Tippy Toes and Tantrums

How to Pick the Right Holiday Card

Christmas lights have gone on display at my local big box store, making the holiday season fair game. It's always out there early and people complain, but that doesn't stop the hordes from buying gifts or thinking about holiday menus. This is clear by the amount of holiday-related content on Pinterest, making it pretty much a scientific fact that we like to get a jump on the holidays. People don't want to zoom past the Fall, but they're eager to look ahead to the fun to come too. This is my favorite time of year. I love the change from hot to cool weather (yet to happen here), the crispness of the cool air (also, coming soon?), the smell of fireplaces in the distance, and knowing that the big three - Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas - are soon to come. It's no coincidence that my photographer friends have been booked for weeks as families pose for the perfect photo to adorn their holiday cards. 

Some people (my husband used to be one of them) think of a holiday card as just that, a card, a social obligation, but they are really little works of art that reflect you. Roll your eyes all you want. I'm not saying your family is a brand and you are the marketing exec in charge of the account...but you kinda are.

How to Pick the Card Size Right for You

First, go through your photos for the year and pick out favorites and the ones that best define your year. Everyone loves to see a photo, unless it comes from a certain relative of mine who uses pictures from about 10 years ago before old age kicked in. To that person I say: we are all on to you! For the rest of us, sometimes that means a crying, full freak out tantrum picture. These don't have to be color coordinated, perfect smile goodness. Natural photos are always best, and everyone will appreciate your inclusion of less than J.Crew catalog perfect photos. I am toying with the idea of using a photo of my kids' dirty feet after they return home from school, but it may be more frightening than entertaining. Last year I included a photo of my son standing next to a bathtub full of gum balls with a look in his eyes that says everything he was thinking. The problem was that his hair got somehow parted in front, making him look something like this:

I'm glad I got over the bangs and went with the emotion of the photo. It worked well in the card.

Next, trim down the list. Pick the best of the best. Do they reflect what you want to communicate? Are they high enough quality for printing? Do any necessary editing or cropping. Once you have your picture or pictures, it's finally the fun part.

If you have one photo that you love more than all others, or if you have a cohesive theme, go with a flat card. This isn't a low quality, one-sided photo card that gets dinged up in the mail. The Tiny Prints flat cards are beautiful. I expect that as my kids get older and less inclined to let me take their photos (bribes only go so far), we may use a flat card instead. The flat cards have a lot going for them, including price and ease of display.

If you have a few photos and you like the feel and look of a traditional folded card, go for it. They have tons of personality, they provide plenty of room inside for a note, and they stand up on their own, which is how people display their holiday cards. Many of Tiny Print's flat cards can be ordered as folded cards as well, so don't worry about falling in love with a design for fear that you can't use it.

 

If you have multiple photos, especially multiple large photos, and if you want to show off some great picks, or create something unique, the tri-fold is the winner.

I couldn't find one picture that said everything I wanted in a holiday card last year. I wanted to tell the story of the year, through pictures and text, but I couldn't with a standard one or two photo card. Then I fell in love with Tiny Print's tri-fold. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was the right card for me. I put in a lot of photos - 12 in all - plus text reporting what the kids were up to, what we did as a family, and ending with well wishes for the season. Nearly a year later, I still love that card. My mom would call asking me to send one to this or that friend, one of whom kept it on her refrigerator beyond the holidays despite the fact that I haven't seen her in over 15 years and she's never met my kids. A friend of mine contacted me after receiving the card to say that she felt she caught up with us through the card, which was exactly my intent.

I've picked out some favorite tri-folds for this year, although many of these work best for a few, larger photos. Since I may have a high number of smaller photos, I may go with one of these. After I go through the past few months of my photos to pick out ones that represent the year, then I'll know which card to pick. Last year I fell in love with a tri-fold featuring a few bigger photos, but when I plugged my pictures in, it didn't work. I ended up changing to a different card and photo layout that worked beautifully. Even though I'd ruled the card out before, once I got my pictures in, the colors matched so well that they looked specifically tailored for each other.

Kevin said he knew I'd never be able to go back to a standard card again, but that's not true because I love the beautiful simplicity of flat cards just as much. My biggest problem is that I'm indecisive.

Disclosure: Tiny Prints is giving me 50 free cards in exchange for my holiday card review. I've been a huge fan of Tiny Prints for years, well before I was ever given a free card. Tiny Prints quality is high and their customer service is top notch. I am a paying Tiny Prints customer outside of the free holiday cards.

This Old House, My Version

 

We need to decide - like now - whether to move or remodel. I don't want to move, partially because I'm lazy and when moving, people would expect me to carry things, but also because of this one amazing feature that our current home has: a view. During the past seven years in this house, I've grown quite fond of looking out over a hill instead of another house. There are many downsides to living on a hill, including no sidewalks or space for kids to play in the street (or, if you're my mother, the terrorizing fear of knowing my kids will one day be teenagers driving up and down our curvy roads), but it has an expansive view with a value that is hard to quantify. Actually, it's probably easy to quantify from a real estate stand point, but that doesn't say what it has done for me, sitting outside under the wide open sky, entertaining friends on our front deck, looking out to see giant rainbows after a storm, watching the fog roll in or just staring out at something beautiful when my day most needs it. This view has ruined traditional neighborhoods for me.

I miss trick-or-treating on our street, block parties, comparing Christmas lights, and all the neighborly fun that comes from a traditional street, according to the soup parties and other get togethers highlighted in Sunset Magazine, but without a view, it feels claustrophobic to me. Or maybe that's because in our last neighborhood, the unofficial neighborhood watch was a little intense. I'd walk in the door and the phone would ring immediately with the neighbor across the street wanting to chat after seeing me return home, no matter about the groceries I was holding. Another across the street neighbor in our old 'hood never watered his yard, ever, so it was always brown, which clashed against his black house that needed to be repainted a decade before. It looked haunted. This is one of the reasons why I appreciate my view. Or there was the family behind us who would unabashedly watch us from their second story window, as though we were putting on a play for them in our kitchen. Now, I have to climb a hill and walk 50 yards to see our back neighbor. I cannot risk going back to our old neighborhood lifestyle. They are what drove us uphill, after all.

Still, we looked online at houses. No house is perfect, and even with significantly more money, factoring in the amount we'd spend renovating this one, the houses I saw still needed an upgraded kitchen, significant landscaping or other work, which would not be in the budget. While we could afford to move to more affluent towns nearby, I don't want to. I like our little community and the friends we've made here.

The pros on staying and renovating are winning.

Living with a Five Year Old Con Man

The phone rang after Rocket was asleep and Clover's bedtime was near. Kevin saw from the caller ID that the call was coming from his cell phone. He answered to the sound of muffles. It was like during a horror movie when it's clear the call is coming from inside the house. He ran into Rocket's room, where he was supposed to be sleeping, but instead Rocket was in bed, playing with kevins iPhone under the covers. Busted.

The next day, minutes after he got home from school, Rocket was suspiciously trying to get under one of the ottomans in our family room. [Ed. note: it should really be ottomen, right? But I looked it up and the correct plural is ottomans, which sounds so wrong.] As I walked quickly toward him, he assured me he was "doing nothing." I found a pack of Raisels that he'd nabbed from the kitchen. "I would have given you a pack, had you asked," I told him as I walked the box back into the kitchen.

When I went to the kitchen, he went toward the front of the house, and after what we'd been through, I quickly checked on him. "Just going to the bathroom, mom," he said, super depressed sounding from behind the closed bathroom door. It was silent, not like when he uses the hand soap to coat the entire bathroom as part of his helpful "cleaning." I walked away, worried he was coming down with something.

I got played. I got played by a five year old. This kid gets me time and time again.

Within minutes, I got an email from a friend that said, "oh?" It was in response to an email from my account that was pure gibberish. For a split second it thought I'd been hacked, but then I remembered the boy in the bathroom. Also, it helped that at the end of the gibberish, it said, Sent from my iPod.

I ran to the bathroom, and pushed the door open, to see him sitting on the toilet with my iPod. He quickly put it low behind his back. I had to walk in slowly, like I was talking someone off the ledge because if he dropped the iPod into the toilet, it would be done. I don't care if the iPod could be saved or how many bleach wipes scrubbed it, it would be unusuable to me. I wouldn't even be able to fish it out without our long barbeque tongs. Calmly I asked for him to hand me the iPod, and he did. Then he screamed from his perceived injustice of it all while he moved to a new seat for a time out.

I'm starting to feel like a prison warden.

Make Your Own Lapdesk (Super Easy, I Promise)

When it's not winter, I don't really appreciate my laptop giving me third degree burns on my thighs while I work at night from my cozy chair. Putting something under it would solve the problem, but I wanted my laptop raised too, to make typing easier, which required something thicker than the magazine I'd been using to protect my legs. This started my search for a reasonable lapdesk. I wanted to buy one, but I looked everywhere and could not find the one.

Soon, I found these directions (downloadable at the bottom of her post), which are truly easy and require minimal sewing. A lot of DIY templates involved screws or building a cup holder, all bells and whistles I did not need. This was straight up cutting, sewing, and hot gluing. I decided to make three: one for me, one for Clover, who is always writing, drawing, or reading, and one for Rocket, who would feel left out otherwise.

The hardest part was getting the wood cut at Home Depot. They'll cut it for free, but tracking down an employee to do it is almost impossible at our local store. I nearly gave up, which is when an employee who is not the usual cutter took pity on me (or felt his life threatened when I trapped him in the pre-fab fence aisle) and cut them without quite knowing what he was doing. The measurements are a little off due to the guy's inexperience, and he used black Sharpie to make his measurement marks, but I got my slab of wood cut into threes, which is what mattered.

Kevin sanded the edges for me, to make them perfect and to avoid sharp corner pokes. I tried sealing the top of the boards, but it was absorbed by the MDF wood and made it look kind of streaky, so I made that the bottom and used the unfinished side as the top. I went with MDF instead of real wood because of the weight. I held other boards at Home Depot, but they had too much heft for something I wanted on my lap.

I wanted my pillow part bigger than those used in the directions, so I experimented a little with each one until I got it about right with mine. I may have gone overboard slightly, as the kids make fun of my large pillow. But screw them, because I have full coverage and they don't. I glued the fabric (with sewn corners) to poster board, filled the pillow with bean bag filler (after I debated for days over the merits of foam, Polyfill or bean bag filler until Kevin told me I was over-thinking it), then hot glued it all to the pre-cut board.

It's an easy project and the perfect solution to my problem. The kids love theirs, and they're portable, so they can move them from room to room and potentially even into the car, if I felt remotely okay with pens or Crayons in my car.

Trying to Be the Quiet Soccer Mom

We host an annual Super Bowl party because I love football and throwing parties, but the unmentioned reason is because I yell at the TV. It's awful, I don't know what to say other than my dad does it too, but when you get used to yelling while watching games, it's hard to turn that feature off. It's especially hard when you're watching your young child play a sport, which I would have thought would be the easier time to just enjoy the game, but really, when they are older and are actually playing and have serious refs, it's much easier to sit back and watch. Rocket's soccer games look more like a rugby match, and they are only overseen by the coaches. Which means when a player on the other team starts straight-arming opponents, knocking them down while looking for approval from his family on the sidelines, it's a little hard not to yell.

Clover's game was easy to stay quiet, even as the other team dominated them. It was easy to sit back and watch the girls play. The girls are at an age where they know what they're doing, they're trying to be fair, refs were on plays that weren't, Clover's team looked like they were playing the sport for the first time. Before the game began, Clover volunteered to be goalie. I held my breath. They'd done zero goalie training this season and Clover had just moved up an age division from a younger group where the rules were much looser. Now goalies need to respect the lines, do proper kicks, and most harrowing, defend penalty kicks. Just minutes into the game, under some confusion, a teammate picked up the ball (she was going to do the goal kick and didn't realize it was live), prompting a penalty kick. All of the girls had to move back behind the lines, while one opponent moved forward about 10 feet to take the kick. Clover, confused, was directed to the goal line. Everyone was quiet, with only the two girls on stage. The whistle blew, the girl kicked the ball cleanly into the corner. Or so it seemed. She'd moved before the whistle, forcing a rekick. Once again: boom, boom, boom. Another goal, practically in exactly the same spot. It was only one goal, but it felt like two. Clover hunched her shoulders and started to cry. Her teammates tried to console her, the opponents' parents cheered her, but I still couldn't breathe because if I did, the real tears would begin for me too. This is the hard part of being a spectator.

My friend said last season that she wished she could be seven again, just for that soccer game, so she could go in to dominate the hell out of it.

I know exactly how Clover felt because the same thing happened to me in fifth grade. I was on a good soccer team, so good that there were rarely goals kicked against me as goalie. One day, Jody, our best player, a girl so tough that she could have easily beaten the boys, shoved an opponent, forcing a penalty kick. I remember thinking that Jody should have had to defend the shot since it was her fault that I was in this mess. But there I was, with everyone watching as the opponent charged the ball. I moved to my right, but not enough because the ball smacked the ends of my fingers and deflected into the goal. My hand stung and I cried, embarrassed that I'd let my team down. My friend Julie came over to tell me that it wasn't my fault. I don't remember crying during a game ever again.

After the game, we talked about it with Clover and commended her for being brave enough to be the first goalie. At practice, her coach told her he tried to be a goalie when he was young, only to have seven goals scored against him in his first game. She recovered soon enough, but the question is whether or not she'll ask to be goalie again. I want her to overcome any fears and try it again, but at the same time, it's hell to watch from the sidelines. For now, I'm staying quiet. 

First Day, New Chapter

The school year is underway, finally. The kids were excited and nervous, both up early and ready to go before I got out of the shower.

We got to school early and waited for one of Clover's teachers to open the door, while she fiddled her hair and let out great sighs, the only signs that she was a little anxious. Once a teacher opened the door, she disappeared with her classmates to start their lives as fourth graders.

Fourth grade is the great transition year. At least I remember it being that way. Like Clover, my fourth grade teacher was also male, he had a couch in his classroom, signifying his late-1970s coolness, and he cooked with us during the school year. This was a stark contrast to the female teachers at the school, and kids who were assigned to his class were lucky. We all knew that. The classroom was in the center cluster of rooms at the school, unintentionally signifying the end of young childhood as we left the younger grades behind and transitioned into the older grades with the kids who seemed much more mature, though they were only a year ahead of us. It was the year between hopscotch and tight Chemin De Fe jeans with a plastic comb in the back pocket. We collected and traded stickers, the last vestige of childhood. It was the year that we started caring about clothes, hair and what our peers thought. We may have cared some before, but the intensity started to pick up in fourth grade. 

Clover's year is similar. Her teacher is known for being laid back, including his first day of school tradition of showing the Simpsons and giving the kids Ho-Hos. I know it will be a transitional year for her, but it just hit me today. Dropping off Clover at fourth grade was much bigger than Rocket at kindergarten. Clover is taking a big step ahead and there is no slowing down the progress.

The only small sadness in dropping off Rocket was how much he did not care. I had to hunt Rocket down outside to say goodbye, and even then it was from a 20 foot distance as he waved over his shoulder while running with friends.

Within minutes, I was alone. I jumped into my car and possibly yelled, "Adios, suckers!" to my friends still with their kids. One person asked what I'd do with all of my free time. "Catching up on years of recorded Oprahs!" I answered. What the hell? I work and even if I didn't work, someone has to do the laundry and cooking around here.

Once home, before jumping into the long list of unanswered emails awaiting me, I made my family Mikey's Peanut Butter Pie to celebrate this important week. My kids start school, finally alone, I get to work in peace or sit at home painting my nails (depending upon what people think that at home moms do), and Kevin started working at a new company this week too. It's a week of transition. All good.

Now to catch up with Judge Judy.

The Finish Line is Near

School begins tomorrow! There are not enough exclamation points to fully express how I feel. I imagine it's like running the last half mile of a marathon: sure, my nipples are bleeding and I've crapped myself, but I can see the finish line.

For the last day, I planned a day trip to Stinson Beach, but Clover wanted to work on Lego all day, and Rocket decided he hates getting wet at the beach (the sand stays glued to him forever, like he's a small, walking craft project). I compromised with Half Moon Bay, but the weather is supposed to be cold and cloudy all day, so I gave up, which was when both kids changed their minds about the beach. Clover suggested instead we go see the final Happy Potter movie before it leaves the theater. Rocket is too young for such a dark movie, and she casually said, "That's fine, he can stay out." I don't know if she meant at home, in the car, or outside of the theater door, regardless, I don't think the girl has a career as a social worker ahead of her.

As a final compromise, I'm taking the kids to Johnny Rockets for lunch, after a morning of Lego play. I do not like Johnny Rockets, but my kids do. I hope they see this as proof of how deeply I love them, especially as I feign joyful surprise as the server makes each of us a ketchup happy face even though both of my kids are engrossed in their coloring paper. I only act interested to make the server feel better, which is messed up, because I think all of us - me, the kids, and the server - would love to skip the ketchup happy face part of the meal.

Oh well, one more day.

One Week Until School Begins

I'm finally able to see the light. The day after Labor Day brought another wave of first day of school photos on Facebook and Twitter, but I've reached the point where I can cope because the end of summer is near.

This optimism is in part, due to the fact that my kids are are my parents' house. I pick them up tomorrow, but it was enough of a break to restore my sanity. As my parents drove away on Saturday evening, with the kids in the backseat, Rocket yelled from the open window, "ENJOY YOUR TIME WITH NO ONE SCREAMING!" He couldn't leave without firing one last shot.

The next few days are busy with activity and chaos, and worst of all, trying to shift our schedules so that everyone gets moving earlier in the morning. With the kids gone, I've slept in, waking up on Sunday at 9 a.m. It reminded me of when Kevin and I went to Paris years ago, leaving an almost-two year old Clover with my parents. We slept the first three days, in a coma of jet lag, time difference, and parental exhaustion. It was the kind of hibernation where you wake up, not knowing if it's night or day and you don't really care. We only left our room for two meals a day until I put an end to it, fearing we'd return from France, only to tell people that we slept for 10 days.

It's time to wake up from summer. In a few days, the trip is over. Thank god.