So! So so so! This weekend I went on a mini-vacation without Paul or the kids. I went to see my brother (Erik), sister-in-law (Anna), sister-in-law’s sister (Lottie), and niece (Niestle). First there was the mini-roadtrip to get there. I brought with me CDs, a large coffee, and a 9×13 pan full of mini-cupcakes I made with the leftover cake batter from the bake sale cake plus the second bake sale cake I had to make when the first one was uncooked in the middle. (I got cocky and thought I didn’t need the toothpick test. OH HUBRIS.)

I see nothing funny about these CD choices.
John Denver is awesome,
and so is Blink-182.

(For those of you who have the Blink-182 album and are wondering why the, er, “nurse” is on the inside of the case instead of on the outside: I turned the cover around because I prefer to look at young men in boxer shorts.)

I arrived mid-afternoon, and Erik stayed home with Niestle while Anna, Lottie, and I went to a big musical Christmas variety show, in the kind of theater with enormous high ceilings with, like, nymphs painted on them, with gilt and velvet EVERYWHERE, and a wreath the size of a minivan. We had a wonderful time. One highlight: at one point there was a sober recitation of The Life of Jesus: he was born, he was a carpenter (wait, we seem to be veering away from the Christmas part of this story), and when he was 30 years old the tide of popular opinion turned against him and he was killed but rose again (Easter, this is the EASTER story now). Out of the darkness, the incredulous voice of a little girl in our row: “He DIED??” Another highlight: ACTUAL LIVE CAMELS. Another highlight: muscular young men wearing snug bright pink. Another highlight: The Twelve Days of Christmas with chicken-dancing for the “three French hens” part.

Then we went home, and Niestle was already asleep, and so the four of us grown-ups had tacos and wine and mini-cupcakes. The plan was to play Pictionary, but after my brother found out he’d have to be partners with me again, we somehow never got around to it, and instead stayed up until midnight talking about all the ways our respective parents neglected and mistreated us (KIDDING, kidding, parents who read this blog!). Erik and I totally trumped Anna and Lottie with our Childhood Illness stories: we both got croup a lot; Erik has a systemic poison ivy story and a near-fatal asthma attack story; I have a nowhere-near-as-good-but-still-pretty-good pneumonia story and a tonsillectomy story, plus I can add the Big Sister Cam to his stories. Anna and Lottie were like, “Let’s see…I think we must have had some colds.” WE WIN. (So it’s good we did this instead of Pictionary, because um.)

Then I slept until ten in the morning. TEN.

TENNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN.

We discussed brunch. Erik and Anna said we could do a Mexican scramble, or we could do French toast, or we could have Belgian waffles. We weighed the options indecisively, and then Lottie said, “I’m in the mood for sweet AND savory—so why don’t we have the Mexican scramble and then finish off the cupcakes?” SOLD.

I left reluctantly, but it was a very pretty day for a drive home. I listened to the radio and felt a leeeeetle silly being a mid/late-thirties mother-of-five singing vigorously “We will never be! never be! anything but loud and nitty-gritty, dirty little freaks!,” but not as silly as you might expect (slash-hope).

This is skimpy because I am on a 24-hour vacation WITHOUT ANY CHILDREN! More on this when I get back!

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I got an assignment to spend $25 at HomeGoods on a gift for someone, and I decided to spend it on one of you: you can enter my fancy pink salt giveaway through December 6th, which is the day after tomorrow so hurry up. I can mail it to you, or if you want me to send it directly to another U.S./Canadian address I can do that too. I’ll even wrap it and put a gift tag on it (from YOU, of course!).

New gift ideas post at Milk and Cookies: Gift ideas for people you don’t like.

Alert! Alert! Amazon has a deal today on some of their Melissa & Doug toys. I lovvvvvvvve Melissa & Doug. I’ll quick point out some favorites, but then you need to get over there before stuff sells out: some of these Amazon deals are gone before I decide what to buy. (All images from Amazon’s site.)

Abby & Emma Deluxe Magnetic Dress-Up, $10. I bought this for Elizabeth to give as a gift at the next birthday party she goes to, but maybe I should have gotten one for her, too. In fact, I think I will, right after I finish here.

Bake and Decorate Cupcake Set, $10. My mom bought this for the kids to play with at her house, and it is pretty much the biggest success ever. The only thing I wish were different is that the cupcake papers are ACTUAL cupcake papers. Downside: those are going to need to be replaced pretty regularly. Upside: easy and cheap to replace. Still, silicone would have been better and smarter for a children’s toy, I think. I bought one for a future party gift anyway. $10 is EXACTLY what I like to spend on a birthday party gift.

Deluxe Picnic Basket Fill & Spill, $10. These are so great for babies.

Deluxe Sandwich-Making Set, $10. This is the one _I_ want to play with.

Okay, enough messing around! You don’t need me to show you every single one while they sell out under your feet, when you can just as easily go look for yourself.

Yesterday’s not-awkward shopping trip was at Walmart, and I have another Walmart pricing report. I’ve been unhappy to see at Target that the 20-pound bags of Iams cat food have gone up more than $10 over the past few years, from being about $24 to now being $35. So I checked the price at Walmart when I was there yesterday, and danged if it wasn’t $25! So I was hauling it into my cart, and….wait. It’s a 14-pound bag. Designed to be the same size/shape as the 20-pound bag, so that if you didn’t happen to look at the weight you’d think you were saving $11. Well-played, Walmart, but I win this round.

Now. We need to discuss Christmas trees. I’m going to buy a dead one this year for the first time, instead of using our fake tree. I have taken the first step: I have purchased a Christmas tree stand. But now I don’t know what the next step is. Just…go choose a tree? Here are the issues plaguing my mind:

1. Do I buy it at the cool gardening store or at the animal shelter or at the place within sight of our house? I’d like to support the animal shelter, but when I drove by it looked like they had a small selection of trees, and that most of the trees were wrapped up. The cool gardening store had a huge selection, but I know from past pumpkin-purchases that they tend to be significantly overpriced. The nearby place, it would be awesome to just go get it and carry it home, rather than messing with the car—but it looks like they have basically one kind of tree.

2. You might wonder why I don’t just go LOOK and SEE what kind of trees each place has, rather than driving by and guessing. I feel weird about browsing at a tree place and then leaving without a tree. Do people…do that? Plus, I don’t even really know what kind of tree I should be wanting.

3. I want a tree that smells really piney. I don’t know which kinds do that. It seems like in the open air it would be hard to tell.

4. Those trees are just SITTING THERE, and it seems like they should be in buckets of water or something. I’m worried I’ll buy a tree that was cut a week ago, and it will turn all brown and crispy before Christmas. Maybe I should wait to buy the tree. Or maybe I should go to a cut-your-own place? But that brings up so many more issues about saws and so forth. Wait, I’ll bet I need a saw to cut bits off a non-cut-your-own anyway.

5. I feel awkward about doing tests for tree freshness.

6. I want a tree that’s nice and sparse, so there’s plenty of room for ornaments. Maybe all the choices will be TOO FULL.

All right, I feel better. Now I think I can go look for one. I think I’ll go to the nearby place this year, to simplify things. Oh, wait, that gives me a new one:

7. Can one person carry a tree by herself? And I don’t think I have heavy gloves—or at least, none that weren’t stored in such a way that they might now have spiders in them.

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.