The End of Christmas

This week was the end of the 12 Days of Christmas - Tuesday was Twelfth Night. We watched lots of Christmas movies (Muppet Christmas Carol was a big hit) and had eggnog and enjoyed the Christmas season. Our Christmas tree almost stayed alive for the whole time!

In order to watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas now that we don't have a VHS player, Alison bought the Ultimate Edition on YouTube. It also includes two other Grinch movies, one about Halloween and one that Alison has decided is about Mother's Day. Neither one is very good, but in the Halloween one, a kid says "I have to visit the euphemism" when he has to go to the bathroom, and we all decided that was hilarious, so we might have a new joke phrase from it.

For Twelfth Night, we made our crown cake (canned cinnamon rolls arranged in a circle in the baking pan, one with a crown under it) early, and ate it when Mike got off work at 2pm. Alison thought it would be fun to have most of a day for the King to choose activities, but it actually got a little long and hard to think of things to do, so maybe we won't do it quite so early next year. Sara got the crown and had us watch a few episodes of My Little Pony and play dress ups. We had fun.

Wednesday we went back to a normal school schedule, which has been a bit challenging. And Mike's school started again. Big oof. No more Pokémon Go for me. It was fun while it lasted.

Alison took the kids to the park to practice their bike riding. Timmy has forgotten how to ride a big bike, and Sara was a little shy, but Rea is a good coach and helped them along.

We've played a lot of games over the last week: Tale of Equestria (the My Little Pony roleplaying game) and a homebrew Final Fantasy roleplaying game, Splendor, and Legacy. We've also done some Smash Brothers on our new Nintendo Switch. It now has a storyline you can play through to free characters, so Mike has been doing that, much to the kids' excitement. Mike has also been trying to get the kids to play Tetris, but they don't like it much. Still, Gideon beat the first level of Dr Mario all by himself; Mike is impressed. We've enjoyed all the game time.

Baby has been sleeping horribly again. It's very frustrating. We hope it's over soon.

Sara managed to yank her hammock out of the wall one night, so Mike fixed that, as well as fixing Rea's bike tires, this Saturday. He also had to repair the downstairs shower where we discovered that the tiles were actually stick-on squares when one of them fell off. We may have to put redoing that shower on the list. It's a good thing Mike is very handy.

We made homemade pizza Saturday night. Timmy had trouble being polite, but it was good. Mike has been experimenting with crusts and sauces and has found the combination he thinks is the best. We also had Lemon Zest ice cream, which is actually made to taste like a lemon meringue pie with a graham cracker crust. It was fun to try out.

A quote from a few weeks ago that I forgot to add: We were talking about something and Mike said to Gideon, "You can't blame Mommy for that." Gideon replied, with emphasis worthy of a Shakespearean actor, "Blame, blame, blame! I blame you all!"