Fortunately it is not the least bit awkward to go through a checkout line with a 3-year-old, and buy whole-wheat bread, low-fat milk, Play-Doh, Elmer’s glue, and 3 bottles of wine and a box of condoms, and then find out the cashier is a friend of your mother. Not the LEAST BIT.

(I was given a $25 gift card to HomeGoods. Because the value was less than $40 and I wasn’t otherwise paid, BlogHer Ads is allowing me to do the post on my regular blog, instead of on the review blog. Normally I LIKE keeping the two areas separate, but this particular post involves a present for someone, and I wanted the someone to be “a reader of my regular blog,” so I’m doing it here. If you are sort of like, “You know, if I wanted to read about reviews/giveaways, I would read that other blog of yours I’m not reading,” I agree, which is why I normally like to keep them separate. This one is an exception, not a portent of bad things to come.)

The day before finding out I was going to be participating in the BlogHer/HomeGoods gift card program, I had a happy shopping trip at HomeGoods. I’d already taken the photos and written a shopping post ANYWAY, so that makes a nice intro to this now-partially-sponsored-via-gift-card-contribution post:

This set of wall stickers was marked down to $3. I copied the branch arrangement exactly as shown on the package, but I did the birds and the falling leaves differently. My sister-in-law did some bird wall stickers in my niece’s room, and she put one of the birdies way over on top of a window, and I loved that idea so I put one of my birds on the little round mirror. Another bird was shown on the package coming in for a landing, and I just put him/her higher up in the air.

I don’t put cream in a creamer, so this was a little bit of a silly purchase. But I plan to use this little pitcher decoratively, on a little shelf with other bird knick-knacks—AND, then if I ever DO have people over for coffee, I can call it into service! $4.

Cute magnetic turtle clips! (My dad: “Are those turtles, or are they green ladybugs?”) I have a lot of stuff from this Animal House line, and I would have had these a lot sooner if I’d realized they existed. I use our fridge as an extension of my brain: I put up notices I have to remember to act on, or spelling words I have to remember to practice with one of the kids, or whatever. Clips are better than regular magnets for this, for a variety of dull reasons. $5.

Set of eight cards. I LOVE these. And I almost didn’t get them, because the sunflower (my least favorite) was the top card and I assumed they were all the same. But then I was looking at a different set more closely, and saw THAT one had an assortment, so I went back and checked these and LOVED them. Clearance $3.

Ladybug paper assortment: one lined pad, one unlined pad, one square sticky note pad, two rectangular sticky-note pads. Clearance $3.

So I came home with a big bag of fun stuff to put all over the house, all for $18, and took photos to show you.

Then I got the gift card. The assignment was to buy one or two gifts, worth a total of $25, for anyone we wanted: teachers, mail carriers, family, friends. I went to Home Goods and looked around, and I decided it would be most fun to choose a present for one of YOU.

My first idea was to go back and buy all the things I had just bought for myself and give THOSE away—but when I went back the next day, everything was gone except the bird pitcher. So I looked a bit more, but I was getting overwhelmed by all the possibilities, so I went home to regroup and plan.

I made a list of possible gifts. I wanted it to be something that wouldn’t be heavy or fragile, because of shipping it. I also wanted it to be something I thought a lot of people would want (as opposed to, say, a decorative item, which I might LOVE but maybe I’d be the only one), and something kind of FUN and interesting, and ideally something that the winner could keep OR might be able to give as a gift to someone on their own list, if things were tight for them this year. AND I wanted it to be something fun to buy. So you can see this was a Shopping Challenge.

I considered doing kitchen linens: oven mitts, dishtowels, hot pads—maybe holiday-themed. Or an assortment of stationery, maybe with a journal. Or a set of wrapping paper and ribbons and gift tags. Or a bunch of holiday paper plates and napkins. Or cloth napkins and napkin rings. Or whimsical kitchen things. Or a brownie pan plus oven mitts, or a muffin tin plus silicone muffin cups. Or a coffee/chocolate assortment. Or a throw blanket and throw pillow (MUST we throw them?). Or mixing bowls and measuring cups. Or a photo album and a frame. Or Spode serving utensils with Christmas trees on them. ….Are you beginning to sympathize with my mother, who was dragged along on this trip and subjected to many happy ditherings by someone in no hurry to make up her mind?

This is what we chose:

(I used my HomeGoods dark turquoise leather chair as the backdrop!)

My mom and I have been admiring that pink salt cube with grater, but it is THIRTEEN DOLLARS, which we’re sure is totally worth it, but we are more accustomed to the 49-cent cylinder of Morton’s salt, so this wouldn’t be something we’d buy for ourselves—but we’d be delighted to get it as a gift so we could TRY IT! Furthermore, you would not believe how special and awesome this salt claims to be: “purest salt on earth,” “primordial Himalayan sea salt,” “unique, subtle flavors of HimalaSalt’s essential minerals, created 250 million years ago during a time of pristine environmental integrity.” PRISTINE ENVIRONMENTAL INTEGRITY. It goes on, too, with more praises of this salt.

I also got the refill container of more pink salt (“Ethically sourced. Artisan made.”), which was $8. That left $4, so I bought a container of Aleppo Chile Finishing Salt that was on clearance down from $6 or $7.

All this fancy salt can be yours (er, as long as you want me to ship it to a U.S. or Canadian address), a holiday gift from me to you (or to a recipient of your choice: I can ship it directly, and in fact, heck, I will wrap it and stick on a gift tag if you like), and I will barely even taste it first, only if a little salt breaks off and falls out of the package!

To enter, leave a comment on this post by December 6, 2010. It doesn’t have to be any particular comment, but if you need inspiration you can tell me if you normally spring for Morton’s salt or if you save a dime and get the store brand, or if you have tried fancy salts before, or whether you would keep it yourself or give it as a gift. Pitiful-situation stories accepted, but will not increase odds of winning, which will be random.

FURTHERMORE, BlogHer is giving away a $100 HomeGoods gift card and twenty $25 HomeGoods gift cards, so even if you don’t win the salt, you might win a card and can go buy your own thing. To get to the card giveaways, go to the BlogHer page. (But leave a comment HERE first if you want to win the salt.)

I have two main projects for Thanksgiving vacation. One is to start baking for all the school bake sales I donate to (I’m not going to chaperon any field trips but BY GUM I can bake some stuff). I’m starting with stuff that freezes well. After much deliberation I made a batch of salt brownies for this year: I labeled each baggie “SALT BROWNIES” so I hope no small child chooses them and is disappointed. I also made plain chocolate brownies.

My second project is to get a Christmas card picture of the five kids. Every year I’m SO GLAD I did it, but WHILE I’m doing it I wish I didn’t even HAVE kids. Or at least not THESE kids. Next year, remind me to have several stiff drinks before the photography session—the pictures might end up blurry or tilted, but at least I will not blow a gasket. I’ve been going through the pictures I took (336 of them) and some of them are comically awful, some of them MIGHT work, and most of them make me ruin my dental work: four children looking perfect, one child choosing that exact moment to make a dumb face on purpose; four children looking perfect, one child wiping his nose with his sleeve; three children looking perfect and two pretending not to know the difference between “smiling” and “baring teeth”; etc.

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I love Unofficial Mom’s story about how a baby dropped into their laps. I was trying to tell my mom about it in the car, and I had tears (OF HAPPY) dripping onto my shirt, and thank goodness I was using the drive-up ATM instead of a teller window. Then my mom tried to make me tell it again at Thanksgiving, because “making Swistle cry” is her party trick, and I declined to tell it but teared up ANYWAY.

Kelsey is doing her annual Christmas Mix CD giveway, and I highly recommend you enter: she sent me one of her non-Christmas mix CDs awhile back, and I have it in my kitchen CD player and I listen to it pretty much every day as I’m making dinner or cleaning it up, and I lovvvve it. When it’s NOT actually on, I have it going through my head.

One of my Thanksgiving tasks in recent years (if “years” can be used to refer to last year plus this year) is making sweet potatoes with marshmallows. No one likes sweet potatoes with marshmallows except my dad, so I make one single sweet potato (with marshmallows). I was at the store today to buy my sweet potato, and there were two options: yams, sold individually, and sweet potatoes, sold in bags of many.

I found a produce clerk and I said, “If I wanted to buy a single sweet potato…could I buy a single sweet potato? or no?” And she said, “Here are the single ones, over here!” and I said, “Those have a sign over them that says ‘YAMS'” and she said, “They come to us in a crate that says ‘YAMS’ but they’re sweet potatoes” and I said, “…” and she said, “Some people say they’re different; some people say they’re the same. Maybe it’s regional?” And I said thank you, and I looked at the yams, and I looked at the bags of sweet potatoes, and they looked different, and the bag of sweet potatoes was not much more expensive than a single yam, so I bought a bag of sweet potatoes.

So! Here is how many sweet potatoes I need for Thanksgiving: one. And here is how many sweet potatoes I have: eight. So…do you have some ideas? Elizabeth and Henry both still like baby food sweet potatoes, so for one sweet potato I plan to boil it and mash it and see if they like it. (My prediction: no.) For another, I will bake it and eat it like a potato, and see if I like it. (My prediction: no.)

I had heard lots of talk about sweet potato fries, so I got some once at a restaurant, and I thought they were awful. What ELSE is there to do with sweet potatoes?

Would you like to make the kind of noises that cause the other adult in your household to come in from the other room saying worriedly, “Are those happy noises or sad noises?” Then read Shauna’s Me Vs. the Color Printer.

Or/and, read Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving by Allie, which made my stomach muscles literally hurt. Literally. Hurt.

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This is the first of many weeks of gift ideas. Coming up with gift ideas is one of my FAVORITE THINGS OF THE WHOLE ENTIRE YEAR. This week at Milk and Cookies it’s Gifts for People Having Financial Problems, which is perhaps not the CHEERIEST of topics but was nevertheless fun to think of solutions for.

I’ve been wanting to talk about this for weeks but, you know, there’s Personal and then there’s PERSONAL, and it’s so hard to figure out which is the kind of personal that’s good to blog about and which is the kind of personal that should go in a diary. But it’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep, and the middle of the night is such a good time for confiding things.

I’m feeling moody and upset, and it’s because I think it’s time for Paul and me to move on to The Snip stage of life. And I realize from previous discussions on this topic that for some of you it’s unfathomable that I would want another child or feel sad about being done after five. In real-life discussions with other moms, eyes bug out of heads when I say I’d like another.

What I want to emphasize is that for me, this is NORMAL LIFE: when someone says “How do you do it?,” I don’t have an answer for that (other than “It’s not as bad/hard as you’d think”) because this is just ORDINARY. Having one baby felt ordinary, having two felt ordinary, having four felt ordinary, having five feels ordinary—and I would like another child, and to me that’s no weirder than someone with one child wanting a second. And this is not because I am a freak of nature: a few generations ago, we all would have been like, “Only five kids? Do they have…you know…problems-if-you-know-what-I-mean?”

Can you tell I’m feeling a little rough around the edges about this? I feel so stuck, trying to communicate the way things are, and the way they’re NOT. It’s so frustrating to feel the bugged-out eyes all the time. I know, I DO KNOW, that five children is not the norm in this generation and in this culture, but it’s the norm IN MY HOUSE and IN MY LIFE. In a household with two children it would be odd to suddenly go to six children, yes, but in a household with five children, it would NOT be. And because we’re already a one-income household, and because we bought our house and our car as a one-income household, adding another child doesn’t make much difference financially, either: one more plate at the table, one more use for the handmedowns, that’s all. Maybe a small increase in the water bill for the laundry.

Anyway. Anyway. YOU know all this. It’s not a financial decision at our house, not even a little. It’s that Paul says he is at his maximum capacity for spending quality time with individual children. He says he doesn’t have room in his heart for another baby. Whether or not that’s true (he thought the same about Henry, and that has not turned out to be the case—to a degree that is almost comical) is irrelevant: it’s his reason, and he’s not backing down no matter what I say or want or think or feel or WHATEVER.

And as time goes on, the convenience factor has started to help me adjust to this. Henry is potty-trained now, and Elizabeth can put on her own seatbelt. Henry is the only one who still does things like draw on the walls, and he’s due to stop that crap any day now. It’s nice not to have to carry anyone. It’s nice that no one’s in a 5-point car seat anymore. It’s nice that everyone can feed himself/herself. It’s nice to be able to get rid of clothes Henry outgrows, instead of saving them. It’s nice that half the kids can make their own breakfasts and lunches.

And I can see more and more freedoms ahead: soon no one will need a hand held. Soon everyone will be able to pull up his own pants. Soon everyone will be able to tie his or her own shoes. Soon everyone will be able to bathe himself. Soon I will be able to close the office door when I’m working. In two years Henry will start kindergarten, and the year after that all five will be in school all day. (But this is like your boss telling you don’t worry, soon you won’t have to do Task A and Task B anymore—when actually Task A and Task B are your favorite parts of your job.)

Reading Marie Green‘s posts on the topic have also helped me adjust, by making me think day and night and very intensely about the topic. And at this point…hey, are we two full years past my own Big Crisis? I think we are, but I don’t want to look it up, even to link to it. I just remember it was near Christmas. Let’s say two years, and not only has that been some time to get used to the idea, it’s been some time for our family to settle into its state of Being Seven of Us. I’d wanted Henry to have a buddy, since it’s Rob and William, and then the twins, and then Henry alone—but Henry has joined up with the twins. Another baby at this point would be born when he was four, which would mean we’d have Rob and William, and then the twins and Henry, and then a lone baby.

But just because I can see the upside of not having more children, it doesn’t mean this isn’t a big deal in our marriage. It was a matter of one of us wanting things one way, and one of us wanting things the other way—and only one of us could have it the way we wanted it, and Paul is the one who gets it, at the cost of what I wanted so badly. There could have been another person in our family, and he decided on his own that there would not be, and I had to submit to that. I think it leaves scar tissue, when one spouse lets his or her preferences trump the other spouse’s. When the stakes are very very high (a PERSON, a whole person who won’t exist), there’s more scarring than when it’s a matter of one person getting to make the decision about which car the couple will drive.

May I interject here that in the past when I’ve said such things, commenters have acted as if I got MY way with five kids and then Paul finally gets to make a decision by saying no to a sixth—when GOODNESS that is an icky and untrue way of looking at things. Paul and I BOTH wanted and planned on four children, and without getting into details let’s just say that Henry was the result of Paul’s decision as well. It’s not those five children on my side of the scales, versus poor Paul getting only the decision to stop; it’s the two of us wanting and having a large family, and now differing in whether our family could handle another member. It would be the same decision/situation if we’d both wanted the first child, but then I wanted a second child and he didn’t: the number of children agreed upon by both parties before the disagreement is irrelevant.

So. I told Paul that if he was really really really definitely sure he would never change his mind about another child, he could make an appointment. And because recently he implied (possibly only carelessly) that if I made the appointment it would be “my decision,” I added that he would need to make the appointment himself. Now I guess we will see what happens. I feel sometimes panicky and upset and sometimes impatient and irritated, and I wish very much that we really did have “child lines” on the palms of our hands that would tell us the fated number of children for us to have. I feel like by telling Paul he can go ahead and live our lives his way, I’m giving up on a person who could have been here but now won’t be. Also, I think he totally owes me as many cats as I want.

I know these things can vary regionally, but my Target has a good sale this week on the kinds of chocolate gifts I’d buy for teachers, mail carriers, bus drivers, etc., if I hadn’t decided to go the gift card route instead. Like, they have the hard plastic Christmas-tree-shaped and rectangular boxes of Ferrero Rocher, $4 down from $5.99, or maybe it was down from $6.99, in any case it was down to $4. And so were the pretty metallic cardboard triangular boxes of Lindt truffles. I stood there agitating for a lonnnnng time: So pretty! And so yummy! And such a good sale! But I’d already decided to do gift cards! Should I do candy AND gift card? No, too expensive. And they’d probably prefer the gift card. But the chocolate is exactly what I would have chosen if I didn’t want to do a gift card. And a $5 or even $10 gift card really doesn’t look like as much as a $6-7 box of chocolate. And maybe I should rethink the whole thing? Agitate agitate agitate.

Then Edward wanted to buy ME one of the boxes of Ferrero Rocher for Christmas, and I suggested he should go shopping closer to Christmas with Daddy instead, and he declined that idea, and I suggested a little more forcefully, and he DECLINED! THAT! IDEA!!!1! So…win for me, especially since both Paul and Edward are likely to forget all about it and purchase me ANOTHER gift from him.

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It is time! to! shop! This year, as every year, I am going to try not to over-buy. I love gift-shopping so! much! and what happens is I keep seeing little things for everyone, and really it works better to have a few big things than a thousand tiny ones, and so then I cram the tiny ones into the stockings, and then THOSE are overfilled, and gah. So this year! I will try to be better! PLANNING is required. (But spontaneous buying is so fun!)

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I just ordered holiday stamps. This is one of my favorite things, and even better now that I do Postcrossing. I go online so I can take a long time to make up my mind and so I don’t have to make the clerk impatient and exasperated. Some of the clerks even act as if it DOESN’T MATTER what the stamps look like! I KNOW!!

For my own holiday cards I ordered Holiday Evergreens. For Postcrossing I ordered one book each of all the holiday ones: a book of angels, a book of Hanukkah, a book of Kwanzaa, a book of assorted (reindeer/snowman/nutcracker/gingerbread), a book of Madonna and child, a book of holiday evergreens, and a book of the ones that say CELEBRATE. Most international postcards need two stamps (plus a 10c stamp), so I like putting a combination: like, if I use a Christmas postcard, I put on a Kwanzaa and a Hanukkah stamp. If the card is more winter-holiday-neutral, I pick whichever two look nicest with it.

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I think I am going to buy a new fake tree. We have one I bought on sale at Target for $16.99 ten years ago, and it bothers me every year: it’s 6 feet tall (if the single branch at the top sticking up a foot above the rest counts) and it’s “slimline” so it hardly holds any ornaments, and although it DOES look pretty when heavily decorated so you can’t see the metal parts sticking out, I want BIGGER and more room for ornaments. Every year I wait for trees to go on clearance, but by the time they DO, I’m not in the mood to buy one. AND, I’m picky.

AND, remember when I finally DID buy one on clearance, and I put it away for the next year, and when we set it up the next year it gave me vibrating electrical shocks? and Target handled the situation super-suckily so that I felt not only cheated but also put-upon and “I WILL NOT BE IGNORED”-ish? So this year I think maybe I’ll buy one just on SALE, so I can set it up right away and see if Target is trying to kill me (AGAIN). Sure, sure, I shouldn’t buy it from Target, I should vote my dollars and etc., but the thing is I like their trees best so there it is. And then I can give the old one away on Freecycle BEFORE Christmas, so someone else can use it.

The Holiday Card Scoring Guide in 11×11 poster form (there is also an 11×14 version):

(as you can see from the watermark, this screenshot is from Zazzle.com)
(the watermark is not on the poster itself)

Yesterday I was all bleh and muh and “How come there’s never anything GOOD to do?” and so I went and made a Swistle Holiday Card featuring the Holiday Card Scoring System. It looks like this:

(as you can see from the watermark, this screenshot is from Zazzle.com)
(the watermark is not on the card itself)

On the inside it says:

(and again, as you can see from the watermark, this screenshot is from Zazzle.com)
(and again, the giant Z watermark is not on the card itself)

I consulted with my buddy The Gori Wife to find out how to say the Muslim holiday, too (and in fact, how to say “the Muslim holiday,” because I wasn’t sure if that was right or if it should be “the Islamic holiday,” and I can’t believe I’m confessing this instead of pretending I knew the right way all along), but she reminded me that the Muslim calendar is lunar (which of course I totally knew) (no I did not) and so although I could say “Happy Eid!” if I wanted to, it would soon be weird to be saying it in winter, and in fact even this year it would be a little weird since in mid-December it would be, like, a month too late for Eid cards. So! That is the explanation for why we have Festivus but not Eid, and why does the spell-checker reject BOTH holidays? COEXIST, spell-checker.

ANYWAY, then I wanted to buy some of my cards, not only to send them but also to see how they look in person, but I thought I’d wait until there was a sale—and this morning I got an email about a today-only today-and-tomorrow-only sale. It’s 50% off all cards (which means the Hey Pinehole! postcards are included so I got some of those too), plus free shipping with no minimum, and the code is ZAZZLECARD50. And I’m telling you because hey, maybe you want to pay what is still a very high per-card price to send Swistle cards. OR, more likely, maybe you want to design your OWN cards and save 50% and get free shipping (as long as you get them done by the end of today).

If you buy anything Swistley, I get a 10% commission, which they won’t let me refuse: I dialed the adjustable commission percentage as low as it would go. I’m putting that money into the care package and/or “buying one of each thing I design to make sure it looks okay in person” fund.

And if you are asking, “So, was it fun to design a self-promoting holiday card and then pay too much for them?”: yes. Yes, it was. So I also made some Christmas ornaments, though I have not yet ordered any because they’re not on sale. (FUN.) (TRY IT.) (And if you do, link from the comments section so I can go see what you made!)

Sometimes I like to blow my children’s minds by suddenly stopping to get them an unexpected treat. I was out with Rob and Henry (of the five, they are the highest maintenance right now, so I take them out pretty much every Sunday to give Paul a break). I saw a Dunkin’ Donuts and before they knew what was happening we were turning in.

I wanted a treat too, but I wasn’t in the mood for a doughnut. Which made it perfect: one of the combo options is a medium coffee and two doughnuts. Each child got to pick a doughnut, and I got a coffee in a fun flavor (gingerbread) plus got cream and sugar in it.

Side note: did you know that a medium regular coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts is 3 creams and 3 sugars? I found this HUGELY USEFUL, because even though I know we are now a nation of Perfectly Acceptable Coffee Pickiness, I still have trouble when I don’t know what it is I’m asking for. The regular is both creamier and sweeter than I like, and I was in a particularly confident mood, so I said to the clerk, “I want cream and sugar, but, like, half to three quarters of the usual amount?” And she said, “Er, well, it’s 3 creams and 3 sugars,” and I said “PERFECT: 2 creams and 2 sugars, then,” because those of us with math medals have instantly noticed that 2/3rds is right between 1/2 and 3/4ths. (Hey: why don’t we put letters after 1/2?)

Where was I? Oh yes! The gingerbread coffee was good. I liked it. And I noticed the sign said that the gingerbread flavoring was pre-sweetened, which made me wonder if some flavorings were just simple syrups with spices in them.

Before I give the recipe I tinkered together, I need to warn you that this is not meant to be a COPY of the Dunkin’ Donuts flavor: I’d only had one single cup of it, so I wasn’t familiar enough with it to try to duplicate it. What I DID do was make a version that would please me if I ordered a gingerbread coffee at a coffee shop.

Swistle’s Version of Gingerbread Coffee Flavoring

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
2 T. molasses
1/2 t. cinnamon
1 t. ginger
1/8 t. cloves

First, the simple syrup, which is just as simple as it sounds: 1 part sugar to 1 part water. Put 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 cup water in a small saucepan, bring it to a boil, and then turn off the heat. (In metric, 1/2 cup is about 120 ml. But it doesn’t matter the precise ml as long as it’s close to 120 and you’re using one measuring cup of sugar and one of the same measuring cup of water.)

Add 2 tablespoons (30 ml) molasses. If you don’t want to have to scoop the sticky molasses out of the measuring spoon with your finger, use the measuring spoon to stir the hot simple syrup and the molasses will dissolve off.

Add the spices: 1/2 teaspoon (2.5 ml) of ground cinnamon, 1 teaspoon (5 ml) of ground ginger, 1/8 teaspoon (er, just over half a ml?) of ground cloves. Stir until they’re evenly mixed in.

In a mug of coffee (my mug holds 1.25 cups, or about 300 ml), I used 1/2 tablespoon (7.5 ml) of syrup. Then I added a slosh of 2% milk, which is how I usually drink my coffee. It was still a little too sweet for me, but approximated the sweetness I remembered from the Dunkin’ Donuts kind. If it’s too sweet for you, too, you can half-again the spices in the same amount of syrup and then use a teaspoon (5 ml) or even half a teaspoon of it in the coffee.

The extra can be stored in a little container in the fridge, though you will need to stir like the charles dickens to make sure the spices aren’t just hanging around on the bottom. And it’ll be thicker, so again: to make measuring less messy, you can use the measuring spoon to stir the mixture, then use it again to stir the syrup into the coffee.