Christmas Eve Recap

I did a lot of baking in the weeks leading up to Christmas.  But none of it was for us.

It was for teachers . . .

. . . nursery workers . . .

. . . neighbors . . .

. . . and other assorted folk.

But we did have a lovely Christmas Eve dinner, just for us.

Hope you all had a lovely holiday.  A very happy New Year to you.

Sugar it up!

When the kids--ours and a few other people's--started to get a little energetic last night, Stephen said, "We better get them dessert."

Normally, I would question the notion that adding sugar to an already over-energized crowd of under-tens will somehow help.

But, last night, it actually did.

We decorated cupcakes for dessert.

It was fun.

There is, I suppose, a point past which a cupcake becomes un-yummy in its overdecoration.

But we didn't seem to get there last night.

Everyone enjoyed their creations.

And then they all played quietly (no, really!) for another hour.

Say What?

I love the learning-to-talk stage.

There's something to love about (almost) every stage of your child's life, if you look for it.  Some years you have to look harder than others.  But the learning-to-talk stage doesn't take much work to enjoy.

New words and sentences come out of Amos's mouth almost every day, and we're constantly saying, "Wait, what?  When did he learn THAT?"

We're also constantly saying, "Wait, what?  What are you trying to say?  I just don't understand."

Like this morning.

Amos said, "Eee pa, grrrr."

"What, sweetie?"

"Eee pa, grrrrrrrr."

"I don't understand."

"Eee PA, grr."

"I'm sorry, I just . . ."

"EEEEE PA! GRRRRRRR!"

"Panda says grrr?"

:points emphatically at the empty middle of the room:

"I'm just not getting it, baby boy."

:points, screaming:
 "EEE PA! GR!"

And I finally looked out of the window and saw . . .

The squirrel was eating my lettuce plants.

I'm pretty sure he'd had half a salad while watching me not understand Amos.  I think I saw him smirk.

He'll stop smirking when he gets a peek at my google search history.

"Hunting season squirrel Alabama."
"How to field dress a squirrel."
"Brunswick stew recipe."
"Tanning squirrel hides."

Anyway, some days, communication goes more smoothly than others.  But it's fun to watch Amos grow in confidence that he can communicate with us.

Experiments

I made some cupcakes this weekend.

I wanted to try a few new things, since I felt as though I was getting into a cupcake rut.

So, I tried this recipe for salted caramel buttercream.  It was very nice.  Maybe a little subtle with the caramel flavor, especial in comparison with the other cupcake I made.

Oh my gracious heavens, this cupcake was insane.

Okay, the cupcake on the left is a chocolate cupcake with the aforementioned salted caramel buttercream.  It really was a nice cupcake.

The cupcake on the right is a lime-coconut cupcake with a lime buttercream.

The lime-coconut cupcake was just your standard 1-2-3-4 cake batter, with coconut milk substituted for the milk, a little lime zest and coconut extract added with the liquid ingredients, and about half a cup of shredded coconut added at the end.  It was pretty subtle in both the lime and the coconut departments.

I may as well have made plain white cake, because it was the buttercream that did it.

I made my usual French buttercream recipe.

Then I zested and juiced two limes.  I added the zest to the finished buttercream, which made for a very subtle, but very nice, vaguely lime-ish flavor.  If you wanted to stop there, you could.  No one would say, "Oh, this is lime!" But everyone would say, "Oh, this is good!  What's that flavor in the background?"

Well, then I took the juice and boiled it down until it was syrupy.  I added the syrup to the buttercream.

It was yowza.

I probably would use a smidge less of the condensed lime juice next time.  It was perhaps a little too assertively lime.  Or if I did it this way again, I would put it on a little more flavorful cupcake--something that could really stand up to the lime.

And it did make the buttercream a little soft.  It started to slump pretty quickly in our warmer-than-room-temperature kitchen.

But I will definitely do buttercream this way again.  Just not until I lose the seventy-eight pounds I gained "sampling" and "testing" this one.  ("You know, it's for company.  I'd better make sure it really does taste okay.")

Brudders

Theo, on the other hand . . .

These are such sweet names for a Sunday School group.

Something tells me, though, that long about December of Theo's third grade year, it will occur to someone to rename the groups something else.

Something like Third Grade Quiet Lifers and Fourth Grade Contemplatives.

Just a guess.

During. And more during.

After all the work Stephen and Isaac did pulling down the sickly, thin, and annoying trees, there were still some serious problems with the trees.

There were several trees, like this one, that were just dead or dying.

And most of the rest were hackberry trees, which have a tendency to rot and split and generally make life difficult.

So we decided to take thirteen of the weakest and least healthy trees out.

The tree guys came, and very sensibly marked which ones we wanted gone.

And then on the appointed day, they came, all seven of them, with their bucket truck and Bobcat and ropes and pulleys and fourteen (!) chainsaws.

First they dropped the easy trees.  Right in the middle of the yard, without, like, measuring it or anything.

They used the Bobcat to help them cut it into pieces.

Then they brought out the bucket truck.

And we all watched . . .

(some of us more nervously than others)

. . . as they cut down the trickier trees.

I will admit that I got a little nervous at this point, too.

The guy in the bucket seemed less concerned for his safety than, perhaps, he ought to have been.

He kept leaning right out of the bucket, with the chainsaw in one hand, just lopping off big old branches.

I mean, he was really leaning.  Really far out of the bucket.  Using a chainsaw one-handed.

I found this a little stressful.  (But nothing went wrong, and we're all grateful for that.)

There were a few trees that needed an even more elaborate setup.

There were pulleys and anchors and a bobcat pulling rope and all kinds of fun stuff . . .

. . . so that they could drop the individual branches slowly and carefully, before taking the trunk down.

It was a fascinating process.

The Bobcat had a lot to do, in addition to anchoring ropes and lifting big trunks to be cut up.

It hauled all the trees to the curb.

There was a rather big pile.

So big, in fact, that they needed even more heavy equipment to come haul it away.

(I'm pretty sure Theo and Amos had the best day of their lives.  And I feel really stupid for failing to take video.  We could have made our own episode of Mighty Machines, and it could have been about two hours long.)

Theo hung out with the guys whenever they took a break.

Because, you know, he's Theo.  I'm pretty sure he wangled a job offer out of them.

And, finally, it was done.

We went from this:

. . . to this:

(Still not a huge change.)

This:

. . . to this:

This:

. . . to this:

And this:

. . . to this:

Alas, once more, the improvement left us feeling even more depressed and unhappy.

All the light finally flowing in to the yard only served to point up all its deficiencies.  And as hard as they tried not to destroy anything, you can't bring all that heavy equipment into a place without tearing up the soil.

We tried working with it.  We thought about ways to go piecemeal--a little grass seed on this side, a little mulch on that side, a few bushes here until we could get the ones we really wanted there.

But after a few weeks of trying to wrestle it into submission, we surrendered.

We got even more professional help.