All is Calm

Life can be a whirlwind running from one activity to the next, one responsibility to the next, one chore to the next. Even when I’m sitting still things are not usually calm. My mind is generally a chaotic cacophony of scheduling, to-do lists, advance planning, etc. It can get pretty noisy in there. But there are moments when I’m blessed with stillness, moments like those spent in the temple or the times during my scripture study when the Spirit is teaching me something profound. Those moments never seem to occur often enough, but I am grateful when they do.

Today was one of those moments of stillness. As I celebrated Christmas with my little flock gathered around me, there was peace and calm both surrounding me and inside my head. Everyone was happy and peaceful, just so grateful for this day we had to be together. There was laughing and joking and joy all around. There was plenty of good food all prepared in advance so there was minimal work for all on this holiday. There wasn’t even any bickering. And for once, my mind was blessedly still, not working on what is next but focusing on this moment. 

As my kids have gotten older, Christmas has become a calmer day all around. There is still plenty of excitement and anticipation and we all still look forward to seeing what Santa brought us, but things are just a bit lower key. Last year we started sharing our wish lists in a shared google doc and it was so helpful that we updated it for this year. Most of us knew what we were getting from everyone, but that didn’t make things any less fun. It was still great to watch all my loved ones open gifts and feign surprise. And knowing that they had received something they were really hoping for completely made up for the lack of secrecy. Of course, there were still a few surprises and that was just as fun as always. 

Last night was a bit of calm as well. Half of my siblings and their families were elsewhere so with only fifteen of us in attendance at my parents’ house, things were much quieter. Malia was the only youngling on hand so acting out the nativity was off the program as well. Instead, we had a musical evening with singing, piano, some trumpet and saxophone and even an ASL translation of “Silent Night.” I really enjoyed the greater peace of the evening and as the littles all continue to grow into bigs, it is something I’d like to continue. Our traditional Christmas Eve religious gifts were given once we got home and everyone got to bed at a fairly decent hour, which was nice.

As I mentioned before, today was calm. Malia was super excited and thrilled about everything, but with everyone else being a bit older, things are less chaotic. For the first time in many years, things were light on the Lego. Malia got a Lego dragon, Matthew was gifted with a Lego Ferrari, Daniel got a Star Wars themed set and I got my first ever big Lego set which was the Chinese spring lantern festival. Lego dumplings! So fun! And yes, even with four of us receiving Lego, it was a light Lego year. 😉 Kevin, Daniel, and Matthew received enough plastic models to last them for years. Malia got a variety of dragon themed items and some new sketch books. Nathan was gifted with a variety of items he will use on his mission as well as several ASL themed items just for grins and giggles. And Kev gave me a gold CTR ring, one I’ve had my eye on for years.

“Silent Night” is one of my favorite Christmas songs. For me, the stillness it invokes is the same stillness that the gospel brings. It is the “be still and know that I am God” kind of a feeling, the one where I’m completely at peace despite the turmoil around me, knowing that the Lord has everything under control. It is no big surprise that the Savior, whose birth “Silent Night” recalls, is the author of this peace. It is because of him that I can have the calm of knowing that all will be right in the end, that God will always prevail, and that if I keep my covenants and stay on the path he has set for me, I will have this stillness and the joy it brings eternally. So as my day of peace winds down, I hope I can carry this calm with me into the new year. We live in a chaotic world and being able to walk through the worldly turmoil without being caught up in it is one of the blessings of the gospel. 

Merry Christmas. May there be peace on earth and peace in our hearts.

Elf Antics

According to Malia, our elf is the best elf. She loves that Jingle Jangle is funny, but not naughty. So many families have elves that make a mess and leave havoc in their wake. Ours is mischievous from time to time, but never in a mean or destructive way. He tends towards humor and creativity rather than leaning towards felony. This year he arrived by air, flying in by paper airplane the first week of December. He spent his time with us fishing, doing some sledding, and giving us all a glimpse of how we would look if we decided to sport a mustache. He even gave Nathan a big Texas mustache so Nathan could decide if that is a look he would consider post mission. 😉 

Malia gets so excited for Jingle Jangle’s arrival each year. She gets so excited by all his antics. And every morning she gets so excited to pop out of bed and search for him.  (I wish she would be so eager to get up for the other eleven months of the year!) She is sad today because she knows that tonight Jingle Jangle will return to the North Pole, although that sadness is greatly tempered by the fact that tomorrow is Christmas. She is the last of my kids and I know that as she gets older her excitement for our elf will wane, but hopefully her affection for him will remain. He has been an important part of our Christmas celebrations for many years, and I hope that as all my kids grow up, they will remember the years he has spent with us with fondness. 

In other news, Nathan won the roommate lottery this year. They all got along really well, enjoyed each other’s company, and had a fantastic semester. They became such good friends that they sent a Christmas card together. Talk about an amazing blessing for Nathan in this first semester of college. I’m so grateful for these young men and the joy that they helped Nathan find in his first semester in college. Hopefully at least some of them will still be around when Nathan goes back to USU after his mission.

Festive Food-Parts III and IV

Today was a two-fer in terms of fun food. With a limited number of days remaining until Christmas, so many fun ideas to create, and only so many days that all my kids are here, sneaking in a couple fun foods seemed like a good way to go.

After the grand time we had fashioning our gingerbread village last Christmas, we all knew gingerbread in some form or another needed to be on the schedule of festivities again this year. I polled the kids and rather than do miniature houses again, we decided to go big and make giant gingerbread men. My goal was to make them as big as conveniently possible, so I sized up a template to print on an 8.5”x11” sheet of paper. The kids used a knife to cut around their templates, the boys all using a traditional gingerbread man shape and Malia going rogue to turn her gingerbread girl into a dragon girl. The boys and I all thought it looked just like Batgirl, but Malia was adamant that it was a dragon. Both men and dragon girl expanded a bit as they baked, and they turned out pretty gargantuan. I’m really glad I didn’t try to make two on a single cookie sheet. We would have ended up with some crazy conjoined gingerbread.

As in all things, all four of my children created very different gingerbread men people beings. Daniel’s man ended up looking like an ‘80’s punk rocker with multicolored spiked hair. Nathan’s looked an awful lot like Oscar the Grouch with a bit of extra bit of color in his hair. Matthew’s was wearing a rockin’ Christmas suit. And Malia’s did not end up looking like Batgirl. It became a man-eating dragon wearing a pearl necklace and star earrings. I’m so proud that my only daughter has such refined tastes. Of course, she did soften the slaughter by adding a timeless piece of jewelry. And to be completely honest, the whole ginger-dead men thing was all my fault. 😂

At the conclusion of the decorating, Daniel decided that the houses had been more fun, but the giant gingerbread men were still fun. I think it would be great to combine the two-a village of tiny houses terrorized by a giant gingerbread man. (I think there have been side effects associated with raising three boys. Twenty years ago, I don’t think I would have considered having a gingerbread village meet a grisly end a funny idea, but I’ve had to make some mental adjustments to keep up with my boys. 😜)

Once the explosion of buttercream, candy and sprinkles was cleaned up, we moved on to our second course of fun food for the day. My kids ask about five million times a day what we are having for dinner, and today I just told them they would have to wait and see. When that is my response, they all know something fun is on the horizon. Nathan even changed some plans for this evening so he would be here for dinner. He realized what I was creating when he saw me breaking the pretzels, but the rest of the kids were otherwise occupied and didn’t figure it out until the moment of final assembly. Sloppy joes with a few additions became a tasty bevy of Santa’s helpers. Yes, they did look more like dogs than reindeer, but a little imagination solved that problem. After our cadre of reindeer was completed, my crew hunkered down and ate every last antler. Seriously, I thought there would be some leftovers. I was wrong.

As for my kitchen, it is jam packed full of Christmas goodness. These are the moments when I wish I had just a bit more counter space. I’m so grateful my crew is willing to clean up when my creativity explodes all over the place. I have definitely made a lot of dirty dishes over the course of the past two days and there are more to come. But my clan will all be well fed time and time again over the course of the week and they know it, so they don’t usually complain too much. 😉

Festive Food-Part II

With waffles on the menu at least weekly around here, they have begun to creep their way into our fun food repertoire. The only wrinkle is that most of the ideas I see online use round waffle irons and ours is square. But with a few adjustments, I can usually find a way to make things work out. Thus was the story with this morning’s Belgian reindeer. The first ones were a bit disproportionate, but they improved in the second generation. And even the weird looking ones tasted good, so I consider that a success. 😉

Big Time Marching Band

 Daniel has had one of those once in a lifetime experiences. The USU football team went to a bowl game and the marching band got to go. Since I wasn’t there, Daniel is my guest blogger to share his experience.

A little bit of context: The USU football team had the best season in school history this year. First season since the 80s with double digit wins, and first Mountain West Championship win in school history. It was our win in the conference championship that landed us into the inaugural Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl. Because the football team made into the bowl, the marching band was invited as well to come and play for them! 

Our trip to the LA Bowl began on Thursday with getting up at 4:00 in the morning to make sure we arrived on time to our frigid 5:00 am call time in the Laub Athletics center. It was below freezing in Logan at the time. We loaded up tour busses, which had stickers placed on the side for the band and were on the road by 5:40. Thursday was spent in the bus traveling to L.A. Twelve hours later and a large amount of stir-crazy band kids later, we arrived at our hotel by LAX. The bus ride was largely uneventful, except for my first experience with LA traffic. Let me tell you, that made me really grateful that we don’t have any place with traffic that bad in the places I go! Once we arrived at the hotel, we were all pretty much done for the day. A few of the saxophonists in the band got together and played a few JackBox Games, but we were all tired from driving all day and so we went to bed.

Friday morning, we went and had breakfast. The university gave us a stipend of about $100 for food, so I ate at no expense. After that we went to do the only rehearsal we had in LA. It was a rather uncanny rehearsal, as we were on a community college field that felt like a high school field and it was 70 degrees. I had to keep reminding myself that it was nearly Christmas. For this game, we had learned a whole new pre-game show to account for the people that couldn’t come with us and an all-new halftime show. We had set the shows the night before we left for LA, so they were all still very new. That being said, we were able to get them on the field really quickly! We had our rehearsal, and then we went and had lunch. After lunch, it was a little bit of down time before we went to the pep rally the night before the game proper. The pep rally consisted of us playing the fight song and the Scotsman a few times along with a few of our other stand tunes in a battle of the bands format with the OSU band. The place they had us do the pep rally just outside SoFi Stadium was not suited for bands, and so the acoustics made hearing the OSU band hard. But I believe that they sounded good, even if we couldn’t hear it! We went back to the hotel and turned in for the night.

Saturday was the day that most of the event occurred. We woke up, and then had breakfast. Afterward, we packed up the hotel and got dressed in our marching band uniforms, which we would spend the rest of the day in. We were out of the hotel by Noon, and we were on our way back to SoFi. We started by walking into the stadium and finding our seats, and all I can say is that it is the nicest stadium I have ever been in. We had to walk down a ramp that led to our seats. We got situated and discovered that the field was 100 feet below ground level. That made it much cooler in the stadium than in the parking lot. We were served a lunch provided by the Aggie Alumni Association in the Toyota Patio area. We hung out there a bit, then we got all lined up, and then played our halftime show, fight song, and the Scotsman for them. After we performed there, we were shepherded down to the field for our pre-game show. In the tunnel on the way down, we ran into the OSU band, and we ran past giving them high fives and fist bumps and wishing them good luck. We got down on into the tunnels and waited a bit. When we were let onto the field to line up on the sidelines, I discovered that the stadium had some of the best turf I had ever stood on. It was easily the nicest field that I have ever been on! We got all lined up, got the green light and played our pre-game show. Unfortunately, we were amplified throughout the stadium, so the reverb was really hard to play through, but the marching experience was absolutely amazing! 

After pre-game, we went back to our seats to watch the first half. I very quickly discovered that earplugs were mandatory if I wanted to hear anything after the game. The announcer and the sound effects were really loud. We watched the first quarter and most of the second quarter in our seats before heading back down through the stadium to the field to prepare for halftime. When halftime hit, we were treated with the OSU band halftime. The Aggie Marching Band cheered them on quite profusely, and we were probably their biggest fans for a minute. As soon as they were done, we ran onto the field to play our halftime show, which was a reprise of one we had done earlier in the season. We played music from Shrek consisting of Funkytown and I’m a Believer. Once again, the reverb was a problem, but we were successful in working through it and playing a really great show! And once again, I was struck with how nice the turf was.

We finished our show and went back to our seats, where we played our short tunes and other stand tunes when we could. Once again, the volume of the stadium was crazy loud. We watched the third and fourth quarters and we all went bananas when we somehow managed to win the game! The technology in the stadium was really cool, as whenever either team did anything, the stadium’s many screens would change the accent colors of the stadium to that team’s colors and seeing the stadium blue and white with the proclamation that we had won was an exhilarating experience! After the win and the awards ceremony, we headed out to the parking lot where we were able to briefly meet the OSU band. We were fed dinner and we changed out of our uniforms. We ended up driving through the night to get back into Logan around 1:00 pm. It was another 12-hour stint on the bus, but I was glad to be off the bus and in December weather again. I rested that day and then drove home for Christmas that Monday. All in all, I think that the LA Bowl was a ton of fun! It’s experiences and performances like that that drew me back to marching band in college. It was a blast!

Festive Food-Part I

Tis the season for fun food. Actually, it’s always the season for fun food around here, but the Christmas season gives me a reason to peruse Pinterest for some new ideas. My incentive, other than the fact that I just enjoy it, is that if I don’t do something new, my kids will wonder what is wrong with me. 😜

During the course of our international pancake experimentation over the summer, my kids discovered that they really like crepes and the many crepe-like European pancakes that we tested. With that fact in the back of my brain, I was thrilled to discover a simple yet festive way to create a Christmas tree from crepes. With a bit of food coloring and an assortment of fruity baubles to decorate our crepe-mas trees, we had a lovely breakfast. There was also whipped cream on hand, the dairy and non-dairy versions. Malia doesn’t usually eat a big breakfast, but she ate two full trees worth of crepes and I certainly can’t say that I blame her. They were delicious.

I have a feeling that crepes may be making another appearance on our menu fairly soon. Maybe I should add a crepe pan to my Christmas wish list…

Whipped Delight

When you have a kid with a dairy allergy, whipped cream is a no-no. Add a tree nut allergy and whipped coconut cream is also off limits. In addition to that, all non-dairy whipped toppings actually have milk in them. As such, the first five or so years of Matthew’s life were completely free of any creamy whipped delights. He didn’t know any different, but I really missed that creamy genre of foods.

When Matthew was six or seven, a food challenge with positive results brought whipped coconut cream onto the menu and that created a lot of possibilities. While I’ve taken advantage of canned coconut cream whole heartedly since then and always keep a couple of cans in the back of the fridge, the one thing they don’t really have is convenience. As vegan eating has gained popularity over the past few years, I’ve seen more and more dairy free whipped cream and whipped topping options hit the market, but they are never safe for Matthew. They either have cross contact with milk, peanuts or tree nuts or they contain pea protein. 

In past years, many products used soy protein as a stabilizer and that was not a problem for Matthew. But as more things have become increasingly “allergen free,” we are running into the use of pea protein instead of soy more and more often. And Matthew is allergic to peas which means we’ve actually lost some foods that he used to enjoy. His favorite brand of dairy free ice cream changed their recipes and now their entire product line is off the menu. That was a rough day for us, very emotional and disappointing. But realistically, those kinds of disappointments are pretty common for him. It’s just a part of his life as a highly allergic individual. 

But once in a while, things go our way. Today was one of those days. I have some fun food plans for the next week because it’s Christmas and intend to employ some heavy use of whipped cream in a can for the ease of preparation. I had planned to whip some coconut cream for Matthew, but I’m always on the lookout for new options and while I was at Sprouts this morning, I happened to spy a can of oatmilk based dairy free whipped cream. Oatmilk is fairly new on the market, and I’ve been seeing it used in more and more products because of the creamy quality if brings to foods. I’ve used oats in dairy free ice cream and can attest to the fact that they do indeed make things super creamy. So I was intrigued. I read the can, not expecting much due to past experience. And then the excitement came. Oatmilk. Coconut milk. No peas. No cross-contact warnings. I read the can three times to make sure it was safe and then I sent a picture to Matthew and put the can in my cart. And then Matthew was excited as well.

I intend to make use of the whipped cream for breakfast tomorrow, but that was too long for Matthew to wait. He had to try it right away. We have some fresh berries in the fridge, also intended for breakfast in the morning, but I figured that giving him a vehicle for his taste test of the whipped cream was a good idea. And guess what? The whipped cream is good. I tried it and liked it. There is a slight aftertaste of oats, but other than that, it tastes like whipped cream. But more importantly, Matthew liked it. His eyes lit up. In fact, his whole face lit up. And then he needed a few more berries. And then he experienced the nearly unavoidable overspray associated with whipped cream in a can. And it did nothing to taint the experience. In fact, I think it enhanced it.

Days when we can add new foods to Matthew’s diet are good days. Today was a good day.

Here There Be Dragons

Several days ago, I got a digital flyer from our school district highlighting a coming attraction. We get those from time to time, but I don’t usually pay much attention as they aren’t generally things my kids are interested in. However, this time the word “dragon” leaped off the page and captured my attention. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the event was in town one weekend only and the school district had arranged for a free ticket for every student in the district age 17 and under. I checked out the website and Kev and I decided it would be a jolly outing that Malia, our dragon lover, would enjoy. As such, we got our tickets, two of which were completely free, and headed to the expo center this afternoon.

The attraction was called “Dino and Dragon Stroll.” Based on the pictures, we thought it would be big statues of dinosaurs and dragons. We were sort of right, but what we didn’t expect was the fact that all the figures moved. The heads, arms, and wings moved. They opened and closed their mouths. They blinked their eyes. They even looked like they were breathing. It was pretty impressive. And of course, there were roars and other sounds that accompanied the movement.

Most of the kids in attendance were much younger than Matthew and Malia. The bounce house and rides were all geared for younger kids. But that did not detract from the enjoyment. We wouldn’t have wanted to spend an entire afternoon there, but we were all entertained for over an hour. And Malia got up close and personal with a dragon. I call that a successful outing.