Speaking of schedules, I think my earlier post should have been called “ideal” rather than “typical.”  I rarely get dinner on the table that early, and I think that night I got it together closer to bedtime, which is also fairly late quite often.  But it’s good to have a schedule to shoot for even if you don’t hit it exactly very often.

Last night Sonja helped me cut out the pieces for the pajamas I’m making for Heidi for Christmas.  My mom always used to give all us kids pjs for Christmas every year, often making them herself, and I’ve continued the tradition in our family.  Sonja and I went down to the fabric store on Monday when the patterns were on sale for $2 and picked out a pattern that would work for all the kids, plus possibly Maggie’s Halloween costume (she wants to be a doctor this year).  And flannel happened to be on sale, so I bought the fabric for all the pjs while we were there.  Last night I figured it’d be a good idea to get going on the project while I was still excited about it and Sonja helped me lay everything out and cut it out, which is almost invariably the toughest part for me.  It was fun because, like my mom, she’s very skilled in getting things straight and accurate and saving fabric.  I think she saved about 1/2 yard over what the pattern required!  Pretty amazing. I LOVE the fabric we found–Heidi’s is a brown polka dot, Degen’s a robot print, and Maggie’s has frogs and butterflies.  The colors all coordinate, and they’ll be in the same pattern, and it’s going to be so cute!  I just hope I can get it all done.  Four months seems like a long time till you have to work only during nap time and after bed…  I have no idea how my mother did it.

So, what’s been going on here?  Hmmmm…

Thanksgiving in Arizona with my parents and some of my siblings was divine.  We had all sorts of good food, including a cheesecake flan made by my very own Chef Colin.  My brother, Uncle Nephi, was a hit with Degen and Maggie as expected.  They just can’t stop talking about him and how wonderful he is.  We did some yard work together, which really means everyone else did yard work while I sat in the sun and kept them company.  I tried to lift a shovel of dirt once and immediately thought better of it with my very large belly and confused sense of balance (not to mention my healing sprained knee and very loose ligaments).  I got to see my sisters Ruth and Eliza pass their road tests and receive their driver licenses on the same day!  Yay Liza and Ruthie!  The test proctor was impressed with both of them and their driving skills.  We cooked and talked and my mom adjusted all of our backs (she’s a DO so she can do that stuff) and went to the park and the kids played with Grandma and Grandpa and their aunts and uncle.  It was really ideal, except that a couple of my sisters were missing (on the other side of the country for Thanksgiving this year). My mom cut Maggie’s hair for the first time (with bangs so she can see without pigtails) and trimmed Degen’s to a presentable length, then Mom and I went to a nearby salon and had our hair cut too.  I really love spending time with my mom, even when she has to study for her next qulifying exam part of the time.

Just before Thanksgiving I was officially diagnosed with gestational diabetes, and just after Thanksgiving I was put on a low dose of insulin overnight to take care of that stubborn fasting number, just like when I was pregnant with Maggie.  My current OB, Dr. Klekman in Santa Rosa, is wonderful and is very laid back about the whole thing while also vigilantly watching and listening for any possible problems.  The diabetes educator I’ve been assigned to, Astrid Ortega, is also friendly and relaxed, even when my kids are running around her office in circles.  I do have to have weekly consults with her, weekly appointments with Dr. K, weekly nonstress tests, an ultrasound at 36 weeks to check the baby’s size, and they want me to induce at 39 weeks if the baby doesn’t arrive before then.  They only have me testing my blood sugar four times a day (compared to seven plus when I was pregnant with Maggie) this time and I don’t have to check my ketones in the morning like I had to last time around.  It’s really helped me this time around to have relaxed providers who explain things slowly and listen to me when I have concerns.  It also helped to have some past experience to compare it to so I had some idea of what was coming.

Monday was Colin’s birthday.  Happy Birthday Colin!  We spent it, just the two of us, in Los Angeles at a training for a new product Colin was researching for his company.  It was the first time we’d been (relatively) childless overnight since Degen was born, so it was fun for me to have a little break from my “job.”  It really was amazing to have a room to myself and several meals in a row with no squeals of “Mommy Mommy Mommy!” requesting a refill of plate or cup.  Thanks so much to Sonja and Dick for the time off!

Wednesday was my sister Abby’s birthday.  Happy Birthday Abby!  We celebrated Colin’s birthday with his parents, sister Kim, and her boyfriend that evening.  I gave him 2G of RAM for his laptop, which he’s apparently very happy about but accidentally found out about in advance because I wasn’t sneaky enough to delete it from the history of my browser.  So, no surprise, but a good gift anyway.  Kim and Colin’s parents surprised us with an awesome gift–an overnight stay in Kim’s downtown San Francisco apartment after Christmas (hopefully before baby), complete with local restaurant reservations, spa treatments, babysitting, and touristy touring recommendations.  And I thought our LA trip was a vacation!  Definitely a surprise, and a very cool gift.  No, I wasn’t bothered that his birthday present was pretty much half for me (and neither was Colin, as far as I could tell).  Who needs Christmas presents when your husband gets birthday gifts like that?

Maggie chipped a tooth this week, so I’ve got to get her to a dentist to check and see if we can/should do anything about it in the near future.  We’ve got to finish off the Christmas shopping and do some seriousgift wrapping.  And I need to have the car serviced right away (of course the regular maintenance would fall on this month).  And our renters of our house in Utah gave notice, so we’ve got to find a new family to live there, preferably starting in January.  And I really should get appointments for teeth cleaning and doctor checkups and eye glasses for everyone in the family before the end of the year.  I don’t even know if that’s possible, but if it were it’d be ideal.

It’s always busy around here, even when I have no energy.  Actually, I’m usually okay as long as I don’t have to stand up for long or carry anything and I get a nap in the afternoon.  Any guesses on how often those three things coincide?

1. Decorating is a big part of Christmas for me.  A Christmas tree is important.  We have a fake tree out back, but Colin's always had a real tree at Christmas time, so we'll probably have to work on deciding whether to buy a fresh one again this year.  If nothing else, we should get something that smells like evergreen to make the house smell Christmassy.  Both of our parents helped us collect ornaments (usually one a year) as we grew up, so we have a big collection of mismatched, but meaningful, ornaments.  Plus, we've been doing the same thing with Maggie and Degen so we have their own ornaments to add. 

An advent calendar is another favorite of mine.  An advent calendar is a physical way of counting down the days until Christmas, usually from the first day of December as far as I know.  We made a very simple, cheap one when we fist got married that consisted of hanging a long green ribbon with 24 knots in it on the wall and adding a red bow that climbs the ribbon one knot each day, ending up at the top on Christmas Eve.  You can buy more elaborate ones in stores where you get a toy or candy each day, but there are lots of ways to do it and they can be cheap or free.

Nativity scenes are a big part of Christmas, though we don't have a nice one yet.  We have a little one-piece ceramic scene and Colin's mom just sent the kids a finger-puppet version to play with in church.  Someday I'd like to get an olive wood one like the ones they make in Israel, or less ambitiously, I'd really just like to have one where the Baby Jesus is removable so that we can continue Colin's family tradition of waiting until Christmas Day to put the baby in the manger.

2. Baking not only creates Christmassy smells that help you feel the spirit of the season, but is also an opportunity to spend time together if you do it right.  In my family all of us spent hours in the kitchen together every year mixing and pouring and burning and tasting cookies and candies.  My dad always makes "figgy pudding" like in the old "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" song.  On Christmas Eve or the day of, we compile ribbon-topped plates of cookies and deliver them to neighbors, usually carolling all the way.  The food didn't always turn out great, but we had a lot of cozy fun.  A couple of essential items includes: chocolate chip cookies, candy-cane shaped cookies, and fudge.

3.  Watching Christmas movies is a nice family tradition, especially if you watch ones with a more spiritual message.  Not all of them have to be spiritual, though.  Some or my favorite Christmas movies are White Christmas, It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Krueger's Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and A Charlie Brown Christmas.    

Now, to get the most out of A Christmas Carol you need to read it aloud.  There are all sorts of sounds in the words that lend to the descriptions that you just won't get the effect of it you read silently.  For example, try reading the following quote silently, then aloud, and see if you get a better feeling for what the author and I are trying to say:

Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone.  Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!

See what I mean?  That's the way the entire story is–it's very auditory.

The book is quite short.  The version in my hands right now is about 125 pages long (it has pictures, too!) and the $1 version I linked to above was only 60 pages long.  So, if you start reading around mid- or late-November, it's very easy to get to the end by Christmas even with all the holiday busy-ness of the season if you read a bit every day.  There's a pleasant suspense to reading the story that way, as my dad read it to our family when I was little–he'd read a bit to us every night after family prayer and we would always beg him to read more if we were awake enough when he shut the book for the night. 

For those of you unfortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the story, A Christmas Carol is a ghost story of Christmas in prose, as the subtitle tells us.  The main character is a man named Scrooge who is about as nasty and Grinchy as they come and who popularized the phrase "Bah!  Humbug!"  To his great chagrin, he is visted by four ghosts in the course of a Christmas Eve.  These ghosts' business is to teach him to love Christmas and to get him to repent of his meanness by showing him who he was, is, and who he may become.  Despite the spookiness inherent in the subject of ghosts, there is a lightness and a humorous tone in the story that I haven't seen in many of Dickens' other works.

Aside from the power of the story itself to create goodwill, I find a lot of pleasure in hearing the descriptions of various Christmas celebrations.  I love hearing about the ball thrown by Scrooge's old employer, Fezziwig, and how Mrs. Fezziwig "was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term.  If that's not high praise, tell me higher and I'll use it."  The description of the Second Spirit's appearance and the long lists Christmassy foods like

"…turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.."   

in contrast to the Cratchit family's "display of glass" that consisted of "two tumblers, and a custard cup without a handle." 

Get out your books and start reading aloud, to yourself or your family, and make it a tradition that will help you smile and appreciate what you have.

• Having a Passover Seder every year
• Easter baskets
• Christmas: cinnamon rolls for breakfast, opening gifts one at a time directed by Dad, reading the Christmas story together, advent calendars, putting baby Jesus in the nativity scene on Christmas morning (Colin's parents do that one), reading A Christmas Carol every year, singing Christmas carols, taking plates of goodies to neighbors
• Reading the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July
• Watching all the sessions of General Conference every time
• Family prayer, twice a day
• Daily family scripture study
• Weekly Family Home Evening
• Family Council
• Family Outings
• On birthdays, the birthday-person gets to choose what to have for dinner and doesn't have to do any chores.  We go around the table at dinner and everyone says something nice about the birthday-person.  Mom and Dad tell the story of when the person was born.
• Interviews–my dad regularly had a one-on-one meeting with each of us kids to talk about what was going on in our lives and what we needed help with and how we were doing spiritually.  I loved interviews.
• Date night–weekly date with spouse
• Daddy-daughter dates-Dad used to take us on one-on-one "dates" occasionally and we got to do fun things with him like go to museums and restaurants
• Going to church every Sunday
• Staying up till midnight (or trying to) on New Year's Eve
• Singing around the piano
• Agendas for everything, including vacations and family reunions
• On Valentine's Day, Dad would buy each of us a carnation
• Getting a Priesthood blessing before starting a new school year or going to a new school
• Trick or treating in costume on Halloween, even though my mom hates Halloween
• Thanksgiving–saying things you're thankful for at Thanksgiving dinner.  Talking about the Pilgrims.  Making tons of pies together from scratch and eating them!
• Dad making us hug each other and say nice things to each other when we fought
• Summer goals–Mom would talk to each of us and help us make a list of goals to accomplish each summer.  She would give us lessons (sewing, cooking, cleaning, etc.) and Dad gave us our "reading assignments."