The Griffith Family Christmas List 2014

The first Christmas gift of the season has been purchased. This beauty will soon be the property of our own intrepid girl reporter, Isabella. It's even her favourite colour. This is the same girl who, for her last birthday, wanted a skateboard and a walkman. Not an iPod. A walkman. We breed hipsters in Nordeast without even trying. 

I was pleased that this years selections have been, thus far, much more attainable than last years, which consisted of a live orphan (Cheyenne), a dead dinosaur (James) and drink coasters (Bella). The drink coasters, at least, were both actually possible to purchase and reasonably priced. 

Without further ado. This year's list. 

A typewriter (See above)

A wheel of Gouda

A hammock

A hammock chair

Batman

A nightlight

Star Wars Cookies

A lightsaber

A coat with a built-in heater

Hair and nail stuff

Crochet hooks

Stilton

A fencing mask

Cupcakes

A hedgehog

And a shark 

The last two may or may not have been me. 

Some of that is going to happen, people. It really is. 

Thanksgiving simplified. Sort of.

 I love to cook. Love it. As my Father-in-law astutely pointed out to me this past summer, the kitchen is where I retreat when life is overwhelming me. No one questions your alone time if you emerge from it with cupcakes or a pot roast for them to eat. 

I do not, however, like holiday cooking. I find it boring and laden with expectation, and Thanksgiving is the worst of it for me. The only real room for creativity is in the pies. 

For a variety of reasons we spend most holidays with just our immediate family (which includes my dad, who lives here). Zach doesn't cook and my dad, though once a fantastic chef, has hung up his apron for good. That leaves me to do everything. Thanksgiving dinner is a full week's work for me. Last year I went a little crazy. OK, maybe a lot crazy. I lost sight of the point and by the time the turkey hit the table I was feeling cranky, resentful and anything but grateful. Before dinner was over, it was suggested that next year we might be better off eating out. 

This year dad decided that we needed to simplify. "I don't care if all we have is tuna casserole and pie. I don't even care if all we have is pie."

 I considered that. An all pie Thanksgiving has potential, but I'm not quite ready to give up all pretense of a real holiday just yet. I can find a way to make it special without stressing myself out to the point that my turkey is served with a side of crab. 

It turns out, turkey isn't really anyone in this house's favourite food. It's good, but so are grilled cheese sandwiches, and that's not on the holiday menu. I polled the troops and it was decided that prime rib would be greatly preferred. Once we threw out the traditional turkey, no one cared if we have our 5 traditional side dishes plus mashed potatoes and gravy. "Whatever you want to make will be fine mom, as long as there is pie."  So I've decided that we will have roasted potatoes (easy), Yorkshire pudding (easy) and a salad made from a kit from Costco.

The downside of this menu change-up is that it makes the turkey crafts I had planned for the week seem a little ridiculous. Not as ridiculous as prime rib crafts would be, however, so I think we'll stick with the original plan for activities. 

Love and Lutefisk

In an exciting turn of events, this fall my maternal grandmother, known to one and all as GGB (Great-Grandma Barb), after years of snowbirding in Arizona, Las Vegas and Mexico, moved back to the Twin Cities to be closer to her family. 

Great-Grandma Barb is awesome. She has never really been your stereotypical, cookie-baking Grandma (although she actually does bake a mean batch of cookies). Growing up, she was my Vegas Grandma, with her sequined tennis shoes. The kind who goes hula dancing, gambling and deep sea fishing in Mexico. She has taken me RVing through the Canadian Rockies, helicoptering over Mount Rushmore and flying over glaciers in Alaska in a bush plane. She has played practical jokes on me in an outhouse in the Alaskan wilderness. She has had her domestic moments, to be sure. She once refused to go on safari with her world-traveler sister because she wanted to spend the money on drapes (which, if you call them curtains and buy them at Target, don't cost the same as a plane ticket to Africa), but overall, it's not been a quiet, elderly sort of life for my grandma. 

But, the reality is, at 89 years old, that it was getting hard to keep up her house. It was getting harder to drive at night. A lot of their friends, who were young retirees when they moved into their Las Vegas house, have now passed on. The only family member in Vegas is my cousin, who is awesome, but 20 years old, and has her own life. In, what I think was an epic, heroic move, Grandma decided to put her house up for sale and move into a much smaller senior condo here in the Twin Cities. In an even more stunning move, this woman who once encouraged my mother to try and outrun the cops when we were being pulled over, decided to give up her drivers license. 

And you know what? It's been a little hard. She is handling it, but it's a big change. After 24 years, the silverware is in a different spot. The oven has buttons she doesn't quite understand, and her neighbours are "old ladies." She is not sure she will fit in. She is at the mercy of other people's schedules whe she wants to go out. No more getting in the car and running to the store. To say nothing of moving to Minneapolis in winter, which is, in and of itself, an act of courage. Even with the help of her family, who have been awesome and supportive, it's going to take a little getting used to. 

The one thing, in addition to her family, that she was really looking forward to about being home was finally being able to eat lutefisk again. I do understand the desire for familiar foods when you live out of state. I used to live in L.A. I know the joys of asking a grocer where you might find the sauerkraut and not having them look at you like you invented a word. But Lutefisk? That, I am not so sure of. I have always felt that our ancestors moved here from Sweden precicely to give their descendents the sort of life where we didn't have to eat that sort of thing. 

For those of you who are not familiar, lutefisk is codfish that is soaked in lye until it is the consistency of snot, soaked again in salt water to draw out the caustic poison, and served boiled with butter or white sauce. The only reason I can come up with for its popularity is that Minnesotans like a challenge. We are hearty enough to hack -60F windchills and dangit, we are hearty enough to eat poison soaked snot-fish and like it. 

But what is a girl to do? This woman once waited with me in the Small World line at Disneyland, not once, but five times, and all she is asking for is lutefisk. It's my duty to provide. Luckily, I have connections. My neighbourhood has it's very own Lutefisk Support Group. Several times a year lutefisk lovers, and the people who love them, gather at Lutheran Church lutefisk suppers all over the city sampling the finest poison snot-fish in town. Thankfully, for those of us who aren't fans, there are also meatballs. I think it's time to join. My grandmother needs me. 

As we are heading towards Thanksgiving and advent, and I am reflecting often on love, I feel like there is some kind of lesson in all this. Something about love being about the other, about setting aside your own desires (or aversions) to bring joy to someone else. You know, that kind of thing. Or maybe I'm just overthinking this. Either way, I am grateful to God for the gift of my grandma, and grateful to God for the gift of Swedish meatballs. 

This and That

As we approach the holidays (yes, I am Catholic and I call it the holidays. Thanksgiving, St Nicholas Day, The Feast of the Immaculate Conception, St Lucia Day, 12 Days of Christmas, the Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God, New Years. Holidays. Also I am ethnically Jewish and my in-laws celebrate Jewish holidays.) I have been thinking of tackling my kitchen. I love my kitchen, but it really was not designed with the needs of a large family in mind. Over the years I have done a few things to mitigate the profound lack of storage. We jettisoned the coat closet in favour of an auxiliary pantry, which is now largely filled with homeschool supplies and, other than storing some less frequently used small appliances, is no longer much help to the kitchen. For my Christmas present this year, I decided that I wanted Zach to help me address my many storage issues. Thanks to last year's Christmas present, an indoor play area for the kids...

I do occasionally get a chance to work on projects of my own. 

Step one was to reclaim my desk from the 12 slice toaster that invaded it two years ago. The toaster, while useful, is big and ugly and will be better off in the pantry when the pantry counters are put in. I am temporarily storing my restuarant size pans and bowls on the window shelf, but eventually I am hoping to replace that with more attractive jars of food, or something prettier. For the moment, though, it works. 

The shelves are simple, but that is what I was looking for. Simple. Easy. Inexpensive. I like a kitchen to get it's beauty from its function. 

A Home for People Who do Stuff





As part of my upcoming Year of Simplicity and Poverty, I am thinking a lot about how that relates to my home and posessions. Everywhere I look on the internet, on Pinterest and on Facebook there are articles telling me how to declutter, complete with pictures of magazine homes with everything perfectly in order. I read these and spend the next week driving everyone in my family nuts. We are going to simplify. Minimalism! Thats what we need, or a new system. Something that will finally tame the chaos. If I can just get rid of enough stuff, everything will be OK.

Jerusalem Workshop Nell Howard

The problem is that this never, ever works, and after a decade of parenthood, I'm starting to think it just never will. A lot of those houses you see in magazines aren't made for people who do things. They are made for people who visit their houses on evenings and weekends, not people who live and work there full time. There are nine people living in this house and all of us are doers. We cook, we build, we create, we draw, we write, we read, we play music, we explore, we pray, we serve, we tinker, we learn; in short, we really live in this house. This is not just a house, it's a workshop, a gathering place, a school and a studio.

Ultimately, that is a good thing. It's what I've always wanted my home to be, a place where love and creativity reign. I want to raise saints and scholars and craftsmen, people who put their heart and soul into their life and work. People who see their life and their vocation as one and the same, and who use the gifts they have been given for the benefit of the world, as a sweet smelling offering to the God who gave them those gifts.



Atelier d'un luthier Anthony V


Climb a mountain. Look into the bottom of a pond, or a forest. there is order there, but it isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, tame. It's alive. I want my home to be a reflection of that. I want my home to be a place that is teeming with beauty, truth and goodness. In a lot of ways, it already is. I need to look at it like a gardener looks at their garden. Where do I need to prune to make space for the things that nourish us? What do I need to let grow? How can I make a fertile soil? What needs to be watered? What needs to be brought out into the sun, and how can I create shelter from the cold? How can all of these things, growing independently and doing what they were made to do, work together to create a place of beauty?



.Office de tourisme

Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy gifts, which we are about to recieve from thy bounty, through Christ, our Lord. Amen. 

Pears and grapes still life cbransto

It seems to me that those words apply to so much more than food. How can I look on all of the gifts I have been given, physical, spiritual and personal, and use them for the purposes for which they were intended, or give them away with an attitude of gratitude and abundance? That, is the question. That is definitely going to involve some decluttering. It is definitely going to involve some bins, and some traditional organization. It's also going to invovle some letting go of expectations created from years of reading Better Homes and Gardens and embracing some of the mess of real life. 

Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real

I am once again joining in the Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real link party from Like Mother, Like Daughter.


{Pretty}

A few of us have been dreadfully sick this week, myself included, and my sweet, adorable husband has taken such amazing care of us. The man made me fresh squeezed orange juice, brought me hot tea and hot water bottles and, for last night's dinner, some chicken pho. I haven't been especially hungry, but this was just exactly what I needed, hot, brothy, a little spicy (with the addition of some hot sauce) and chock full of good things. He is all kinds of wonderful.

{Happy}

On Valentine's Day, before we all got hit with the bug, an elderly neighbour lady invited the big girls to a tea party at her house. They decorated Valentine cookies and ate strawberry sundaes. Mrs. Anderson is amazing. She has a level of refinement and class that you don't see a lot of anymore, and she has passed it on to her daughters and granddaughters. She has hosted the occasional tea party before and it's always a white-napkins-and-silver-tea-service affair with amazing homemade cakes, cookies and sandwiches, grapes in a silver grape server with silver grape scissors and the good china. She's an excellent example of what I love about my neighborhood. I love living in the kind of place where these kinds of intergenerational friendships flourish. I was lucky enough to have that as a kid, and it has been a gift of immesurable value. She also makes a mean sugar cookie. Normally cookies are nothing but a vehicle for frosting to me, but these were something to write home about. Very buttery and flavourful. I will have to get her recipe.

While the girls were at their party and the babies were napping, I had some one-on-one time with James making banana pudding for our Valentine's Day dessert. I love these times. He can be kind of a monkey, like any three year old boy, but when it's just the two of us I get to see his sweet side and hear what's going on in his perpetual-motion-machine of a brain, most of which involves dinosaurs and Captain America.


{Funny}

Speaking of dinosaurs... "It's just like the Jurassic Period, but with rainbow spaghetti instead of sand." - James Griffith. I think this was one of his favourite activities ever. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of walking away from it to check the laundry. Then, in a misguided attempt to help me clean it up, one of the big girls broke out the vacuum cleaner. This is the sort of thing you don't think about before you have kids. You don't imagine yourself one day, far in the future, picking rainbow spaghetti out of a vacuum cleaner. Luckily these kinds of things, while not amusing in the moment, can be pretty funny in the retelling.

{Real}

 

This is not all the same picture. It is not even the bulk of the series. Preschoolers and toddlers have apparently been embarking on a photo project, Pictures of the Top of my Head, while their mother was distracted. It has a Warhol-esque feel to it, don't you think? 

Time Management System- Part Two, the Homeschool Chart

I have tried about a million systems of organizing my homeschool lessons and until I came up with this, nothing actually stuck. I am not really a big fan of rigid schedules. I have babies and toddlers and I have never been functional at 2:00PM of any afternoon in my 34 years of life. My life has a lot of variables to work around. Still, I don't want school to fall through the cracks, so something had to be done to keep us more or less on track. This little baby has been helping a lot.

 Each school kid has their own column of pockets, divided up by subject; Badge Work, Math, Grammar and Spelling (both of which include writing assignments) with a pocket at the bottom for completed work. James just has one pocket for preschool activites. The pockets are made out of envelopes I cut in half and stapled to the board. At the beginning of the week I put all of the week's assignments in their envelopes and they work on them during school time. If they want to keep working, and sometimes they do, and get it all done in a few days, good for them. They are done with school for the week. On the right side of the chart I have extra curricular activites, group activites, field trips and fun outings so they can see at a glance what our week looks like. It's not shown in this picture, but I have a simple dry erase calendar above this chart that shows us our month at a glance. It's simple, it's easy and it helps them work independently.