Grandma and Grandpa Springer visit

I feel lucky to have wonderful parents who are also fantastic grandparents for my children. Grandma and Grandpa Springer visited for a week around Thanksgiving 2010. They are great guests - willing to help, easy to please, and interactive with the kids. It is a privilege to have such a great  relationship with my parents - I appreciate their advice and insight, and I thoroughly enjoy the time we spend together.

The week prior to Thanksgiving was a busy one, with the kids still in school and many rehearsals and performances of Aubrey's play. Despite the tight schedule, we found time to visit, shop, and do some fun activities.

For Family Home Evening we played a "super-competitive" game of How Well Do You Know Your Family.  Family members drew a sometimes wacky, sometimes serious question out of a bowl and answered it.

We experienced really cold weather while we had visitors - about as cold as we get here in Vancouver.  We even had ice, threats of freezing rain, and some snow. We even had a "late start" day on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving due to icy roads.  There was not nearly as much snow as Bailey wanted, it was still fun!  Here are the girls after running around outside as the first snowflakes fell.

Now, this is exciting.  Mom and Dad quite willingly drove with Joseph and me to Chown Hardware in the Pearl District of Portland, where they have absolutely every door handle, knob, faucet, etc. I thought it was really cool. Dan was glad that he was spared this particular home improvement shopping trip. I was looking at door hardware, in preparation to buy new doorknobs for the house.  

Afterward we dashed through the rain to eat Thai food at a nearby restaurant.  Yum!  Joseph was unimpressed with the decidedly non-McDonald's offerings, so I distracted him by letting him text his Dad a message.

 

Next we drove across the Willamette to OMSI, our favorite science museum.

Later that night, Bailey and I roasted tomatillos, garlic, and jalapeno peppers to make our very favorite tomatillo salsa.

Sometimes I despair because our house can never seem to stay clean. Mostly we owe that fact to our very creative and inventive youngest child.  He is always creating "worlds" which require large numbers of toys and "guys" (toy figurines) spread out over an entire room.  We're glad he likes to entertain himself so we patiently step over the messes every day.  Here Grandma snapped a picture of him making a city.

 We are so glad Grandma and Grandpa could visit us - we love to have company!

Thanksgiving 2010

We were privileged to have a full house for Thanksgiving this year.  Brandon was home from college for the week (hooray!) and Grandma and Grandpa Springer also spent a week with us. It was the perfect Thanksgiving - small enough that we could visit with each other, but large enough to feel festive.


Preparing for Thanksgiving
A month or more before the big day,  Bailey, our resident organizer and food expert, perused her favorite food blog sites and my recipe books for dinner ideas.  Eventually, she and I put together a menu of foods for Thanksgiving dinner and created a schedule and food assignment list.

We did much of the food prep (rolls, pies, and jello) the day before, so Thanksgiving Day was remarkably "unstressful."

Setting the table
I have always wanted to have festive dinnerware, so this year I found a great deal on beautiful reddish-orange plates (the color is called "paprika", which just sounds delicious!) Aubrey was in charge of setting the table, an assignment which she took very seriously. I had suggested a simple fold for the cloth napkins, but that was not fancy enough for her artistic sensibilities.  So, she googled and then followed directions to create a piece of napkin art.

Joseph thought his napkin made a great hat.

Mom and Dad were extremely helpful in getting the turkey cooked and ready for serving, and Mom made a great gravy and stuffing.
 
Time to Eat!
Dinner was served at about 1:30 p.m. We had a great time visiting around the table. Notice what Joseph was eating for the big feast.  Yes, that's right . . . a banana and sunflower seeds.  Someday we hope he will realize what he is missing out on!

After Dinner Activities:
Grandpa and Brandon worked on replacing doorknobs in our house.  We are switching all the door hardware, and Grandpa taught Brandon how to do it (this will be a great money-earning "job" for Brandon during Christmas break!)

Dan researched extensively the after-Thanksgiving sales.  He is an expert shopper and was a man with a plan . . . . until he, I, and Brandon tried to go to the Toys R Us sale, which started at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving night. Over 3,000 people showed up for the opening, and it was a madhouse.  We gave up and went home without buying a single item, and he lost all his enthusiasm for battling the crowds.  Whew . . . we missed out on some great deals, but I didn't really want to be out shopping on Black Friday anyway! 

Brandon read his 2009 scrapbook, which I just had printed.

Aubrey set up a Life Game (which lasted until late into the evening). As usual, she absolutely creamed her competition (Joseph and me). She has figured out all the little known secrets about the game.  Such as . . . did you know that you can buy stock in "numbers," and then whenever someone rolls that number you receive dividends?  Seriously.   She also played some beautiful Christmas music for us on the piano.  We all enjoyed a very relaxing Thanksgiving evening.

We tried to take family pictures and pictures of the  kids for Christmas cards. Overall, it didn't go well.  I will not comment further!

This year I am especially grateful for family. Family is what it's all about!  There is nothing better than having everyone home (and extra family visiting), making big messes, laughing, and creating happy chaos. Sometimes we drive each other crazy, but I am insanely grateful for each person's unique contributions to the family. I love you all!

Finding the Perfect Christmas Tree

We live in an amazing area.  If you live in the western United States, there is a good chance that your Christmas tree was grown within 20 miles of us. Getting a live Christmas tree means driving a few minutes to one of many Christmas tree farms, choosing the perfect tree, and cutting it down. However, this is our fifth Christmas in Vancouver, and the previous four years we have used our pre-lit artificial tree instead of cutting down a real tree.  Why?  Well, it's easier, of course.  Reliable, beautiful, requiring no additional expenditure or effort to procure it.  However, Dan has grumbled (more each year) about the way the aging artificial tree has to be wired together to look right, and the last few years we have had to manually light sections where the pre-lit strands have failed.

More reasons we have not cut down our own tree: December can be cold, and who wants to be outside in the cold rain (snow is rare - rain is typical).  And, then there is our one previous experience with a live tree.

The year was 2003.  We were living in Sandy, Utah.  I had my heart set on trying out a real tree, so we looked through the Christmas tree lots around town and picked one from Home Depot. Ironically, the tree was "grown in Oregon," which means that it was likely grown in the Portland/Vancouver area!  The tree was pretty, and it was fun to decorate, but within a few weeks it started to droop, despite our careful watering. By a few days before Christmas all the branches drooped, resulting in a tree looking like this for Christmas morning.

Needless to say, the experience was disappointing, and I decided that an artificial tree was just fine for the Porters.  Until this year.

It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Brandon was still in town for the holiday. The weather was mid 40s and not raining at the moment. We drove a few back roads (5 minutes) to a Christmas tree farm and set off with the saw and wagon the farm provided. We weren't terribly discriminating in choosing the tree, because they all looked good to us. Dan measured to make sure we didn't get a tree too tall for the living room.


This is what we know now . . . smart tree buyers are aware that the circumference of tree trunks can vary greatly, and cutting a thick trunk is literally a pain in the back. We, being novices, chose a beautiful tree with a really big trunk. Dan and Brandon took turns sawing away at it. This is Dan's description of how to cut a Christmas tree: "kneel down in the mud, stick your bum high in the air and lay your cheek on the ground while you reach as far as you can through thick greenery, and then saw back and forth . . . for a long, long time." It was a pretty arduous task, and while we were still cutting the tree the heavens opened and poured more rain on us. By this point Joseph was filled with anxiety about the mud all around him and all over his shoes and clothes.  The girls were whining, "this isn't worth it.  I'm cold."  Don't let the smiles in these pictures fool you. There was plenty of complainin' going on!

Goofing off while the guys labored diligently to cut the tree.

Joseph and Aubrey yelling "Timber" as the tree finally fell to the ground.

Finally, task completed.  The tree was cut, carried to the barn, put in a "tree shaker" to get dead stuff off it, and we paid ($35 for an over 7 foot tree!)  We waited out the worst of the rainstorm in the barn, drinking hot cocoa, and then pulled the tree to our car, where the guys hefted it to the top and secured it. In the meantime, I was pulling muddy shoes off people and throwing the shoes in the trunk before they climbed into the car.  So. Much. Mud. Finally, I put one of my muddy shoes in the back, hopped on the other foot to the front (my thought was that it would minimize the amount of mud in the front of the car, but mostly I just looked funny), and we drove slowly home.  We had to let the tree dry out in the garage for a few hours, and then had to cut off a lot of beautiful branches from the bottom of the tree so we could fit our enormously large trunk into the tree stand.
Whew.  Was it worth it?  I say yes.  I think it has the makings of a new family tradition, whining and discomfort and all.  Because, really, what valued family tradition DOESN'T involve significant whining and challenges?  I liked that we were all together to get the tree.  I like that it was a little challenging and wet and muddy, but we did it anyway. I like that we were taking advantage of our close proximity to cool tree farms. I like that we all wore Santa hats throughout the experience and ate candy canes in the car while blasting Christmas music. I love the way the tree smells and looks. It was a great way to kick off what I hope will be a fantastic Christmas season.