So Long, Farewell

I hate saying good bye to Christmas. While Thanksgiving Day is my favorite day, the Christmas season is my favorite time of year. I love the history, the tradition, the memories, the decorations, all of it.

As much as I love the Christmas season, I hate taking down all the decorations and saying good bye to this wonderful time of the year. So I hem...and I haw...and I procrastinate some more...and then I realize that it's the middle of January and things really need to come down.

Tonight Baird and I stripped the decorations from our live Christmas tree. This once proud decoration stood bare and tired for a moment before we pulled it out of the house and tossed it in the alley.

All good things must end. Good bye Christmas. See you in 11 months.

A Day Off

A typical work-from-home day looks something like this:

Get the kids up and thru their morning routine

See them off to school with hugs and kisses

Tidy up the house a bit (sometimes it's a lot of tidying up)

Laundry & Dishes

Check email

Lots of work phone calls

Handle some paperwork

Maybe run and errand or two

Do a bit of food prep for supper, if there's still time

Pick up Drew from school

and then the afternoon/evening rush sets in with homework, carpooling, dinner, etc.

Quite frequently, I sneak in a breakfast or lunch date with a friend on Thursdays. Today, however, I took the whole day off. I went over to my foodie friend Mel's house armed with fresh fruit and extravagant cheeses from Marion Street Cheese Market. Mel provided baked brie, chocolate and a little bubbly. We spent the day indulging ourselves with a grown-up play date, nibbling our way thru a beautiful platter of food, chatting about this and that, and watching the movie What's Cooking. Wrapping myself up in this bubble of warm friendship and fabulous food was the perfect cure for mid-January blues.

I know that it's back to reality first thing tomorrow morning, but this is a day I'll savor for a long time to come.

My Budding Food Critics

I grew up on a working farm in NE Iowa. My dad raised high quality hogs. Not the mass-produced, poor-quality pork that you find in the grocery stores. I'm talking top-of-the-line, great-tasting meat, the stuff that wins awards at the Iowa State Fair and gets sent to high-end restaurants. When we cooked bacon growing up, there was less than 1 tablespoon of fat that came off an entire pound of bacon. When turkey bacon first became popular because it was leaner than pork bacon I remember thinking, "How is that even possible?" But then I left home and bought supermarket bacon for the first time in my life. I cooked 5 pieces in a cast-iron skillet and they were drowning in grease and it was only 5 pieces, nowhere near a whole pound. When I called my mom to complain she remarked, "Honey, it's not your dad's bacon. Welcome to the world of commercial meat." All I could say was "Yuck."

It was also at that point back in the late 1980s that I decided supermarket meat was a waste of money, and I've been buying my beef and pork from the farmers I grew up with ever since. As a result, my kids have become bona fide bacon snobs. I usually don't even bother buying bacon from the store, but Erin had a big sleep over party last night so this morning I was quite literally making breakfast for a crowd.

I found this pre-cooked bacon dirt cheap at Ultra Foods and figured this was as good a time as any to give it a try. I should have known better.Erin took one look at it and knew it wasn't "Grandpa's bacon." She hollered out, "What is this? 'Cause it's not real bacon!"

After tasting it Drew remarked, "Eww! It tastes like I'm chewing on a shoe lace!"

Ok, ok, I get the idea.

Found!

There is something that my church and Irving School have in common. Each place has space dedicated to a lost and found. It's amazing to me how these two repositories seem to attract similar items. Clearly, one's ability to lose things crosses lines of culture, class, age, and yes, faith.

I'm pretty sure that over the course of the last decade, I've forfeited more than an entire day of my life to tracking down lost gloves, hats, coats, Bibles and textbooks between these two locations. As I'm rummaging thru one stack or the other, two thoughts frequently cross my mind. One is wondering what happens to all those single mittens and gloves? While I know items like coats and hats are donated after remaining unclaimed for months, can you actually donate single gloves, or do they somehow find their way to the Island of Misfit Toys?

The other frequent (yet unrelated) thought that crosses my mind is that perhaps I should duct tape every single item directly to my children to ensure they arrive home with whatever it is they took with them when they left the house.

Here's something else the two places have in common: in spite of dedicating significant cabinet/locker space to lost and found items, my family's missing stuff never winds up there. I swear that there's an invisible black hole that follows my family everywhere, and when one of us drops something the black hole quickly swallows it up. On super-rare occasions, the black hole regurgitates. For example, once I was going thru Irving's lost and found looking for a coat Drew had lost...and ended up finding one of Erin's favorite sweaters that had been gone for months and had somehow eluded my previous searches for it.

And, as many of you know, I teach Sparks (religious education) on Wednesday evenings at our church. A few years back I put my Bible on top of the coat rack while I got my coat on and helped the kids with theirs. I realized when we got home that I'd left my Bible back at the church. I thought if I went back first thing in the morning it would surely be there, but alas, it had been swallowed by the black hole. I checked everywhere - the coat rack where I left it, the lost and found, and every place in between - to no avail. I was heartsick...it was my favorite Bible, the one my parents had given me years and years before. I kept looking and kept checking...and six months later I still hadn't found it. I'd pretty much given up hope of ever seeing that Bible again. And then one day, more than a year later, I thought I'd just go and check one last time in the lost and found. Lo and behold! The black hole had regurgitated! There among 35 other Bibles that had been lost by one person but found by another was my beloved, long-lost Bible! How does that happen?

So when Drew came home from school on the last day before Christmas break with only one glove, I assumed the other was in the black hole. And had this particular glove been just a cheap $.50 knit glove, I probably would have never bothered to even search Irving's lost and found for such an item. But he lost his good heavy snow glove, and I really didn't want to replace it without at least a cursory search thru the lost and found. So this morning I went into the building and checked the lockers marked Lost and Found: gloves and hats and guess what?! Right there on the top of the heap of the very first locker I opened was Drew's missing glove! I couldn't believe it! It's the equivalent of a post-Christmas miracle! I mean, this never, ever happens to me. It's the first time since my kids have started losing things that I've retrieved something on the first attempt. Thank God for small favors. And it sure seemed like the Hallelujah Chorus was playing somewhere nearby.

Let's Go Hawks!

Tonight the Iowa Hawkeye football team played in the Orange Bowl against Georgia Tech. Iowa's had an amazing, nerve-wracking, come-from-behind-in-most-games season that made this game a must-watch. While the rest of the family came and went, Erin and I snuggled under blankets in the basement and watched the Hawkeyes take the lead early and never look back. I've always been proud to be a Hawkeye fan, but never more so than tonight.

Final score:

Iowa: 24

Georgia Tech: 14

I think I'm going to have to get one of these t-shirts in the very near future.

Way to go Hawks!!

Stop or I'll Sing!

It's been really cold these last few days - temperatures in the single digits with wind chills well below zero. Yes. I am aware it's January in Chicagoland. I get that it's supposed to be cold. But sometimes I forget exactly how cold, and I do silly things like step outside with no coat and just my socks to grab a box off the front porch. Then I come back in the house and I'm chilled to the bone for a really long time.

That's what happened today. I decided there was no better way to kick that chilled-to-the-bone feeling than to climb into my bed, pile on the covers, and read Garlic and Sapphires for awhile. One by one the kids found me and snuggled down next to me. Kelsey was on the outside corner, Erin was on the other side, and Drew was sort of bouncing all over the place.

It didn't take long for the silliness to set in and then Erin started nudging Kelsey and me ever closer to the edge of the bed. Kelsey was warm and comfortable in her spot and she wanted to stay there. Her pleas to her sister for mercy went unheeded, right up until she threatened, "STOP OR I'LL SING!"

Please understand that the Good Lord has blessed Kelsey with many talents. She's gorgeous. She's funny. She's smart. She's a gifted writer and poet. She's coordinated and athletic. But she is a terrible singer. I say that with love, since I can't sing either. The irony is that while 4 out of 5 members of the 5 Ring Circus are awful singers, we can all tell when someone's singing off key, and it drives us crazy. So when Kelsey threatened to sing the tables were turned, and suddenly it was Erin who was begging for mercy.

With most of the holiday stress behind us, it felt good to hold each other close in a warm house, act silly, and enjoy the day.

New Year's Day

Kelsey rolled out of bed about 1pm today, thirsty and hungry. As she was eating me out of house and home, we told her about our dinner conversation last night, and asked her what her "best thing" of 2009 was. We shared our guesses with her and while she admitted that everything we guessed would definitely make her top 10 list, none of us nailed her favorite thing, which was running track for Percy Julian Middle School in the spring, and playing spring soccer.

Just goes to show that no matter how closely you're paying attention to your teenager, she can still surprise you.

We're all looking forward to watching Kelsey play for the OPRF Huskies on the freshman team this spring!