Titi time, showing him how to Bucky
gift exchange
Over some months of time I have been admittedly dreading Christmas gift exchange. I am not good at getting gifts for people and probably even worse at wrapping them. So, sorry to our gift recipients in advance…but after taping the last box up tonight with masking tape, because why would you ever have enough scotch tape around Christmas???,
I realized how much I thought about the names we picked out of the hat over the last weeks, and that through the course of my sometimes insanely busy days, I wouldn’t have thought as much about these family members in the last few months. So maybe that it is what Christmas is all about… sitting on a dirty kitchen floor shabbily wrapping a gift and realizing how much you really do love your family, even the ones you don’t see so much, if not for what they are to you in the present moment, but for everything you have shared.
Control
I have always thought that I was a go with the flow kind of gal, until I met my new class of Kinders. There are 25 of them, all lovely in their own right. They are comprised of 7 girls and 18 boys. And there is at least one of every kind in there. We’re kind of like a box of 64 crayons with every shade of pink or purple or pastel removed.
But ironically I tend to learn more from my students than I think I teach them at times, and sometimes giving them control is okay. Except you don’t give them the trucks. They break the toy trucks.
I think being Midwestern means not really wasting food. Also, the crockpot is probably any Midwestern woman’s secret lover. Hot, steamy steel-cut oats with apples (the ones you would no longer eat plain) and cinnamon sticks.
In the crock pot you have to use 4x as much water as steel cut oats. I added about a half cup of my son’s whole milk to make it a bit creamier.
The Milwaukee Brewer slugger Ryan Braun becomes the first player known to successfully have a positive test result overturned and will not be suspended for 50 games.
