December 2022 month in review

by admin

Okay, it’s December 15 and I have exactly 5 minutes to get started writing before I have to head off for a meeting. December was insanely busy.

Shocker, I know!

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Week 1

The meal, I need to come back and say where that is. From a guess, Africa.

But, we’ll start off with the two game board pictures. Superman backed the latest Zombiecide (random game of it that may not be the one he kickstarted) on Kickstarter and it came in. There were so many boxes and then more boxes of figures and expansions. He was giggling like a madman.

While Superman played that with friends Batman was busy playing Sushi Go! (apparently, I don’t have a post on that, I should).

The bottom left is the books I’m giving for Christmas. That’s actually not even all of them. The list, from what I remember:

Week 2

Our co-op had a field trip to Ceramic Lodge, a local paint-your-own pottery studio. I made the entire family go since Jeff wasn’t working that day and we all happily sat and painted our ceramic stuff, and then picked it up later.

Then we had our Marititus meal, which was surprisingly good, even though it had mustard which I’m not really a big fan of.

Every now and then the kids remember it’s their job to hide the wisemen and now their placements are pretty hilarious, like The Artist putting the wisemen amidst the various empty coke cans my son has left next to his computer over a couple of days. It made me laugh when I found them. Currently the wisemen are up in the chandelier, I guess trying to find just where Bethlehem is.

We had the cousins over for a sleepover and to paint our presents. My kids have decided this is the best way to do it now, as they all happily sit in a circle and paint various presents. Even “the baby” who is now 4, gets in on it.

At one point they were playing a game of truth or dare, which I’m not a big fan of but they have pretty firm boundaries on what they can dare someone to do and you can turn down a dare if you are not comfortable doing it, and the same with a truth.

At one point, the cousins were dared to sit in the crate with the dog for 3 minutes. Leezard was very confused why she had extra people in her crate.

I thought it was absolutely hilarious.

Week 3

December week 3 2022

Do you know how hard it is to line up a picture of teens so that you only get pictures of the people who you can show their faces on the internet? I’m trying to work really hard to only show my only family unless I have specific permission (remember the old days when this wasn’t something we thought about because it was the wild West and no one thought about consequences? I have so many pictures I’m going back and putting emojis over the faces of friends’ kids from then). Since December started on a Thursday the third Thursday is so early in the month, it always throws me. My boys happily played games and talked with their friends while The Artist sat over with me and avoided all those teen boys, none of her friends were able to come.

I don’t have any pictures from it, but we went up to Dallas to see Jeff’s family, and it’s a very different thing now as his parents are getting older. We stayed the night at his sister’s house. The kids watched several classic Christmas movies that the kids hadn’t seen before, and it was quite hilarious to me to see the kids look at me and say, “Why do people like this?” I attempted to explain it, but really it just comes down to what you like. It’s a style of comedy and a style of nostalgia that Jeff and I weren’t fans of and so my kids didn’t see growing up and so they don’t have nostalgia for it.

We attempted to make the Tajikistan recipe, but that didn’t go well. Or I should say, the meal ended up great, but the meal is absolutely nothing like the actual recipe calls for. When I write about it, I’ll be saying, “Our pretend Tajikistan recipe” because so many things went wrong and it’s nothing like what it’s supposed to be with all of the ingredients that were missing by the end.

The boys really love to randomly grab The Artist and give her hugs. Or surround her and chant “One of Us,” or something else like that. It’s not as fun for everyone else as it is for them. Wait, no let me rephrase that. It’s hilarious to me as they do it to her, and it’s hilarious to me when it happens to me. The Artist is not as amused.

I had a mini-retreat with my high school girls this week (yes, I’m actually writing this right after the week ended, and since I did that right as the week ended it is still super fresh in my mind, except I was so sleep deprived I don’t know what I was thinking). If anyone ever thinks it’s a good idea to organize a retreat less than a week before Christmas because that’s when everyone is off of school and less busy. Tell that person they are insane.

I was absolutely insane to do this on top of going up to Dallas right before, getting all the Christmas stuff done, and then I have two baby blankets to sew.

That’s right, the wedding I went to back in May (I think), she’s pregnant! They are both so very very excited about this baby, and I’m super excited for her, but also at the same time, I’m feeling old since a few years ago she was babysitting for my kids. Also, it’s the first time the kid of one of my friends who is my contemporary is having kids. It’s super weird.

But going back to that mini-retreat. It was amazing. I think God did some amazing things with that, and I’m planning on writing a cool post on the Bible study we did and the craft project we did with it. That post might even be live before this post is, in which case I’ll come and link to that.

The two pictures from our retreat are us going Downtown to wander around and see Christmas lights and take silly pictures together. It was a lot of fun. Not too surprisingly when taking pictures near Christmas lights I ended up with lots and lots of backlit pictures that don’t look that great. It would probably look a lot better if I had a more current phone and not a 5-year-old phone. Oh well.

But, I’m super proud of the charcuterie board that The Artist and I put together. She made these super cool roses out of salami slices and I accidentally made a heart out of the Brie cheese I’d bought. The Brie was in an oval and I sliced it diagonally thinking I would put it on two different plates, but then I realized I could make a heart with it. It was super cool. I’m very very proud of those.

December 2022 week 4

Wow, just scrolled through my week 3 and it was quite a long week…

Most of the pictures here are from Christmas. Texas, just like the rest of the country got hit with a cold front, however we didn’t get any condensation from it, so it was cold for no reason.

I firmly believe if it’s going to be cold, then I sure better get snow. But I did not get snow, I was just cold. But it was only cold for a day or so, and by Christmas Eve it was warm enough for our planned silly string battle to commence (that’s the bottom left corner, I got a picture with The Artist and my niece, actually I got lots of people, but that’s the most obvious we had a silly string battle).

Oh, the giant picture is my kids leading their part of our Christmas Eve service. The kid were quite amused when I made them come forward for the children’s portion of the service.

It was a good Christmas overall. I got a sword cane for Christmas. I gave Jeff a 3D printer, and he’s still trying to figure out how to set it up and how to use it. There were several board games given, and we then played many of them on Christmas Day.

After Christmas, Batman went out and bought Cthulu: Death May Die, it’s a cooperative game and we’ve been playing it a bunch together, including The Artist who doesn’t usually like games.

We cooked a couple of recipes for around the world, we tried a Philippines adobo recipe, I was worried it would be too salty and it was not. Then we tried a Tongan dessert or maybe a breakfast food (?), that did not turn out well. I made everyone try at least one bite and the looks I got and the excuses made were pretty impressive. All in all it’s a sad waste of coconut. We pretty much agree we would like it more if it had been fried rather than boiled.

We finished off the year with a recreation of our very first ever movie marathon, Lord of the Rings movie marathon, recreating all of the snacks and meals from the day (which means I get to finally update that post with decent pictures. I forgot to ever update it with pictures when I first did it, as I posted it live before we’d done the actual marathon to post with other people each month).

As we watched Two Towers I worked on that applique down in the bottom. A former student of mine (and The Artist’s friend is due in January). The top is all done except the gold on the cup I decided to add in, and today, January 1, I’m hoping to get it all pinned to be ready to quilt.

And that finishes out 2022. It’s a bit weird to me to realize that we are almost 1/4 of the way through this century. Does that feel weird to anyone else?

The post December 2022 month in review appeared first on Adventures in a Messy Life.

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