I went through my Instagrams so I could do a round up of our holidays. We are trying to get back into some semblance of a routine before school starts on Monday, just to ease us in.
Since I last updated, we did a bit more decorating…
From 1:30-3:30ish in the afternoon is when the disco magic starts in the kitchen…I bust out the sparkly platforms and get my boogie on…just kidding, not really. My windows are DIRTY.
I made another strand of wooden baubles with bigger spheres, since I ended up draping the first one on the white tree.
We made candy! Dark chocolate crunchy and creamy peanut butter bites. Reese’s are our favorite, so it was a logical choice to start us off.
We made our own Christmas crackers this year. We followed the tutorial here.
We knocked out a couple of screenprinted Minecraft T-shirts for gifts.
Speaking of screen printing, we also made our own wrapping paper at the Watkins College of Art Open House. These were the most fun to unwrap..I wish I had pictures of all the different patterns we made.
We went down to the Country Music Hall of Fame to make T-shirts with Hatch Show Print. They didn’t have as many of their vintage printing blocks as last year, but we still got fun shirts out of it.
We had a whirlwind trip to my parents for a few days…a party, presents, food, family and fun, until we had to leave to come back home on Christmas Eve.
Back home, we scurried and prepared and cooked for the next day, just in time to reveal the last figure of the Star Wars Lego advent calendar…..we call him SantaMaul.
We made our first batch of homemade donuts and donut holes that morning…a lot of trouble, but very tasty. We used the Pioneer Woman’s recipe. One problem. She doesn’t tell you where to add the shortening and after reading 100 comments, not ONE person seemed to mention it, so rather than read through another 100 comments to see if it gets resolved, I went to the gold standard of Alton Brown for his recipe to find out it gets incorporated with the warm milk and yeast. Their recipes are very similar and Alton has never led me astray.
Otto was very pleased with the treats in his stocking. He is eagerly watching a bag of them being opened here….
It was a big day for him too.
The CC was so excited about his Christmas present, he had to cut into the walls within hours. AS YOU DO.
He crawled under the house running wire, and by bedtime, we had music in the living room. Camouflaging art gallery wall hijinks coming soon.
Our new tradition for a more formal holiday meal is to make a nice boxing day dinner. None of us want to bother with cooking a big dinner on Christmas, and everyone was happy…except that I overcooked the Beef Wellington. Boooooo. It was still very tasty, but over done for me.
We went down to the Rutherford county line to get some fancy sparklers for New Year’s Eve. Fireworks are banned in Davidson county, and the park rangers are always out in our neighborhood, so we have to buy quiet pyrotechnics.
NYE also happens to be Thing One’s birthday…who is now a TEENAGER. Gulp.
The slumber party with 13 year olds and sparklers was exhausting…..
…and by New Year’s Day, we felt like Otto’s new nutcracker toy.
Time to take down the decorations and get back to normal life.
We have spent some of our time off hatching the next renovation plan, so I’ll be back with that very soon. I hope everyone had a nice holiday, whatever you got up to!
