The Not Important Important Details

I said that we decorated the tree, but I forgot about the most exciting part! The first year that Steve and I got married we got some red, gold, and white ball ornaments for the tree. Then, slowly, we added things here and there, until the past two three years we have mainly had a white, silver, and gold tree - with a little bit of orangey-brown, one of my most favorite colors of all time. This year, as we pulled out all our tree decorations we decided, at 9:30pm, that we needed an update. This is one of the great things about living here. We called upstairs and found out that Kevin and Gennae were home, in exchange for some homemade apple pie (and which they normally do this for us out of the kindness of their hearts, regardless of apple pie or not) they took a monitor for us and we were able to run out to Target. Also, kudos to Target for having extended holiday hours and being open until 11:00pm so that people like Steve and I can decide last minute to change our tree decorations.

What we did was add blue to the orangey-brown that we already had and ended up with a tree that has my all time current favorite color combination right now, blue and orangey-brown. When we buy a house I really want to have an orange and blue bathroom or bedroom, it's my fav. I love our tree results. Love.

I also, for the first time ever, put candy canes on the tree. I don't like candy canes, nor do I really like them on my tree, but I knew that the girls would be excited about them. And they were/are. Oh, the sacrifices of a mother. :)

The Holiday

That's what the British call it, right? When you go away for a weekend or have a break from work it's called "holiday"? Like, this last weekend we had a mini-holiday. I think. I guess my sister-in-law can let me know if I am wrong, seeing as she was born in England and all. Anyway, we did have a mini-break or...whatever.

As I mentioned, Steve had the weekend off and we officially did just about nothing. I mean, we did a lot, but, really, we did nothing.

Friday morning Steve took off to have some time alone. Tryn had a friend pick her up and bring her to Disney on Ice where she got to see life size princesses skating around - pretty much mini-heaven for her. Berlin and I stayed home and did all sorts of important things like play with Play-dough, dress up babies, and read books.


We also did really important things like write letters to Santa to tell him what we want for Christmas.




Steve helped Tryn draw pictures of what she wants. She wants glass slippers (check!), the new Snow White movie (check!), a ball, and a doll with a pink dress. Also, though, when I asked her what she really wanted, if she could have one thing, she said, "Well...a boat. Because I don't have a little boat." ?!?! I don't know, don't ask me. Berlin wants a green dress, glass slippies, a princess, and a book. Unfortunately, we forgot to take the letters out of the mailbox today before the mailman came and he actually took the letters. I have no idea what he is actually going to do with them, I intended to keep them. *Sigh*

We also played with princess stickers, of course. How can a day be complete without princess stickers?! It can't.

I took a picture of Berli's shiner so I could show you all. Sad :( This was the second day, the third day actually looked the worst though as far as color goes. Poor baby.

And Berlin practiced being a good mommy to Teddy.


One fun activity that we did do on Saturday morning was take the girls to the new movie The Princess and the Frog. It's the new obsession in our house, of course. Tryn's new favorite princess is Princess Tiana from the movie. It was Berli's first time seeing a movie in a theater and she pretty well. Her max attention span is about 45 mins to an hour for a movie, then she just gives up and gets bored. It was the same in the theater. Thankfully, she loves popcorn and ate more than anyone else (except me:p), it was a great distraction.

On Sunday we stayed home all day. Steve and I watched our first whole Vikings game together this season. It was perfect.

The end.

Oh, Just Thursday

I asked Tryn what she wanted to do tonight and she said play Hide and Seek, so we did. The first time she hid I found her in plain view sitting on top of my bed. The second time she was laying on the couch giggling with her hands over her eyes (so I couldn't see her). It was hilarious. I think we need to work on the goal of that game a little bit. Especially since every time I hid and she couldn't find me right away the panic in her voice rose in serious levels. Like I said, it was humorous.

One of my children got her first black eye yesterday. Can you guess who? :) Yes, it was Berlin. She was climbing into her chair for dinner trying to "do it self!" and attached the tray to her chair. Well, she fell off the chair onto the floor and her face connected with the tray that was still, sort of, in her hands. She had a huge welt on her cheek bone right below her left eye (thank goodness she didn't hit her eye) and today the underneath part of her eye is purple-ish. So sad. The term "act like a baby" really shouldn't be used as much as it is though, she is acting far better about a black eye than I would. I don't even think she remembers at this point. She didn't mention it all night. I would've.

So, that's it. It's just Thursday. And I am very excited about the weekend!! Steve finally has another weekend off!! I don't know if you remember, but I blogged about the last weekend he had off. It was Labor Day weekend back in September. Steve was asking me what I wanted to do this weekend and I suggested that we just stay home. Our girls are not at all used to have both parents home at the same time for more than about three hours max, so this could be fun for them. Here's to the our upcoming family days this weekend! Though they are few and far between, I am sure they will be fun and I am sure there will be pictures to share!

And I know, this picture of Berlin is a little blurry, but doesn't it still melt your heart? Even blurry? It does mine.

First Appeal

I made this really great dinner last night. I can’t take any credit for it, I got it out of a Real Simple magazine. It’s healthy and easy, which is the best!! In fact, it’s so easy that I can give you the recipe right now!

You need two sweet potatoes, cut up into long thin-ish wedges (about half an inch to an inch thick). This is the hardest part of the making the meal. Sweet potatoes are so hard to cut!! I feared for my fingers at one point. Anyway, cut up them up and put them in a roasting pan. Then cut up one purple/red onion into larger wedges and add them to the pan. Toss these with a couple tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, fresh or dried Thyme (I used dried because I am not cool enough to always have fresh on hand), and a little salt and pepper. Make sure to use enough EVOO that all the potatoes get some, otherwise the outsides will be dry and not as yummy. Now, the original recipe says to cut up a whole small chicken. No. Don’t have time. Instead, I just used some chicken legs. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper and put them on top of the sweet potato and onion mix. Put it in the oven and bake at 400 degrees for 40-50 minutes. Voila! Done and so, so yummy.

I love this meal, probably more than anyone in my family. The girls love the chicken, but not the veggies, Steve likes the veggies, but not oven baked chicken so much. I love the whole thing. Anyway, the point…

As I was cutting up dinner Tryn starting whining, “Mom, I don’t want to eat sweet potatoes! I don’t like sweet potatoes! I don’t want to eat them.”

I turned to her and said, very sternly, “Trynica, that is not a nice thing to say. You are not allowed to talk that way about the dinners that mommy makes for you. You don’t have to like everything, but you are not allowed to whine and you are not allowed to say that you don’t like it before you have even taken a bite.”

She was really quiet for two whole minutes.

Then, in a way that I swear I didn’t figure out until I was 16 years old, she made an appeal. This was the very next thing she said to me, in a very calm and non-whiny voice, “Well, Mom, do you think that maybe I could not eat the sweet potatoes? Like maybe I could only eat this many bites?” she held up four fingers.

So I negotiated. She took six bites.

She would make a good lawyer.

The Sweetest Voice

Here's just a taste of what I hear from the sweetest voice I know...

Words?

There is something, maybe fortunate maybe unfortunate, that I think our girls get from me. They have a special ability to make up their own words. They will add or change sounds so that normal words are different. These are outside of the normal words, like fossball (softball) and princessessess that they regularly mispronounce.

Some of Tryn's:

Sophanator (Sophie, her dog)
Berlin-y-lynn (Berlin)
SpankyManke (Mankie/Blankie)

Tryn will really just try out any new sound along with a word to see how it sounds, which is something that I find myself doing occasionally - especially if it rhymes. It's just more fun that way.

Berlin even does it, although at a more limited level:

Slippies (slippers)
Shoesies (shoes)
Sockies (socks)

She mainly just likes to add "e" sounds onto the end of words that she can say perfectly fine otherwise.

Crazy kids. I don't know where they get these silly ideas from.
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Haha!! Oh, and if you noticed who was in every single picture with Trynica in the previous post give yourself a pat on the back. Yes, she was with Tryn the entire time.

And Then, The Tree

I love the holiday season. Truly, I do. Of course, I am so thankful for the reason there is even a Christmas season. However, I also just really love everything about the end of November and all of December. I love the decorations, the lights, cookies, holiday desserts, traditions, advent, candles, snow (when there is any), and I even love the busy stores. I might be a holiday season junky.

I don't overly decorate our house, or really decorate our house at all. But I love getting the Christmas tree. I love to get it the day or two after Thanksgiving so that we can have it up for as long as possible, mainly because I just think Christmas trees are beautiful. So it has become our tradition to get our tree Thanksgiving weekend. And, if possible, we love to cut down our own. Here are some pictures.









What's great about this place that we found up north of Andover is that there are short little hayrides with a wagon pulled by actual horses and...Santa Claus is there. Tryn has never visited Santa, mainly because the whole mall Santa thing in the cities is ridiculous. I don't want to stand in line for 20 minutes with the chance that the kids won't want to talk to Santa anyway/cry when they actually see him. Fortunately, Tryn marched right up to him like it was no big deal. He asked her what she wanted for Christmas and she told him she needs new glass slippers (as several of hers are broken). When he asked Berlin she copied Tryn, of course, and said that she wanted "slippies" too. It's my favorite that she calls them slippies.






It was fun. I learned something about Steve in the process as well. He is much pickier about what our tree looks like than I am. I would say, that compared to him, I am not really picky at all. So I have to give him the credit, he found our perfect tree. It's a good one. The only sad part of the day is that Berlin lost one of her cute gloves forever out in Christmas tree land. Bummer.