Last Saturday, we had Santa Shop. Now, I ended up helping with Santa Shop purchasing/set-up until about 11:15 PM last Friday night. K and I had to be back up to the school on Saturday morning to start the coffee, get the hot dogs cooking (yes, we sell hot dogs right from the start) and to get the 5th grade concessions all set. We were there until 2:15 PM.
This is where I should add a photo of my child's Lego contest submission, but I failed to get one. I will tell you that it had Santa's sleigh with a motorized propeller with a "push here" button, Lego peeps all dressed up in Hershey Kiss wrapper dresses and some lovely Christmas trees. Baby girl won! Hooray! Mama should have taken a photo.
We had the family house cleaning session that evening. Yes, our house is cleaned and picked up, but when you are having 12 people over to your house, you make sure the corners are free of cobwebs and that you've wiped all of the hand prints off of the light switches, walls, doors and woodwork that you normally don't see. We worked together and got things all set.
I might add that at this point I was beat and Hubs even asked why I over schedule myself.
The tea was lovely and the desserts were delicious. (I ask my guests to bring a dessert to share since I'm cooking everything else.) The variety was wonderful!
I had enough soup leftover to give Julia some for her birthday on Monday and Matt enjoyed it for lunch for his birthday on Tuesday. (Coworkers.) I had it Sun-Tues. It was delightful, but I could not finish the rest. Too much soup.
What kind of soup was it? It was Butter Bean, Bacon and Button Mushroom soup. (My coworker made it for us to have for dinner on a late decorating night.) It was broth based with Worcester sauce and brown sugar in the broth and that was it. For the crowd I had, the soup recipe I made was:
Toni's Butter Bean, Bacon and Button Mushroom Soup
3 x 6 oz packages of little button mushrooms
7 cans butter beans WITH the bean water
1 pound sliced, cooked & cooled bacon (I drained it twice and blotted it twice.)
About 10 shakes of Worcester Sauce
About 1/2 cup brown sugar
Clean your mushrooms. Cook up your bacon. Put those into a crock-pot along with all beans WITH bean water. Throw in some Worcester Sauce (to taste) and brown sugar. Cook on low until done. My coworker said NOT to add more water, but I did a little. I also added some shredded carrots for color.
Delicious!
K played in her first harp "recital" the other day. She was upset that she missed a few notes. She told me that the camera flashes distracted her. I told her that it was her first experience ever in doing such a thing and that I thought she did a fantastic job. I might add that I didn't even notice the missing few notes.
The harp students then joined the rest of the 5th grade for a recorder concert. It sounds pretty cheesy, but the kiddos did a good job! They are working hard to learn songs to play with the symphony at a local theater here in the spring.
So it brings me to today. This past week was busy, as usual and I needed to stop and take care of some Christmas things. We've been wrapping and taking inventory. I had to make sure I had everything for everyone. I have one giant bag packed for my mom's house. (Christmas for 4 families and Christmas Eve.) I also have make-up birthday gifts in there for any birthdays that may not have been celebrated in mass this year.
Whew.
I also picked up a few extra names for the Christmas Eve exchange at my mom's house. Thankfully, the shelf extras I had filled those in nicely.
I have clothes. They are clean. They are on deck for folding after the extravaganza of wrapping is complete. My folding this week kind of flew out the door. My people have been hunter-gatherer in clean laundry baskets for the last two days. I really must fix that.
I suppose that I should probably figure out what will be for dinner. A nice slow roasted chicken might be in order. I can tell you, though-- I'm not leaving the house. We'll work with what we have here. The one of two times of year I wear sweat pants happens to be today along with a holiday fleece sweatshirt. I'm toasty, but I look like I fell off of the back of a pumpkin truck. My hair is wound up into a ball on the back of my head and I have no make-up on. I'm not going forth to share this look with anyone.
