7 Quick Takes about Gingerbread, Why Last-Minute Invitations to Introverts Don't Work, and Doomed Planning Sessions

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

Last week I promised pictures of the gingerbread houses we made. They're actually graham cracker houses but I think they still count. 

The 8-year-old was all business. Before he started, he drew up a little blueprint in a notebook, but he soon realized that what he really wanted to focus on was the candy and his design emphasis shifted dramatically at that point.

The 16-year-old decided to build a replica of Stark Tower from The Avengers. If it wasn't obvious, he's currently working through as many of the Marvel movies with his sisters as they can get in before the older ones go back to college.

The gummy bears lined up in Avengers colors are what sells it for me.

The 10-year-old created a jail. Some nice touches that I appreciated: the peppermint support pillar and the Santa Claus gummy bear with a sack full of toys coming out of the chimney.

Felons deserve a merry Christmas, too.

The 20-year-old made a creepy abandoned castle. It looked a little less creepy after the addition of the colorful candy.

Here's the 13-year-old's vision come to life. I loved the use of frosting to delineate the floors of the house and also the sawed-off ice cream cone "wishing well" in the yard (it's full of blue Mike and Ikes.)

The 18-year-old made this post-apocalyptic lighthouse. I love the vines.

Appropriately enough, she says that this lighthouse was inspired by a book she read called Annihilation. 

Because that's what we plan to do, whack them into tiny pieces with a meat mallet to ring in the new year. We usually do it on New Year's Day but we're having trouble finding a time when we're all home simultaneously, so it will probably have to wait until this Sunday.

—2—

We've actually spent a lot of family time together, but most of it has been out of the house as we tried to cram all 6 of our Christmas experience gifts into one week.

The first thing we did was visit a planetarium, and explored the science and art museums connected to it.  I visited this museum one other time, when the youngest hadn't been born yet and the other five kids were 12 and under. By the time we got halfway through the art museum, all the kids except the oldest were literally rolling around on the floor crying of boredom, and their grandpa took them outside to run around while the 12-year-old and I finished looking around.

Ironically, this visit went about the same. I'm not sure, but we may have even been at the exact same spot in the art museum when everyone got whiny, bored, and started begging to go home... everyone except for me and my oldest daughter, who's now 20.

—3—

Our neighbors threw an impromptu New Year's Eve party and texted us an invitation while we were eating dinner. I read it out loud, looked at the seven introverted grimaces around the table, and wrote back "Sorry, we're super-lame and are going to stay in tonight."

(As a general rule, introverts require 3-4 business days to mentally prepare for attending social events, but we appreciated the invitation.)

We were also really tired. We counted down to 8:30 and had sparkling cider, and the teenagers stayed up doing who knows what while Phillip and I put the little kids down and went to bed at 10:30.

—4—

On New Year's Day, we spent the morning at an indoor rock climbing place. It was great for everyone, but if I'm honest, the person I was most proud of was me. 

On my first attempt I got stuck about 4 feet off the ground, too scared to keep going up (I was afraid of falling, even though I was wearing a harness) and too scared to jump backward and let the harness lower me down (because what if it didn't work??)

But I kept trying, and by the end I'd made it about three-quarters of the way up three different rock faces. It was actually — and I can't believe I'm saying this — kind of fun.

I couldn't do the "bouldering" area, though. That's what they called the free climbing area: no ropes or harnesses used. My elementary schoolers were scrambling all over it, demonstrating how to tuck and roll when you fell off saying, "See, Mom? You just flop down like this and it's no big deal!" 

Okay, but I'm 42 and I know lots of people my age who've "just flopped down" from falls a lot lower than that and shattered ankles or wrists, so it felt like a higher-stakes situation for me than them.

 

—5—

As another experience gift, my girls made their own candles at a candlemaking bar. When they came in, they were handed clipboards and directed to a giant wall of scents, and instructed to pick as many as they wanted to combine into their own custom scented candle.

I liked almost all the scents except for baked bread.

They mixed up the scents and wax, poured it in jars, and named their finished product. The 13-year-old mixed 'field of flowers' and 'apple orchard' to make "Spring Orchard." The 20-year-old mixed like 6 different citrus scents and named it "Nothing Rhymes with Orange." And the 18-year-old combined peppermint and sugar cookies and called it "Mariah Carey in a Jar."

—6—

On another day, we took an intro class on making bowls with a pottery wheel, which is a lot harder than YouTube shorts would lead you to believe. The only pottery my girls had ever done before was making clay pinch pots in 5th grade art, and these required significantly more technique.

I can't guarantee that the finished products will become treasured family heirlooms, but it was fun to try once, and my older two daughters enjoyed petting the owner's hugely fat and fluffy cat when it came wandering into the studio at the end of the class.

—7—

Phillip and I went out for brunch and a planning session to outline our family goals for 2025, and it was not very successful. 

We got through the first quarter of the year before we started getting mad at each other over the little quirks that respectively make us difficult people to work with on accomplishing goals, and it was not a great day after that.

However, I'm trying to keep in mind that the last time we sat down in January to plan out our year, it was 2020 and we ended up not completing a single thing in our plan because a worldwide pandemic hit two months later. So it still went better than last time.

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7 Quick Takes about Online Shopping Fails, Christmas Scavenger Hunts, and Unusual Laundry Tips

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

I woke up on the morning of Christmas Eve wondering, where are the stocking stuffers I ordered from Amazon several days ago? That's when I checked my cart, and realized they were still sitting in it. Apparently I'd forgotten to click the final button.

I flew out of bed and charged into the living room, muttering at my phone. The 8-year-old looked up from reading on the couch and asked what happened.

"I forgot to order some stuff for Christmas and now it won't be here in time," I told him.

Clearly remembering a talk at church about how one family's particular penniless, giftless Christmas turned out to be a wonderful time being together and honoring Jesus, he smiled and replied, "It's going to be the best Christmas ever, then." 

In the end, of course, he was right. The kids didn't die from getting IOUs in their stockings, and actually it drew out the fun to get little trinkets in the mail through the 30^th. My 13-year-old won't remember that her hair clips arrived late, but she did randomly share with me that she loves how we read Luke 2 together before going downstairs to check out the goodies Santa brought us, so I know that Christmas doesn't depend on Amazon Prime shipping.

But seriously, next time remind me to double-check the online shopping cart.

—2—

I was feeling overwhelmed at the idea of making our usual Christmas cookie plates to deliver to friends and neighbors, but good thing the kids are older now because they came to the rescue.

Gingerbread, jam strips, Russian teacakes, and sugar cookies ready to assemble onto mixed plates and deliver.

It's a beautiful thing when you can walk in the kitchen to steal a bite of cookie dough that you had no part in making and just walk right back out again. You don't think it will ever happen when your kids are little, but it will.

—3—

On Christmas day, we opened some gifts from the grandparents and then revealed our experience gifts for the kids. Phillip used AI to design a scavenger hunt through the woods for code words that would allow AI to tell them what their experience gift was. 

It took a fair bit of tinkering beforehand to make sure the AI didn't go rogue and start making stuff up, as it tends to do without explicit instructions to stick to the script.

Two of the code words.

Gathered around the phone to get their next set of coordinates.

For our experience gifts this year, we're making candles at a local art store, doing a pottery wheel workshop, watching a show at the planetarium, going indoor rock climbing, having a Marvel movie marathon, and going to a Brazilian steakhouse with an all-you-can-eat-option. I'll let you guess which one is for the 16-year-old boy.

—4—

The space-loving 10-year-old is delighted with a new computer game called Universe Sandbox that he got from his grandparents, and started playing it right away on Christmas morning. It lets you create and alter universes, add planets and asteroids, change their orbits, give planets a bunch of extra moons, and basically play around however you want to see what happens. 

"How's the game?" I called from the living room after he'd been playing on it for a little while. "What are you doing?"

"Crashing Kepler-10b into Earth," he responded sweetly.

—5—

We watched a cute new Christmas movie called 8-Bit Christmas. It was a loose retelling of A Christmas Story, but set in a different decade and way better. I won't spoil it for you, but if you ever loved a Nintendo when you were younger, you'll probably like it.

An unexpected bonus was that the ending really made the kids excited to build a treehouse with their dad. Once upon a time, we thought about building a platform in the trees as an extension of the kids' playset in the backyard, but the idea never got enough momentum to go anywhere. 

I think if the kids are into it, though, it can happen this spring. (Is it too much to hope that it might also motivate us to finish the basement so we can move on to a treehouse?)

—6—

One of my favorite new Christmas gifts is my Supercloth. It's a rinse-and-reuse microfiber cloth that apparently cleans with just water. 

My in-laws videocalled and could see me in the background trying it out on the dining room windows. "Are you making the maid work on Christmas??" they were teasing. (For reference, we don't have a maid on Christmas or on the other 364 days of the year, unless you count me.)

The only thing that gives me pause about the Supercloth is this oddly specific care instruction.

So far my favorite use is for washing windows. I also used it to clean the stainless steel appliances in the kitchen and it took ⅓ the time it usually does to wipe them down with Turtle Wax and bring back the shine. Do you guys have one of these? What do you use it for?

—7—

Every Christmastime, the kids make "gingerbread" houses. We started out with the premade kits but as they got older we started getting boxes of graham crackers and clearing out the candy section of the grocery store instead.

They create (1) the hugest mess that anyone has ever seen and (2) some really cool houses, which I'll post pictures of next week. For now, here's a picture of the table when they were done. Please pray for us.

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7 Quick Takes about Fixing the Garage Door Opener, Holiday Recitals, and Post-Shower Injuries

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

You know how I talked about closing all the open loops in the house every morning?

Well, forget it. There are 5 days until Christmas. There are an infinite number of loops. I'm saying "Oh, crap!" because I remember something important that I forgot to do every 7 and a half minutes. The house is a disaster and the kids are feral. I have given up closing the loops. The loops win.

—2—

I ordered Christmas cards almost a month ago, but since I hadn't yet written the family newsletter I send along with them, I tucked the Christmas cards away for safekeeping. 

I think you know where this is going.

Long story short, I wasn't even mad when I finished the newsletter and realized I had no idea where I'd stashed the cards. Honestly, I even felt a little relieved at the prospect of not having to address and stuff all the envelopes. "I either want to find them tonight, or not at all," I told Phillip. "They'd just better not turn up in February."

Anyway, we found them after 20 minutes of tearing the house apart so I did have to address and stuff them, after all, but the kids helped with that part so it wasn't that bad.

—3—

My two oldest daughters are home from college for their Christmas break. Everyone is loving having them here. 

In fact, just last night the 20-year-old was giving the 8- and 10-year-olds a double piggyback ride, with the other kids laughing at the sight of their triple rear ends from behind and calling them "the three buttsketeers." 

I don't exactly create memories like that as a parent, so needless to say the kids are having the best time.

—4—

Phillip and I had been hoping to surprise the girls with more progress toward finishing the basement, but then the garage door opener broke and we had to fix that instead. 

Our basement trim might not be installed, but at least the 10-year-old learned something about garage door openers.

I guess that's the problem with doing home improvement projects yourself. Whenever you try to work on it, you've got to pause and take care of something critical that stops working — the dishwasher, the dryer, the kids' toilet. It never ends.

—5—

My 16-year-old wants to get contacts instead of glasses, so they scheduled him for a "contacts lesson." They showed him a video about how to insert and remove contacts, and then set him up with a mirror so he could try doing it a few times while they watched and gave helpful hints. Apparently there's a steep learning curve because it took forever.

My son stayed patient, but I was eager to get out of there. If you've never sat in on a contacts lesson, let me tell you that watching someone clumsily poke at their own eyeballs for 25 minutes is not pleasant.

—6—

Both the 8- and 13-year-old had separate holiday recitals on Saturday. When you take the actual 4 hours of recital time plus the required early arrival for each performer (and me, too, since they can't drive), I felt like the music school should consider setting up accommodations for live-in parents like myself. 

Both recitals were a lot of fun. My son played "Waltz of the Flowers" from The Nutcracker on the piano, and for his first recital it went really well. My daughter is getting over a cold so her voice was a little husky for her singing recital, but it actually worked with her song "Snowman" by Sia and people probably thought it was on purpose.

—7—

I hurt my neck over the weekend. After almost a week it's getting better, but for the first few days I was practically unable to move it at all and I was pretty miserable. 

Do you know what crazy thing I was doing to mess up my neck so badly? I reached up too fast to dry my hair with a towel. Getting older is wild.

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7 Quick Takes about Choosing a Christmas Tree, Solving Local Mysteries, and When the Nutcracker Doesn't Go the Way You Want It To

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

We went to a pick-your-own farm to get our Christmas tree. (Actually, we went to two but the first one weren't letting customers cut down any more trees until next year.) 

The teenagers helped cut down the tree and load it onto the cart while the younger kids threw snowballs at each other and were generally oblivious to what was going on.

At least they stopped complaining for a few minutes about being bored, cold, or thirsty.

There were so many cute little kids at the farm. We saw one dad with a hacksaw headed toward the trees and his preschooler toddling after him to help with the plastic toy chainsaw he was carrying. In the parking lot, a couple was pushing their little girl in a Cozy Coupe with a little 2' tree tied to the roof. It was an overwhelming amount of cuteness in a relatively small geographical area.

—2—

On the way home from the Christmas tree farm, Phillip commented, "You know, our selection process is the same every time we do this."

"We wander around randomly?" one of the kids guessed.

"Yes, but we wander around randomly with everyone pointing out ones we like, until finally we get to a tree where Mom says 'How about this one?' and that's the one we end up bringing home."

"Hmm," I said noncommitally, unwilling to admit that I'm bossy and probably hard to live with sometimes. "So you're saying that without me, we'd never pick a Christmas tree? You're welcome, guys!" 

—3—

Sometimes, we see this car driving around town with a personalized license plate that says 'CORN.' The kids and I have wondered what it means and speculated whether it's an inside joke, or if they really like 1990s alternative metal music but 'KOЯN' was already taken, or what.

But the other day I noticed the car parked near the barn of a small farm in our town, and I realized: the guy is literally a corn farmer. I love it.

—4—

My daughter comes home telling me the most ridiculous things. She says that "gyat" is new slang for "a big butt."

Call me old-fashioned, but in my day slang words at least followed a loose logic. They were short for something like "dis" for "disrepect," or they combined two words like "chillax." In some fashion, your mind could connect the dots without a lot of context.

But 'gyat'? It's just a bunch of random letters. Even the kids in middle school who are saying it will admit that they don't know why it means that.

Probably the etymology of 'gyat.'

—5—

I was sitting in a waiting room at my medical lab, and saw the best mom come in holding the hand of her disabled adult son. She spoke with so much kindness in her voice and took her time to talk with him about everything instead of just doing it herself.

When he needed to use the bathroom she suggested "Let's knock to make sure no one's in there first" and then waited outside in case he needed help. When he came out, she asked kindly, "Did you wash your hands?" and then when he wouldn't stop playing with the water she complimented him on doing a good job rinsing and guided him back out into the waiting room. 

She just did it all with such patience and love, like she probably had been doing every day for the last 30 years. It really warmed my heart to see. 

—6—

Some contingent of our family goes to see The Nutcracker ballet almost every Deceember, but this year I was super-excited because my 8-year-old is playing "Waltz of the Flowers" in a piano recital on Saturday. I wanted to see his reaction to hearing (and seeing) it live.

Working on memorizing his piece.

This year I splurged a little on Nutcracker tickets, picking a higher-end ballet that we ordinarily can't afford because (1) fewer of us were going this year, and (2) a few performances of the performances were offering half-price admission for kids.

So wouldn't it be sad if traffic the entire way from our house to the theater was so terrible that it took us over twice as long to get there as I'd planned, and we missed the first 30 minutes of the show?

—7—

Well, that's exactly what happened. I'm not going to say that I wasn't stressed out of my mind sitting in stop-and-go-traffic watching the ETA on the GPS creep later and later and later for the entire trip. I also won't say that the kids and I weren't disappointed to miss the first half-hour which included the entire Christmas party at Clara's house. But it turned out okay in the end.

I honestly felt a little better when we joined a dozen other people in the lobby who'd apparently had just as disastrous a journey and were waiting to get in late, and by the time they let us in and got to our seats we were just in time to see the Mouse King (my boys' favorite) and the dancing snowflakes (my favorite). 

Amazing costumes, amazing set.

It actually turned out to be a lovely evening with my 3 youngest kids. They enjoyed the show and during intermission we got up and checked out the pit orchestra, where my daughter found a few stray pieces of confetti "snow" and took them home for souvenirs and I got a laugh out of the trombones all watching a football game during their break.

When the orchestra started playing Waltz of the Flowers in the second act, the 8-year-old flashed me a huge grin and thumbs-up... so even after the horrendous drive and the frustration of missing ¼ of the expensive show, I was still glad we'd come.

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7 Quick Takes about Claustrophobia, the Art of the Backhanded Compliment, and Adventures in Cosmetics

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

Well, I finished reading Parenting with Love and Logic. I may not have loved everything about the book (see my full review on Goodreads), but it definitely made me realize it's time to deal with a few chronic issues in the house.

One of them is being on time to church. Well, anywhere, really, but church is a good place to start. To my kids, "leaving at 11:30" means "start thinking about where on earth you left your coat at 11:30" and that's not really the same thing. So I decided to apply Love and Logic to the problem.

I informed the kids that this Sunday, the van would be exiting the driveway at exactly 11:20. Whoever was in it would get a ride to church, and whoever didn't would be walking there. Generously, I gave them copious warnings:

"The time is now 10:40. Be ready to go in 40 minutes!"

"Leaving in 20 minutes!"

"Ten minutes until departure: that means 5 minutes to finish up what you're doing and 5 minutes to put your shoes on and get in the car!"

"I'm going out to the car now, it will be driving away in 5 minutes!"

In the end, I drove away with only one of the four kids. And do you know what the 10-year-old said when he finally showed up at church, face flushed from walking 10 minutes in the cold? "Why didn't you tell me you were leaving?"

We'll see if his hearing is as selective next week when we do the same thing.

—2—

I haven't been able to wear my wedding ring since the swelling incident a few weeks ago. Not physically unable, but mentally. I've slipped the ring on my finger a few times, but each time I start to hyperventilate at how it feels a little snug going over my knuckle and then I yank it off in claustrophobic panic.

A few days ago I started reading Michael J. Fox's memoir No Time Like the Future, and I kid you not, on page 47 he falls and injures his ring finger, which swells until it necessitates an emergency visit to the hospital, by which time it's cut off his circulation so much they almost have to amputate his entire finger.

WHAT IS THE UNIVERSE DOING?! I'm already freaked out, there's no need to keep beating me over the head with this. Also, in a double irony, I was reading the book before bed but instead of getting sleepy I got an adrenaline rush with a side of impending doom.

—3—

The kids took down a framed picture on the wall, took off the back, and found this 15-year-old photo of Phillip and I hidden behind the one on display:  

My daughter gasped and said, "Mommy, you used to be so pretty!"

If she had more self-awareness, she would've looked at how exhausted and crabby I am now after a decade of dealing with her shenangians and drawled like Steve Urkel: "Did I do that?"

He gets it.

—4—

You know that product Poo-Pourri? You spray it in the toilet before you use the bathroom. Well, apparently the flowery bottles and logos only speak to women, and the company figured out how to make it for boys, too: you put it in a toolbox.

It's all in the marketing.

It's still going to be all women buying this product, but now they can get the "throw a monkey wrench into bathroom stench" version for their husbands or dads. 

Because I can't see any man buying himself a toolbox that says "Master Crapsman" on it.

—5—

For the last several years, I've gone through phases where I do go running for exercise regularly, but I've never been able to call myself a runner with a straight face. I don't even know if I want to, because that comes with all kinds of expectations like that I will run a 5K with you and I don't want to live under that kind of pressure. 

Whenever someone asks me if I run, I usually hesitate and say, "Well, I jog... but I don't like it." But I've been realizing that I think I can claim being a runner, if I want to. I run 2.5 miles a couple of times per week. I even did it earlier this week in 25° weather when it would've been way easier to stay inside.

I still don't know if I want to adopt this identity. I'm only saying that I technically could. I want to be enough of a runner to stay in shape and feel energetic, but not so much that I have an embarrassing poop story like most of the distance runners I know.

—6—

We got our first real snow of the season. Of course, Phillip had stuck the shovels in the loft over the garage at the end of last winter, and since he'd already left for work it was my job to get them down.

Which sounds way easier than it actually was, because:

1. He'd put them up over the rafters where no normal-height person (including me) could reach them, and
2. Directly beneath the shovels was a gaping hole with a one-story drop to the concrete garage floor, from temporarily removing the pull-down stairs to fix them (although that happened years ago so it's becoming more permanent than temporary, but I digress.)

Anyway, here is the text I sent him at work that day: 

Sadly, his plot to commit life insurance fraud failed, and I retrieved a shovel and cleared the driveway without incident. He'll have to try harder than that.

—7—

Makeup question: how in the world does any woman find the right foundation color? I've always used the "guess and hope" method of holding random bottles up next to my face in CVS and trying to match my skin color, but it never works well. I always think I picked a good one, until I take it home and try it on and I look like a mime. (Sometimes like an oompa loompa, depending.)

After my last failed expedition to the cosmetics aisle, I decided to get little more methodical for next time. I needed to arrive with better data. 

I took a selfie, uploaded it to a vector graphics program, and used the color matching tool to get a sense for my actual skin tone. Pixels don't lie, and I realized that my skin is pinker than I thought it was. Which makes my past failures make more sense because I was consciously steering away from pink-leaning foundation, thinking that wasn't me.

Am I closer to finding my foundation color? Probably not by much. But I feel like I learned something, at least.

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7 Quick Takes about Thanksgiving Pants, Closing the Open Loops, and New Ways to Decorate Your Car for the Holidays

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

Happy Thanksgiving!

Phillip and our 13-year-old did the cooking. I washed the dishes and tried to keep the kitchen a workable space as they piled up more dirty dishes in the sink. Everyone else tried to make themselves scarce so they didn't get an assignment to help out, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.

We had mostly our standard favorites (I love the cranberry-pear sauce more than anything), but the 13-year-old really wanted to make some kind of fancy fruit salad so she asked ChatGPT to design her a recipe. She made it and served it in a trifle bowl and I am all for innovation.

Thanksgiving dinner at the Evans house.

Let me talk about these pants for a minute.

They are the best Thanksgiving pants because they look dressy, but they're stretchy and feel like pajama pants... there could be no better pants to wear on a holiday that revolves around eating and taking a post-dinner nap.

—2—

This Thanksgiving was just me, Phillip, and the four remaining Evans kids still at home, which is just the way I like it. 

Sometimes I think people feel like they have to invite us over (because no one should be alone on a holiday!) If I was completely alone, I'd probably appreciate the invite; as it is, I've got my husband and 4 kids, and this is one of the few weekends a year when we just get to hang out together, instead of briefly waving to each other as we separately run to a million practices and banquets and meetings and appointments. Socializing with others is great, but this holiday weekend feels like a family vacation and I want to preserve that as much as I can.

This weekend is going to be heavenly. We're going to watch movies, do some projects with the kids that we never ordinarily have time to do with them, and possibly go launch the model rocket the 8-year-old got for his birthday and we also never had time to do. Maybe we'll get a Christmas tree, who knows? Phillip even went running with me this morning, although at 6'2" he barely had to trot to keep up (he probably could've just walked quickly if he didn't mind making me feel bad).

—3—

Sometimes it takes a while, but almost everything I've ever listed on Facebook Marketplace has sold eventually, no matter what it is. 

I just sold an ancient floppy disk drive that we found in our basement for $5. Which immediately made me think of this joke:

To be fair, I did meet the floppy disk drive lady at the grocery store instead of my house. Because I hate to judge, but if you're buying a floppy disk drive odds are that something isn't quite right with you.

—4—

I've been doing this new thing where I start every day by closing the "open loops" around the house after getting the kids off to school. 

Instead of starting on the to-do list in my head, I look around and check off the to-do list in my house first: what's left out on the counter or the table because it's in the middle of a project or because I don't know where to put it or because I've been putting off the next step I need to do with it? Before I start anything else, I need to do that stuff.

Closing those open loops first thing in the morning feels good because then I don't have to look around and see what the Minimal Mom calls "the silent to-do list" staring at me all day long. 

—5—

On the highway the other day, a car passed me that was fully decked out in colored LED Christmas lights. 

I tried to take a picture but I was a little slow and my camera isn't great at night and I was also focusing on other things like driving 60 MPH, but you can kind of see it here:

Better than plush antlers and a reindeer nose attached to your van.

Watch this video if you want to see more clearly what it looks like (and how they did it).

—6—

Although I haven't quite reached the level of the driver that spent hours fully wrapping his entire car in Christmas lights before it was even Thanksgiving, I've been pleasantly surprised with how on top of Christmas preparations we are so far. 

I've already ordered and received our Christmas cards and decided on several presents for extended family and experience gifts for the kids (a few of theses have even been bought!) 

Of course, it always starts out this way and I think, "Yep, this year I am totally going to be on top of everything" and then the perfect storm of unpreparedness comes later. But I can enjoy this feeling while it lasts.

—7—

I got sucked into reading this crazy followup piece on a family who sued their I.V.F. clinic for switching their embryo with another couples', and both of them birthed and raised each others' babies for several months. The long-form article is about a million pages long, but it was so interesting I couldn't tear myself away.

The way the couples chose to handle it, and the complicated emotions they went through in doing so, were so interesting that I kept talking about it over dinner, so the 13-year-old asked if she could read it, too. 

I gave permission but she only made it about a third of the way through before getting bored and petering out. I guess you have to be a parent to really get invested in the story.

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7 Quick Takes about Carving Pumpkins (Better Late than Never), Dollar Store Surveillance, and Take Your AI to Church Day

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

I somehow misplaced a letter from our bank that listed my 16-year-old's PIN for his debit card. When I finally found it, I wasn't sure where the 16-year-old was at the moment so I just yelled into the other room, "I found your PIN number!" in the hope that he would hear me.

Without looking up, his 8-year-old brother reading a book on the couch responded: "The 'N' stands for number." 

Fine, whatever. Just remember who taught who how to use a spoon.

—2—

For years the teenagers have carved pumpkins at a church Halloween party, so we never did it at home with the younger kids. Quite frankly, I was avoiding it. Whenever we tried it in the past, the kids were too little to handle knives and wouldn't touch the seeds so Phillip and I were basically doing all the scooping and the carving, and the kids would just get bored and wander away leaving us with a big mess to clean up.

However, my 8-year-old mentioned a couple of times that he really wanted to carve pumpkins this year, so when I drove by a place giving away free pumpkins last week I picked one up for each kid.

Turns out it's WAY easier now that they're older. The 8- and 10-year-olds did practically everything on their own, I just got to watch them and roast the leftover pumpkin seeds.

Here is my favorite jack-o-lantern, designed by the 16-year-old after a character from a video game called Plants vs. Zombies:

The older and more crumpled he gets, the better it looks in my opinion.

The 12-year-old designed the cutest frog you ever did see:

So I won't be scared to carve pumpkins with the kids again next year. I'll look forward to it because I know it's enjoyable now, and they'll even help clean up when we're finished!

—3—

I saw this fake security camera at the dollar store:

As hilarious as it is brilliant.

I love that it does absolutely nothing, but in order to give suspicious people the illusion that it does something, you need to add batteries to power the red light on the front.

—4—

Phillip and I are starting to feel like two ships passing in the night, so we did some brainstorming about how we can spend more time together. Adding traditional date nights isn't an option because (1) one or both of us need to be home to drive kids to activities every night, and (2) we're too exhausted to add in another thing even if we could.

We decided that twice a week, we're going together to pick the 8-year-old up from gymnastics instead of taking turns doing it. The gym is 30 minutes away, so that's a whole hour round trip.

On Monday we mostly talked business and scheduling for the household, and on Wednesday we just had a conversation like two people who enjoy spending time together and it was probably the longest conversation we've had in a year.

—5—

This text came to my phone from an unknown number.

If I work 10-20 minutes a day for 50 weeks a year, that's a salary of $75,000-$450,000. In other words, what an awesome opportunity! I've already sent Daria literally all of my personal information. I can't wait to get started.

 

—6—

In reading news, I finished The Day the World Came to Town (a heartwarming true story that happened during 9/11) and started Parenting with Love and Logic (I read a ton of parenting books but for all the times I've heard this one recommended I've never read it). 

After finishing the first three chapters of Love and Logic, I think I can sum up the book as "Don't make your kids wear a coat if you want them to learn to make good decisions."

Which is good advice and totally true, but I would add one thing. Still ask them to shove it in their backpack, just to show their teacher that she doesn't need to send a note home asking if you're aware of the no-cost winter gear for student families collected during the school's annual coat drive. (ASK ME HOW I KNOW.) Maybe that's the "logic" part of Love and Logic and I still haven't gotten to that chapter.

—7—

At work, Phillip is in charge of making sure that his company is fully utilizing AI in what they do. As a result, he's always thinking about new ways to use it, even when he's at home.

So when it was his turn to plan the Family Home Evening lesson, it surprised exactly no one when he decided to give it using AI.

First, he picked a session of general conference and asked AI to summarize each talk. Then, he fed the summary paragraphs into an AI image generator. He asked it to show the pictures at random, and the kids tried to guess which talk went with each picture.

Some of the pictures were as weird as most AI-generated pictures tend to be, but others turned out interesting like this one:

Supposedly illustrates this talk.

In any case, using A.I. was a pretty cool idea that kept the kids engaged and interested. I'm going to have to remember this the next time I give a youth lesson at church.

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