December Part II

Here we are in January!  How did this happen?  The rest of December was jam packed, and a total whirlwind to boot.  I'll do a separate post about Christmas itself, but here's what we were up to the rest of December, pre-Christmas!

When I left off, we had hacked down a Christmas tree and brought it home.  After a few days of looking at it, Leah was ready to decorate it, even though I wasn't.  But my new holiday tradition is "Let the kid(s) decide what we do when", which I adopted last year and which worked very well.  So when Leah announced it was time to decorate, we decorated.  The tree turned out to be a huge, hairy thing and I dubbed it Hagrid, as it just sort of showed up in our living room, massive and covered in furry, shaggy needles.  Leah always immediately wants to put the ornaments on, but I definitely insist on the ways I've been taught, which is lights, ornaments, garland, star.  Unfortunately, given the size of this tree, we didn't have nearly enough lights, so we had to improvise with some icicle lights as well as the traditional lights.  The lights were all different shades, so it looked like Hagrid had been to Las Vegas and got decked out like a showgirl.  It was easy to see that Ine had no idea what to make of this.  She told us her tree at home is covered in only white lights, with only silver and blue stars for ornaments.  But we Kosiors like to go whole hog.

Each year, I give Leah a special ornament that kind of embodies what she is interested in, or how our year has gone, and this year was no different.  But I also got one for Ine.  In keeping with the theme of what she is interested in, and in the fact that she inherited a sister this year, I got them Anna and Elsa ornaments.

I also got one of both Anna and Elsa for myself and the back reads "Family Forever".  Anna will go home to Belgium with Ine at the end of the year, and I told the girls if they ever spend Christmas together again, they can reunite the ornaments and remember our first Christmas together.

That week was Ine's last week of school.  She had exams on Monday that she was really worried about, but she passed them just fine!  She had swimming and a chiropractor appointment, and then by Wednesday it was done until the new year.  So we were sitting around, not doing much, and she asked if we could do 'something'.  I decided we would make the gifts for Leah's teachers.

I have asked Ine several times if she likes cooking, and she says no.  She doesn't know how to cook and she has no interest in cooking at all, which is a shame because I LOVE it!  So this was a chance to get her hands dirty and teach her some new skills.  We started out with making "puppy chow", which is a Chex Mix many people also call Muddy Buddies.  It's a pretty basic recipe--chocolate, peanut butter and butter poured over Chex cereal and then the cereal is coated in powdered sugar as well.  It's delicious and everyone loves it, but not many people take the time to actually make it, and now you can buy it in the store (although it's not really very good).  So I taught Ine to melt things in the microwave with this recipe and how to stir things with great feeling.

Afterwards, we made a big batch of sugar scrub.  Sugar scrubs are a luxurious product that are super simple and inexpensive to make at home.  I like to make lemon vanilla scrubs, which is what we made.  Ine got to learn how to zest a lemon, a very important skill!  The scrub is just sugar, oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, and vanilla.  You combine them all together and bottle them up, and it takes care of dry winter skin like a champion!

After we got the scrub made and mixed, we bottled it in mason jars and made pretty tops for it.  I had some bags I had made when I was teaching myself to sew, and so I put a bag of Chex and a sugar scrub in each and the teachers got a lovely gift.  I also gave a jar of scrub to the bus driver, as we had an extra.  The teachers sent home lovely thank you notes, which was really great, but ultimately they are superstars in my book, so it was the least I could do!

That Friday, we went up to Baltimore to see the Fresh Beat Band in concert.  The Fresh Beat Band is a children's pop band which has its own TV show on Nick Jr.  It is Leah's most favorite thing in the world.  We first went to see them when she was just turning 3 years old, and then we had tickets to go see them when my husband died.  Leah and he used to watch the FBB together on Saturday mornings while I slept it, and after he died, it was a very firm memory she had of her dad.  We had backstage passes to go see them that fall, and I told the band about all this, and they have really championed Leah.  They have been so kind to all of us, and I do hear from them from time to time as they have the time.  The band members this time put us on the VIP list without us having to pay for the passes, so we got backstage passes and took Ine and my mom with us for free!  Yay!  Here we all are showing off our VIP Swagger.

 

The show was new and very high energy as always!  Afterwards, we went to the after party and met the band.  Unfortunately there were so many people, I didn't stop to get a picture of Ine with the band, but I did introduce them to her and Jon Beavers (in the blue shirt with the yellow package above) told her, "You are with a beautiful family" which made me proud and happy.  It was a really fun night!

The next day, Leah had been invited to a birthday party, which was after swimming lessons.  Ine decided she would like to go along and check it out.  I was so glad she did, as it turned out to be quite a scene!  The theme was "Winter Wonderland" and they had a beautiful table of food--a chili station, a hot cocoa bar, cheese balls fashioned into snowmen, and gorgeous cakes.  The piece de resistance was that they had Anna and Elsa show up and do an entire performance for the kids.  Afterwards you could take pictures and meet the princesses, so we did that too.  It was so fun!  Ine said that kids birthdays are nothing like that in Belgium, and I believe it.  She said usually a couple friends come over, eat some cake, and call it a day.  That's what used to happen when I was a kid too, but either it's life in the suburbs or this stuff has just gotten totally out of hand.  I'm not sure which.  But we had a wonderful time doing crafts, watching the kids play games, eating, and all the rest.  It was great.

The next morning, we woke up and Leah announced that we were all going to make Christmas ornaments together. So we taught Ine to make glitter ornaments out of clear glass ornaments, floor cleaner, and glitter.  Leah was in charge of the teaching, and as you can see, she was rather enthusiastic about it.  We made a big box of ornaments, and there was glitter and giggling everywhere.  I was very happy we had done that!

That afternoon, my sister brought her kids down to bake and decorate cookies.  We got a tub of sugar cookies to decorate, and baked up some chocolate chip cookies and chocolate-raspberry bars as well.  The littles had great fun instructing Ine in all the ways she should properly decorate cookies, which included a 3 inch high base of frosting, every possible sprinkle you could lay your hands on, and just going crazy.  In contrast, Ine used as little frosting as required and artfully arranged her sprinkles very carefully.

She also tried egg nog for the first time.  I hate it when it's store bought, but usually drink one cup per year.  Ine said she thought it was pretty good.

Hilarity ensued when we told the littles to make sure Ine put the butter in correctly.

On Monday evening, the 22nd, we went over to St. George's Episcopal Church in town and volunteered in the soup kitchen.  I started doing this with Leah last year, as she was developing a bit of an attitude about being entitled to things and I thought it was important that she learn that not everyone has such a nice life as she has.  So once or twice a year, we go to the soup kitchen and serve the community's homeless.  The outing is organized by our church, so all we have to do is show up, which is nice especially at this time of year!  This year, we were assigned dish duty--collecting dirty dishes and putting them in tubs.  There were a lot of people trying to get involved in the dish business, and Leah was getting mad, so eventually she had to get the grown ups in line and we all worked out our order.  I was in charge of scraping scraps and napkins into the trash, and she and Ine took turns taking dirty plates and silverware, while other volunteers brought the dishes from the tables.  This worked out well till the end when one volunteer just decided to do everything and Leah got tired and hungry and took off to eat.  Ine and I eventually turned in our aprons and called it a day.

By now, Leah was done with school for the year, so we were all home together.  Tuesday afternoon, we delivered cookies to my friends Jennifer and Dave and their daughter Anna, and that night, my friend Amber invited us over to her house for dinner and to exchange gifts.  She told me that I should be ready--her gift to Ine was going to put all mine to shame!  It turned out Amber had gone on Google and found a bunch of Belgian recipes and decided to make Ine a full Belgian meal for dinner.  I was so impressed and totally blown away!  She made Belgian endive wrapped in ham with cheese, something called Liege Salad, which was green beans, onions, and bacon with vinegar, and some fancy potatoes.  She also made some Belgian butter cookies for dessert, which Ine didn't even bother to say much about, just groaned happily around a mouthful and nodded.  Amber did great! :-)  It was such a fun night, and a pleasant surprise.

On the way home, we stopped off at Paul's Bakery.  Jennifer had told us that they had moved their Christmas display up behind the bakery, and that there was a train and all, so we decided to check it out on the way home.  It was quite a scene--there was an entire village in lights, sure enough a train, Santa and Rudolph were there for pictures, it was crazy.  We somehow got lucky enough that the girls both got on the next train ride that was leaving, and Ine was full of smiles.  She said nothing of this magnitude exists in Belgium where just regular people go to this extent to decorate and put on Christmas displays.  I told her she should bring it home with her and I'd send her an inflatable for her lawn next year.  She said she was pretty sure everyone would think they were crazy!  

The following day was Christmas Eve, and in keeping with my regular routines, I took the girls to tea at a local tea shop.  We started doing this a couple of years ago, and I love it.  Unfortunately there was only one person working and it took forever, which took some of the joy out of it for me, because 90 minutes is a long time to keep a 5 year old waiting for lunch!  Ine had gone to swim practice that morning and she was quite hungry as well, but eventually it was worth the wait!  Everyone kept smiling and eventually we got our delightful tea for 3.  There was so much food, we couldn't manage to eat it all, and took quite a lot home.  

So that takes us to Christmas Eve, which will I blog about in conjunction with Christmas.  Although I pride myself on taking my students all over the place and doing fun things with them, one of the thing I am struck by in this post is how much there is to do at home.  We spent a lot of December watching cheesy holiday romance movies, baking, going around town and looking at Christmas lights, visiting friends, going to parties, and just having fun.  It's been a very festive Christmas season indeed!  I hope my fellow AFS families enjoyed theirs as well.