Elise's Middle School Stage Debut!

This weekend Elise performed in her middle school's production of "The Mix,"a "salute to Broadway" show that included songs and short scenes from a number of well-known musicals like West Side Story, Wicked, Annie Get Your Gun, Grease, and The Lion King. The students did a great job and I was impressed with all the hard work and energy that all those 6th to 8th grade kids put into pulling off the show.

I was particularly proud of Elise (of course!). Not only did she have the courage to tackle a solo in "Annie Get Your Gun" -- not every kid had a solo, and she did great -- but she even overcame a small snafu on opening night with aplomb. Elise's number, "Anything You Can Do" from Annie Get Your Gun, came right after the big opening number, so Elise and her gang had to make a super-quick costume change involving a plaid shirt. The director had mentioned that the kids might want to button the two bottom buttons of the shirt and then pull it over their heads, but Elise's shirt was pretty tight and it got stuck! So as all the kids for her scene walked out, Elise was still backstage wrestling with her shirt, which would put even a seasoned pro into panic mode.  I admit I was a little nervous for her too as I sat in the audience thinking, "Where's Elise!?!?"  But then she walked in with a smile on her face and picked up with a line that made total sense for the scene; although she missed saying a few lines, nobody in the audience was one bit the wiser. It seemed like it was all meant to be that way.  And even though she was a little out of breath, she found her footing in her song pretty quickly and did a great job.  I was so proud!

Here's a video of Elise's solo performance. The other snafu was mom-related (or technology-related): the minute I started videoing the "memory card full" message started flashing (arrghh!) so I missed the first few lines and the opening of Elise's solo as I switched from the video camera to my cell phone camera. The video and audio quality isn't the greatest, either, since it was filmed on my phone. But I captured enough to at least give you a taste:



I thought I'd let you see one of the big group numbers, too. This is "One Short Day" from Wicked. Elise is the tall one. :-)



And here are some photos taken during "parent photo night"-- a couple of nights before the actual performance, Moms and Dads could come and take all the pictures they wanted while the kids held poses and ran through some of the numbers. A great idea! That way the parents can sit back and enjoy the actual show instead of worrying about taking pictures, and the performers aren't distracted by photography flashes:

Officer Krupke

"Please Officer Krupke!"

Perfecting the look of adolescent angst

Elise as Annie and her Frank Butler

They can shoot a sparrow, with a bow and arrow

The battle of the sexes.

One short day . . . in the emmmerallld city!

The mothers of River City

Elise and the other brainiacs, jocks, and skaters encouraging the students at East High to "Stick to the Status Quo"

And the final group shot!

It was so much fun to see Elise perform and I look forward to lots of musicals in our future. Great job, hon!

Blog Backlog, Chunk #1: The Nerd Herd

So, yes, I know I left the disturbing post up for a little too long (and yes, I also realize that both my hair in the photo and the shirtless hand dancer qualified as disturbing). Lots has been going on at our house and I haven't seemed to find the time to update ye olde blog. So I'm going to break things up into chunks over the next few days.

Chunk 1: The Nerd Herd/Battle of the Books (Jonas)
Chunk 2: Forrest's trips to both Germany and Mexico. Sheesh, that was a long time for me to do the single mom thing. But as least Forrest took some good pictures. And brought home chocolate.
Chunk 3: Elise's musical (first performance tonight--break a leg honey!)
Chunk 4: Miscellania, paraphernalia, juveinila

The Nerd Herd!

So Jonas has been on a "Battle of the Books" team for the past few months. They've read all twelve of the Maud Hart Lovelace nominated novels for 2010 and met every other Wednesday to discuss them, and last night they competed.

Walking into the cafeteria, ready to do battle

Jonas's team competed against 8 other 4th grade teams. They were asked 50 questions related to the twelve books, ranging from "What was the name of so-and-so's uncle" to "why didn't so-and-so want to go to school in the morning?", then they had thirty seconds to whisper possible answers amongst themselves and have the scribe write the answer on a white board.

You'll notice the nice woman sitting holding the green(ish) card in her lap. She's the coach of another team. Coaches went to sit with other teams to serve as a judge. If they got the answer right, the judge would hold up a green card. Wrong? Red. Not sure (e.g. if the wording the boys wrote down didn't exactly match the wording in the official answer)? Yellow. Our judge held up a lot of yellow cards, which necessitated a head judge coming to the table and making the final call. Nine times out of ten the head judge called it in our favor. So while our table judge was a bit of a stickler, it did make things more exciting.

The Nerd Herd was leading up until question 30. In fact, at one point we were up by four and seemed untouchable! But then we had a few missed questions and a couple of close calls (the boys knew the answer but didn't write it down completely) and suddenly, an all girl team to our right surged and before we knew it, the lead had slipped out of our hands!

We ended the night two questions behind the eventual winners, who get to have a pizza party at school (luckies!). But the boys were good sports and had a lot of fun and are going to have their OWN pizza party.

All the kids who read each of the 12 books (not a requirement) got a special ribbon.

I think the best part of this whole thing for Jonas was meeting a group of really nice kids. Two of them live quite close to our house, so hopefully once it warms up they'll be going outside to play sometime soon. (Hooray for going outside to play!).

On other good Jonas news, we just had parent teacher conferences last week, and not only did his teacher say, "Jonas is the type of kid that I would love to get to know as a grown up. He's such a nice person, and he just gets it!", but his grades are excellent and his test scores have improved quite markedly since the beginning of the year. He went from the 86-88th percentile in reading and math on his standardized tests (they tested him when we first moved for placement purposes) to 96-98th percentile when he took the tests last month with the rest of his class. I think the accelerated curriculum (to which we did NOT have access in the ALPs-dominated Jordan School district, much to my dismay) has done him a lot of good. I really like his elementary school and his teacher in particular.

Good job, my super-reader Jonas. Right now he's reading The Little House books. Oh, my mother heart smiled at that! Elise didn't really like them so I didn't think any of my kids would, but after reading a ton of fantasy--which he still claims is his favorite genre--he's decided to read some historical fiction. He read a few WWII books (Number the Stars and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) and then thought he'd give Little House a whirl.

Anyway, thanks for being such a great kid, Joe. Love you.

To Germany With Love

So on this Valentine's Day, I was thinking about the very best man I know -- yes, the very same man my 16-year old, acid washed, big-haired self managed somehow to woo -- and I wanted to send him a message.  A cryptic message, yes, since this is a public blog, yadda yadda yadda, but it's a message he will understand. And so will some of you.

So I went to Youtube, trying to find the music video for Alphaville's "To Germany With Love." (Fun fact: when I was 16 years old, I went to Washington D.C. all by myself to a national program called Washington Workshops as a representative from Cyprus High School.  Forrest lent me his Grandma's blue suitcase and his Alphaville tape, and I listened to it over and over on both plane rides and at night before I went to bed.) So now, 21 years later, here I sit in my office in our house in Minnesota, surrounded by our four rapidly growing kids and all the stuff we've accumulated over the years, googling "Germany With Love," trying to find something that represents the depth of my feeling for the man who's more responsible for my happiness in this life than anyone else.  And this, dear readers (and dear husband of mine) is what I found.

It seems even more eerily apropos that the "station" where one can find this one-of-a-kind video is called "ForrestTV" (seriously--you can't tell in the embedded video, but look it up on Youtube. Synchronicity?)  This message is for you, my love, brought to you by the very best exhibitionistic balding hand dancer on the internet:

(for my gentler readers: don't worry, the disrobing ends after he takes off his shirt)

On Writing

So my C Jane post went up on Sunday and it was a fun ride. Interesting to think on how it's probably the most widely-read thing I've ever written: a blog post that I labored over for two whole days! It was an honor to be able to do it, though, and even if it doesn't really translate into many Dispensation sales or Irreantum subscriptions, it's satisfying that a few more people know now that such things exist. A step in the right direction, yes?

Now I just need to figure out what my plans are with my own writing. I'm stuck (again) on another novel, feeling like I'm going the wrong direction but a little sick about chucking it all and starting over again. It's easy to stand up and preach the gospel of revision, but man, it never stops being extraordinarily hard to do in practice. Especially when there's no guarantee of anyone actually reading the finished product: three, four years of your life, hours and hours and hours of work, all for the sliver of a chance that it might get an agent, then a tinier sliver of a chance that it will get published, then an even tinier sliver of a chance that, after publication, it will be read instead of slinking off into the ever-crowded corner of literary obscurity to curl up into a ball and die.

Wow. This is really uninspiring.

Part of my own problem has to do with permission.  It's hard for me to give myself permission to write toward such a nebulous goal. And it's galling for me to even write these words since I spend so much energy encouraging others to do that very thing (be brave! you can't be a successful writer until you allow yourself to carve out the time and space necessary to make it work! the vast majority of anything you write will end up discarded -- that's the process!).  But I'm still struggling with it.  Working on Irreantum, working on Dispensation, writing blog posts or essays for Segullah, all those things are easier for me to get my arms around because I know what I'm doing will eventually get out into the world and be read. It justifies the time away from my family, from cooking dinner or folding socks.  It also justifies the really really really hard work. Writing fiction (for me) isn't like reading, which is pure enjoyment, or even other activities that people would call leisurely, like (hey!) blogging or baking or gardening: activities that can be broken up into discrete blocks with discernible results at the end of the day. A new blog post, brownies, a planter of petunias on the front porch.  No, writing fiction requires this kind of leap of faith, coupled with the ability to work hard and be disciplined for the sake of working hard and being disciplined, coupled with a kind of single-mindedness that requires me to shut everyone and anyone else out.  (I can't even have somebody put a hand on my shoulder when I'm writing. Jerks me right out of where I need to be.)

But I'm going to keep plugging away.  Keep writing slowly. While I sit and simmer about my (possibly) abandoned novel, I've started working on a short story. I haven't started a short story in years because I've wanted to spend my fiction writing time on getting a *&(* novel finished, but I think I need the kick in the pants, the creative jolt that starting and finishing a work of fiction will give me.

Wish me luck.

And isn't the sound of all those Egyptians cheering in the streets an inspiring thing?

Cool!

The back yard, winter morning

So the coolest thing about the last week -- and no, I don't mean temperature-cool -- is that Ethan competed in his very first speech tournament and (drumroll!) he won 2nd place in novice storytelling! First time ever, freshman, right outta the gate, baby! Over 900 students from all over the state participated in a number of different categories.  We're really proud of Ethan and know he'll continue to do a a great job the rest of the season.

Elise has been busy with her musical rehearsals every day after school, and it's been fun to hear her upstairs practicing her guitar now that she's taking lessons.  And Jonas has been singing in his school choir and getting ready for his Battle of the Books competition in a couple of weeks. He had to read all 12 books nominated for the Maud Hart Lovelace award, and he and his fellow team members (they christened their team "The Nerd Herd," and I think it means you're not that nerdy if you're able to self-referentially call yourselves The Nerd Herd) will compete in a trivia competition based on the novels. Jonas has also been reading The Series of Unfortunate Events books like a maniac (seriously, like 10 of them in the last few weeks, to the point where he's ignoring things like, ahem, the dreaded "purple packet" whose unfinished contents were the source of much discontent a few mornings ago).

Wyatt is chillin. (See? Extending the cool metaphor.) He made everyone laugh at dinner the other night when he pretended to be me prodding Jonas to eat his dinner: "I'm going to count to three! One, two . . . don't make me get to three!"

Am I really that obvious?  Um, yes.

A yucky cold has been circulating throughout the family, but we're all holding up okay, despite a few missed days of school. The combination of sick kids + icky weather + nothing really much to force me to go outside has turned me into a bit of a hermit.  Strange word, hermit. Not a pretty one. It's bad enough being a hermit; you'd think they could come up with a nicer word to describe us. Like "philanthropist." There's a pretty word. Or "dilettante." That's a perfectly pretty word wasted on amateur wannabe artists.  What I really want to be is a bon vivant, but a bon vivant is the polar opposite of a hermit, yes?  So you see how I'm stuck. And how I like French words.

Oh! The other super cool thing that happened this last week is the birth of Tony and Cindy's sixth baby, this beautiful little bundle of squishy goodness (I'm assuming he's squishy based on photographic evidence and past experience with Tony/Cindy Babies, since I haven't been able to personally squish him):

That makes 16 grandkids on my side, seven boys and nine girls. And more good news: Mindy and Pete will be having another baby this summer, rounding out the cousins on Forrest's side to eight. I'm thinking it has to be a boy for the sake of evenness: three boys and one girl from Forrest, three girls and one boy from Mindy. Seems about right!

So, for more formless rambling, how about this. From the world of current events: everything going on in Egypt is fascinating. I, too, would be irritated if a guy named Hosni had been running my country into the ground since I was a little kid.  Go freedom!  Just don't end up like Iran and we'll all be happy! And I've heard some scuttle that Jon Hunstman is probably going to try for the Republican nomination for President. (He just stepped down from his position as ambassador to China.)  I've always liked him a lot more than I liked Romney. Plus my dad guarded his dad's house, so that makes us almost friends, yes?  Could get me a ticket to the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn? Should be interesting.  The Mormons! They're everywhere!

And finally, I'm guest posting on C Jane Enjoy It! on Sunday.  Eek! I also need to keep it under 800 words.  Double eek!  I'm going to write a little about stories -- how stories connect us, feed us spiritually, all that.  But much more articulately.  I won't say Eek!  But maybe I'll say dilettante.  Or bon vivant.  Maybe my bio can be "Angela Hallstrom is a dilettante bon vivant hermit who enjoys Top Chef All Stars and period dramas.  And by period dramas, she doesn't mean "menstruation histrionics," (see comments by Andrea and Delise), because who enjoys menstruation histrionics?  Certainly not her loving and ever-patient husband, Forrest. Just ask him."

Bingo!  You'd read a post by that woman, right?

And now, I've gotta go.  Somewhere.  Maybe I'll wander to the upstairs loft.  Little change of scenery and whatnot.  Maybe I'll do some laundry.  Maybe I'll load the dishwasher.  Maybe I'll help Wyatt made a gun out of his Thomas train tracks (his latest project).  All sorts of options!

Wyatt Dean, 4 Years Old

 

My sweet boy turned 4 on Friday.  He's still little enough that he can tell me he wants to marry me when he grows up without an ounce of self-consciousness, but he's big enough that he can write his name and go to school and build a fort (well, kinda--more like he can harangue me into helping him build a fort).  I'm just so glad we have a few more years of cute little-kidhood to enjoy in our house, since the other kids insist on wrestling with long division, scaring me into thinking there's an intruder in the house by calling my name in a deep manly voice, and wearing eyeliner. (You can decide which kid is doing which in the preceding list.)

On Friday, Wyatt brought treats for preschool and then the two of us met Dad at McDonald's (with a Play Place--unlike in Utah, not every single McD's has a Play Place in MN) and Wyatt opened his present from us: a Transformers mask he'd tried on the last three times we wandered through the toy aisle at Target, and a new game for his Leapster.

But on Saturday Wyatt had his first friend birthday party.  He's met a cute little group of kids at church and through the babysitting co-op and was so excited to have them over.  Two of the five kids we invited were girls, so we couldn't have the Transformers birthday he originally requested without making them feel a little left out, so we decided instead on having a Toy Story party.  Woody AND Jessie, you see?

I took advantage of the wonder of the internet and googled some Toy Story party ideas and found a few that were simple but fun--right up my alley!  I haven't done a little kid party in a while, and although I remember dreading them somewhat in the past, this one was actually kind of fun to plan.  Crazy, I know!  Here are a few of the highlights:

Thank you Disney.com for the cute Toy Story alien cupcake idea.  I find it particularly hilarious that I made these cupcakes the weekend after writing a Segullah post in response to the now-infamous Salon Mormon Mommy blogger article where I made a point of explaining that my husband makes most of the cupcakes at my house.  Now look at me!  A Mormon mommy blogger stereotype, and something of a hypocrite to boot!  But dang, aren't those cupcakes cute?  I wish the green was a little more lime-y than grass-y, but otherwise I was quite pleased.  And this is coming from someone who's experienced some wicked birthday-cake-making disappointments.  (Elise's 6 year old birthday My Little Pony cake debacle is a particularly tragic memory.)

And this is the table before the kids came. Each kid got a cowboy hat (although the girls weren't so keen on wearing them.  I guess they weren't feeling the Jessie vibe. Imagine if they'd been invited to the Transformer party!)

Then the kids came.  Such cute kids:

And even though I realize this isn't the most interesting thing to blog about and I could instead regale you with my opinions on the Republicans and Democrats deciding to sit with each other at the State of the Union . . . here are the games we played:

Game #1: Buzz Lightyear beanbag toss.  Forgot to take pictures of this one, but we have a bean bag toss game already, and I found this little Buzz Lightyear bean bag toy thingie at clearance on Wal-Mart. That's the only thing that made it Toy Story-ish, but the kids didn't seem to complain about going off theme too much.  Instead, they simply edged closer and closer to the wooden bean bag receptacle until they could basically drop the bean bag into the hole, then one kid stood on the wooden bean bag receptacle and cracked it.  Whoopsie!  The only real collateral damage from the party, though, which isn't bad considering there were six 3-4 year-olds in the house.

Game #2: Hot Mr. Potato Head.  Just like Hot Potato except one uses a Mr. Potato head.  Like in Toy Story!  Get it?  I downloaded "You've Got a Friend In Me" from iTunes and played it as the kids passed Mr. Potato head around.  When a kid got out, he/she got to take a piece of candy from the storage area in Mr. Potato Head's backside (hmmm, that sounds unsanitary), then the winner got to take TWO pieces of candy.  Seemed to work well: the kids who got out first got their candy first, and the kid who won got two.

Game #3: Buzz Lightyear Moon Rock Hunt.  I told the kids that Buzz Lightyear had crashed and dumped a whole bunch of moon rocks upstairs in our house.  Instead of putting their party favors in a goody bag at the end of the party, I wrapped the favors up on tin foil ("moon rocks") then had them all hunt for them.  They each got a thing of bubbles, a party blower, and a $1 bag of silly bands (bandz? harumph--I refuse to spell words with a z instead of an s), then I put their names on the "rocks" so that one kid didn't end up with 10 rocks and another with none.  They had a great time on the hunt and unwrapping their prizes.

Game #4: Of course, you gotta play pin the tail on SOMETHING.  Big thanks, again, to Disney.com for the Pin the Tail on Bullseye game I could print out for free:

Each of the kids had a Toy Story bandanna that I made (read: cut out but didn't hem) from some fabric I bought at Wal-Mart.  Quick funny story: I don't buy a lot of fabric, and I really don't buy a lot of fabric at Wal-Mart, so when I went shopping late Friday night to get last minute stuff for the party I wasn't prepared for how long it would take to find somebody to cut the fabric for me. Anyway, took a while.  But I finally got it cut and price-tagged, grabbed a few more things, waited in line for a Wal-Mart amount of time (3 1/2 minutes more than I would have spent in line at Target) . . . but when I gave the fabric to the checkout lady, the price tag had disappeared.  We both looked on the ground, on the other items, pretty much everywhere, but alas, no price tag to be found.  So we had to "suspend" my purchase and I headed back to the fabric counter to try AGAIN to find somebody to price it for me.  Waiting, ringing little ineffectal silver bell on table, stalking around grumpily, waiting some more, until finally I found somebody in the toy section who said she'd send someone else over shortly.  More waiting, more grumpy stalking, then finally a lady showed up.  I started to explain that I'd already had this cut and priced, I was at the checkout counter and everyone was waiting for me, etc etc., while in the midst of my breathless recitation she reached down and pulled the price tag off from the front of my coat in the area right under my chestal region (you know, the region that I'm least likely to be able to see without the assistance of a mirror.)  Stuck there the whole time!  Sigh.

Last game: pinata!  The pinata broke after the first couple of whacks at it, but luckily McGuyver dad figured out a way to rig it up:

One of the final swings, to jostle out the few remaining morsels of candy.

The kids ate their alien cupcakes, vanilla ice cream, and root beer. (POP! I know, I gave them pop.  Funny how you can give them cupcakes and candy and nobody blinks, but give them pop and the kids look at you with a little thrill in their eye that means "if only my mother knew what I was doing!" We're a bad influence.)

They opened presents:

I love how little kids all hunker together in a big group to open presents and can't help but "help" the birthday boy open it.

They were just altogether cute.

We rounded out the party by watching a little Toy Story 3 on DVD and I wondered during the scary cymbal-banging monkey scene whether or not I was REALLY being a bad influence (pop + scary monkeys = who is this woman and does my mom know what's going on here??) . . . but all the kids assured me that they HAD seen this movie before, so I'm hoping I didn't send home kids who wouldn't go to bed due to a sugar high and then woke up with cymbal monkey nightmares.

Wyatt had a great time, and it's kind of nice to finally say he's four.  He's looked four for almost a year now, so it's about time!  We sure love our Bubba, though, and I secretly wish he'd never grow up.

So It's January

and that means a few things:

1. It's cold.  Whoda thunk.  And the snow just keeps coming.  Yesterday I pulled out the cell phone camera to snap a picture of Wyatt playing in the snow drifts while I scraped off the vestiges of that day's snowfall, and to prove that I do, in fact, venture out of doors every once in a while:

And here's our front yard.  The thing about Minnesota is that all the snow just accumulates.  It doesn't melt, it simply piles up and reminds you how far you've got to go before you see grass again:

Can you see our row of mailboxes off in the distance, the snow piled up to the bottom of the mailbox door?  It would be a hard job, delivering mail in Minnesota during the winter.

2.  Another thing about January:  it usually makes me feel a little funky.  Not terrible or anything--just sluggish, yearning for a little warmth but aware how far off spring really is.  And big news!  Forrest tells me (just now as a matter of fact) that Thursday night we're going to reach double digit below zero temps.  Without windchill.  So, yeah.  But you don't want to hear about my winter blahs on the blog do you?  No, of course you don't!  So I'll change the subject to:

3.  Period dramas!  An excellent cure for the winter blahs.  I've been going on a bit of a period drama spree with our new Netflix account, having rewatched a few old standards (Howard's End, The Age of Innocence, The Remains of the Day) as well as watching The Duchess with Keira Knightly for the first time (good, but a little racy, in a period drama kind of way), seeing The King's Speech in the theater with Forrest (SO excellent--and the only reason it's R is because he lets out a string of swear words during a session of speech therapy, otherwise it's totally PG, not even PG-13--not that you should be watching rated R movies, heavens), and devouring the new BBC series Downton Abbey on PBS.  If you haven't started watching Downton Abbey yet, check your local PBS listings and see if you can catch the first two episodes in reruns.  There are two more episodes to go and I've found it utterly mesmerizing.  Plus it stars Elizabeth McGovern--the 80s actress some of you might remember from the Kevin Bacon movie She's Having a Baby (among others)--and I love seeing how her lovely face has aged in such a non-Hollywood way.  She's beautiful.  Anyway, all the period dramas must be serving as a bit of comfort-food-for-the-soul.  Why is it that these constrained, stoic, highly regimented societies are so fascinating, and even attractive?  Beyond the amazing clothes and servants-catering-to-one's-every-whim, of course.

4.  And finally, January means we're back in the swing of kid activities.  I've been doing a lot of chauffeuring: Jonas to choir and Battle of the Books; Ethan to speech (first tournament this weekend); Elise to guitar lessons and play practice.  Elise was excited to learn today that she got a solo part in the school play: she gets to sing "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better" from Annie Get Your Gun!  I still have a copy of my script from my foray as Nellie in the Cyprus High School production of Annie Get Your Gun when I was in the 6th grade.   I remember getting out my yellow highlighting pen and marking my lines AND my suggested costumes on the back--oh, the thrill!  So it's particularly exciting that Elise gets to sing this song.  I'm so happy for her.  Forrest has been keeping busy with work, but a good kind of busy.  He's enjoying being back in the thick of things at headquarters and he's looking forward to an upcoming trip to Germany.  He's also cross country skiing like a mad man, venturing out in ridiculously cold temperatures to go tromp around in the snow at 7:30 a.m.  Yes, opposites attract, apparently.  (See staying home and watching period dramas, above.)

And that's January thus far.  This weekend we're celebrating Wyatt's birthday with his first friend party--a Toy Story theme.  He's so excited he can hardly stand it.  Photos to come!

Happy New Year!

I hope all of you had a fun New Year's Eve and are spending today contemplating the myriad ways you plan to improve yourself in the next twelve months.  (I, for one, have spent today--after going to church, of course--eating leftover ham, reading a book on my new Kindle, and losing a game of Scrabble to Forrest by 8 measly points.  But I hope YOU are contemplating.)

We did have a fun New Year's Eve, though.  It seemed to me that after so many years of muy excellente New Year's parties at our place involving different combinations of Mindy and Pete, Tony and Cindy, Andrew and Andi, Amy and Dave, and various cousins and grandparents, that it would be muy triste (that's "very sad" in Spanish--I looked it up for the sake of parallelism) to let this New Year's go by without a little fun.  So we invited three other couples and their kids and had a really good time eating, playing SingStar (of course!--and even though I'm convinced nobody SingStars like our family, we got the group at our house going and I had to force most of them to stop so we could play Taboo.  Why won't anyone ever play Taboo with me without arm-twisting, I ask you????)

Here are some shots of the fun:

A little Bananagrams action.  A bunch of the teenagers, including Ethan, left at 9:00 to go to the Multi-Stake dance in Minneapolis.  We missed them . . . but I don't think they missed us. :-)

I'm glad to finally be able to use our big center island for a large group and lots of food.

Wyatt and his friend Max singing Pink's "Rock Star."  (Wyatt's version of this song goes like this, and has for months: "So what! / I'm still a Rock Star! / and it's a New Year! / Yes it's a Neeeeww Yeeeeaar!"  His version seemed appropriate for the evening.

Another shot of Wyatt and Max.  They had a ball dressing up like "Injas" (ninjas, you know) and running all over the house.  Wyatt finally crashed a little bit before 11, when our neighbor Steve came downstairs and said he'd tucked Wyatt in bed. :-)

This is Steve.  And his wife Becky.  They live just one street down from us in our neighborhood and have been great friends to us and our kids since we moved in.  A real answer to prayer.  Their cute oldest daughter [I'm not putting names because I don't know how these guys feel about names on blogs, so I'm being safe and conscientious here] is in the chair, unable to go to the dance because she just had surgery on her foot. 

Steve and Becky's son and Jonas, dancing on the front porch in sub-zero temperatures to herald the new year.

And Steve and Becky's OTHER daughter with Elise at the stroke of midnight.  I have a special fondness for this sweet girl because she let Elise sit with her and her friends at lunch from day one of middle school.   

Steve and Becky  have one more child, a boy who's Ethan's age, but both he and Ethan were at the dance at the fateful hour.  (The two of them went skiing at the local resort a few days ago and I was going to take pictures then, but forgot.  Whoopsie!) Forrest went to go pick up the kids from the church, so by the time the kids were picked up and dropped off and home, we didn't get to bed until a little before 2 a.m.! I don't think I've stayed up that late for years and years and the next day I felt it in my bones.  But we had a great time, and it was worth staying up that late because Ethan had a blast at the dance.  I've been so grateful for the really strong youth groups in our ward and for all the opportunities they have to do fun stuff together.

And now it's 2011!  Can you believe it?  I can't.  Man, I'm old.

Finally, here's the promised video of the kids' Christmas skit, written by Ethan and rehearsed by all in about an hour on Christmas Eve day.  The picture quality isn't the greatest (it was kinda dark) but I think you can get the feel of it anyway.  Gotta love those kids of mine.

 

Our Homey Little Christmas

For the first time in a looooong long time, Christmas was just our own little family this year. When we moved to MN the first time, we traveled to Utah with Toddler Ethan and Baby Elise for a few years, and I think Grandma and Grandpa Sweat came to visit us one Christmas, too. (Didn't you? At our little split level house on 11th Street?) Then, after we had Jonas, Grandma and Grandpa Hallstrom were in Minnesota and were able to come and provide an audience for the kids' Nativity play and eat some Christmas dinner.

But this year? This year it was the six of us. And I admit that I was a little Utah-sick, at least at first, and especially on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is still an extended-family event in my mind. But I've got to say that at the end of it all, we had a really nice, cozy, relaxed Christmas this year. One of the most relaxed in recent memory. And that is a very good thing.

Here are a few of the highlights of our Christmas festivities:

My giant 3 year old, happy as can be on Santa's lap

This is this official Mall of America Santa, one I never thought I'd brave the throngs to see. I'd gotten complacent about my Santa pictures over the last 5 years since we were always able to see Santa at the Wilkey Christmas Eve Day party.  The day before Elise's Bel Canto concert at the MOA it hit me: Wyatt hadn't seen Santa yet!  And what would be a better time to do so than 2:00 p.m. on a school day.  Yes?  Yes?  Umm . . . no.  We got there almost an hour before Elise's choir was set to sing and the line didn't seem too long.  But this gentleman was the slowest. Santa. EVER!!!!  Finally, ten minutes before showtime and with four kids still in front of us in the line, it was decided that we had to leave the line in order to be seated in the audience in time.  Poor Wyatt was devastated, burying his head in my shoulder and sobbing (that's so much more heartbreaking than a temper tantrum), but I promised him that after Elise's choir concert we'd go and get BACK in that dang line and wait another hour so he could see Santa after all.  That seemed to placate him and we were able to settle in and enjoy this:

Elise: the tall, pretty girl on the right

 Here's a quick, ill-shot video of part of the concert.  I can't be entirely blamed for the shaky videography.  I had a 3-year old pulling on my arm, trying to see himself in the viewfinder every 30 seconds.  But still, you can get a taste:



Ethan also had a concert this week, his band holiday concert.  Here he is in front of the Christmas tree, looking handsome in his black band shirt:

We did a few other fun things the week of Christmas that I didn't photograph:  Jonas's class Christmas party (they had a book exchange, and he had the idea to cut the letters name of the girl he'd chosen, Jacqueline, out of magazines so she wouldn't guess it was him); Wyatt's class Christmas party; sledding at a ward member's house; Forrest and I attending a couples' progressive dinner Christmas party as well as a party with all the Mormons in our specific neighborhood (there are, like, seven LDS families in our neighborhood alone, a fact which continues to amaze me).  And, surprise surprise, none of the white elephant gifts at either of these parties were wildly inappropriate (although we did take home a book on managing incontinence and an adult diaper with a tootsie roll inside).  Ah, the cringe-worthy white elephant gifts that would be exchanged in South Jordan.  Memories.

We also got some Room Doodles from Amy and put them up on Elise and Wyatt's walls.  They look so dang cute that I don't even mind that I broke Wyatt's bed by standing on it and wrenching it around the room whilst putting said doodles on the wall.  (Forrest put it all back together again.  Thanks hon.)  Don't they look great?  Thank you again, Amy, Room Doodler Extraordinaire!

Elise's peace sign.  She loves it.

Wyatt's WYATT. He thinks it's awesome.  "Hey, that's my W-Y-A-T-T!" he said.

Anyway, we had a relatively leisurely week, culminating in a really nice, homey Christmas Eve, just the six of us:

The family gathered around our traditional Christmas Eve dinner based loosely on my childhood where Christmas Eve was all about making food everybody likes.  We had: popcorn shrimp, macaroni and cheese, scones, and pears.  We were supposed to have pineapple . . . but it was rotten.  Drat! But the dinner was still tasty.  Mmm.  Scones.

Ethan helping Wyatt act out the Nativity with our kid-friendly nativity set.  The big kids deemed themselves too mature to dress up this year.  Sigh.

Elise and Jonas narrating the Christmas story

Ethan also wrote a hilarious skit based on Ebenezer Scrooge, but I haven't uploaded that to Youtube yet.  I will soon and give it a post all its own.  I will say, though, that Ethan takes after his mom.  I remember all those years that as the Eldest Sweat child, I was in charge of the Christmas Eve "program."  This year I told Ethan it was his job, and he whipped out a script and had the kids rehearsing in no time.  How many 14 year old boys do you know that relish the opportunity to write and direct a Christmas spoof skit with their siblings on short notice?  Exactly.  Ah, genetics.

The traditional top-o-the-stairs shot, wearing the new pjs from Grandma Sweat.  I realize Wyatt is aiming a gun at us in this photo.  It's actually an extremely cool gun, if that helps at all.  It was Grandpa Hallstrom's gun when he was a little boy and it's over 50 years old.  Grandpa H. sent it along with a real-life World War I (not II, I) holster that he's had all these years.  Wyatt was thrilled beyond belief, slept with said gun and had it with him all Christmas morning.  Even on the stairs.

And, yes, here Wyatt is opening yet another gun.  It was the one thing he asked Santa for: a Nerf rifle he saw in Target and had been longing for ever since.  Santa could not disappoint him.  But Santa also wants people to know that he got Wyatt a nice Woody and Bullseye set and a Crayola drawing table and some other non-violent toys which Wyatt's mother is hoping he will decide to play with at some point. :-)

Jonas holding his big gift this Christmas: a DSi.  Jonas's first DS, a Christmas gift from many moons ago, met its maker when it was accidentally dropped in the toilet.  (Who has time to stop playing Pokemon to go to the bathroom?  I ask you?)  But two years have now passed since that tragic day, and Jonas feels he is responsible enough to put the electronics down when nature calls. 

My Precious!  Okay, Ethan might kill me for posting this picture because he DOES look a teensy bit on the psychotic side.  But this shot does exemplify the extreme emotional response elicited when a 14-year-old is given an iPod Touch.

This is a better picture of Ethan.  And, oh yeah.  Jonas and Wyatt got swords.  Wyatt has been almost as interested in playing with the swords as he is in playing with his guns.  (The crayola drawing table is still waiting.)  In case you were wondering. 

And Elise's gift to beat all gifts: a touch phone!  I finally gave in and added Ethan and Elise to my Verizon account, coming to terms with the fact that kids 12 and up all have cell phones (well, almost all of them do) and that I find it quite handy for them to have cell phones, too, what with all the picking up and dropping off and everything else a Mom of teenagers has to do.  And my relationship with our previous teen cell phone carrier, Tracfone?  Strained.  At best.  Elise was thrilled with the results.

Is this the true meaning of Christmas or what?  Sigh.  At leas they're sitting in a circle, facing each other.  Right?

There aren't any photos of Forrest or me and our Christmas goodies, but Forrest got a new carry on bag. He needed one, Santa decided--taking a the carry-on I'd purchased for the boys (light blue with lime green trim) on business trips just didn't do his Studly Business Traveler persona any favors.  In my humble opinion.  I also got him two books I'd like to read myself, and some Godiva chocolate I'd like to help him sample.  Christmas is a time of giving!  And speaking of reading, I have ventured into the world of e-books and now own my very own Kindle.  It's very cool.  Once I finish reading my first e-book, I'll return and report.  

It was really a wonderful Christmas, and I'm enjoying this week of no school and sleeping in.  The kids are, too.   We missed our family a lot, but we're grateful to have each other and enjoy a slower pace that helped us focus more on what Christmas is all about.  (And no, it's not gunplay.  Or swordplay.  Or electronics.  Or chocolate.)  Cue the sappy music:  it's love.  Really, it is, and we're blessed to have that in abundance.