Merry Christmas!

We had a big dinner party with Tom's family on Christmas Eve day. Then my parents came for the night. My Dad and I went to a Christmas Eve service at the Unitarian Church...the church is a beautiful white church that has been there in the center of town since the 1600's. Very old New England. It was basically all carols and everyone holding lit candles at the end. It totally rocked. My kind of church. 

The boys are asleep finally. Poor Jack could not get to sleep. He was so excited and frustrated that he couldn't sleep. Everything is all set downstairs...I even have the coffee maker set up to turn on by itself in the morning. Well, I didn't do that. Tom did. He's good like that:)

We have another batch of people coming over tomorrow. My sisters and their husbands and my neice, Samantha. We will have another big rib roast dinner and eat lots of cheesecake and pie.

Then, if that is not enough...my brother and his wife are flying in Friday around 4:30pm and will be at my parents house that night for another Christmas party with all my family (again...God help me. I love them...but it is a little overkill.) My brother was supposed to come to my house on Christmas Eve, but the day he was going to leave, pipes burst in their house. They live in a huge historic building in Pennsylvania...I think it used to be a church or a convent or something like that. They have three floors and on the third floor, which they kept unheated, pipes burst and left quite a bit of damage. I am just glad they are able to come at all. They will only be here for the weekend.

Oh, I will for sure be back on eating more clean after all this holiday hullaballoo. I know this mindless eating is making me feel tired and sluggish (along with lack of sleep.) I am not going to fret about what I am eating for another day and then get back to menu planning and tracking my food and water. 

Have a wonderful day today!! I have to go to sleep because my boys will be up at the crack of dawn.

No School...Again

So for the third time this week, school was cancelled due to the weather. Winter hasn't even officially started and these poor kids have already used 4 snow days. They are totally screwed and will be in school in July.

What the hell happened to us New Englanders? When did we become wimps with the weather? The superintendent of the schools cancelled school yesterday during school for the next day because we were getting a snow storm in the afternoon. The snow started around 1:45 pm today. What the bloody hell? 

Don't get me wrong...I love snow days. Love them. I love to have the surprise day home with kids, cozy on the couch, watching movies and having hot cocoa. But 4 snow days in 6 days...a week before Christmas? No, not so much. I would rather be wrapping presents and cleaning freaking toilets. Yay.

Oh My Sweet Jesus...

Do you have an hour to read my previous post?!

Rambly Shambly Style

I know I have not been around for a while. So much is going on and I have been so tired at night that I have been falling asleep really early. On the couch. 

The ice storm really wreaked havoc on our little part of the world. So many people still don't have power. Trees are down everywhere. Some towns have closed down their schools until January. Not our school thankfully. BUT this kids have not had school since last Thursday. Well, they did have school on Tuesday...the day I work for free at the school so I could not get anything done at home. Then we had a little snowstorm so they closed again today. The boys have been great, but it is not as easy to get stuff done with them home. I really need to start wrapping presents for them as I am not going to have any time later. 

So here's the deal with what has been going on:

Friday, the day after the ice storm, with no power and everything a big mess, we happened to have matinee tickets for the Boston Ballet's Nutcracker at the Opera House. Now there was no way we were going to miss that. Believe me, we nearly did. Everything was going against us. All I can say is thank God I took a shower the night before so I was slightly presentable. Really. It had been days since I took a shower and I was going to just take one Friday morning, but at the last minute I decided to take one the night before. I had just had my hair cut and colored the day before so it was reasonable looking. 

We are driving past electrical wires and downed trees everywhere, trying to find a place for a cup of coffee to have on the way in to Boston. I was dying, man. I really love my coffee. I started out as a snob, not wanting to go to a Dunkin' Donuts because I hate their coffee. Didn't matter because the lines were 20 and 30 people deep. Seriously. Tom's says he can wait until we get to Boston. I just looked at him like "I can not do that." Finally get some coffee...if I had an intravenous needle, I would have shot it up. 

Then when we got to the outskirts of the city in Newton, Murphy says his belly doesn't feel good. I say 'maybe you need something to eat.' Um, no. That is not it at all. Major barfing going on...with my quick thinking, I empty the lunch bag filled with snacks and hand it to him to throw up in. Jack is next to him with a horrified expression and a few smarmy comments. There is not much vomit on Murphy because of my little lunch bag save (for the record, I threw the lunch bag out. Totally not worth cleaning.) We don't know what to do. We are an hour from home. We are practically at the place. Do we stay or do we go home? Murphy says he feels a little better. It had to have been car-sickness, not an actual stomach bug (which would have been nasty and embarrassing if he had done this inside of the Opera House.) We decide to try to go still. We are now running really late, but hell, we have come this far. We miss the first part of the show, but I am so glad we went. It was a beautiful theater. The music was great. At first, Tom and I thought we should go to the Nutcracker every year as a tradition...but by the end of the performance, I realized that we are not a ballet family. We need more singing and dancing. It was really bizarre to be seated in front of two moms and their girls who were hooting "whhoooo whhooo" to parts of the ballet like they were at a sporting event. Bizarre. Plus, here I was so careful to have none of us make any noise....I unwrapped a bunch of Werther toffees for the boys before we got into the show so I would not make a peep and these chit-chattering moms had a box of Whoppers going behind us. Tom and I were totally cracking up. You have to realize that we were not at the local High School production. We were at the Boston Ballet.

Here's what else is going down:  With one week until Christmas, Tom and I thought that now would be the perfect time to do a little home renovations. Yes. Let's strip wallpaper from the mud room and back stairway. Let's patch up the walls of this 100+ year old house. Oh, hey, that's been fun...rip up that rust carpet on the back stairs. Oooh...let's see what's under that. Nice wood stairs with a few coats of totally LEADED paint. Oh look, there are five million hard staples on the stairs. Well, we got to get rid of those. All the while, the kids are home because school keeps getting cancelled. Then in the middle of it all I decide that the boys and I will make my super delicious thumbprint butter cookies and some sugar cookies. Just let me rinse the lead dust off my hands. I decide to double the recipe in hopes that I can bag a few dozen to give to the garbage man, postman, a neighbor who gave me his latest poetry book...the cookies keep coming out totally flat. WTF is going on? They taste good, but are not fit for gift giving. They are too thin and crispy and would crumble on contact. Then I realize that we doubled everything in the recipe except the flour. Crap. I tried to add flour, but I got greedy, wanting to get as much out of this batch as I could with what batter was left so I added way too much flour and I baked a bunch of tasteless white rocks. If there is too much flour in a cookie, it doesn't lightly brown like it would if there was a proper amount of butter. I just learned that. 

Oh, that's right, so this is all going on and we will all of Tom's family coming on Christmas Eve day for a sit down dinner. That's 11 of us total. And then later that day, my parents and my brother and his wife will be coming for dinner and staying over. Then Christmas day my sisters and their families are coming. We will have 13 total that day for dinner and presents, etc. So we HAVE to get this fucking work done. We have the entire mudroom contents in our dining room. We have tools, paint, bags of ripped up rug and tiny scraps of wallpaper everywhere. The house is in total disorder. Did I happen to mention that we are hosting two Christmas dinners?! I have five million presents to wrap and my house is complete disarray. 

Hmmm...what did I eat today? A small bowl of some really good for me cereal with a few banana slices. A latte. A bunch of cookies. A huge hot chocolate. A slice and a half of pizza. I feel dehydrated and gross. 

Last thing....want to know what I was most concerned about having an extended power failure? Not that the pump in the basement was not working so we had a foot of water. No, no, no. I was worried about the milk I had bought the day before. All $16 worth of organic milk. I have finally gone totally organic with the dairy. The milk cost is double, but I feel it is worth it for my kids. I guess even for me, too:) Okay, for Tom, too.

Ice Storm

We've had a major ice storm here in the northeast. Power outages, tons of trees and wires down. I will get back to posting later.

We are fine and have power back though.

All I care about is the coffee situation. I got coffee so all is good.

I painted my blog

I really want to do some painting around my house. 

This is easier.

My Yellow House

I do live in a yellow house. It's this one...

And here are the cows that got into my backyard...they live behind my house, but somehow got loose.

For some reason, the photo with the cows is at the top. I have spent way too much time trying to make it appear the way I intended. I now give up and post as is.

Here are photos from my 4oth birthday in November...

This gorgeous yellow house was the bed and breakfast that Tom and I stayed at in Woodstock, Vermont as a getaway for my birthday. My parents stayed with the boys at home and had a grand time playing Monopoly. My poor parents did not know better so my boys had them playing marathon games of Monopoly starting at 7:00 in the freaking morning...before they even had coffee. I told my parents there was no way in hell that I would have done that and that they are good people. We typically can't play that game (or any game) that long before a brawl starts between my boys. 

Here's my cake with Chanukah candles on it because we had no birthday candles. Yes, we have candles for a Menorah even though we are not Jewish and do not celebrate Chanukah. Just another weird thing about me. 

I have a beautiful Menorah and always intend to light the candles, but I am inconsistent and really don't have anything to say while doing it so I make up shit and it has not really captured my kids' attention because I don't know what the hell I am doing. I keep thinking I will come up with some cool tradition that requires lighting 8 or 9 days of candles...

I have not invented it yet.

Murphy was really concerned that we were using up all of the Chanukah candles and that we would not have enough for the Menorah. I told him not to worry and that I had another box of even cooler hand dipped multicolor candles to use for it this year. And it is true. Again, we don't even celebrate this holiday

This is me in Vermont outside some road side stand that had these stuffed animal herds of cows and sheep. This place was a little crazy...the guy who owns the place was cutting up fudge and selling it to these foolish tourists from New York while he smoked a cigarette. Only one photo was necessary here, but I have no idea how to delete photos once they are added onto a post. 

I spent a crapload of money at Whole Foods today...

It is so nice and quiet in the house right now. I am loving it. Everyone else is asleep.

How is it possible that I can't get myself going with writing a blog entry yet I could write a freaking novel in the comments?

I mean, I was just about to just state exactly what I did today and none of it was really overly interesting so who cares.  Well, actually, I did go to two of my favorite stores on the planet...the big Whole Foods in Cambridge and Susanna's, a funky clothing store in Porter Square (also in Cambridge.) Tom took the day off from work...he has a bunch of time he has to take off before the end of the year or he loses them. We dropped the boys off at school and went to civilization. I live an hour west of Boston. I am a former city girl who lives in a somewhat rural town. Rural for city people anyway. When mini herds of deer hang out across the street from your home and big ass beavers walk down your street during a big rainstorm, it's pretty fucking rural for me. So it is news for me when I get to go to Whole Foods. I will never get over the fact that I don't live within 10 minutes of one. I have always, and I mean always lived within a 5 minute drive or 10 minute walk of one. When I grew up in Wellesley, MA, there was a Bread & Circus just a walk away from my house...Bread & Circus turned into a Whole Foods at some point, but I actually still call them all Bread & Circus in real life.

Oh, hey, here's some good news about not being at one's ideal weight...you don't spend quite as much on clothes when you go into one of your absolute favorite stores. I have enough clothes in my closet that have gone unworn since I let myself go...my closet is like a store. 

I am really tired and have to go to Jack's basketball game at 8:30 am so I am going sign off now. 

I do want to say I do feel closer to getting myself on a more healthy track. I tried to jazz up that sentence with the addition of the word "healthy"...I am so sick of seeing myself write "back on track." Back on track...what the hell does that even mean anymore...just take it moment by moment. I do believe in that whole habit thing. Got to make it a habit. 

Alright, in the spirit of Mrs Furious, check-check.

The real Biggest Loser

I actually sobbed while watching the Biggest Loser last night. Sobbed. Tears streaming down my face. Everyone was in bed and I was up late watching it by myself (not like anyone ever watches it with me.)

I have such a good life. A good husband who is my best friend in the world. Two healthy, robust boys. We have a house, newer cars, food, the ability to pay our bills. There is nothing in the world that I need or want (well, I would love to be able travel.) The only thing I want is to be thinner. That's it. It's up to me completely and I don't do it. I let myself down time and time again. I know what it feels like to be thinner. I have a closet full of clothes that don't fit anymore. I even have a bunch of clothes with price tags still on because I would buy them in my old size.

I actually wrote the above post like 12 hours ago and never got to get back to it. I am just going to post it as is and unfinished because I have to get something up here.