Magic and Mayhem

Today was a lovely day.

Since we travel to be with extended family on Christmas Eve and Christmas, the winter solstice is always when we have our own little holiday together.

Here’s a bit of how we celebrated…

We started our day with presents.

The kids got lots, though mostly small things like art supplies and “rubber powered” airplane kits and Matchbox cars.

The kids gave each other lots of things too, since they love to give gifts. Check out this picture of Alex happily holding up his present from Jack– a bolt. It’s from Jack’s collection of parts for his future Alicia-bot, so it’s a nifty present as far as Jack is concerned.

I just took the picture so someday Alex can tell his kids “Do you know what I got for Christmas when I was little? A bolt! And I was happy!”.

I got Daryl some nifties like fossilized squid (because he’s the kind of guy who fossilized squid is the perfect gift for), an air blaster and a gadget that plays cool patterns on the ceiling. Oh yeah, and bacon flavored toothpicks, because he’s also the only guy I know who you could give those to.

(He says they’re horrid. This is a surprise?)

If you want to learn about fossilized squid (really belemnites), here’s some cool info. I highly recommend them for the science geek who has everything. (I mean the big, manly science geek who has everything, of course!) Then you can go “Oh yeah? Well, do you have any of these?” and see if he can guess what they are.

I got nifties like kahlua, mudslide mix (are you sensing a theme? I wanted some booze!), earrings and coupons for things like hour long back rubs. Sweet!

Anyway…. the day was filled with playing and lounging and making messes and cleaning them up to make new messes and eating way too much chocolate and refrigerated egg rolls from Bubai Foods.

Our winter feast was really good. Daryl was my sous chef and was great at rinsing, chopping and slicing everything I tossed his way. The menu included smashed potatoes with butter and whipping cream, mushrooms in gravy, sliced brussel sprouts with carmelized onions (don’t knock ‘em till you try ‘em!), orange cranberry sauce (it turns out I do like cranberry sauce if it’s homemade and this stuff!), peas, a billion crescent rolls, eggnog and blueberry cream cheese pie.

We ate till we nearly burst. I still feel like someone snuck a large pumpkin into my torso.

(You will note that my hair is still tied up on my head from cooking in this picture, and the house is a mess. Ah well! I’m messy and frequently funny looking. It’s the real me!)

Then we did our little solstice candle tradition. We turned out all of the lights, lit a candle and talked about how it was the shortest day of the year and after tonight the sun would start slowly returning with longer and longer days again. We all blew out the candle and then said the light would return and the kids madly rushed through the house turning on every light.

Alex had no idea what on earth they were doing, but he was wild about it.

Then Daryl got the great idea to relight the candle and see if he could use his air blaster to blow it out.

He could.

It was so neat he let every kid have one turn blowing out that way, too (me too! twice!).

We of course had to also put the homeschool spin on everything and talk about the earth in relation to the sun on solstice and why you could hear the air before it hit you and how fast the speed of sound is and how the air came as a vortex and was spinning…..

Yeah, we’re homeschool geeks.

Happy, full ones.

It was a good day.

And now I have a hot bath and a perennial catalog calling my name!