First we got out our trusty ol’ artificial tree. Seven feet tall, got it for ONE DOLLAR at a garage sale, and it’s a nice looking one to boot – can’t beat that! The tree stood bare in our living room for about a week. (Please pardon my crummy phone pictures!)

No decorations yet!

Bare Tree - SO BORING

Then after we added lights and let it sit for a couple more days, we got the decorations out and let Jeremy get started with some of the less-breakable (or so we thought) ones. He was very excited and I grabbed a picture of his little low-tree cluster of decorating (see below).

Ta-Da!

This was before the drama struck. Jeremy had a LOT of fun, and about three candy canes, and got a bit too hyped up. He started throwing toys and decorations at the tree in fun, but it was getting too messy. Then toys were getting lost in the tree, and he was knocking things down trying to dig them out. Jon and I got tired of retrieving them for him, so we told him that any more toys being thrown into the tree would be confiscated. So as an alternate game, Jeremy started whacking the tree branches and yanking strands of lights. HARD. Ornaments were flying, “un-breakable” ornaments were losing pieces, everything was just falling apart. Jeremy was not listening to a word we were saying. He was having a blast, but causing a lot of destruction, and eventually we took ALL the decorations off the tree to show how serious we were. The branch and light yanking continued and got even more violent, so Jeremy was put to bed early.

Two weeks later, we decided to give it another go. On a tip from Kate (their family and ours got together to take some pictures – hope to get those up soon!), we picked up some plastic decorations at Menards and re-decorated the tree with Jeremy’s help. This time things went a lot better, and we love our beautiful and TOUGH new ornaments! They are various brown and gold mirrored and satin balls, and we added a gold-trimmed red ribbon. Jeremy decided to also add a few small velvet bows:

Adding the red bows

And here’s the finished product.

All done!

We’ve put up our Christmas tree, but it’s dark and un-decorated as of yet. We’ve been using an extreme phased approach! First Jon pulled it down from the garage rafters, then a few days later it came into the house from the garage. Then the next day we actually assembled it. Then a day or two later we moved from in front of my desk to its proper location in the living room! Now there it sits, bare. It’s not as sad as you’d think though; something about having a pine tree standing in a room just makes things a little more festive, even without lights and decorations.

Tonight will probably be when we put the lights on, and MAYBE decorations, although no guarantees. With luck, we’ll manage to get all our decorating done before the end of the month, just in time to take it all down, HAH!

This morning a poem came to me as I looked at the small human and animal crowd that accompanied me to my first bathroom trip of the day. Fortunately, I only have one kid, a dog, and 2 cats, so it’s not as complicated as it can be for some moms with bigger families, but this is plenty enough for me right now!

Mom’s Potty Break

Walked to the bathroom and
sat down to pee.
Dog’s in here too,
Wants to nuzzle my knee.

Cats in the doorway?
This seems like a trap.
And now there’s a toddler
sprawled wide on my lap.

Privacy’s rare, but I
can’t really gripe;
The only small challenge
is trying to wipe.

At least they’re with me
(I’ll chalk that up to luck);
It’s better than having them
running amok!

Most times it’s not awful,
But now here’s the scoop:
What’s gonna happen
When I have to poop?

Copyright 2011, Amber Balch

So now we’re down to “only” the Passat, the Scion xB, the R32/Jetta wagon, the Scirocco, and the junky parts car sitting out behind the garage. I think it’s a Golf. Long Live the Balch Armada.

So on Sunday, I diced up half a dozen beets, tossed them with olive oil, sprinkled a little of our unrefined (gray) sea salt on them, and roasted them up. They were tasty, and everyone had a big helping at supper. This was the first time Jon had ever tried beets, and Jeremy called them candy! Monday, I tossed asparagus with olive oil and lemon juice and roasted them. I also made some mock-hollandaise sauce for myself, but Jon just ate them plain with a little salt.  This was the first time he’d ever tasted asparagus, too! (Jeremy tried a bite or two but then said, “I don’t like that one.” It’s ok, I don’t expect him to like anything until he’s tried it 10 times.) Yesterday I roasted broccoli! This time I sprinkled garlic salt on it (after the olive oil of course), and then after it was done in the oven, I put a bunch of Parmesan cheese on top. And then I ate way too much of it because it was the tastiest way I have ever had broccoli, I’m not even kidding.

I’m not sure what to try next… I think Brussels sprouts might be good!

Then the power went out again at about 5:30AM, right about when Jeremy was waking up, so we brought him into our bed to snuggle up and be cozy for a while since no one really wanted to get up into a dark, cold house. We did get up around 6:30, and the power came back on at 7:00, just in time for sunrise, so I got to have a nice cup of tea and a hot shower to start the day. The lights did flicker and blink out a couple more times after that but we just laughed it off and marveled at how heavy the snow was out there!

Jon had to go to his office to do some server work, so he headed out mid-morning, and shortly after he left, the power went out again! This was at about 10:30am. I called Jon a few minutes later to let him know it had happened, and then shortly after that I called the Xcel Energy to report our outage.

One nice thing about having a smartphone is being able to browse the web over the phone network even if the wifi is out of service. I was checking in at Xcel’s outage page periodically, and the numbers of outages kept going up until it eventually showed about 90,000 people without power in the Metro area by the end of the day. Of course, by this time it was evening, and we had evacuated the house to go stay with some nearby friends who still had power. I quickly packed an overnight bag and Jeremy & I left at about 3:30 in the afternoon, just as it was starting to get dark and cold in the house. (Dark at that hour, can you believe it? Winter in the Upper Midwest is so depressing )

Jon stayed at our house to tend the fireplace and make sure the pipes didn’t freeze up. It was nice for me and Jeremy to be with friends, and their older girl is Jeremy’s age  so he even had a playmate. The fun didn’t last long, though. First Bonzo got a bit overwhelmed and confused and peed on the carpet. Ugh. I cleaned it up right away.  I don’t know why we didn’t leave him at home with Jon and the cats, but oh well. I guess we think of him more like a kid than an animal. The cats don’t get that kind of status in our house, LOL. Then, at bedtime, after I got Jeremy changed into his pajamas and we were going down to the guest bedroom, he suddenly threw up all over the wall and (carpeted) stairs. I managed to get him leaned forward enough to miss most of his clothes, but he did get some vomit on his pajama sleeves. I pulled his shirt off and helped him get cleaned up, and we were able to borrow a toddler t-shirt from our hosts for him to sleep in. Jeremy went straight to sleep, but a little while later I went to check on him and move him from my bed into his little sleeping bag. He awoke seeming pretty distressed and he quickly vomited again – all over the inside of his sleeping bag. The poor kid! This time I was able to help him avoid getting anything on himself at least, so we went and got his teeth brushed again, and I put him back in my bed with my fingers firmly crossed. We were running out of options!

Jeremy slept the rest the night with a bit of squirming and moaning, but no more throwing up thank goodness. But the next morning, we found out that his little girlfriend had thrown up FIVE times overnight! While we were all sorry for the kids, her mom was still just a bit proud that she managed to help her daughter vomit in the toilet on the 5th round. I would be proud too – that’s much better than having to wash even more clothes and bedding!

Just to round things out, Bonzo peed on the carpet again the next morning. Thanks, Dog.

We spent the next day chasing kids around and checking the outage status with no real progress. That afternoon Jon joined us for a group outing to the hardware store, which was nice for everyone. We needed to get out and about and it was nice to be doing something more normal and familiar instead of sitting around feeling like a refugee!

Sunday evening, after the kids had their supper, Jon texted to tell me that the Xcel Energy trucks were on our road! Half an hour later (just as Jeremy was getting ready for bed) he sent another text message – “POWER NOW!!!” I was thrilled but I knew the house would still be pretty cold, so I called him and we planned to wait for it to warm up a bit before I brought Jeremy and Bonzo back. I put Jeremy to bed and had a nice relaxed dinner with our hosts.  Then as I started getting my things together, Jon called back to say the house was about 62 degrees and that it would probably be fine to come back. Jeremy woke up as we went to the car, and he chatted with me a little about what was going on, but he fell back asleep almost as soon as his head hit his pillow, LOL.

It was an exhausting weekend and I still don’t feel like I’m caught up on sleep yet, but I’ve never been so glad to be at home doing normal mundane things. The only other time I’ve been without power for more than an hour or two was during the big Northeast Blackout of 2003, when I was in New York – and that was pretty dull by comparison. It was summer, but it wasn’t too hot. We had plenty of sunlight, and spent more time outside instead of in the dark, stuffy houses and apartments, and we could grill our meals with relative ease. This outage was a lot more stressful, and I hope I never have to deal with anything like it again!

I know it’s not legal to distribute copies of someone else’s knitting patterns, even if they are free patterns to begin with, and you are just giving them away. And it’s also not legal to make copies of a pattern you paid for to give away to your friends. So does that mean what I’m doing is not right? I would not sell these copies, and I would not give them to anyone else – they are for my own use only, because I would not be able to keep the library books checked out long enough to complete the patterns.

I was copying no more than one or maybe two patterns out of each book, which felt pretty reasonable for such an ethical grey area, but then I got to the last book, Classic Knits by Erika Knight, and I realized that I had marked 7 of the 15 patterns in the book – WHOA. I couldn’t bring myself to copy them. It felt like I would be crossing a line if I did. One pattern from a whole book seems to feel OK, but half the book?! I might as well just buy it!

Or, maybe Santa reads this blog…

Happy Halloween!

Oh, and we carved a pumpkin on Saturday. Jeremy named the Jack-O’-Lantern “Paws” — (He actually said this when I asked what we should name the pumpkin: “He names is Paws.”