Blah and Books and Barbies and Baby Jesus.

Add blogging to the list of “crap I’ve been letting slide”. It’s right up there with “taking nice pictures” and “laundry” and “showering with any sort of regularity”. The slow slide of November into December into 2014 has been a rough one. I mean, it’s been mostly decent, just cold as all hell, and depressingly dreary for the most part, and so, you know. I basically just want to quit things and nap whilst the children watch tv. Because I’m AWESOME AT THIS.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about Christmas. And how proud I am that we didn’t go completely overboard this year. (Even if we did literally quintuple the total barbie count at our house).

First of all- Christmas Eve. One thing I DID go crazy overboard with was cookies. I just kept finding more and more kinds of cookies that I just had to make, and so we had chocolate chip and snickerdoodles and peanut butter blossoms and of course decorated sugar cookies. I also made dough for hot cocoa cookies (double chocolate cookies topped with melted marshmallows and covered in a chocolate glaze OHMYGAH soooo good.) which I made the day after Christmas and I still have dough in the fridge to make Italian Christmas cookies (which I am super excited about because I am the only one in the entire family that likes that anise flavor and so that entire batch is guaranteed mine all mine.) and I can totally still get away with baking more Christmas cookies because we are Catholic and therefore we are obligated to stretch the Christmas season out to its fullest WHICH MEANS there are still six more days of decadence as it pertains to cookie baking and eating.

After we hopped the kids up on a crap ton of sugar in various forms, we bathed them and put them in adorable matching jammies and attempted to open the traditional one xmas eve gift of a new book. But this mostly just turned into screaming with frustration over not being able to open more gifts, and then some carol singers came to the door and distracted them from their tantruming. Which was nice, until I suggested that we give the nice people a little baggie of freshly baked cookies and Violet completely lost her schmidt because “how dare I give away 6 of our eleventy-frillion dozen cookies? How will we live without those six cookies?” And then she realized we still had like a thousand tins full on the counter and it was all good. Except then she wanted more cookies and we said no and then it was more screaming.

*All is calm, all is bright*

Once the little hellions angels were finally bedded down for the night and we once again realized that the dream of making midnight Mass was sheer lunacy, we cleaned powdered sugar from every possible surface, vacuumed up an entire bag’s worth of pine needles off the living room carpet, and settled in with some nog and some Elf and started wrapping and arranging and stuffing stockings. At 4:00am, we went to bed.  *note to self- Next year, for the LOVE OF BABY JESUS, wrap gifts as they arrive. There is simply no need for this level of sleep deprivation.

Using an iPhone to light nativity scene because I is a creative genius at 3:40am.

After a brief nap, the children awoke us with excited babbling about all the goodies that Santa left in their stockings, and the sugar overconsumption began anew. Santa had of course packed some coloring books and crayons and granola bars and juice boxes and other baubles in there, enough to keep children occupied for a good half hour while Nate and I peeled our eyelids open wide enough to walk downstairs without falling over. And so it was Christmas morning.

The big item on the wishlists this year was BARBIES. Both the big girls wanted them, Bianca (though she may not have known it) wanted to eat their shoes. On Christmas Eve, Nate took each big girl to the store separately, to buy presents for each of their sisters. Fiona picked out a Barbie for Violet. Violet picked out a Barbie for Fiona. They were really excited for Barbies, y’all. And since they were both as excited to GIFT a barbie as they were to RECEIVE a barbie, they each selected their gifts to each other as the first presents to be opened.

YOU GUYS IT’S BARBIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And then we made our way through the remainder of the gifts, which included gifts from Santa (ponies for Violet, and a snowglobe for Fiona, because the kid legit asked Santa for “snow” and I don’t even…we live in CANADA child, we have snow coming out of our ears here! Oh and something for Bianca. I don’t remember. We already owned it. Santa’s so crafty and thrifty.) and a large quantity of books. Christmas books, joke books, Ramona books, books based off of madcap YouTube sensations. That’s right. There’s a book version of What Does the Fox Say and it is fantastic. We bought it for Violet. Once she realized what it was, she was really excited.

And as for Baby Bianca- well, she was happy as a clam with all the gifts I took out of her room and wrapped for her. Her main goal was just getting all the wrapping paper into the recycling bin. She was super happy. I love babies at Christmas.

And then there were cinnamon rolls, and then quiche, and church, and more cookies and candy, and cheese and meat and crackers, and veggies arranged in the shape of an ornament and grinch kebabs (because Pinterest!) and OH MY GOSH YOU GUYS. I almost forgot to tell you about the presents Nate got for me! Ok, first of all, he gave me a Red Sox jersey with a special edition B Strong patch on the sleeve. Which was a group effort between himself and several of my sisters, so um thanks girls. Secondly, I got a treadmill. Which I’ve been wanting for forever, and I’m super excited and thrilled about, but dude didn’t just give me a treadmill. No. He couldn’t keep something that big hidden in the house, clearly, so he gave me a card. Inside the card was a small piece of construction paper with a weird cryptic clue on it. And that turned out to be the first of several clues on a freaking scavenger hunt you guys! IT WAS SO COOL. And it culminated in a tinyurl link that led to a youTube video of him telling me he got me a treadmill. Also a funny video of a dude falling off a treadmill. So, I mean, props dude. Color me impressed. The hockey skates and NIИ cd I got for him seem kind of lame in comparison.

Aaaand that pretty much sums it up. Merry Christmas to you all, here’s hoping I get my blog mojo back in the new year!

 

 

Oh and guys? With regards to the Barbie situation. I let the girls pick whatever they wanted for each other (which- princesses, blurgh) but I carefully chose the ones I bought for them. Zookeeper Barbie and Astronaut Barbie, because Empowerment and Strong Women and Role Models and all that shit. Guess what. Princess or astronaut, that girl is made to be naked. It’s the the way things are, I guess.

Oh, Barbie. You so scandalous.