We've had a very, very busy few days, and a very white and gorgeous Christmas, but I'm a mite cabin-crazy at the moment, so it's good that John and I are going to be able to go to a movie this afternoon. :-)

The snowflake icon was from a cool Popular Science article Carl pointed me at on how to save a snowflake.

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Jet Meets Santa Claus 2005 This is right after Jet participated in his preschool's Holiday Program. I liked this picture better than the one of the two of them smiling at the camera because Jet, here, is explaining about his letter that he sent to Santa.

One of the many pictures of the season, but I liked this one the best. I think that Jet had no fear at all, much like the picture from last year, in Oregon, where the little tyke is just smiling away on Santa's lap.

One story the Jet told me this last week seems to emphasize the "good" Jet now is... he told John and I about a boy that had "punched him twice and hit him once" and we were pretty concerned. But then Jet said, "I didn't fight him back because he was just a preschool kid, not pre-K. I just told him to stop doing it and he did." Which translates to Jet realizing that the kid was younger than he was and he acted appropriately. We were very, very impressed and told Jet so in no uncertain terms. Jet kind of glowed with quiet pride for a while, too, which was very, very keen to see.

So it's been a pretty darned good holiday season.

Finally got in an account of Jet's preschool's Holiday Program.

Also put in a lot of stuff since work ended last Thursday, in case anyone wants to run through them in sequence.

Short version: Great Christmas at home with lots of friends. Jet loved all of his Christmas. I loved cooking massive amounts. :-) I got sick, and am better. Jet got sick early last week, and is gradually recovering with one hiccup the day after Christmas. We are resting well.

I hope everyone else had a very Merry Christmas.

Jet was amazed at what he found the next morning! Stuffed stockings! And TWO presents!

I was very glad. He'd gotten the fact that in "The Polar Express" all the kids only get one present from Santa. It's a good precident.

We had our stockings while John baked the cinnamon rolls. I got one of the Lego cars and Jet got the other, and we each had gotten the others' matching car for the Big Cars. Oop. So we swapped. That was good. Jet liked the candy and other small goodies he'd gotten. Yay!

He was so excited he could only eat half a cinnamon roll before begging to do presents. John and I took our time and enjoyed the fresh, yeasty rolls and freshly roasted coffee... Yum.

I could, however, feel a cold coming on and I wasn't that happy with that. So I took an Airborne before we hit the presents.

There were drifts of presents under the tree. We got a huge bounty today, and it was really impressive that Jet's pile of presents was decisively bigger than John's and mine combined. :-) That's the way it should be, I think. Hee.

Jet was very workmanlike in unwrapping. He was great, this year, and didn't insist on playing with everything before going onto the next one. Even it wasn't until 10:30 that he was finally finished and we were well and totally late for Christmas service. So we decided not to go. I was sick enough I decided to just go to sleep, and I slept three hours. In the midst of it, Jet hurtled into my room and said, "Mom, mom! Is it okay if I'm loud and the monster yells a lot of stuff?" "Uhm... sure. Go ahead..."

I didn't hear a thing. John had to come in and wake me up and ask if there was something he could help with. I rattled off the first thing off my head, and he went down to start that while I blearily got myself together and got dressed. I decongested myself and Tylenol'ed myself and then went down and hit the menu, hard.

There was a lentil-nut loaf to be made, dressing with meat and veg, the rolls to make and rise and bake, the turkey to reheat, and two kinds of gravy to make, all before 5. So I had a time line all laid out of what could be done when. I prepped both dressings and the loaf, both to bake for the last bit of time. The turkey gravy came next, as it gets silky if I slow simmer it for an hour or more. Then the rolls were quick and easy to roll out since they could sit out to warm up for me. They rose nicely while I took a quick shower.

Then people arrived. 12 adults and 9 kids. It was great. We had a house full of fun people with little kids all occupying each other in the basement by 4:30. Mei made astonishingly good potstickers for everyone for appetizers, and then the food started flowing to the board. We'd set up our granite table to hold all the food, and it did beautifully. All the drinks, hot cider, wine, beer, and water were on the central island. Folks had brought jello fruit salad, some white asparagus, salad, desserts, mashed potatoes (with some on the side with red and green food coloring), and it was wonderful. The rolls were nearly burnt, but not quite, and they were still warm by the time everything else hit the table. Wow.

So everyone sat down at once and ate. The kids were brought up from the basement and they all sat at their table at one time! My gosh! I even got a picture of them! :-)

I got to sit down with everyone, too. That was quite the treat. The kids behaved beautifully, so nearly all the adults got to eat with the adults as well. And those that didn't spelled each other and got some adult time, which was good for all of us. When the kids were done eating, they all ran down to the basement again, and had a great time trying to wreck the train and slide everything but themselves down the tiny wood slide down there.

I ate quite happily, and then started the dessert. Fermented rice with mandarine oranges and mochi rice balls filled with sesame seed paste was the offering besides the more American traditional stuff that two of the other moms had brought. Most of the parents there were either Asian, married to an Asian, or had adopted an Asian child. So even the adults who had never tried this kind of things before were curious enough to at least try it to see if they liked it. Most did! That was cool. Ivy, a little Chinese girl who had come to Bonnie and Fred this last fall, dug into hers like there was no tomorrow, and made coo'ing sounds at the balls. Though, admittedly, she did the same at the Cool Whip blobs she could pick up with her fingers. Hee.

It was a great evening. Everyone had fun. Tonya helped out with some of the cleaning up when most everyone else had left, and we'd done a good enough job of planning that most of it was dishwasher work. John got one load started early, so we could talk a little more, and then we got the second load in soon after everyone had left.

When I asked Jet what he'd liked best about Christmas, at first he said, "The presents." But then he thought a little and said, "But really I liked the whole thing. Every bit of it."

Amen.

After six months of near constant use I finally broke my Mr. Coffee ECMP40, and it was the lame, tiny bit of plastic holding the power switches that broke, not any of the working parts of the machine itself. It was still under warrentee, but I spent only $60 on it, and the shipping and hassel didn't seem worth it. So I had John take it apart. One special bolt had to just be drilled out, but everything else came apart quite neatly, and we found the offending, sadly weak single support of the on and off switches.

Jet watched with great interest. "Why are you breaking it?" he asked, and he got a pretty good explanation of the difference between "Breaking" and "Taking apart carefully so that it can go back together later."

I think he got it. Hoorah!

Luckily, I'd gotten my two drinks out of the beast before it finally gave up the ghost. John was able to get it apart, diagnose it and suggest a fix. I approved the fix, and John carefully packed up all the parts as the last part of clearing the decks for my mise en place for tomorrow's dinner.

Yes, Virginia, Liralen cooks her turkey the day BEFORE Christmas, so it is ready and beautiful for the day.

I'm learning a lot from Mr. Bourdain about how to prep food so that it's beautiful and ready to serve and I still have the time to sit with my guests and enjoy their company. Plus, a stock cooked for just about ever is nothing to sneeze at, either, for richness and taste.

So I roasted my turkey in the middle of the day. A 20 pounder, stuffed with onion, sage, celery, and apples in big, chunks, over a moat of chicken broth. Jet watched his videos. We played some video games. I started with the beast on its breast, and after 30 minutes at high temp, an hour at low, John and I did the amusing feat of turning the whole thing over, and letting it roast the right way up until it was 10 degrees from done, and then I turned the heat back up. It came out bronzed and beautiful, crisp, sizzling, and tender and juicy to the bone. The drippings were caramelized and sizzling from the fats, and I used most of my store of brown chicken stock to get it off the pan and into a metal bowl.

We ate leftovers for dinner, to finish clearing out the fridge. Then I carved that bird down to the carcass, arrainging everything on a beautiful turkey platter John had bought years ago. All but half a breast fit on the platter, and the half a breast I put into its own storage box. The carcass, vegitables, herbs, and spices went into a lot of water into a stock pot, and I got that to a boil and then down to a simmer in the Stockpot. Then we went to the 6pm Christmas Eve Service.

John wore pants. I could hears, all across the pews, "He's wearing PANTS! Do you believe it?" He was also wearing his Scottish sweater, a tweedy grey green from the wool of sheep that ate so much seaweed their wool turned that faint shade of green.

Jet was a little antsy during the service, but lasted it out. He watched us sing, eventhough he'd sung so many songs during the caroling we'd done last week, he wasn't into doing the impromptu pagent that everyone else did. They found volunteer Mary and Joseph, and had choirs of angels and herds of sheperds from the audience. It was fun and relaxed, and we sang the familiar caroles. It was comforting for me, too, in a way.

Afterwards we went to a friends' house for "Cookie Decorating" and the house was filled with girls younger than Jet, and their parents. There was one other boy there that was exactly Jet's age, but he kept trying to get Jet into trouble and Jet finally just wrinkled his nose at the other guy and started playing with every car and truck he could find in the house. Jet and John ended up making four cookies and we took them home with us. John and Jet then setup the cookies, milk, and carrots and Jet went merrily to bed with me. He slept easily. Whew.

That's when I realized that I hadn't made the cinnamon roll dough, yet, and it had to go through a rise before I could shape them for the overnight rise. Oops. So I had John warm the oven while I used the Big mixer to get it all together. It went into the just warm oven to rise, while I made dinner roll dough for tomorrow and stuffed that into the refrigerator, too.

Then John and I did parent duties (;-)) and went to bed with cinnamon rolls dancing in my head.

Jet's teachers were waaaaay braver than I would ever be. The whole school rolled out a Christmas program this Friday, with all the kids at the center, and they invited all the parents as well. They had hundreds of parents packed into the Longmont High School auditorium, along with all the screaming, laughing, and crying siiblings. The kids were all over the place when we first arrived. Jet's class was up in a back area where they could sit, run around, and talk to each other. The preschoolers were all led down to the stage, where they could line them up for the bleachers.

The first act was the dance school and instructor. Then there was a bit by the school age kids that participate in the afterschool program. Then Jet's class. They did great! Shining crowns, four songs that got more and more disorganized as they went on, but all sung with enthusiasm and not too much staring outright fear at the audience. The kindergardeners were astonishingly coordinated in contrast. They actually sang all together and most of them were smiling!

It was fun. 2 hours all in all and it was worth it. Miss Tony loved the scarf that Jet gave her, the one I'd made from the leftovers of Macy's poncho. She loved the mauve color of it, even, so that was great. I was glad she enjoyed it so much.

Mikayla and Jet had fun playing with each other in the line to see Santa. And Jet marched right up, sat in Santa's lap and had a great time. He loved it and spoke very seriously with Santa about the letter he'd written him with the whole list of things he wanted. Yay!

It was a lot more fun than I'd bargained for, and I'm glad that Jet really loved going, as all day he'd been saying that he wasn't going to go! I'm glad that he decided to do it as soon as he saw all his classmates and teachers all together. They were familiar, so he could go up with them, all together. That was great.

Jet's now watching The Polar Express every single evening and every morning he asks to see it and he is now predicting what happens on a fairly frequent basis. He loves it, wants the book, wants the train, and just enjoys the experience of it, over and over.

The good part to all that is that I'm able to watch Read Or Die or R.O.D. TV every time he gets involved in his movie, despite the overwhelming sounds of the train nearly crashing every few intervals or so. I'm about halfway through the T.V. series and feel immensely like Maggie, too tall, extremely protective of the cuter members, and really, really quiet. I'm enjoying it immensely, thanks to Carl who lent it to me when I visited this last sumer. But it's definitely not kid level, and Jet has, occasionally climbed into my lap to ask me if he can watch the little movie, too, and I've said no often enough that he's finally okay with it, especially when I only do it when his favorite movie is on somewhere else.

Last night I got to ride the exercise bike and I am MUCH calmer. Thank goodness.

We also had the pizza John went out twice to get. It was good, but in this cold weather I really want to make baked macaroni and cheese. I have a recipe, but knowing that there are a few foodies reading this, what are your favorite recipes for baked macaroni and cheese? Add 'em to the comments, I'd appreciate that.

Luckily for us, it should be back up near 50° F (~ 5° C) by Sunday, so we won't be in the deep freeze for too long.

WHY do I just want to jump UP and DOWN repeatedly?

I have no idea. Likely stress buildup and no physical outlet with my stupid, ruined toe. I should probably just bike on a stationary bike or something to let the steam off.

Jet's getting more and more excited about Christmas. He and John bought the Polar Express DVD on Monday and Jet's been watching it, multiple times, in the morning and evening. He loves it. He knows who everyone is. He WANTS the Thomas-like wooden engine. He quotes movie bits, now.

He helped with setting up the tree last weekend, and had a good time and was very careful with all the fragile bits. He also demanded that we have a star that lights up at the top, so we went to Target and found a cheap one that glows quite nicely. Then he spent a few hours with my digital camera taking movies of everything including his last "stamps toy" that he saved up for and bought at the same time.

I'm mostly done with Christmas shopping at the expense of providing detailed Christmas lists to my family as to What Jet Wants for Christmas, as it's all about him anyway, isn't it?

Well, okay, so no, it isn't. And, likely, Jet would be the first one to tell me that, in all honesty. Sunday school has been drilling all the kids on what it's really about, and he had quite a rush with helping collect money for the Heifer Project donation his class is giving this year. Jet really likes the animals and has asked me what we're going to give this year, so we're poring over the catalog together. That's much more calming, I'll also admit, than all this shopping, too.

We had a really nice Christmas. On Christmas Eve John and Jet played angels in a living nativity, only Jet wouldn't wear the robe and he was using his halo as a lasso; but he did pay a lot of attention to the live baby and didn't upstage anyone he wasn't supposed to. Everyone told him that he made a fine angel, even without the robes.

John's mom and dad had a great time seeing Jet's Christmas and the aftermath of opening 24 gifts and playing with them. Jet made quite the haul. He was great about it, too, taking some time to play with each new thing he could play with (i.e. wasn't missing batteries or would make too much of a mess on his own), and then moving on to business-like opening of the next present. Much faster than last year, and he actually took a nap! Unlike next year, he actually rested.

Whew. That night, though, he wouldn't eat dinner with us, he wanted to just play, and since he'd had a very late lunch (after his long nap) I didn't bug him.

Since then we've had Chinese food, swam at the Rec. Center with a bunch of Jet's friends, went to the local aquarium which was much better than I thought it would be ("Big splash!!"), did the church thang, ran around in various playgrounds, and did two big meals. I did Christmas dinner like Thanksgiving but without the potatoes. And I made my Three-Gallon lasagna, which wasn't three gallons this time as we didn't do the two quart bread... just did the gallon of milk for moz, gallon of milk for ricotta, quart and a half of tomato sauce, and the rest of the volume plus a little of flour and eggs for the pasta. It was a family affair, though, as Jet cranked pasta, I made sauces, Isabel cooked the noodles, and John and George did the cheeses. I had to rescue the moz, as John couldn't get the protein strands to string together as he was cutting it up too much with a metal spoon. Plenty of heat and a gentle touch and it turned out quite nicely. BIG pan of lasagna from all that work.

Of course, Jet wouldn't eat it, though he did cheerfully raid the home-made mozarella for a few handfuls of cheese.

He ran over to the pantry, pulled out the multi-grain Cheerios box, and said, "This!!"

So John poured him a bowl and Jet's face fell and he started wailing. "What's wrong?" asked John.

"No berries! Where berries???!"

Sure enough, on the front of the box, there are beautiful, big, red raspberries in the cereal. Jet expected them to be in the box and when they weren't he was pretty upset. John rescued the situation by getting some of the frozen, Costco strawberries out and defrosting them in the microwave on defrost so they didn't lose their texture. Jet then plowed through a big bowl of the multi-grain Cheerios with strawberry slices and topped it off with four chicken nuggets. When John asked him how many, Jet held up both hands with all fingers splayed, "This many!" "Ten?" "Yeah! Ten!" Luckily, John didn't believe him and gave him just four, which Jet managed to eat before falling asleep in John's lap while watching Laputa in the Japanese (no sub-titles for Jet!).

John and I spent last night in the Boulderado in Boulder. It was beautiful and perfect timing as they were taking down the three-story tree this morning, as we checked out. It was funny walking to the Boulder Chop House in teen-degree weather with John in shorts and Birkies. One guy told him that he should have his picture taken. That made me giggle. John's mom sounded fine on the phone this morning and told us Jet had an enormous breakfast. Hoorah!! He's eating again. Whew.

Christmas Morning, and Jet's pretty amazed by the fact that the cookies and milk are gone, that there's *something* in the stockings and there's a box far bigger than even two of him under the fireplace. John hears Grandpa moving around in the basement so he asks, "Jet, you wanna tell Grandpa what happened?"

Jet nods, runs over to the door down to the basement. He opens it, and goes down just two steps before yelling, as loud as he can, "WHAT HAPPENED!!"