This year I decided I’d make something homemade for each of my kids for Christmas. And not just, like, toothpick picture frames… nay! I decided to make each kid an intricate gift that requires pinning and basting and sewing and hard liquor (if only I drank). Now, because I worry that my children are three of my four blog readers, I can’t tell you directly what these gifts are. But I will give you blurry picture clues and vague descriptions that will leave you puzzled and wanting to know more!

For Jachin I am attempting to make something that I’ve never made the likes of before. There is no pattern for this. I am winging it. And me + an idea + a sewing machine + winging it (almost always) = disaster. But I’m going for it.

These are squares of material. Think squares. Lots of them. Sewn together.

These are iron-on pages. You print out pictures of things, like… oh, I don’t know, Nintendo characters, and then iron them onto white squares. (That is dark blue minky behind there. Minky, if you are not familiar with it, is super-soft fuzzy material that feels like kittens rolled in cotton balls. Minky can often be sewn to the back of lots of squares that have been sewn together. You follow me?)

These are some of the iron-on pages. I know. Totally cute.

Shhh… no blabbing to Jachin.

Now we move on to Zoe. Zoe, as you may recall, wants nothing but Julie the American Girl for Christmas. I have it on good authority that Santa may be bringing the goods. Therefore, I am sewing Zoe something that has to do with this:

See? How they match?

And it goes with this:

Hello? Can you get more 70’s looking? I don’t see how.

And Deacon, well… okay, I’m not super-worried about Deacon reading my blog, so I’ll just flat out tell you what I’m making. (Plus, I actually work on it in front of him. Because he’s a baby. And two minutes after I’ve put it away, he’s forgotten about it. Because he’s a baby. And on Christmas day he’ll open it and be like all, Yay! I’m a baby and I’ve never seen this before in my life! )

It’s a Quiet Book. The Quiet Book that I started making when I was pregnant with Jachin. Yes, I have been working on this Quiet Book since 1998. Because have I told you how bad I am about finishing things I start? The Quiet Book is actually the token object that is referred to every time I embark on something new. Like, I will start ripping out everything in the boxes in the basement and labeling and color-coding and Jon will come down and look at me in the center of a disaster and say, “Umm, is this going to be like the Quiet Book?” And I’ll shoot him with my angry wife laser eyes. And then a week later I will have abandoned the color-coding labeling project and you won’t be able to walk around in our disaster-ridden basement.

Yeah, it’s like that.

But this Christmas is it! The Quiet Book will be completed! Jon will have a stroke! Pigs will fly by our windows on Christmas morning! And then we will shoot them and have fresh bacon!… but that’s something else entirely…

Okay, did you get a good look at creepy Jonah?

I guess a few days in a whale’s stomach would make you a little worse for wear.

Anyhoo… these are my current projects. Things that I have to finish before Christmas morning. Which — if I know anything about myself — means that I will be up until 3am Christmas Eve finishing them.

Are you making anything homemade for Christmas??

Clue #16 that your geek-itude is rubbing off on your children-

If you hear your children say the following while watching A Christmas Carol:

“Why is Captain Picard playing Scrooge?”

(If you do not understand the above clue, rest assured friend, you are not a geek.)

No one crying. No one hitting. No one whining. No one with their fingers up their nose or anyone else’s nose. Showered, hair brushed, and generally clean.

And it’s immortalized on film.

Score.

Tuesday night Jon, Jachin, and I went to the symphony. Utah Symphony was doing a performance called “Play! A Video Game Symphony” It was all video game music, all the time.

And it was amazing.

Who knew that video game music was so beautiful? Who knew that you could close your eyes and imagine a whole other world of sweeping, magical landscapes and winged creatures? Hmm, everyone but me, huh? Yeah, I’m not much of a gamer. But you didn’t have to be to appreciate the awesome music coming out of Abravanel Hall.

For the symphony, I told Jachin he had to wear fancy clothes. It was a problem because none of us really own fancy clothes. So I changed the requirement to “nice-ish” clothes. He came out of his room wearing his tuxedo shirt.

Good enough for me.

Also, when we asked him where he wanted to go to dinner for his fancy night out on the town, his response was “Subway”.

Never question the highness of our class.

This blog is in the middle of a face-lift, which included a host switch. Most everything made it “over” to the new host without incident or injury. Some stuff, however, did not. Like, for some reason you can’t read or leave comments on a lot of my stuff. Also, some of the picture links are broken. Jon informs me that this is because I have an “ancient version” of Wordpress. I have version .0023 or there abouts. See, while I have been hammering my posts into a hunk of granite using a rudimentary chisel (and then uploading an image of the granite), the rest of the world has been typing posts directly into their computers using something called a keyboard and then hitting something else called a “publish” button. I know, I’d never heard of it either.

Anyway, new themes are being sorted through and ideas are being fleshed out with my totally hot website designer (hi, hottie pants) and my blog will be shiny and awesome in a little while. The sad news? More of my stuff will probably fall off the face of the earth when we try to change over things.

*sigh*

I’m bummed. I hope it isn’t anything that I posted hoping never to forget. Because I probably already forgot it. And since it won’t be there any longer for me to find, I will forever be forgetting what I forgot.

I know, it hurts to follow my logic.

So stay tuned for exciting changes and lost memories!!

My old neighbor, Kristen, (I don’t mean old like, she is old, I mean old like she moved a while back and is no longer my neighbor…) did some pictures of the kids this morning. It was originally supposed to be a family shoot, with nice family pics for the Christmas card, but Jon decided to go get all sick. So instead it turned into a shoot for the kids. Kristen is the one who did my maternity shots and also the shots of Deac as a newborn. She is awesome! She has already put a few shots up from this morning on her new blog (she is good AND fast) and — holy cow — are they cute!

Umm, seriously? Could you die? The really amazing thing is that she even got this shot. He pulled that hat off over and over and screamed about it being on his head. She snapped this during the one split-second that he was not freaking out.

Yeah, she’s good.

I can’t believe that this used to be my baby. Now he has smoldering looks for the camera. Looks that don’t include his tongue hanging out or his eyes crossed (though he did try to pull that on her a few times… along with the wink and finger guns).

And Zoe did not want her photo shoot to end. She rocked the camera with all kinds of sassy poses and looks. She wore tu-tu’s in two different colors with coordinating scarves. It was high fashion, make no mistake.

Thank you, Kristen! You are amazing!

Ok, ok… I know that my word count has not moved. It stills sits blankly at zero. This is not actually a true representation of my novel. See, I’m re-working the same novel that I worked on for NaNoWriMo last year. Last year I logged nearly 14,000 words (which is a little more than zero), so it’s not like my novel is just some unembodied, imagined thing. It’s real, people. It has words in semi-coherent order. It has chapters, even! (Even though some of those chapter will be chopped out completely. Same thing with a character or two.)

The problem that I’m faced with is that I have 15,000+ words and the NaNoWriMo peeps frown on writers logging giant word counts. (Like, if I were to go from 0 to 15,000…) So I’ve logged nothing, fearful that if I do people will write nasty things about me on the NaNoWriMo message boards. Which, I know none of them so why should I care…? I don’t know, but I do. Anyhoo, it looks like I’ve been super lazy, when in fact I’ve been medium diligent. I’ve also submitted two more items to children’s magazines and I’m revising a third. So I’m not doing nothing.

One thing that I really need to do, but that I’ve been too pansy to try thus far, is to pick up the phone and call the famous rehab center here in town. I could really use a tour of their facility to get a clear picture in my head for my setting. I’m fearful that if I call and tell them that I’m a writer and want a tour for research, they will turn me down cold. Instead, I am planning an elaborate lie for them about how I have a alcoholic younger brother who steals from the mall and who’s tearing our family apart. (I’m currently holding auditions for the role of my alcoholic younger brother. My real-life, non-alcoholic little brother would play it too straight, I think.)

A fun side note: I found an interesting site, written by a talented, cute YA author. It’s a site dedicated to relaying what she’s learned about the writing process, start to published. I found it late last night, and I haven’t read through the entire thing (yet), but if you are in the process of writing a novel (or even thinking about it) it’s totally worth a read.

And now, more medium diligence.

It’s already starting to look a little like Christmas around here… not because it’s cold, or snowy, or because we’ve put up any decorations yet (I am staunchly opposed to Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving), but because my kids are acting like the 12 days of Christmas have already begun. “The Santa Clause” has been playing non-stop for the last 4 or 5 days. Christmas wish lists have been made, and recited repeatedly. And when I say “repeatedly”, I mean the kids have been rattling off their lists every moment that they are awake until they see my ears start to bleed (that’s how they know that the information has sunk in).

Topping Jachin’s list is a Robo dwarf hamster. It’s sort of like a cotton ball with tiny feet. It speaks a lot of his nature that he wants something cuddly and cute instead of, say, a large python that he could feed live Robo dwarf hamsters to. Beneath the hamster on the list are assorted video games, a few Lego sets, and a basketball hoop for the backyard. I almost passed out when I realized that he’s asking for not just one but several things that don’t require a charger or a WiFi connection. Could I have heard him wrong? But then my ears began to bleed and I realized that, nope, I heard his list correctly. All 82 times.

Zoe’s list is particularly amusing to me. She wants nothing but an American Girl. Julie Albright, the girl of 1974. Because Zoe has decided that she loves the 70’s. Particularly anything with a peace sign on it (which is technically more of a 60’s thing, but let’s not split hairs about ancient times…). What is also funny is that Zoe has never before owned a doll. Never. She’s had stuffed animals by the truck load, My Little Ponies are just as prolific here as Lego pieces, and she’s bought the occasional Barbie, but she’s never, ever owned a doll. She’s never owned anything that needs to be carried around and dressed in different outfits. (Truthfully, her Barbies are usually naked, and she’s fine with popping their heads off to create new and exciting creations.) See, Zoe has always been something of a tomboy. She can build a Lego structure and talk Pokemon with the best of them. I don’t know if it’s been entirely by choice or because she’s usually been surrounded by boys… but she is most comfortable dressing in cute skirts and flowery hair bows, and then going out to throw rocks in the street or roll in the dirt with the boys. She’s a prissy tomboy, if there is such a thing.

So when she asked for Julie — and only Julie, she wants nothing else — for Christmas, I was a little surprised. I wondered if it would pass. I wondered if she just had a temporary longing because some girl at school mentioned how cool her’s was. But when the American Girl catalog came in the mail and she spotted Julie, it really went into full-throttle.

Plus, y’know, the whole thing about how she loves the 70’s.

“Do you know how much I want Julie?” she asks me.

“Yes, I think I get it,” I say.

“No, like, do you really know how much I want her? I want her so much I can’t stand it!”

“I can’t stand it, either.”

I hear about Julie every day. All day. Zoe carries the catalog to school. She eats breakfast with the catalog opened to the Julie page. She watches TV with the Julie page.

She — I am not joking — tucks in her catalog when she goes to bed at night.

Since she can’t yet play with a real Julie doll, she plays with a picture of the Julie doll.

But I know that excitement she feels. I know it perfectly. I remember the year that my sisters and I wanted Cabbage Patch Kids so badly that we thought we would literally explode from the expectation. We would all lie in bed at night and describe what our dolls would look like, what their names would be, what we would do with them. Every night. For about two months leading up to Christmas. I think we would have combusted from disappointment if we wouldn’t have gotten them that year. But we did. I’m pretty sure I cried and/or peed when I opened mine. (My sisters were just as excited as I was, but they aren’t nearly as emotional as I am. They are actually kind of hard-asses. Even as small children…)

So when I see Zoe talking to her magazine and giving her magazine picture a stuffed animal to sleep with at night, it just makes me smile.

I’m really, really hoping Santa comes through.

Apparently all you have to do to get an all-elusive “yes letter” from a magazine is to blog about how you’ve always gotten nothing but rejection letters. About how you’ve resigned yourself to a life of constant no’s and suppressed bitterness. You just have to mock yourself and strut around shouting insults at yourself in a semi-humorous, self-deprecating manner.

The writing gods love that belittling stuff. They eat it up. They eat it up after they slather it with gravy. And then — apparently — they wipe their messy mouths and take a small moment to smile down on you.

Tada!

A submission agreement! Someone is purchasing my crap… err, I mean, quality story! It is a good story (I’m not saying the writing is stellar, but the story is a good one). It’s based on the time Jachin sold a bunch of his toys to raise money for his preschool classmate who had cancer. And yes, that’s a true story. (See picture below.) Back before Jachin became obsessed with video games, he sold his own toys for charity. Or maybe that’s why he got into video games, because he had sold all of his toys. Well, whatever… the point is: yay!

And now, since it is NaNoWriMo, I appeal once more the writing gods… are you guys listening?? I’m crap. My stuff is crap! Hear me? Garbage! Listen to me being snarky and self-deprecating! I stink, yo! Now, if you could help me finish my novel this month and push it through to a fast publish (in twenty languages… that would be cool), I would totally owe you one. Also, if you could help me out with a National Book Award, I’d go brunette or something.

Seriously though, internets, if you want to watch my word counter over there on the right and crack the whip at me every few days, that would be helpful. And if you shout insults at me while you crack the whip, that may help even more. Or it could just make me cry. We’ll have to see.

Before video games and lost teeth:

keep smiling…