When I finally descended from my lair, our fake tree was standing in the living room and Theo was dancing around it yelling THEO HELP DADDY TEE! THEO HELP! So the tree was up and the garland was hung around the banister with care and I’ll be darned if it didn’t cheer me right up. So we strung up the lights and wiped off the nativity set and here we are in a Christmas wonderland.

We’d considered going undecorated this year since we’ll celebrate the big day elsewhere, but it’s amazing how much nicer it is to walk downstairs in the morning to see twinkling lights instead of an empty expanse of carpet and a sad little footstool occupying our living room. Maybe we’ll just leave it up year round.

And that is all I have to tell you.

Fortunately, I didn’t actually have to be in the photo. It was just going to be a picture of the kids. There are nine of them right now, all under the age of seven. The youngest is not quite a year old, the oldest is a first grader, and the rest are like squirming stair-steps between them. And speaking of stair-steps and squirming, here is one of the shots.

Believe it or not, that’s the best of the lot. After I took it, one of them started crying and one of them dropped the baby he was supposed to be holding and someone else decided to play dead and slide down the stairs in a heap, out of camera range. Someone walked up midway through the photo shoot and said, “This is a disaster!” And she was right. But what a fantastic disaster it was. I’m just impressed that no one fell down the stairs and broke a limb or split a lip.

Go see!

I hope you’re having a great Thanksgiving. I’m off to eat some brussels sprouts with bacon. The turkey is OK but it’s the bacon that makes the holiday. Don’t tell anyone.

Tomorrow, we’ll be surrounded by more than thrity family members (and that’s just on Jeff’s side), and we’ll be just one time zone away from my side of the family, so we can all celebrate and talk to each other during daylight hours. It’s going to be different and overwhelming, but that’s why we moved back.

That, and because we wanted Theo to learn to say GOBBLE GOBBLE in proper context.

Grandma Liz’s Chili
2lb hamburger
1 cup chopped onions
1/2 cup chopped green pepper
2 (15oz) cans chili or kidney beans
2 (16oz) cans crushed tomatoes
1 (6oz) can tomato sauce or paste
1 clove crushed garlic
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp chili powder

Brown hamburger, then add the rest of the ingredients and simmer for one hour to 1 1/2 hours.

(Special note from Grandma at the bottom: “I cook mine in Crock-Pot overnite on low, Grandpa always had a bowl full for breakfast.”)

But Prince and his infinite control issues have apparently scoured the internet and removed all traces of the video. That’s part of his charm, I guess. So you’ll just have to trust me on this one.

And since I just got home from my book group where we did actually discuss the book, (we re-read a book we’d read a decade ago (how great is it that my book group has been together for something like 15 years?) and discovered we still liked it a lot the second time around) I’m going to have to blame Prince for the severe lame-ness of this post.

I advise you to break out your Purple Rain soundtrack (What?! You don’t own one?! Download that baby, stat.) and thank me later.

-Is there anything better than moving into a house with pre-strung Christmas lights? Well, maybe a house with a built-in housekeeper/gardener, like that robot on the Jetsons. But I’ll take what I can get.

-Have you noticed I’m totally ignoring the lack of comments on that post where I asked you to comment? I’m trying to be cool and not feel sort of embarrassed about it.

-Have you read anything by Anne Lamott lately? You totally should.

-

I started my afternoon by putting a bunch of holes in the walls. The people who lived here before us must have owned a whole bunch of very heavy artwork, because they left monster-sized picture hangers behind in every room. We’re talking about the kind with plastic casings and fat screws hung side-by-side – multiple hangers for each picture, it seems. And they were kind of bugging me, but until I pulled them out of the walls I didn’t even realize how much. They were a glaring reminder that we hadn’t yet made ourselves at home, that we didn’t have enough substantial stuff to fill up our walls, and neener neener neener, the people before us were better decorators than we are.

So when I had a satisfying pile of sheetrock-dusted screws and hangers in my hand, I spackled the holes and sanded them down and even painted over them with paint I found in the garage (fortunately the right colors – probably should have checked that out before I began ripping stuff off the walls and smearing white spackle everywhere, but apparently it was my lucky day). And, wow, it made a difference. I don’t find myself gazing at the walls, wondering what once hung there and trying to figure out if we having something to hang there so I don’t have to pound in another nail. Now that they’re gone, I can pound my own nails and hang my own pictures, and start feeling like I live here for real.

Actually, we probably ran around for fifteen minutes, screaming and hitting each other on the heads with the board books and knocking down the paperback book racks, but that’s not how I remember it.

Storytime at our local library is led by a young and energetic librarian who knows a million kids’ songs and finger games and walks around the room while she reads that week’s book. The kids run around and dance and learn how to jump and play under a parachute and drag out the plastic toy bucket at the end. There are name stickers and hand-stamps and bubbles.

Theo loves it and displays his adoration by applauding and, today, lying down on the floor with his feet crossed while the librarian led the songs. As though he thought it was a personal concert, just for him. I think I love it just as much as he does, because it makes me think of the Story Lady but also (and this is key) because I get my very own nametag sticker every week.