Holidays – Page 6 – Casa Camisas

Easter Cuteness

April 18, 2009April 18, 2009 brookeshelf2 Comments

Brian gave me grief the other day about how I hadn’t posted any pictures of the children in a long, long while. He keeps wanting to send his colleagues at work to this blog in order to show off the kinder, but there aren’t any pictures! Horrors!

Well, that’s something easily amended. Here, everyone — enjoy some kid pics in cute Easter clothes.

This first picture was technically taken the day before Easter, just before we went to a wedding lunch. But this is Ella’s special Easter dress. I think it’s kind of funny, the way each child happens to be holding his or her favorite toy: a Lego car, a doll, a bear.

birthday-ella-4th-dressed-up

The dress came with a little matching one for her Jenny doll. I nearly swooned from the girliness of it all. The next picture was taken on Easter proper. Love that hat. Note the chocolate gripped in Wimmy’s little fists.

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Jeffrey insisted on turning sideways for his picture. Yes, that’s a bike helmet on his head. This is de rigeur for Jeffrey’s portraits.

jeffrey-crooked

Ellabelle is Four Years Old!

April 11, 2009 brookeshelf4 Comments

According to my daughter, being four means that she is no longer cute.

“I’m big now,” she told me. “‘Cute’ is for babies.”

Don’t tell anyone, though — I personally considered her birthday party very cute indeed.

I usually like to have cute themes for my children’s birthday parties — pirates, ladybugs, whatever. This year I was a little busy and uninspired, so I decided Ella’s party would be “birthday” themed.

It was also an attempt to recapture the kind of birthdays I had when I was little — the guests arrived, had a snack, we played Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Musical Chairs, a game in which you try to drop clothespins into a jar (does it have a name?). Then we opened presents, sang “Happy Birthday,” and ate cake and ice cream.

Voila! Very laid-back, although it helped that the child-to-adult ratio was pretty even (both grandmas and my sister attended). It also helped that the girls (two of whom were also named Ellie, v. v. confusing) were the calm sort.

Was it a success? Well, when Eleanor climbed into her chair and saw her birthday cake, she declared it to be “the best birthday party ever.” Awwww!

Here she is helping set the table:

birthday-ella-4th-table

She was as polite as can be opening presents, even to her big brother:

birthday-ella-4th-present

Eleanor was over the moon that both of her grandmas could be there:

birthday-ella-4th-grandmas

And may I just say how proud I am of this cake? It was a chocolate-chip cake with almond flavoring. Someone later asked Eleanor what kind of cake it was, and you know what she said? “It was Princess flavored!” Yes . . . I always add Extract of Princess when baking:

birthday-ella-4th-cake

Mmm . . . Excuse me, but there are a few cakey leftovers that I need to consume just now!

There Went Santa Claus

December 27, 2008December 27, 2008 brookeshelf1 Comment

A grand Christmas was had by all in the Casa Camisas family. For the first time in ages, we were able to celebrate with just our little family on Christmas morning. It was wonderful.

The kids slept in, as is their habit — actually, I had a bad dream on Christmas Eve and was therefore the first to wake. Once everyone was up, however, the children were so excited! It was loads of fun to lead them into the library, where Santa had left their treats.

Jeffrey saw his Lego “troll wagon” set right away — he’d been talking about wanting one for weeks. He immediately opened it onto the coffee table and insisted on putting it together right then.

Eleanor found her baby doll sitting in its little dolly highchair, and gently picked it up. She immediately christened the doll “Allelujiah” and spent the next several minutes cuddling with it on the couch. Every now and then she would look up at me shyly and murmur, “Mommy, it’s just what I wanted, it’s just what I wanted.”

We gave William a “Bilibo,” this odd little rocking/climbing toy, but he wasn’t interested in it nearly as much as the candy cane he found in his stocking. He fished it out and held it high, squawking until we opened it for him. While his big brother and sister enjoyed their new toys, he marched around the room in a happy stupor, crunching noisily on his sweet.

That’s the best memory of this Christmas — a quiet, old-fashioned one full of delighted children. There were some other good bits, too — the gasp of surprise and glee when Jeffrey unwrapped his Playmobil set of Romans. Eleanor tucking Allelujiah into her doll crib and singing a lullaby. My parents later brought over their new Rockband set, and Jeffrey managed to get a great score on a Beastie Boys song just by babbling incoherently into the microphone. But it was that morning that Brian and I treasure the most — just us, just quiet, full of peace and love.

Christmas Is Upon Us

December 19, 2008 brookeshelf6 Comments

There’s a song that all of third graders at Jeffrey’s school learn every Christmas, called “Christmas Is Upon Us.” It goes like this:

Christmas is upon us, our favorite time of year

We wish you happy holidays and peace throughout the year.

When you pass us by, you can hear us cry:

At this moment in the song, various groups of children chant little phrases like “I make the toys, for all the girls and boys!” or “Mommy, Daddy, I looooove you,” or “I’m made of snow, and I’m melllllting.”

This song has been taught to the third grade for over fifty years — at least– and everybody in the neighborhood knows it. What’s been funny is that Brian, who attended the same school for a few years in childhood, has realized that he remembers this song, as well. Then we mentioned it to his mom, and she remembers learning it at the same school when she was a child.

For the most part, it definitely sums up the feeling around Retro Acres. Christmas is definitely falling, descending, sitting, squashing, upon us. It’s great fun, if it is a little exhausting. Here are a few brief glimpses on various holiday things we’ve done:

Once again, we were able to perform a shadow puppet show for the ward christmas party. The good news is that nobody around here has seen one before, so we can recycle all our old scripts and puppets from shows of yore. The bad news is that our somewhat rigid activities director needed some convincing to allow us to perform. But everybody enjoyed it. However, I think the real stars of the evening were the “Shuffling Sisters Ballet” — a group of ladies-over-sixty dancing to “The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy.” Don’t worry, there were no unitards. Just good silliness.
Eleanor’s preschool had a morning of “music sharing” — not a performance, but a time when parents were allowed to participate in the class music time. Eleanor was thrilled to have me join her for circle time and singing, and William was rather enthusiastic about the program as well, and did his toddler darndest to participate. The best part was when Ms. Susan, the music teacher, passed around wooden Nativity figures to the children. She didn’t see William holding out his hands at first, so he was stuck with the only piece left in the basket — a little green block representing the manger. The children were supposed to take turns putting their figures on a little cloth while we sang a song, and I was worried that William wouldn’t want to give up his manger. Little did I need to worry — he marched right up and slammed that manger down like a quarterback spiking a football. It bounced off the cloth a ways. What an enthusiastic little guy!
There’s a family in our ward who host an open house for everybody each Christmas, and it’s now become an official ward acitivity. The flyers for the event said, “Come for treats, friends, and . . . The Tree!” Well, I wondered upon reading that. It must be some tree. And it WAS — when my kids saw it, they all held still and just stared for a good ten minutes. It was actually three big trees lashed together . . . with big rainbow lights . . . covered thickly with spray-on flocking and hung with icicle tinsel. But that’s not all — under the tree was an enormous Christmas village, complete with a running train and animatronic skaters and sledders and whatnot. More flocking had been sprayed on the ground to make snow. Whoa. That tree was a good nine or ten feet across.
Lastly, last Sunday we hosted a caroling party here at Retro Acres. Brian and I had tremendous fun picking out a variety of little known carols to sing, and I even spent time looking up how to cook a real, actual figgy pudding. Know what? It turned out pretty well, quite yummy. It was a cake batter made with pureed figs, that is steamed in a pot of boiling water instead of baked in an oven. You end up with a very moist, dense cake, like a high-class Fig Newton.

Still to come: a party with the residents tonight (which we may skip, as it’s snowing hard); a candy-making/ice-skating party with Brian’s family; Jeffrey’s nativity pageant; cookie making with my mom and sister; hosting dinner for fourteen on Christmas Eve. And then: peace on earth!

Oy to the World

December 13, 2008 brookeshelf2 Comments

. . . is the name of a song played by KlezMore, the BYU klezmer band. Klezmer is a kind of Jewish folk music, the oompah-oompah kind that one usually associates with Fiddler on the Roof. Yes, it’s kind of weird to hear a klezmer version of a Christmas carol, but that’s the kind of thing that BYU does best.

Brian’s brother, Peter, plays the clarinet for KlezMore, and once a year they hold a barn dance down south of Provo to celebrate Hanukkah. Or, well . . . to celebrate it as much as a bunch of Mormons possibly can.

This was the second year that Brian and I have managed to meander down for the event, and it took quite the bundle of preparations. We were going to spend the night with Brian’s parents, so I packed up everyone’s clothes. The dance also had a potluck snack table, and so I had to make something to bring. Reading up a little bit on Jewish cooking, I decided to make a noodle kugel.

What? Oh, yes — a noodle kugel, otherwise known as “the dish whose name Brian can never pronounce correctly.” During the course of the evening, he referred to it as “noodle kiggel,” “noodle kugilia,” and “noodaFRUINLEVEN, LADY!”

Here’s what a noodle kugel actually is:

Cooked egg noodles, with butter, cottage cheese, and raisins, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and baked for about half an hour.

It smelled SO GOOD while it was baking; I was very proud. When it came out of the oven, I popped it, the kids, the luggage, and various whatnots into the car, and we went to get Brian from work. . .

. . . but he was running late . . .

. . . and we had to get dinner at the drive through . . .

. . . then drive in rush-hour traffic . . .

. . . and then we had to settle the kids in at Grandma’s . . .

. . . Brian then announced that he had to finish up a 15-minute report for work on the computer . . .

. . . the program he needed wouldn’t work . . .

. . . and it took us a long time to get to the barn . . .

SO, by the time we actually reached the dance, the noodle kugel looked less lucious and more like the Casserole That Time Forgot. And then it was discovered the there were no eating utensils at the potluck table. Ah, well. I squeezed the pan o’ kugel between a couple of cheese balls, and went off to dance.

Here’s the most important aspect of Jewish folk dancing: standing in a circle. It seems simple, and YET it is an incredibly difficult task for a group of adults of various ages to accomplish, especially when a large percentage of these adults are BYU students on first dates, who do not wish to be separated, and yet do not quite feel comfortable holding hands for extended amounts of time.

However, stand in a circle we eventually did, and then came the shuffling, the hopping, the twirling and whirling. The first dance was fast and made me dizzy. The second dance was slow and gave me many opportunities to observe the room while doing my schmaltzy steps.

There were many girls who felt insecure about shuffle-stepping.

There were many boys doing big thundering steps, to show off their manliness.

There was a man in his 50s standing at the food table, picking up my casserole dish and sniffing it suspiciously.

“IT’S A NOODLE KUGEL!” I shouted across the room.

“MAZEL TOV!” someone shouted in response.

Then came the somewhat faster third dance, in which the men and women took turns dancing in the middle of the room. Nobody quite knew how to do Jewish folk dancing solo. Both genders chose a dance style that used a lot of arm-waving. Then we all held hands in a circle again — we were finally getting used to the concept — and snaked about the room once more.

After much foot-stomping, arm-waving, and shouts of “HEY!” the dance came to an end. A bit winded, I meanered over to the water cooler for a drink, and Lo! I found that somebody had ACTUALLY EATEN A SERVING OF THE KUGEL!

Not only was I amazed, I was curious. How did they consume it without a fork or spoon? Did they use a cracker? Or just nibble via the fingers?

Twinkle, Twinkle

December 8, 2008December 7, 2008 brookeshelf3 Comments

“Mommy, look! It looks like a candy house!”

“Look at the sparkles, Mommy!”

My neighborhood is resplendent with Christmas lights, wreaths and garlands. Even the lamposts are decorated with red ribbons, lights, and a sprig of plastic pine. It’s a nice change from our neighborhood in Pittsburgh, where few of our neighbors put up any lights — a habit I presume is formed not from a lack of Yuletide spirit (although, granted, there were some Jewish families on the block) but simply because our 1930s cottages simply lacked good outdoor access to electricity.

Now we live in Twinkletown. However, given that we are on the East Bench, it’s an austere, tasteful Twinkletown. There are no blow-up nylon balloon Santas, animatronic reindeer, or hard plastic snowmen. There’s one — just one — house on the block with a row of electric candy canes, but it’s very small. Nothing blinks.

Therefore, I didn’t feel bad at all about investing in only three little strings of white lights to run along the roof of our porch. No muss, no fuss. The hooks were already there, we just had to hang the lights on them. In my theory, Christmas light displays shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to set up. But I was concerned that my kids wouldn’t feel the same way.

I grew up on Army posts, where there were rules about how many lights could be put on residential quarters. No lawn ornaments, and only a few strings of lights. There’s no room for the Electric Light Parade in the Army. But as a little kid, I always kind of longed for something more — something rainbowy to drape over our trees and bushes, to transform our practical-yet-mundane quarters into a fairyland.

So I was worried that my kids would be disappointed with our tiny amount of twink. But I needn’t have worried.

“Mommm! Come see the lights that Daddy put up!” Eleanor cheered and twirled as Jeffrey proudly displayed Brian’s work. William clapped his little hands. And I remembered that any amount of twinkle is special, no matter how small. It’s our house; it’s special to our kids.

Last night I drove Jeffrey home from a Christmas party, and I pointed out lights from the windows. We passed the candy cane house.

“Jeffrey, look! Does that house look like it’s made out of candy?”

“Yeah, Mom! It looks yummy!”

Then we turned the corner to our home, and I noticed that a third of the lights had somehow gone out. I winced as I pulled into the driveway.

“Mommy, do you know what our house looks like?”

“No, Jeffrey. What?”

“I think it looks like the way it did on Christmas night.”

I puzzled over this for a moment. Does he realize that our house didn’t exist in ancient Bethlehem?

“Jeffrey, do you mean that our house looks like a stable?”

“No Mom,” he whispered. “I think it looks like the sky full of stars on Christmas night.”

He fluttered his fingers in the air to demonstrate, and I think my heart fluttered, too.

It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas!

December 7, 2008December 7, 2008 brookeshelfLeave a comment

And I expect it will continue to do so for the next three weeks, or until we drop dead from exhaustion, whichever comes first.

Was Thanksgiving weekend just a week ago? It seems much farther away, I suppose mainly becauJse we took down our few Thanksgiving decorations and put up the Christmas stuff so quickly. My theory is: get the tree done as soon as possible, or it doesn’t happen at all.

Jeffrey was most interested in our creches — for the past several years, we have gone down to Ten Thousand Villages and picked out a nativity set from a different country. So far, we have creches from Peru, Indonesia, Maylasia, and Germany (uh . . . we found that at a thrift store). This year, we picked out a lovely one made of Kishi stone from Kenya.

All of this extra color and diversity must have inspired Jeffrey, because he immediately went to his room for a while before reemerging with a creche made of Legos. Joseph is a little Lego person inside, but he couldn’t find any more Lego people for Mary and Joseph, so they are represented by a flower topped with a yellow brick.

A flower — I am especially fond of this detail, since one of my favorite Christmas carols is “Lo, How A Rose is Blooming.”

Speaking of which, Eleanor is delighting in dancing around to the various carols and yuletide melodies I plunk out at the piano after dinner most evenings. When she isn’t dancing, she likes to sit on my lap and watch.

Funny thing is, no matter what I play — from the Nutcracker Suite to “Go Tell It on the Mountain” — she points at the music and says, “When I was a little girl, I learned how to sing this song in Spanish at my preschool!”

Oh, when she was a little girl, indeed!

Twice Thanksgiving

November 30, 2008December 7, 2008 brookeshelfLeave a comment

This was the first year that my parents told me not come to their house for Thanksgiving.

Oh, yes. But not out of spite or harpiness, but simply because my parents have decided that this was the year that all married children eat at their in-laws’ houses. Next year, we’ll all be back at home. (My mom said “we get the odd-numbered years, because we’re so odd.”)

So . . . dinner in Provo. Brian and I were in charge of making my family’s luscious secret-recipe rolls, and acquiring a fancy cheese plate. Oooh, fancy cheese! My heart rejoiceth at the thought of thee! Cheese is REALLY something to be thankful for, no? Brian’s family had never had a cheese board as part of Thanksgiving; Brian and I got the idea beacause our friends from Pittsburgh, the Seppis, always began holiday meals with one.

Brian and I spent an evening sniffing wedges at the Harmon’s quite excellent cheese counter, and this is what we picked:

Morbier — this is a cheese with two layers, separated by a fine border of ash. The bottom part is from the morning milking, and the top from the evening milking. It was voted the favorite.
Mimolette — a carrot-orange, medium-strong hard cheese. We bought it for color.
Onetic Tomme Noir — a mild white cheese with a black rind. I found the day after that it makes the best turkey sandwiches.
Stilton — the classic British blue cheese.
Sage Darby — white and green cheese that we bought again for color. I think the sage flavor was a little overpowering.
French Bouche — a creamy soft goat cheese
Barely Buzzed — a locally made cheese; the rind is rubbed with crushed espresso beans and lavender
Cahill’s Porter – a white cheese with chocolate-brown marbeling, it’s made with beer. Its dramatic coloring is in weird contrast to its mild flavor; it was good, but we were disappointed.

And yeah — there was turkey, sweet potatoes, and whatnot. We stayed up late playing “Sets & Runs,” which I believe is not so much a game as a way to torture your mind.

After that, came Thanksgiving Two: my mom called everyone up last-minute and invited us up to West Point on Friday night to eat leftovers together and play games. Because all of my siblings were there, and we were eating a full Thanksgiving spread (oooh, heavenly shrimp salad!) it was like we just had two holidays in a row. After eating, we all stayed up late playing Rock Band. (I achieved a not-too-shabby 28 phrase streak with “Pinball Wizard.”) Jeffrey had fun playing on a disconnected bass guitar. Patrick and Erich rocked the guitar solos. My 13 year old brother pronounced “Blitzkrieg Pop” as “Bla-gitz-krieg.”

And much thankfulness was proclaimed by all.

Halloween at Retro Acres

October 31, 2008October 31, 2008 brookeshelf2 Comments

Awww. Ain’t he cute? I had the pleasure of witnessing the elementary school Halloween parade this morning, and Jeffrey was thrilled to walk with his class.

In case you couldn’t tell, he’s a centurion — or, as he puts it, “a Roman captain of the guards.” Not some common foot soldier, oh no. He became interested in the costume after recieving a Roman Playmobil set for his birthday. Of course, yesterday he came home from school insisting that he had to change his costume to a mummy — or rather, “a Roman mummy” — but gave up once I told him that we didn’t have any “mummy wrapping stuff.”

Hmmm. Do you think there ever were any Roman mummies? You can see it — some Roman stationed at the garrison in Cairo, who converts to . . . um, Ra-worship or whatever, and is embalmed after his death? Eh? Should I be staying away from the candy bowl?

And here’s Eleanor at her preschool this morning:

She is wearing the Raggedy Ann costume that my mother made for me when I was three years old. My mom’s been saving it for decades, and now the granddaughter finally gets to wear it. The striped kneesocks are, in my opinion, what elevates this costume from cute to awesome. Awwwww! There’s a homemade crepe paper wig that goes along with this costume, but I’m partial to the pigtails, myself. (Truthfully, my only memory of wearing the costume as a three year old is the sensation of the crepe paper rattling around my face. I didn’t like the wig, but Eleanor thinks it’s cool.)

William’s going to be a sheep for Halloween, but we don’t have any pictures of him in the costume yet. It’s the costume that Jeffrey wore when he was one, featuring a hat that Brian knitted himself.

For supper tonight, we’re having sausage chowder in little pumpkin-shaped bread bowls that I found at the grocery store, and I’ve managed to obtain a box of the ever-adorable Halloween doughnuts from the Banbury Cross bakery. It’s a box of doughnuts in the shape of cats, bats, ghosts, and pumpkins, complete with candy corn eyes and sprinkle decorations. Squee!

Of course, the best part of the evening will be giving out candy to kids with our fake-hand bowl.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a big plastic bowl with a fake hand glued to the bottom. You put your hand inside the fake one and find a secret black glove that is sewn to the inside of the bowl. When the bowl is full of candy, the glove is obscured, and when kids reach in for their treat, you can reach up and grab them from the inside of the bowl.

Little kids (like, age 4 and under) don’t think that this is scary, just confusing. It’s the older kids who have learned to be scared, to expect a trick when told to take their own treat. Some kids want to put their hands in the bowl and get grabbed over and over again (although I’m always careful that they only take one piece of candy). It’s fun. And inbetween trick-or-treat visitors, I get to sit on the porch, eat doughnuts, and read a book. What can be sweeter than that?

There Went Peter Cottontail

March 25, 2008 brookeshelf3 Comments

I could tell you about the choir, and the pretty flowers, and the beautiful Story. I could tell you about the lovely ham dinner, and putting actual tulips into my tulipiere vase for the first time, and how our alarm clocks didn’t go off on time, and how we had to scramble to church in the morning. I could tell you about the lemon-coconut cake, and how nervous I was playing the special arrangement of “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” on the organ.

I could tell you about all that.

But I know what you REALLY want to see is cute kids decked out in their Easter clothes. And who am I to resist the demands of my readers?

The kids were thrilled to find the baskets the Easter bunny had left for them. Of course, they pretty much just got to see them in the morning before we hustled them to the car and church. And I mean hustled — we had to eat our breakfast of cinnamon rolls in the car to make it on time.

When we got home, I took them outside for some pictures of the Easter finery. They had fun tromping around the garden, even though it’s not much more than a pile of sticks.

I kept trying to get them to smile at the camera at the same time. Harder than it looks — Eleanor would usually keep her smile long enough for me to snap it, but Jeffrey kept grinning briefly and then darting out of the frame, or look somewhere else.

Have I mentioned how much I love Eleanor’s dress? So springtime-y. I’m a sucker for anything that has a smocked rosebud bodice. She loves any excuse to wear one of her “big dresses.”

In the afternoon, I let the kids handle their chocolate bunnies. Instead of eating them right away, they spent a long time playing “bunny village” with them, and making them hop around and have conversations together. This picture simply cannot capture how adorable this was.

Jeffrey was very enamored of his bunny. He wanted me to take many pictures of him with it . . .

. . . so I was surprised when I glanced away for a moment, and then saw that Jeff’s bunny now looked like this:

Jeffrey said, “Oh, yes, he’s dying. My bunny is suffering.” Suffering, eh? I think he picked up that word from the Easter story he heard in his Primary class at church. I’m not sure if I would want to know how tangled the idea of Easter is to Jeffrey right now — a mishmash of religion and candy.

Mmmm. Sacrilicious.