Christmas

This year, things were a little strange with Christmas. We generally have some additional family around for the holidays, but due to a strange turn of events, it was just the three of us.

At first, I think both Day and I felt a little left out and bummed about being on our own on the holidays, but in the end, we decided to make the best of it. We chose our own traditions, and decided how we would handle stockings, gifts, meals, etc.

Day's family never really celebrated Christmas, so he didn't have any specific traditions, but for him, celebrations often center around food. For me, my family celebrated by having a Christmas Eve get together for the extended family, and then basically did Christmas day on our own, with a special dinner, generally steak and all of the trimmings, or prime rib.

Our new traditions, which I think we will stick with, were to get up when Ethan did and check out our stockings.

Ethan actually chose most of the trinkets in his, including an elephant Pez dispenser, a light up shark, a light up bouncy ball, a hot wheels car, and some crayons.

Day really enjoys trying specialty beers, so I wrapped a few for under the tree and a few for in his stocking. He is especially fond of the hard to find, and Belgian beers, and I found Samichlaus, Watou Tripel, Trappiste Rochefort 8, and a few others.

I also chose my own stocking gifts, which included some cute earrings from World Market, and some yarn that I picked up at Tuesday Morning.

Following our stockings, I went and cooked a big breakfast with scrambled eggs, thick cut bacon, and French toast, with Grand Marnier Cream Cheese, and/or Pomegranate syrup. Everything turned out so yummy, and I did a bunch of the prep work early, so it wasn't too big of a deal to have a real breakfast.

After breakfast, we opened our gifts. Since Ethan had a Christmas celebration with Nana earlier in December, he understood what to do with the presents under the tree, and somehow he managed to open all of the toys first, followed by his new clothes, then mom and dad's gifts. I'm not quite sure how he knew, perhaps the size and shape of boxes, but he chose each present from under the tree, and definitely chose toys over clothes, and then his over ours.

Since Ethan had to play with each gift before moving on to the next one, gift opening took nearly 2 hours, which was nice, considering that we were snowed in anyway.

Our next new tradition was to have one of Day's favorites for dinner. It was idli, sambar and vada, which is a typical breakfast in southern India. It is one of his favorite meals, and I had never been able to accomplish making the vada before, but I was able to make them on Christmas. Even Ethan liked them.

I'm sure that we'll add more traditions as Ethan grows up, but this was a great start, and we had a wonderful time together as a family.

Good Things

I think that today is a good day for a little list of good things going on in my world.

1. Mom (Nana's) birthday.

2. Dining room lights are up and working beautifully. I love them!

3. I made white chocolate macadamia nut cookie dough to freeze today, so that Day can have fresh cookies whenever he wants.

4. Ethan colored by himself for the first time today. I am so hopeful that he'll be interested in coloring a couple of times per week, so I can do a few things around the house, without having to worry about what he is up to.

5. I have 16 rows to go on Day's Christmas scarf. I am hoping to finish up tonight and get it blocked tomorrow. the box is already wrapped, so I just have to slip it in an put it under the tree.

Home Improvement Saturday

Every once in a while, I get the urge to do some DIY home improvement project. This happens every couple of months, and I hope in the end, my home looks better for the effort I've put in.

For our early Christmas, my mom gave us a Lowe's gift card. She intended for us to spend it on a new dishwasher, but we decided to wait until it died to replace it, so that left us with $100 to spend on something else.

Well, the lighting in our dining room has always bugged me, and the ceiling had some stains on it, so last weekend we went out and bought a couple of pendant lights to replace the canned lighting. The biggest problem with this is that we have 10 foot ceilings and the lights are recessed another 6 inches or so, so the room

was always really dimly lit. I was also fairly sure that the water damage had been caused by a shower malfunction a couple of years ago, and that there were no plumbing problems causing the staining, so fixing that up would be a good thing to check off of our to-do list.

Unfortunately, the day didn't go quite as planned. First, the breaker controls all lighting on the first floor, as well as the tv. This is a huge problem because Day has been anticipating the KU Jayhawks game all week. He even reminded me that it was on at 11 today on Wednesday, before we went to bed.

Not to be deterred, I thought, well, take out the recessed lights, at least to the point of electricity,

work on the ceiling repairs, and then I can finish up after the game.

So, we get Ethan put down for a nap, and I get going. The light fixtures have been plastered into the ceiling, so they have to be pried and yanked out, which takes nearly an hour. At the point

where I get them out, I realize that the hole is 6.5 inches, and not the 5.5 inches that our new fixture is, and that there is no electrical box to attach them to.

Ethan then wakes up two hours ahead of schedule, and we decide to go back to Lowe's to get the missing hardware, some sort of medallion to cover the 6.5 inches hole, and some sort of conversion kit to allow us to hang these.

Fast forward a few hours, and $43 dollars later, we are back home and I get back to work, with Day trying to keep Ethan out of the way.

I'd love to say that it was smooth sailing from there, but the

conversion kit was impossible to install, the wiring had to be cut super short to remove canned light, and then was hard to attach to the new fixture. In the end, we stopped for the day, and we'll try again tomorrow.

I turned on the breaker, and checked the light, and it does work. Now if only I could get it attached.