Diary of a December
1 December to 21 December
Got busy. Worked on evenings and weekends to get everything done before Christmas. Got stressed and grumpy.
22 December
At last, work is over for the year. We finished work at 1.00pm and went to a very nice Italian Restaurant for lunch. I had planned to get slightly tipsy with the only one of my workmates who knows how to drink properly, but she called in sick so I limited my drinking to a single glass of pretty amazingly good cab merlot.
I have a simply rule for ordering food on the rare occasions that I eat somewhere classy, which is that Honey Bear and I can both cook most things pretty well (or in her case, amazingly well) so I always make sure I order something that we would not usually cook at home. This can end well or badly.
I had a theory about fish. I grew up believing that tuna came only in cans and had to be served with pasta, cheese and bad sauce and called ‘mornay’, or in some other equally uninspiring manner. Later in life, I discovered that good tuna served in restaurants was nothing like the rubbish I had been eating out of cans. My theory was that the same principle might apply to sardines.
Not on this occasion.
The polenta-crusted sardine fillets on wide mushrooms sounded like a good entrée but tasted exactly like tinned sardines rolled in cornflake crumbs. The mushrooms were good.
Fortunately, the kangaroo fillets with roasted pumpkin and a yoghurt sauce, followed by hazelnut chocolate cake topped with raisins and pear and some seriously decent Italian coffee more than made up for it.
Hooray, work is over for the year and I have two weeks off.
23 December
Well, not quite.
I spent most of the day at work, which is about the dumbest thing one can do on the Saturday before Christmas but sadly it was entirely necessary. On the bright side, no one else was there and I wasn’t required to be on time so I spent most of the morning playing with my beautiful sons while Honey Bear had the world’s most well-earned sleep-in. My wonderful parents came around for the afternoon which meant Bundle and Cherub were probably too excited to notice that I wasn’t around for a few hours. At work, the place was entirely empty and no-one could ring me so I got enough done to be able to go home at 4pm. Okay, now work was really over for the rest of the year. We ate take away pasta that a local place sells for less than it would cost to buy the ingredients and make it ourselves, and celebrated the end of a heck of a year.
24 December
We started our holiday with breakfast at our next door neighbours’ house. Everyone has a hidden talent or two, and in the case of my neighbour, one of them is making really good omelettes. They also have an espresso machine.
Our neighbours have two children, one is about three months younger than Bundle and one is exactly the same age as Cherub, give or take an hour. This meant there was a certain amount of mediating over who was playing with which toy at any given moment, but also some blissful times when the younger two children were sleeping and the older two were playing together nicely and we could all drink some more coffee.
After running madly round the supermarket buying all the stuff I should have been buying the day before if I hadn’t been working, it was over to my sister’s church for their Christmas Eve Carols for Children afternoon. It was a very pleasant afternoon consisting of a couple of the better known carols (Silent Night, Away in a Manger, O Come all ye Faithful) and some lesser known numbers including the “Bethlehem Bop” and a lively 12 bar blues number called something like “When Jesus was born down in Bethlehem there was a Sheep (Baaaa)”.
The “Bethlehem Bop” gave Cherub and I the perfect opportunity to bust out our very best chair dancing moves, and we did. It’s all in the shoulders.
After the carols were done, I took Bundle to pat the selection of sheep, cows, bunnies, chickens and such animals that the church had hired for the occasion. Bundle has often been a bit wary of petting animals. He loves to do this but in the past he often got nervous if a dog (or anything) made a sudden move or tried to lick him or something. On this occasion, however, he was more than happy to run up to a sheep and just start patting. He particularly liked the bunny that I managed to catch and hold for him, but by far the best moment was when I found him engaged in conversation with a chicken. It went like this:
Bundle: Bok bok bok bok bok
A chicken: Boooooook
Bundle: Bok [giggles a lot] bok
A chicken: bok bok booook bok [wanders off looking thoughtful]
We left the animals and went to hall behind the church where they were serving coffee and Bundle could run around like a maniac with his cousins while Cherub could have a good go at keeping up. Cherub is seven months old and yet to learn to walk, but the child can crawl like the wind.
We eventually dragged ourselves (and the children) away and spent a quiet and very pleasant Christmas Eve at home.
25 December
Yay I love Christmas, despite the feeling of utter exhaustion from being up half the night trying to get a certain baby to go back to sleep and a headache that just wouldn’t quit. I barely noticed either of these things because we were having far too good a day.
After hauling ourselves out of bed around seven, we had just enough time to feed the children and unpack the very exciting Christmas stockings before it was off to a church way over the other side of town which Honey Bear and I used to go to every week before we had children. We went back because, despite having attended somewhere more local for the past couple of years, the church across town still feel like home whenever we go back there.
The Christmas morning gathering starts at 9.00am with breakfast. Everyone brings food, and the selection of cereals, home made croissant, fresh fruit and the like was wonderful. Bundle’s love for Christmas can only have been increased when we allowed him, for the first and possibly only time in his life, to eat Fruit Loops.
Breakfast was followed by a simple, and short, service, which was mostly Christmas carols and a brief message about the Christmas story. The minister talked about Jesus being born in a stable full of animals and spending his first night sleeping in a dirty feeding trough. The point was that some people have lives that are obviously dysfunctional, while others are much better at appearing to have everything under control. All of us have parts of our lives, or ourselves, which are out of control, dysfunctional, or perhaps best described as just messy. The message of the Christmas story is, in part, that by sending his son to be born in a dirty stable, God indicated that he wants to engage with the mess and dysfunction, hidden or otherwise, of our lives.
At least, I’m told that that was the point of the message. I missed that part because I was out the back changing a nappy. Perhaps this was a metaphor.
From the church it was straight to my sister’s house. My parents have just come home after living in the USA for eight years. I spent one Christmas with them in Nashville a few years ago, and I have seen my sisters on Christmas day a couple of times in the past five years, but this was the first time that all of us had been together for Christmas since my parents went overseas. The only immediate family member missing was my brother, who lives in Western Australia with his wife and their most beautiful daughter.
Cherub, having refused to sleep all through church, promptly crashed in the portacot and slept all through lunch, while Bundle was far too captivated by his cousin’s train set to need anything more than the occasional wavy hello from a parent, so we sat down to a rare ‘hands-free’ lunch with the family. Lunch was a most pleasant meal of turkey and cranberry sauce with a range of wonderful salads which my little sister had made (the one with the fried saganake cheese was a particular highlight). We also had a large bowl of pomme noisettes, solely because this was a family tradition when we were children, and some very nice Shiraz.
Lunch was followed by Honey Bear’s amazing plum pudding, which we made just over a year ago and my goodness had it matured nicely. It was accompanied by some truly excellent brandy cream sauce, of which I ate a huge amount.
It’s not every family that is lucky enough to be able to get together and simply enjoy each other’s company with no tension, no angst and no family politics. We are one of those very fortunate families. The only moment of tension came during a conversation about the possible uses for miniature donkeys in law enforcement.
Can we just pause for a minute, mention that my mother started this conversation, and consider how completely mad my family is.
Thanks.
Anyway, the only tense moment came when I suggested that the best use for miniature donkeys would be in preventing smuggling, because they would be particularly good at spotting drug mules.
My brother in law suggested, with more than a little asperity, that the fact that I was a guest in his house did not mean I was entitled to make appalling puns.
It would be safe to say that most people would probably have sympathised with his point of view.
Finally, it was time to take too exhausted and way over excited children home. We were going to open the rest of their presents when we got home but Bundle was well and truly asleep by the end of the 20 minute drive so we ate soup and left the pile of unopened presents sent to the children by various relatives for Boxing Day.
As for presents we had opened, I have to give credit where it’s due to my parents, who, along with some other lovely gifts, gave us one of these:
26 December
Boxing Day started with a most enjoyable session of setting up the largest wooden train track that has ever been constructed in my lounge room or possibly the southern hemisphere. And really, the fact that some smarty pants in North Dakota once built a bigger one does not really diminish the achievement.
I didn’t actually have to do much as Bundle has developed the ability to design and build surprisingly complex multi-circuit linked train tracks with bridges and other such features with no need for parents to do much except occasionally ensure that the pieces are linking together properly.
Bundle is currently obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine and was very excited to receive a few more trains for his collection, including his current favourite, James the Red Engine. For those who don’t follow Thomas the Tank Engine that closely, the railway line where Thomas works is run by a mysterious figure known as the Fat Controller.
So, having supervised the setting up of the train track, I then got to watch Bundle run his trains around the track. Occasionally a train would stop for a conversation with the Fat Controller, both halves of which would be supplied by Bundle. In the case of the conversation featuring James the Red Engine, it went like this:
Fat Controller: Hello James, what’s your name?
James: Red
[Beat]
James: I brought lots of coaches, fat ’troller
I could listen to that stuff all day.
27 December to now
Felt tired but really pretty good about my life.
I hope you all had a good Christmas too.
Got busy. Worked on evenings and weekends to get everything done before Christmas. Got stressed and grumpy.
22 December
At last, work is over for the year. We finished work at 1.00pm and went to a very nice Italian Restaurant for lunch. I had planned to get slightly tipsy with the only one of my workmates who knows how to drink properly, but she called in sick so I limited my drinking to a single glass of pretty amazingly good cab merlot.
I have a simply rule for ordering food on the rare occasions that I eat somewhere classy, which is that Honey Bear and I can both cook most things pretty well (or in her case, amazingly well) so I always make sure I order something that we would not usually cook at home. This can end well or badly.
I had a theory about fish. I grew up believing that tuna came only in cans and had to be served with pasta, cheese and bad sauce and called ‘mornay’, or in some other equally uninspiring manner. Later in life, I discovered that good tuna served in restaurants was nothing like the rubbish I had been eating out of cans. My theory was that the same principle might apply to sardines.
Not on this occasion.
The polenta-crusted sardine fillets on wide mushrooms sounded like a good entrée but tasted exactly like tinned sardines rolled in cornflake crumbs. The mushrooms were good.
Fortunately, the kangaroo fillets with roasted pumpkin and a yoghurt sauce, followed by hazelnut chocolate cake topped with raisins and pear and some seriously decent Italian coffee more than made up for it.
Hooray, work is over for the year and I have two weeks off.
23 December
Well, not quite.
I spent most of the day at work, which is about the dumbest thing one can do on the Saturday before Christmas but sadly it was entirely necessary. On the bright side, no one else was there and I wasn’t required to be on time so I spent most of the morning playing with my beautiful sons while Honey Bear had the world’s most well-earned sleep-in. My wonderful parents came around for the afternoon which meant Bundle and Cherub were probably too excited to notice that I wasn’t around for a few hours. At work, the place was entirely empty and no-one could ring me so I got enough done to be able to go home at 4pm. Okay, now work was really over for the rest of the year. We ate take away pasta that a local place sells for less than it would cost to buy the ingredients and make it ourselves, and celebrated the end of a heck of a year.
24 December
We started our holiday with breakfast at our next door neighbours’ house. Everyone has a hidden talent or two, and in the case of my neighbour, one of them is making really good omelettes. They also have an espresso machine.
Our neighbours have two children, one is about three months younger than Bundle and one is exactly the same age as Cherub, give or take an hour. This meant there was a certain amount of mediating over who was playing with which toy at any given moment, but also some blissful times when the younger two children were sleeping and the older two were playing together nicely and we could all drink some more coffee.
After running madly round the supermarket buying all the stuff I should have been buying the day before if I hadn’t been working, it was over to my sister’s church for their Christmas Eve Carols for Children afternoon. It was a very pleasant afternoon consisting of a couple of the better known carols (Silent Night, Away in a Manger, O Come all ye Faithful) and some lesser known numbers including the “Bethlehem Bop” and a lively 12 bar blues number called something like “When Jesus was born down in Bethlehem there was a Sheep (Baaaa)”.
The “Bethlehem Bop” gave Cherub and I the perfect opportunity to bust out our very best chair dancing moves, and we did. It’s all in the shoulders.
After the carols were done, I took Bundle to pat the selection of sheep, cows, bunnies, chickens and such animals that the church had hired for the occasion. Bundle has often been a bit wary of petting animals. He loves to do this but in the past he often got nervous if a dog (or anything) made a sudden move or tried to lick him or something. On this occasion, however, he was more than happy to run up to a sheep and just start patting. He particularly liked the bunny that I managed to catch and hold for him, but by far the best moment was when I found him engaged in conversation with a chicken. It went like this:
Bundle: Bok bok bok bok bok
A chicken: Boooooook
Bundle: Bok [giggles a lot] bok
A chicken: bok bok booook bok [wanders off looking thoughtful]
We left the animals and went to hall behind the church where they were serving coffee and Bundle could run around like a maniac with his cousins while Cherub could have a good go at keeping up. Cherub is seven months old and yet to learn to walk, but the child can crawl like the wind.
We eventually dragged ourselves (and the children) away and spent a quiet and very pleasant Christmas Eve at home.
25 December
Yay I love Christmas, despite the feeling of utter exhaustion from being up half the night trying to get a certain baby to go back to sleep and a headache that just wouldn’t quit. I barely noticed either of these things because we were having far too good a day.
After hauling ourselves out of bed around seven, we had just enough time to feed the children and unpack the very exciting Christmas stockings before it was off to a church way over the other side of town which Honey Bear and I used to go to every week before we had children. We went back because, despite having attended somewhere more local for the past couple of years, the church across town still feel like home whenever we go back there.
The Christmas morning gathering starts at 9.00am with breakfast. Everyone brings food, and the selection of cereals, home made croissant, fresh fruit and the like was wonderful. Bundle’s love for Christmas can only have been increased when we allowed him, for the first and possibly only time in his life, to eat Fruit Loops.
Breakfast was followed by a simple, and short, service, which was mostly Christmas carols and a brief message about the Christmas story. The minister talked about Jesus being born in a stable full of animals and spending his first night sleeping in a dirty feeding trough. The point was that some people have lives that are obviously dysfunctional, while others are much better at appearing to have everything under control. All of us have parts of our lives, or ourselves, which are out of control, dysfunctional, or perhaps best described as just messy. The message of the Christmas story is, in part, that by sending his son to be born in a dirty stable, God indicated that he wants to engage with the mess and dysfunction, hidden or otherwise, of our lives.
At least, I’m told that that was the point of the message. I missed that part because I was out the back changing a nappy. Perhaps this was a metaphor.
From the church it was straight to my sister’s house. My parents have just come home after living in the USA for eight years. I spent one Christmas with them in Nashville a few years ago, and I have seen my sisters on Christmas day a couple of times in the past five years, but this was the first time that all of us had been together for Christmas since my parents went overseas. The only immediate family member missing was my brother, who lives in Western Australia with his wife and their most beautiful daughter.
Cherub, having refused to sleep all through church, promptly crashed in the portacot and slept all through lunch, while Bundle was far too captivated by his cousin’s train set to need anything more than the occasional wavy hello from a parent, so we sat down to a rare ‘hands-free’ lunch with the family. Lunch was a most pleasant meal of turkey and cranberry sauce with a range of wonderful salads which my little sister had made (the one with the fried saganake cheese was a particular highlight). We also had a large bowl of pomme noisettes, solely because this was a family tradition when we were children, and some very nice Shiraz.
Lunch was followed by Honey Bear’s amazing plum pudding, which we made just over a year ago and my goodness had it matured nicely. It was accompanied by some truly excellent brandy cream sauce, of which I ate a huge amount.
It’s not every family that is lucky enough to be able to get together and simply enjoy each other’s company with no tension, no angst and no family politics. We are one of those very fortunate families. The only moment of tension came during a conversation about the possible uses for miniature donkeys in law enforcement.
Can we just pause for a minute, mention that my mother started this conversation, and consider how completely mad my family is.
Thanks.
Anyway, the only tense moment came when I suggested that the best use for miniature donkeys would be in preventing smuggling, because they would be particularly good at spotting drug mules.
My brother in law suggested, with more than a little asperity, that the fact that I was a guest in his house did not mean I was entitled to make appalling puns.
It would be safe to say that most people would probably have sympathised with his point of view.
Finally, it was time to take too exhausted and way over excited children home. We were going to open the rest of their presents when we got home but Bundle was well and truly asleep by the end of the 20 minute drive so we ate soup and left the pile of unopened presents sent to the children by various relatives for Boxing Day.
As for presents we had opened, I have to give credit where it’s due to my parents, who, along with some other lovely gifts, gave us one of these:
26 December
Boxing Day started with a most enjoyable session of setting up the largest wooden train track that has ever been constructed in my lounge room or possibly the southern hemisphere. And really, the fact that some smarty pants in North Dakota once built a bigger one does not really diminish the achievement.
I didn’t actually have to do much as Bundle has developed the ability to design and build surprisingly complex multi-circuit linked train tracks with bridges and other such features with no need for parents to do much except occasionally ensure that the pieces are linking together properly.
Bundle is currently obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine and was very excited to receive a few more trains for his collection, including his current favourite, James the Red Engine. For those who don’t follow Thomas the Tank Engine that closely, the railway line where Thomas works is run by a mysterious figure known as the Fat Controller.
So, having supervised the setting up of the train track, I then got to watch Bundle run his trains around the track. Occasionally a train would stop for a conversation with the Fat Controller, both halves of which would be supplied by Bundle. In the case of the conversation featuring James the Red Engine, it went like this:
Fat Controller: Hello James, what’s your name?
James: Red
[Beat]
James: I brought lots of coaches, fat ’troller
I could listen to that stuff all day.
27 December to now
Felt tired but really pretty good about my life.
I hope you all had a good Christmas too.
posted by I'm not Craig at 10:36 PM
9 Comments:
Glad to hear it went well, and I could listen to that stuff all day too.. I have two nephews who were both Thomas freaks and also have plenty of that blue track stuff.. :)
Merry Christmas, INC. With our first child due in April, I'm reading your blog with great interest! Sounds like we're in for fun times in the years ahead.
That's magnificent stuff! I loved the conversation with the chicken.
And I am often dismayed by the modern prejudice against the humble pun. The first reaction of audiences is always to blame the punster. I say if you don't like puns it's your own fault! Fight the power. Uphold your right to pun because the pun is mightier than the sword.
Snoskred
A belated Merry Christmas to you. I tried to leave a message of that nature on your blog before Christmas, but blogger was in an even less helpful than usual mood and I couldn't even find your comments stream, let alone write in it.
Just in case that happens again, Happy New Year.
Groverjones
A huge congratulations to you and the lovely Mrs Groverjones, I'm very excited for the two of you.
I'm sure you probably already know a bunch of people who can tell you stuff, but if you ever have an pregnancy/childbirth/breastfeeding/raising young children related query, such queries should be left in the comments section or, if you prefer, emailed to notcraigorama@gmail.com (if using email I suggest leaving a comment saying check your email if you need an answer within say a week)
Is this going to affect the touring schedule of Valensi (the Band)?
Harpo
Thanks for your support on the whole pun issue (AND YES I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE)
My family does not have a prejudice against puns in general, just appalling ones, and oh my goodness did they hate the mule pun.
A very happy New Year to you.
I see no reason to postpone any of the dates booked so far for Valensi in 2007.
Anyway, last time I saw Magic Dirt, one of their children was rocking out on stage. And then there's the 'Tin Lids...'
I keep myself endlessly amused (and my companions endlessly mortified) with my very lame punning. I thought your drug mule was trippy!*
Have a new year just as wonderful as your christmas, INC!
xx
* Mule is also a type of shoe. I know! TOTALLY lame to explain a jokes; but you're a boy!
Grover
Now that someone has given Ms Fits a guitar for Christmas it's clear that Valensi (the band) is truly ready to rock. Confirm those tour dates now.
Meva
I am very glad that you explained the joke because I am indeed a boy and all shoe related puns should be explained very carefully indeed.
I hope you have a wonderful New Year too.
INCraig,
Was that a machine that makes pancakes, or omelettes? Could it do both? Why don't I have one?
Grizzlewick got a goodly portion of Geo Trax from his doting grandparents. He is highly impressed. Although mostly, it was a "very movie car day"* in our household
* direct quote, Grizzlewick
Giggles
Happy New Year. That machine, in addition to looking like a penguin, apparently makes waffles (in the shape of penguins).
I don't know whether anyone has ever had the courage, or the originality, to use it to make omelettes.
As to why you don't have one, I assume that you, like me, never imagined that such a thing existed.
I know I have said this before, but Grizzlewick is clearly adorable.
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