My mother-in-law made these advent calendars for our children a few years ago. Every year it’s slightly daunting to find 72 things to fit into the little pockets. Looking for ideas for advent calendar fillers or stocking stuffers? Here are a few:
Wind-up toys
Small animals – stuffed, plastic, wooden, etc.
Finger puppets
Bendy figures
Parachute figures
Clay
Small Games – cards, knitting doll, peg game, etc.
Other little candies – Lindt truffles, little chocolate Santas, Pez, gum, or TicTacs
Matchbox car
Chapstick or lip balm
Tissue packets
Comb
Cap rocket
Toothbrush
Pens, pencils
Erasers
Temporary Tattoos
Seashells
Flash drive (even better in fun shapes and sizes)
Blank books
Flip books
Handwritten notes – “Let’s get our Christmas tree,” “Holiday lights drive tonight,” “Cocoa and Christmas stories by the fire,” “Movie night,” “Cookie baking,” “Christmas carol sing,” “I love you, because…”
Sometimes I make the kids do a little work too: “Do a kind deed today challenge,” “Write a card to your brother/sister”
It was supposed to be a busy weekend with back-to-back soccer games, meetings, rehearsals, and recitals. Winter weather struck and one by one, everything got cancelled. What a gift to be stuck at home!
Cozy
Time to get ready for Christmas.
Peace on Earth and peace at home.
I’ve lost the colored vs. white lights battle. This little tree-shaped boxwood is my consolation prize.
The weather outside is frightful…
And since we have no place to go…Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!
I stayed in my pjs all day. It’s good to have your very own foot warmer.
Teddy’s hanging…
…the best preschool project ever! (His own baby shoe, spray painted gold).
Goodnight; ensured release, Imperishable peace, Have these for yours, While sea abides, and land, And earth’s foundations stand, and heaven endures.
When earth’s foundations flee, nor sky nor land nor sea At all is found Content you, let them burn: It is not your concern; Sleep on, sleep sound.
Peace My Heart
by Rabindranath Tagore
Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet. Let it not be a death but completeness. Let love melt into memory and pain into songs. Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest. Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night. Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence. I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light your way.
Many years ago a fellow minivan-driving-mother-friend of mine sent me a link to this video:
I watched it with detached amusement. It never occurred to me that this video could in any way reflect my reality. The video came to mind again recently when another friend of mine got into my car and erupted into frank and hearty laughter. As she picked through the random assortment of things that had accumulated in my car, she gave a running commentary, punctuated with giggles:
“Oh! Good thing you have this bag of pinecones here. You never know when they’ll come in handy.”
(OK – those cinnamon-scented pine cones were acting as air fresheners, that is, when they still smelled like cinnamon. Whatever.)
“And look at all these batteries in the cup holder! I was going to go the store to buy some, but how convenient! You’ve got a bunch right here.”
“Ha ha ha! And what’s this? Ah, of course! Empty DVD cases in the side pockets!”
Side note: I’d actually cleaned out the car not too long ago. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have, and has been in the recent past!
The tragic fact of my existence is that I’m a lazy slob. Wait, I haven’t gotten to the tragic part yet. Sloth and slovenliness aren’t so terrible in and of themselves. If I could contentedly wallow in filth and disorder, where would be the harm in that? The problem is that I can never truly enjoy my entropic lifestyle, because of the other fundamental aspect of my being – neurosis. I try to laze about on my couch, amidst the piles of books, newspapers, my daughter’s violin case, and toys, but I can never fully relax, because I feel like I should be cleaning up the mess. And yet – alas – I’m too lazy to do so! You see my predicament?
After my friend roundly mocked me for the mess in my car, I went home chastened and determined to turn myself around. I was going to be organized and I was going to get all those million and one tasks that I’d been putting off done, once and for all.
The top priority on my list was to give the dogs their second dose of preventative deworming medicine. I was supposed to administer this three weeks after the first dose and they were now overdue. I was procrastinating, because they had struggled so wildly when I’d given them their first dose that half of the vile smelling medicine ended up on my clothes. This time around, I had the boys hold the dogs while I squirted the syringes into their mouths. It was a piece of cake! I gloated over the ease with which I had executed this distasteful task, and congratulated myself on a job well done.
With this monkey off my back and small victory under my belt, I was emboldened to tackle the kitchen next. I cleared out and organized two whole junk drawers and then rearranged the pantry. I realize this might not sound like a big deal, but it took me all evening. I felt like I had cleaned out the Augean stables.
Basking in the glow of my own virtue, I decided to take a break from my Herculean endeavors. This time when I relaxed on the couch, I felt like I richly deserved to put my feet up. I languidly lounged, contemplating my own moral superiority. And that’s when my dogs started to vomit frothy yellow deworming medicine. Repeatedly. All over the carpet.
The universe had spoken and cosmic order had been restored. Its clarion message to me was this: You, Adrienne, are destined to live in squalor. It is written in the stars. You clean out a couple drawers? I will rain dog puke all over your carpet. Give. It. Up.
I got to spend a lovely morning with my friendy Wendy over the Thanksgiving break. We went to a tea house in Arlington. This is not just any old tea house. Your tea comes presented with a minuscule, but delicious cookie and its own timer that helps ensure you get the perfect brew:
But the real twist is that after sipping a cup of Earl Grey, you can soak your feet in it too. (A fresh batch, that is)!
Tucked away toward the back of the tea house and sectioned off by folding screens is a “foot sanctuary” where you can order up footbath treatments in the $20 dollar range. Suffering from an extreme case of foot shame, (I swear it’s a thing), I would never actually indulge in a footbath treatment myself. I had fun reading about them though!
The “Chin Up” is a treatment using the aforementioned bergamot tea and mint. “Serenity” uses calming lavender, chamomile, and oatmeal. The intriguingly named “Love to Ladies” is made up of geranium, ylang ylang, and clary sage. “Sadness” is basil, cornflower, frankincense, citrus.
Over the Thanksgiving break I got to visit the Newseum for the first time with my kids and my best friend and her family.
When the Newseum first opened in 1997, it was located in my old hometown in Arlington, Virginia. The seven-level, 250,000 square foot museum moved to its present location at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, right next to the Canadian Embassy and overlooking the Capitol and the White House in 2008.
From the Greenspun Terrace you get fabulous, panoramic views of the city…perfect for taking pictures!
Tickets ($21.95 for adults and $12.95 for youth aged 7-18) are good for two days, and you really could spend a whole two days at the museum. I made the mistake of parking in a three hour spot, thinking that would be an ample amount of time. Having only managed to get through half the museum in three hours, I had to leave and re-park the car again.
There’s a great mix of traditional and interactive exhibits. The first exhibit we checked out was the Berlin Wall Gallery. Here you can find the largest piece of the Wall outside of Germany.
The kids were duly impressed to learn that I had my own piece of the Berlin Wall back at our house. I chipped it off shortly after the fall of the wall, when friends and I visited Berlin as college students.
The kids especially loved the HP New Media Gallery on the fourth level:
and the NBC News Interactive Newsroon on the second level, where they could pretend to be journalists and record their own newscasts with the help of prompters:
I have brown hair. This would not be noteworthy, but for the fact that I am Korean and Koreans always have jet black hair. When I was little, my dad would tell me that my hair reminded me of his little sister, who also had brown hair. In those days in Korea, brown hair was so freakish and unnatural as to be considered bad luck. My superstitious grandmother kept shaving her daughter’s head in the hope that the hair would grow back black, but of course it never did. I always felt connected to my dad’s little sister and felt sorry for her, but all I ever knew about her was that she had brown hair like mine and that she died young.
Today as I was sitting with my parents on the last day of our Thanksgiving break, the sun was streaming through the window. My dad stared at my hair lit by the sun and started talking about his little sister again. He told me again about how his mother would shave the little girl’s head. The poor girl hated this, but her mother insisted on doing it over and over again.
“It looked terrible, and she would have to go to school looking like that,” my dad said with pity.
For the first time, I began to ask questions about her.
“What was her name, Dad?”
He hesitated and I held my breath. I was afraid that it had been so long ago that he might have even forgotten her name.
“Her name was Yunja, but the Japanese gave her the name ‘Toshiko.’ My brothers and I thought that was such a fancy sounding name, we decided we would all call her that. She was rather tall for her age and good looking. She would have grown up to be a beautiful woman.”
“How old was she when she died?”
“She was in second grade.”
“How did she die?”
“Sunstroke. During the Japanese invasion, they made us all work outside for hours in the sun. The boys wouldn’t wear shirts and we would get so badly sunburned that all of our skin would bubble and peel off at least twice a year. My little sister was healthy and strong. She should have survived. I don’t know why she didn’t.”
There is not a single photograph of the little girl whose name I have only just learned. And though her life was fleeting, she is remembered over seventy years after her death with abiding love.
o wonderful, wonderful 