, without a lot of bells or whistles" My mom couldn't quit laughing when Rachel opened the package and discovered that she could push a dozen different buttons for different musical instrument sounds and songs. I always know this is a possibility when I ask my folks for a gift for the kids. To be fair, though, it's been the hit of the gifts, and is played with all day long. Also to be fair, my email continued on, "but i realize kids DO like the bells and whistles, so whatever." I figure if I'm asking them for gifts for the kids, I ought to leave a little freedom in the search. This is what that earned me. (My mom knows I'm just giving her a hard time. Mostly. We are 100% appreciative that they bring the fun with them whenever they come.)

And there you have it! My Christmas break recap, finally completed. Up next, maybe I'll manage a year-in-review of 2014 or something equally New Year's-ish, just a couple weeks after the fact! Or maybe I'll just go back to my typical sporadic anecdote posting. Time will tell. On the day after Epiphany, I wish you a very Merry Christmas, one last time!