So. Now I have a UTI, PMS, and a cold, AND the “check engine” light is on in the minivan, AND something is amiss with Rob’s orthodontic appliance. You would think I would be a bit cranky. And yet I am not, and it’s because I have had a lot–A LOT–of coffee: yesterday a Tassimo arrived for me to review, and I am data-collecting with all my might. Later my mom is coming over so we can try the fancy kind that makes coffee AND frothy milk. AND I will have a Tassimo to give away, and I’ve emailed Tassimo to find out if there’s any way it can be done by Christmas, so anyway my adrenaline about that and my caffeine content are both high. And also, this might be a poor time to let posts languish in your feed reader, because if I hear back that they CAN ship it in time for Christmas, I’ll be doing the review FAST with a very short giveaway-entry time. I’ll be sure to mention it here and also on Twitter.

In the meantime, Pseudostoops continues her charity-a-day with a post about The Women’s Treatment Center. If you click through and leave a comment, she’ll increase her donation by another 50 cents and you get to feel like you did something good.

I find these Santa gift boxes disturbing. Very disturbing. Possibly disturbing enough to buy.

Open up Santa’s belt to find your special gift.

I am having a drops IN the bucket! IN!! kind of day. It started pretty well, because Paul had a little extra time before work and used it to CLEAN UP THE DISHES. I’ll just let that soak in for a minute. (1) He had a little extra time before work. (2) So he used it to clean up the dishes. I KNOW.

ANYWAY. Then I was looking at the calendar, and I made the mistake of looking at the days ahead (NEVER LOOK AT THE DAYS AHEAD) and it was like looking down a long corridor of obligations. Ice cream cones to school with Edward! Graham crackers with Elizabeth! Graham crackers and a thing of frosting and a foil-covered 12×12 piece of cardboard with Rob! Send in mugs for a party, but not breakable ones! Put out gift for mail carrier! Last day to send cards to arrive by Christmas!

And then my eye fell naturally on my Holiday Card Station at the dining room table. I did some cards last weekend, but there are still many, many more to go.

And then my eye fell on the supplies for the gingerbread houses, and OMG when are we going to do those?

And then things went downhill from there. Walking into the living room I realized we should probably throw out the carpet rather than try to vacuum the glitter out of it. And the laundry has slipped AGAIN—it’s like I can only make myself work on it if it’s at Code Red levels and children are telling me half an hour before school that they have no pants. And I have so many posts to work on. And I’m behind on email to such an extent, even the flagged ones are getting scrolled out of view and forgotten. And there are piles of clutter everywhere, INSURMOUNTABLE PILES OF CLUTTER, and dust and dirt and crumbs and small toys under all the furniture, and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Well.

It didn’t SEEM like it would help, but I TRIED working on some of these things. First I did a baby name post, one that really needed to be done and was also fun because it involved names for a Christmas baby. I told the children that the fewer times they interrupted me as I worked on this, the sooner we could build gingerbread houses—and that if they interrupted me too many times, I would get too frustrated to be able to work on houses. So they interrupted me only maybe 10 times in half an hour, what good children.

As an aside, I came up with a new technique for, I hope, reducing interruptions: when I have to get up to help one child, I ask if anyone else has anything they need. Sometimes this means I avoid the extreme frustration of jusssst sitting back down before another child asks me for something; sometimes this means I am even MORE frustrated because it happens ANYWAY.

So I finished my post, I brought up the load of laundry from the dryer so I’d see it later and remember to fold it, and I started the washer re-washing the load of laundry that had gotten stale. And the kids and I assembled the gingerbread houses. And OH, what a massive relief after last time! In fact, I was GLAD for last time (and said so to the children), because if we’d started out doing it the way we did it this time, I would have been complaining about how messy and sticky and tricky it was, but since we tried it the OTHER way first, THIS time I was practically CHORTLING at how EASY and AWESOME and LIKE MAGIC it was. Thanks go to Barb @ getupandplay for her idea of using molten sugar (put granulated sugar in a pan and stir it over medium-high heat until it turns into super-hot syrup; try not to burn it like I did; return it to low heat when it gets too thick to use), and to Carmen for mentioning on Twitter that it WORKED.

Dip the cracker edges into the pan of extremely hot sugar, then stick them together and hold them in place for a few seconds. Then put them on a cookie sheet to cool/dry.

Village!

It took a little practice to get the sugar right: first too thin, then too thick as it cooled, then too thin when I re-heated it. You can see the “too thin” (drips) on some of the houses (the ones I put in FRONT, nice going). But they STUCK TOGETHER and THAT is the important part! Also, next time this’ll be way easier: I won’t burn the sugar to begin with (by not knowing when to STOP melting it), and then I’ll put it on low heat so it won’t thicken.

We used two full boxes of graham crackers (only a few broken ones in the box this time, fortunately), and may I recommend NOT using low-fat, despite the fact that I have nowhere near enough data here for a statistical analysis and might have just gotten a box the stocker dropped? We first used a box of regular ones, and then used the box of low-fat ones I’d bought because the store had no more regular ones, and there was a HUGE difference. With the regular ones, we didn’t have a single cracker break during the construction process; with the low-fat ones, ten or so broke while I was holding structures together waiting for them to cool, and that could have been QUITE FRUSTRATING if I hadn’t been bolstered by many recent successes.

Then I told the children that we would “wait for the houses to dry” (they don’t really need waiting when you make them like this, but I felt project-with-children’d out), and that we’d decorate them another day, and I folded the laundry, and I put the now-done washer load into the dryer and started a new washer load. I also picked up the letter magnet that has been sitting by the cats’ water dish for long enough to have acquired a film of stickiness and fuzz, and I washed it off and put it on the fridge.

Then I put on the dumbest cartoon I have EVER SEEN (Mario Bros.) for the kids, wrote this post, and next I think I will write a few cards before the mail comes, even if it’s just two cards. Drops. IN.

[Follow-up: This high of getting! things! done! lasted about 5 minutes, until I went to the kitchen to make the kids’ lunch and had to first put dishes into the dishwasher because gingerbread houses were on my work counter and breakfast dishes were on the other counter, and then I found that Paul had put nearly-clean pans (like, just needed a quick swish) and my metal-trimmed (not dishwasher-safe) china into the dishwasher, and then I saw the empty juice pitcher and realized we needed juice before kindergarten, and then made the juice and found that Edward had never taken his juice bottle out of his backpack the day before which meant I also hadn’t yet gone through his folder, and then I got out the pretzel bag and found it had been put away with seriously 2.5 pretzels in it and I had to get a new bag from the basement, and we had no cups for lunch because they are all in the dishwasher, and then Henry was PICKING UP the gingerbread houses and AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA]

Every year in December, Pseudostoops picks a week, chooses one local awesome charity for each day of that week, and donates $20 to each charity, plus an additional 50 cents for each comment she receives on that charity’s post. I’m not sure I’m explaining this well, but the upshot is that if you comment on that day’s post, the charity featured in that post gets 50 more cents.

Plus, one of your commenting options (you can even just say “comment” or “hi”) is to mention one of your own favorite charities. At the end of the week, Pseudostoops takes five of THOSE charities, puts them in a poll, and gives $50 to the one that gets the most votes. If you love a local charity, this is a great way to get them some attention. (It doesn’t HAVE to be local, though.)

I’ve found it surprisingly interesting to read about the different kinds of work being done by the different charities. I also enjoy picturing an unexpectedly large number of Swistle readers descending on Pseudostoops’s posts, until Pseudostoops begs for mercy. Heh.

Today’s charity is The Greater Chicago Food Depository: go comment on the post and then feel pleased about your charitable work.

This year I feel less frantic to not! miss! any! DEALS! than in previous years. Nevertheless, I found a rich vein of them accidentally, while shopping for Elizabeth. I don’t know how long the prices will be reduced—they just suddenly appeared that way. Here are the things I bought—some for Christmas this year, some for upcoming birthdays, some for the gift shelf for parties the kids attend in the future, and some to put in charity toy collection boxes (all photos from Amazon.com):

Orb Factory Stick ‘n’ Style Blinglets, $7.99 down from $19.99. Elizabeth loves (1) crafts and (2) jewelry and (3) fashion. Perfect.

Orb Factory Sticky Mosaics: Jewels, $7.99 down from $16.99. Elizabeth and I have done several sets of these sticky mosaics, and the Jewels set was by far my favorite: I liked the pictures better, and also there was more “forming the picture out of the mosaic pieces” and less “filling in with colors pre-printed on the background” than the other sets. And these don’t go on sale: I keep them in my cart so I can see if they DO (which is how I found this deal), and all year they’ve gone down no more than a dollar. At $7.99, I bought two to give as future birthday party gifts: I love how they’re crafts, but not MESSY. And unlike many children’s craft kits, where I would rather give the child MONEY than help them work on the craft, I find peeling and sticking the mosaic pieces soothing. Please remember this when I am in whatever residential living situation is in my future.

RoomMates Peel and Stick Dinosaur Wall Stickers, $10.08 down from $12.99. These were not such an amazing deal, but I wanted to show them to you anyway. I love wall stickers, especially for decorating the rooms of children with rapidly-changing interests, and these are for Henry, who likes his dinosaurs REALISTIC, not CARTOONY.

Melissa and Doug Animal Stamp Set, $7.99 down from $14.99. I ordered two of these for future party gifts. I fret sometimes about giving a gift that seems too presumptuously girlish or boyish, but this works for girls and boys alike. And the ink is washable. I repeat: THE INK IS WASHABLE. We have another of these sets and Henry stamped them all over his skin and the wall and the table and the box fan—no big deal.

Orb Factory Sticky Mosaics Jewelry Box, $9.99 down from $14.99. Elizabeth is already getting this as a gift this year from someone else, but when it went on sale I bought another for a toy collection box or for her to bring as a future party gift.

Orb Factory Sticky Mosaics Flower Power, $6.99 down from $16.99. (Hello. Have I mentioned that Elizabeth and I are fans of Sticky Mosaics?) I was wondering why I bought two of these when I like them less than the Jewels one, but then I remembered it’s because I got one for Elizabeth and one for a party gift or toy donation.

Orb Factory Sticky Mosaics Heart Box, $6.99 down from $14.99. STICKY MOSAICS = TL4EVA.

Most of us have to make other people’s surnames plural only once a year, when we address and sign holiday cards. Most of us fail pitifully, even with our OWN surnames, so it is fortunate it doesn’t matter one bit in any sort of “will cause children to starve” or “will worsen the state of the environment/economy” sense. But if you would LIKE to get it right, I am here to help.

Here is my first and best technique: AVOIDANCE. If you write it “The _____ family,” you can put their surname unaltered where the line is and be done with it: “The Sampson family.” “The James family.” “The Moss family.” And of course you could also write “Jim, Melanie, Caden, Olivia, and Isabella Sampson” and be done with it that way, too, but goodness, that is a lot of writing, and also sometimes I am not entirely sure I have all the first names straight.

If you choose to avoid avoidance, we will begin with the easiest: straightforward surnames such as Sampson. If you want to address the envelope to the entire household of Sampsons, it’s a simple plural like cat/cats and you add S at the end: “The Sampsons.”

• NOT: The Sampson’s, which makes no sense.
• NOT: The Sampsons’, which is a structure that would need to be followed by a word telling us what it is they are the owners of, such as a boat or a cat. You might be able to justify writing it The Sampsons’ if you argued that “Residence” was implied, but I’d save that iffy excuse for if you mess it up accidentally.

Mid-level difficulty next: surnames ending in S, such as James. If you want to address the envelope to the entire household of Jameses, it’s the regular plural for words ending in S, like bus/buses: you add ES, and it’s “The Jameses.”

• NOT: The James’, which makes no sense.
• NOT: The Jameses’; see The Sampsons’, above.
• NOT: The Jamesses.

Highest difficulty last: surnames ending in double-S, such as Moss. This is the same as surnames ending in S, but the doubleness of the S throws people off: it’s “The Mosses,” just exactly as with dress/dresses and kiss/kisses.

• NOT: The Moss’, which makes no sense.
• NOT: The Mosses’; see The Sampsons’, above.

If you are feeling confused, you can take comfort in the fact that you are obviously in the majority. If you want it boiled down to something simpler, remember this one thing: NO APOSTROPHES. Got it? NO APOSTROPHES. Not in your own name, either: sign it “With warm holiday wishes from the Jameses,” not “the James’s” or “the James’ ” or “the Jameses’,” or, heaven help us, “The Jame’s.” Why? Because NO APOSTROPHES, that’s why. We are only making things PLURAL (for more than one person in the household), NOT contracting words or discussing who owns what.

But again, my choice is addressing it to “The James family” and signing it “The Thistle family.” Then it’s no apostrophes AND no plurals. This also helped me with a former acquaintance whose family’s surname was Spear, and who got very pissy each year when cards arrived addressed to “The Spears” (which is CORRECT) and she would say, “It’s SPEAR, it’s SPEAR, it’s not like Britney!!” So I addressed my card to “The Spear family” and therefore did not get rebuked for being RIGHT.

I don’t think I have EVER DONE anything as frustrating as trying to build graham cracker gingerbread houses. EVER. I’d thought it would be pretty easy, because the kids have done it in school and it seems like with that kind of adult/child ratio it MUST be a pretty easy project. And maybe it IS if you do it right, but that is NOT HOW IT WENT DOWN.

Just for starters, half the graham crackers in the box were broken. (Okay, fine, it was more like a fourth, but I’m CRABBY and it FELT like half.) Several others broke while we were trying to assemble the houses. (Fine: ONE broke.) I’d spent $3 to get a box of the brand-name ones because the school sign-up sheet emphasized that it was important to use the brand-name ones.

THEN, I got a royal icing recipe online, and even went out and bought pasteurized egg whites for it ($1.89 per cup—ack), and the recipe was a TOTAL FLOP. It was the consistency of…I’m not sure what it was the consistency of, but I could pour it, and when I tried to use it as glue (oh, that’s it: it was the consistency of Elmer’s glue), it just ran and dripped all over the place. The parts that DID stick together kept falling apart.

I believe I’ve mentioned before that I’ve got a flash temper: I get too mad, too fast. As I’ve pointed out to the children in our discussions about how everyone has character flaws to work on, the upside to this particular character flaw is that I also get over it fast. (I still remember with a cringe my grandfather’s temper, which was silent and simmering and wouldn’t be over until he apparently reset in his sleep.) But the downside is that when things are frustrating, I don’t, um, cope well. Nor is my non-coping particularly, um, silent.

So then I took a little break and, in thinking over how things had gone, realized that in addition to needing to find a workable way to do the houses since otherwise it would be too disappointing to the children, I needed to fix how things had gone with our first attempt, to avoid leaving them with the Happy Holiday Memory of “the time we were going to make gingerbread houses but then mom went into a frustrated rage and called the whole thing off like a JERK.”

In years of coping with temper, I’ve learned it’s far better when angry not to indulge in the deep satisfaction of breaking something, because the satisfaction is momentary but the clean-up is significantly more time-consuming. It’s the same with the kind of damage a temper does to children: it requires clean-up, and the clean-up takes significantly longer than the event itself.

I started by going out and saying things like “Whew, that was frustrating, wasn’t it?” I explained that sometimes when something is frustrating, it’s better to take a little break instead of getting mad. Then I said I was sorry for getting so frustrated and mad, and I said things like, “When we’re frustrated, are we supposed to say “AAAAAAA THIS ISN’T WORKING PERFECTLY THE VERY FIRST TIME, SO FORGET THE WHOLE THING!!”? and they’d say “Nooooooooooo!!” and laugh. So step one (indicating end of tantrum, apologizing for tantrum, and breaking the ice by making fun of self while simultaneously delivering lesson on correct handling of something I’d handled incorrectly) was complete.

Then I said we WOULD try again, because it would be too disappointing to just NOT DO IT, and they agreed. I said we’d have to do it another day because we were out of time for today and still needed to find a new frosting recipe, but that we WOULD do it—we would just need to find a way that would work better than the way we’d tried it the first time. They were relieved and happy and saying “Yeah! And maybe NEXT time it will work!” Step two (reassurance, plus contradiction of anything I might have said in the heat of the moment, plus delivering of “try, try again” lesson) complete.

Then I suggested we go to the kitchen and consider the results of our first efforts. We sighed and laughed over the two “successes” (extremely sloppy and dripping and tippy, but TECHNICALLY crackers glued together in a rectangle) and the one total failure, which had tipped over completely. I took a bite of one of the collapsed pieces, and it was really good, so I handed out iced graham crackers to everyone, and we stood in the kitchen eating them and commenting how yummy they were and talking more about what we might try next time. Third step (laughing at what had been frustrating, having a fun and unexpected treat, plus getting to see what the completed houses might taste like when we DID succeed) complete.

So. We are still ON for our Gingerbread! House! Adventure!, but with just a little tantrum learning experience added to the schedule. Day one (yesterday): going out and choosing the candies for decoration. Day two: supposed to be the day for making our own gingerbread houses but rescheduled as a learning experience day. Day three: trying again. Day four: visiting local gingerbread village and being even more impressed now that we’ve tried it ourselves. Day five: eating our gingerbread houses.

I am going to tell you how the Christmas Tree Thing went down. And I would like to warn you in advance that it ends with us having a tree I dislike. But I dislike it so much, it has gone straight past the whole unpleasant realm of Disappointment-‘n’-Regret into an entirely DIFFERENT realm where every time I look at the tree I laugh audibly. Like, long peals of merry laughter. So it may seem as if this is a SAD story, but to me it is not. Here it is:

One morning, after much dithering and fretting on my blog and much reading of the resulting comments sections, I felt in the right mind/mood to tackle the task. After the two older children went to school, I told the three younger that we were going to have a Christmas! Tree! Adventure! And they lost their little minds with uninformed delight, which reminded me of when Rob was 2 years old and we told him we were going to go Vote!! and he lost his mind and then we spent the next couple of weeks talking him down from that disappointment.

I collected a measuring tape, a saw, the addresses of two nearby Christmas tree farms, and heavy gloves. Except all I could find was ONE single heavy glove. So the first step of our Christmas! Tree! Adventure! was going to a gardening store and buying work gloves. We bought two pairs, and we bought one of those Christmas tree skirts that turns into a body bag afterward. The store also sold Christmas trees, so we looked at them, but we were unimpressed.

Second step: drive to a Christmas tree farm!!! to see how Christmas trees are grown!! Hitch: the Christmas tree farm had closed down.

Third step: drive to second Christmas tree farm!!! to see how Christmas trees are grown!! We looked all around. After 15 seconds, the children were complaining about being cold. After 2 minutes, Edward was also complaining about being so! very! tired! But I felt like a Good and Interactive Mother for bringing them on this adventure.

Henry: “I need my hood up before I freeze!!” Edward: “I am 1 minute and 45 seconds from claiming that I cannot walk another step!”

We found a few trees we liked Okay, but nothing that made me feel like Purchasing. Most of them seemed to be Weird Shapes (i.e., not the perfect symmetry we’re accustomed to from our fake tree). (Note: Many of them now look PERFECT to me as I see them in the background of all the pictures, with that Wrong Tree in our living room.)

And now it was lunchtime. And after that, the twins had to go to kindergarten. After THAT, an ever-decreasingly-enthusiastic Henry and I continued on our Christmas! Tree! Adventure!

First we went to a fancy gardening store. Henry was asleep, so I left him in the car and browsed within sight of the car. All balsams and frasers, despite claims of many varieties. I considered a live potted tree, but the scrawniest and smallest was $85, and oh dear no thank you. All the other trees looked exactly the same as all the others, despite having designations such as “deluxe.”

So then Henry and I went to Lowe’s. We looked around. Hm, more balsams and frasers. I pulled out some trees to look at, but each one looked the same as all the others. Then Henry needed to go potty, which was timely because I’d been fretting about how to walk out without buying a tree. On our way out we bought a small potted Alberta spruce for $7.95, because why not. I’m putting it on our front steps for now, and I’ll bring it inside right before Christmas, then bring it back outside afterward and plant it in the spring.

We went to Home Depot. They had only balsams. All the balsams looked exactly the same as all the other balsams we’d seen that day. I made a decision: we were not going to strap a looks-like-all-the-others-everywhere-else tree to our car when we could carry one home from right around the corner.

Henry and I went home. The other kids came home from school. We all went around the corner, looked at the frasers, couldn’t tell the difference between them because they all looked the same, chose one at random, and carried it home.

Left to right: Edward, Henry, Rob, Swistle, William, Elizabeth.
(Elizabeth is carrying the tree stand, which I’d brought with me in case that would be a good idea.)

Hey, look, I think this is Paul’s first appearance on this blog! He’s in the orange shirt, lying on the floor and trying to tighten the screws of the tree stand. Luckily he asked a CHILD to hold the tree straight, which is why we later found the tree is totally not straight at all. And also, I forgot to first put down the tree skirt that changes into a body bag. And also we were like, “Hey, what are these weird little caps that came with the tree stand?” and it turns out they were supposed to go on the screws that we instead screwed directly up against the tree. And also we forgot to trim the branches off the bottom first. And also by the time we realized we should just take it out of the stand, take it outside, cut off the extra bottom branches and start over, I’d already watered it, so all of that was impossible. And it turns out the “easy watering access” doesn’t help at all with figuring out how much water is in the tray, or how full I can fill it. Yays!

AND, do you remember how all of you were like, “A tree looks much smaller on the lot than it will look in your house,” and I was like “Okay,” and you were like, “No, seriously, WAY SMALLER,” and I was like “I GET IT!” And the tree is way too big for our living room. Furthermore, it’s not even conical, it’s pretty much egg-shaped with a stinger coming out of the top. A bumblebee tree! And it’s very densely branched—where will the ornaments have room to hang? And it has barely any scent at all, unless you get sap on your hands, and by you/your I mean me/my.

It’s such a Wrong Tree from beginning to end, it is in its own way a delight. Finally I have hurdled the, er, hurdle, of purchasing a once-living tree. Finally I have made many (MANY) of the mistakes I feared making. And look! It is not a disaster, it is just a Tree Not of Our Style in our living room for a few weeks! And next year we will have more information to work with!

Oh hi! Is there a Kathy who reads here, who entered the holiday cookie giveaway at Hello Fancy Pants? Because you won! And you need to email Anne because she is MAILING OUT THE COOKIES TO THE WINNERS RIGHT NOW!! (She is sending me a box, too, and NO, I am NOT sitting with my back against the mailbox post, texting on my phone while I wait.)