Ahem. Well, evidently I suck at this. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love this idea, and I fully intended to follow through with it, but December just isn’t a great time for me to set aside time to shoot and blog every single day. First of all, it is a crazy-busy time for me at work. So for a week, the only views I had were of large piles of papers to and the tops of my students’ heads as they bent over their final exams.
One serious hindrance to this month’s project was the fact that it got really friggin cold. In years past the cold has not bothered me all that much, but this year I just did not have the incliniation to freeze my tootsies to take pics… it might have been worth it if we had had anything other than what seemed like three solid weeks of grey gloom. But pretty much any picture taken any day in December would have looked exactly like this…
I actually happen to like this shot a lot, but not enough to go out and reproduce it a couple dozen times. In fact, I shot it through my living room window. And since all the beautiful foilage was gone, I just couldn’t get inspired to go outside and find something pretty in all that grey. I got so desperate, I did take pics of rocks. These rocks were no particularly special find. They are literally seven steps from my front door.
I suppose I could have shot more pics inside my house, but [CONFESSION:] I am never happy with the way my indoor photos look. In fact, I am often quite unhappy with them. Everything comes out looking brown and orangey. Brown is the dominant color in my living room, but not as brown/orange as the pics always look. It’s more of a warm, woodsy look in reality.
For the first three days of my Christmas break, my December view was mostly a blur of various retail locations. Grocery, department, grocery, department, grocery… you get it, right? Let’s just say that the view was of a shopping cart and a fistful of receipts. Sad thing is, I had already begun shopping before break began… it’s not like I was waiting until the last minute or anything.
One of the highlights during this time, however, is that the girls and I met Charlie. This is Charlie.
Charlie is 3.3 pounds of perpetual motion. Whereas my puppy is so big and clumsy that she can knock you off balance with a tail wag, Charlie can run all of over you and you barely even feel it. Charlie is so small, even his little poo-poo didn’t stink. Charlie could be eaten by mosquito. I’m fairly confident that we could never introduce Charlie and Tula because Tula would crush him with her mere exuberance. I knew I really liked Charlie when he tinkled on LMG. I don’t know why this is so. Maybe it’s because she was so digusted by it. Maybe it’s because I am still recovering from an especially nasty diaper blowout at an Outback Steakhouse when she was four months old. Maybe it’s because it was such a wee little wee-wee… I found it… charming. Anyway, Charlie is cool.
So after Charlie and shopping, the next two and a half days looked like this.
This might seem like a good thing, right? But I made such an insane amount of cookies… sugar, no-bakes, chocolate chips with nuts, chocolate chips without nuts, rice crispy treats… holy crap. I must pause to say here that I have neglected to relate in this blog my deep and abiding love for cookies. This love is well known to my family, and especially my coworkers. I have no shame is making a swift beeline down the hall at the mere whisper that there are cookies in the teachers’ lounge. So you understand that when I say that I baked so many cookies that I actually threw three full tins of them away because I was making myself sick on them… And that what was leftover after two family dinners, too. That’s how many cookies I baked. It was cookiepalloza. It was too much.
By the time I had exorcized the Betty Crocker demon, it was Christmas Eve. We were successful in having a day at home without a lot of harried, last minute spending based on the guilt of having almost forgotten somebody, but it was still chock full of cleaning and pre-cooking the Christmas meal. By this point, I had been on break for five days, and I was getting awfully tired… happy (mostly), full of the Christmas spirit (pretty much), but I was ready to just sit down. It was my goal to be finished, completely finished, by 6 pm, so I could enjoy a quiet evening with John and the girls watching Christmas movies until it was time to tuck the girls in and get ready for Santa’s arrival. I was successful in that I was on the couch by 6, and I was asleep by 7.
And, somehow, these make all the running, baking, shopping, cleaning, and craziness worthwhile:
This poster of puppies was so very exciting because it was the first gift she opened that morning.
Although her interests are expanding, she adores horses… still.
This pic looks as though she is unhappy, but it’s more a look of disbelief. This was her big gift from us, and she is so proud of it.
This is SL waiting with her eyes shut as Daddy rolled in her last and biggest gift into the living room. It was too big to wrap and keep under the tree.
And this is SL upon her first glance of her very own, brand new, purple bicycle. I almost missed it because she lept up in excitement. Words cannot describe how happy I am that we captured that reaction.
These are the only December Views that really matter.
It was a very, very good day.
I hope you got everything you wanted.
I did.
whatever is lovely 