For 48 Hours, Missoula Was A Little More Fabulous

Hey y'all - 

A few weeks before Christmas, my great friend (and former bridesmaid) Brian and his boyfriend Tyler came to visit us from Los Angeles. 

Now, I love Missoula. Adore it. If I wanted to call up a friend to go hiking or fishing or protesting genetically-modified crops, I'd have no trouble finding a good candidate here. But since I left LA, it's been hard to find someone who just wants to drink a few strong cocktails and go to TJ Maxx to try on shoes while bitching about that girl we hate on that show we can't stop watching.  So when I picked Brian and Tyler up on their first morning here for breakfast and asked what they felt like doing, when they shrugged and said, 'Why don't we go to the mall?" I was beside myself with excitement. 

We packed a tremendous amount of activity into those 48 hours. We shopped ourselves silly - and I mean silly - because, for example,  Tyler just HAD to have this squirrel puppet at the toy store that he named "Frecklepuss." Frecklepuss was kind of a menace.

We picked you guys up from school, and then we all went to the carousel so Tyler could ride it with you. He spent most of the ride concentrating on not throwing up. Because I am not Tyler, I thought this was hilarious.

They came over to our house to hang out, and Laney was overjoyed to have a willing participant to play the role of her prince. Her usual method of prince casting is to tell Hagen, "You're my prince now!" which always makes him yell, "NO, YAY-NEE!" and hide in the other room.

Princess Laney and Prince Tyler had to plot to get their magic sword back from the dreaded sleeping Pirate Brian.

The grown-ups all went out for dessert and had fun taking pictures in some fake moustaches that Tyler had also picked out at the toy store.

Did you remember to tie that girl to the train tracks?

The next day, the adults went skiing.

It was great fun, because after our first run, Tyler admitted that he hadn't so much been in a competitive high school ski club so much as a social club of people who enjoyed drinking hot chocolate at the bottom of what happened to be a ski hill. 

That night, to celebrate our ski day, the guys invited Laney and me out for a fancy schmancy dinner. Being told that she could wear whatever she wanted for her big night out, Laney chose an Easter dress, a tiara, striped tights and glass slippers (a.k.a.clear jelly shoes).*

Brian and Tyler figured that Laney would want to do everything the grown-ups did, so we arrived at our table to find they'd ordered her a wine glass of huckleberry juice. 

They also let her order a 9-pound wedge of chocolate cake, so safe to say she's permanently in love:

In fact, the next morning, she wanted to "make a movie to tell them bye"

Thanks for the visit, Brian and Tyler! Come back soon!

Love,

Mom

* Your dad and I went back to eat at this same restaurant a week later, and we mentioned how much our four year-old had enjoyed it the week before, because she got to have her own wine glass. Our waitress squealed: "I remember her! In the tiara and slippers! All of us came out of the kitchen to walk by your table and check her out because we thought it was so cute!"

Ho Ho Holy Moly

Hey y'all -

Christmas in a house with two small children is a magical experience, and I highly recommend it. Readers: if there are no children in your particular home, I'd suggest knocking on doors in your neighborhood at 4am on Christmas morning until someone yanks open their door half-dressed, covered in glitter and tape, incapable of completing a sentence, and looking like they were just hit by a holly jolly semi truck. Congratulations! You've found the home full of preschoolers! Sit back and enjoy - it'll all be over by 6am.

For the weeks leading up to Christmas, Laney would get so overwhelmed by adrenaline just thinking about Santa that she would start running in circles.

I had taken her to the Lions Club Christmas Tree Sale to buy a pretty tree for our new house: a 7-footer, I was thinking. Instead, she freaked out that the volunteer was using a chainsaw to lop off the bottom of the trunks and help shape the trees; Laney abhors loud noises. So we huddled in the back of the warehouse as far from the power tools as possible, and that's where she saw this four-foot junker and fell in love. I picked it up, swore to the staff that we did NOT need it trimmed (and if we did, we could probably use scissors), and ran out to the car where I tossed it in the passenger seat.  When we got home, I put it on a small side table to make it look more lofty, but it was really a putting-perfume-on-a-pig situation. 

Excellent $10 investment.

On Christmas Eve, Laney wanted to camp out on the floor in Hagen's room downstairs, so she'd be 20 yards closer to catching Santa in the act.

bedtime stories

...and then Hagen wanted to do it, too, because it looked like so much fun. You two were so jacked up on excitement that you didn't go to sleep until after 10pm, which made Santa's elves very cranky. I mean - I'm guessing. 

Laney had set out a plate of snacks for Santa and his reindeer - mostly the reindeer. There were originally five cookies on the plate, but every time Hagen walked past the coffee table, he snatched one. I think if I were Santa and whooshed into a house to find a plate of old purple carrots, mushy apples and a solitary cookie, I'd skip that house entirely and keep the presents in the sleigh. Overall, I'd be a petty and vindictive Santa, so it's probably good news for the children of the world that I don't have the gig. 

When Santa had finished his appointed round, this was the look of our living room:

Your dad built Laney a dress up station for her room (pictured, right), with room for all her princess dresses, witch get-ups, magician's cape, etc, and then bins underneath for her shoes, tiaras and handbags.

Laney woke up at 4am, ready to open presents, but Grandma Sue had spent the night on the couch and Christmas saint that she is, convinced Laney that 6am might be a more appropriate time to open gifts.

At 5:58, Laney couldn't handle it anymore, and we all had to get up and start opening presents. Of course, she noticed the dress-up stuff right away.

We learned very quickly that Laney and Hagen have very different philosophies when it comes to opening presents. Laney wants to set a speed record for getting the paper off anything with her name on it. Hagen wants to open one present at a time and savor it. For example, he noticed Santa had left him a coloring book, and would have been perfectly happy to spend a few hours coloring each and every page in the book methodically before moving on to his next gift. 

This made Laney nuts. When she had finished opening her presents, he still had a dozen under the tree... and didn't seem to be in any hurry to open them. In fact, at one point, he went into his bedroom and came back with a truck he's owned since he was born and started playing with that. I half-suspect that just a few days shy of turning two, he's already figured out how to best make his sister's head explode. 

You'll notice Laney's in four or five different outfits in these pictures, and I can't possibly put them in chronological order. The girl changed clothes more often than Carrie Underwood did hosting the Country Music Awards.

I'm not at all ashamed to say I did a lot of my toy Christmas shopping at Goodwill. First, because you can get a sack of 5 like-new Barbies for $4, and since I know they're all destined to have their hair painted with nail polish, that's just about the right price point for me. Also, I saw a photoessay earlier this year about the Chinese factory workers who make the toys we buy here, and it bummed me out sufficiently that I'm trying to create less of a demand for those goods. 

Thor built a Barbie bed so they'd all have a place to sleep.

Grandpops and Grandma CC sent you a rocket play tent that was a HUGE hit. It's the perfect hideout for quiet coloring, or in Hagen's case, crawling inside and yelling, "THREE! EIGHT! SIX! BLAST OFF!"

Peg Peg and Tex sent Laney a new suitcase, so she'd be ready for her "next vacation to Disney." Covered in purple butterflies and totally diabolical.

Finally, around 8:30am, Laney asked, "Can I just open all of Hagen's presents?" So we let her. He didn't seem to care. 

Around 9:00am, according to Grandma Sue, Laney was working on making a bracelet out of Play Doh when she suddenly fell over sideways and was asleep before she hit the ground. 

Making Christmas happen for small children is a lot like planning a wedding - you put a lot of time and effort and planning into making it perfect, and the whole thing is over in the blink of an eye. 

Totally worth it, though.

Love,

Mom

Merry Mayhem

Hey y'all -

Your school's Holiday party was held last Thursday night, and I think I finished recovering from the event sometime last night. The plan was to have the kids sing a few songs, have Santa make a surprise appearance to give out some toys (that the parents had dropped off earlier in the week), and then eat a little macaroni and cheese.

I was in charge of macaroni and cheese. Last year, 50 people attended this event. Fortunately, I grew up a southern Methodist, so my catering math when determining how much food to prepare for a get-together goes something like this: How many people are expected to come, minus all the folks they might not be speaking to, plus all those tacky folks who are going to invite themselves, plus a 20% divorce rate which tends to add whole new branches to the family tree...and then multiply the whole mess by four, just in case. Using this system, I arrived at the number "200."

I made six varieties of mac n' cheese, and you know what I thought was the best? Buffalo Chicken. Take a tray of regular mac n' cheese and stir in a bottle of buffalo wing sauce, some diced celery and a chopped-up rotisserie chicken. You know which one went first? Chicken and Bacon Alfredo (jarred Alfredo sauce, handful of bacon crumbles, chopped rotisserie chicken). Your school is known for its locally-sourced, organic food program. When you had Curry Eggplant Quinoa on last month's lunch menu, I accused your principal of just randomly stringing nouns together. So sometimes I giggle to myself as I'm preparing mass quantities of Velveeta-based entrees for your school.

My crazy catering math worked to my benefit, because 200 is exactly the number of people who came and packed themselves into that school. Y'all, it was madness.

That many people packed together made the temperature in the room go up about 30 degrees, and your dad was sweating. I took a few pictures of Santa's arrival, and then your dad found me and said, "Hagen's acting up - he just hit a kid downstairs - so I'm going to take him home." Of course, I agreed, and then only five minutes later did I realize that football was on TV and beer was in our fridge and Hagen probably didn't hit anybody; your dad had just found a way to escape the madness under the guise of good parenting. Well played, Thor.

Hagen did not get his picture taken with Santa at the party, because by the time Mr. Claus started handing out presents, he was probably already home on the couch, high-fiving your dad about how smart they are. But Laney got to pick up her present:

You'll never guess what she got:

And when she opened it, she said, "She has a dress just like MY Cinderella dress!" 

No kidding. 

Love,
Mom

MEE MOW!!!

Dear Hagen,

I thought I was done talking about our vacation, but then I realized that I had forgotten to mention what might have been my favorite moment of the whole two weeks.

All over the Disney parks, there are characters you can meet - pretty much any person or animal you've ever seen in a Disney movie is represented. But Laney decided after the princess meet-n-greet that she didn't want to see anyone else. Still, when we got to Epcot, I suggested we all go meet Mickey and Minnie. You've been watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse lately, and I wanted to see what you'd make of Mickey in person.

Laney hung back behind Dad's legs, but you charged ahead and when we rounded the corner and saw Mickey...

MEE MOW! MEE MOW!

You bypassed the other folks waiting to see Mickey Mouse (aka Mee Mow), and ran straight to that big mouse to give him a hug. We had to pull you back in line, and Mickey shrugged an apology to the family we'd cut in front of, and then we waited patiently 'til it was officially our turn:

You were equally excited to meet Minnie and Goofy.

You're just so darn cool sometimes*.

Love,
Mom

* Okay, all the time.

Georgia On Our Mind

Hey y'all -

The last stop on our whirlwind two-week vacation was Vienna, GA. This was really great scheduling on our part because after ten days of non-stop activity, Vienna was a great place to rest, recharge, and accomplish absolutely nothing. My father Philip always says - as if it's a selling point - "When you come to Vienna, you don't have to 'DO' anything." (This is a pretty convenient rule, since if you WANTED to do something in Vienna, there'd be nothing to do).

So we played card games and watched some movies and I got to play around a little with some cheap lens filters that I bought for my camera.

I think there was one bedtime there when we realized we needed to change out of the pajamas we'd been wearing since the previous night into new pajamas. THAT'S how little you can accomplish on a day in Vienna.

Speaking of clothing options, in case everyone was wondering if Laney had forgotten about the Cinderella dress by this point in our vacation, the answer is hell, no.

She wore it to sit by the fire:

When she wanted to look even MORE regal, she paired it with a bedspread royal robe and foam crown:

...and when I told her it was too damn cold outside to wear it to her cousins' house to jump on the trampoline, she layered it over a sensible turtleneck:

The night before Thanksgiving, we went over to my cousin Heidi's house for her annual pre-Thanksgiving dinner and party. All of the women who came brought along some kind of cheese-based dip, and they were all amazing. Buffalo Chicken Cheese Dip, Pizza Dip, Cheddar and Bacon Dip... that anyone in Dooly County lives beyond the age of 30 is a pulmonary miracle. Hagen just stood next to the kitchen island for most of the night, signing "More," and shouting, "Peeese!"

My Uncle David deep-fried some turkeys inside the wooden barn while drinking a local bourbon that could probably melt a styrofoam cup, and managed not to set anything on fire.

I got to spend some time with Heidi (I spent most of my junior high years trying to get my bangs to look like hers),

...and Laney got to jump on the big-girl trampoline with her cousins. 

Cousin Hope

The next day was Thanksgiving, and we made a big dinner at Philip's house. Laney was in charge of the cornbread, and anything else that required cracking an egg.

 

On our last day in Georgia, Clay and Connie Mercer invited us over for dinner so we could visit and Laney could ride a horse. 

The dinner was great, the company was great, and as always, the Mercers made us feel like family.

 And that's a wrap on this vacation.

Love,
Mom