Since I spent half the weekend browsing my computer and Christmas shopping (got most of it done too!), it occurred to me that I should get my own Christmas list together. That way when people ask me what I want, I’ll be able to have a better response than my usual “uhhhh, I don’t know.”

To that end, I spent a couple of hours on Amazon.com today. Do you realize that Amazon has basically every product on the planet available through their site? You can get anything. Well, maybe not a pony, but I don’t know how they’d ship that anyway. Not only that, but you can make Wish Lists for yourself and your family members so that as your are poking around, you can just select whose list you want to save an item to, and it will attach it to the right person. Then you can share the list with friends or family members who keep asking you what you want for Christmas.

For your own personal shopping, you can also create Gift Lists for the people you are buying for and keep all your ideas organized. Sooooo nice! These only show up on your account, so no one else can see them.

Anyway, I have put up Wish Lists for both me and George on the Shubinesque.com website menu (and no, I’m not expecting a Roomba. I just have it there to remind myself that I want one someday…). And here are the links in case turning your eyes to the right is going to cause some sort of brain hemorrhage.

George’s List

Rachel’s List

Okay, time for all your lists now (**Mike and Pop Shubin, cough cough**). Actually, I have almost everyone else done, but we still need those.

Merry post-Thanksgiving, start-of-Christmas season! I am now going to go crawl into bed and watch an ancient episode of X-Files (which holds up pretty well until they whip out their prehistoric cell phones or start talking about what was then cutting edge technology) while waiting for my Hubby to extricate himself from the clutches of his computer and come to bed. Hmmm, news report says snow in the hills and ice maybe. I wonder if that’s us. We’re hills. Guess I’ll go look outside. Good night!

Rachel

The kids had today off  (they have every Friday off but have plenty of homework), and will have the same all next week for Thanksgiving break. The kids spent the morning playing, listening to Christmas music, andwatching family picture slideshows while they ran around making racket.
Georgie and Faith spent half the morning fighting until I disciplined Faithy for crying nonstop and yelled at Georgie for antagonizing her. They seem to be doing better now (they’re sharing an apple).

When the kids decided they wanted to watch a movie, I told them we weregoing to watch Singing in the Rain, which they’ve never seen (time to introduce them to old musicals). They complained until about five minutes into the show and now seem to be rather enjoying themselves. There’s all that singing and dancing, which they appear to have an appreciation for (whew! Somehow they’re learning to like culture. Hurray!).

Trinity spends half of every dance number exclaiming what wonderful dancers Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor are. Georgie seems to be paying more attention than I was expecting him to. He’s definitely got the plot figured out. As soon as Lina Lamont starts speaking in her horrible voice, which was going to be a huge problem with the advent of talking pictures, Georgie asked why couldn’t they just have someone else do her voice for the movie?

Then in the scene where they’re trying to get Lina to talk into the microphone, the director finally sticks the mic down Lina’s dress. Georgie immediately said, “I hope it doesn’t pick up her heartbeat.” The director walked into the sound booth, they turn on the sound and hear the “thump, thump, thump” of Lina’s heart. Big smartypants.:)

Overall it’s been a lovely morning and I actually got a grocery list mostly made.

Rachel

My son wrote a Spiderman story (his current theme of choice, which is a departure from last year when virtually all of his stories involved giant Venus flytraps devouring buildings and people) this week, and upon re-reading it discovered that he had omitted the period at the end of one of the sentences.

“Oh no! There’s no period at the end of this sentence.” he exclaimed, “I’ve committed wrongdoing!”

He’s nine. So I responded with

“Not the grammatical malfeasance!” which is, of course, the proper response when confronted with punctuational panic. For some reason he thought that was funny. He also told me later that evening that he had taken something I said to him literally. I don’t think he quite knows what that means, but he was not too far off on his usage so he must have some idea. What a great vocabulary! I think it’s from listening to books on tape that are several years above his reading level.

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Tonight the house looked atrocious as it does at least every other day before clean up time (I can’t figure out how they can demolish a home so quickly. The government should use them for enemy scare tactics or something.). I told them to go clean up everything off the floor and then they could go watch the SpongeBob Atlantis show their Daddy had nicely recorded for them. Trinity and Anika found their new gloves with fingers on the floor while they were tidying and decided that instead of putting them away, they could be pressed into a much more interesting service.

So naturally they put them on their…. feet and walked around the house making gorilla noises and screeches while they were cleaning until I couldn’t stand the racket and hollered at them to quit making weird noises (I say this at least once a day, usually to Anika who is the wacky noise queen). They left the gorilla feet on and contented themselves with proclaiming me as the GorillaMom, which is how they addressed me when they kissed me and headed up to bed. No, I have no plans to put gloves on my feet tomorrow just in case you were wondering.

Rachel

Reformation Night at our church was last Wednesday on Halloween as it is every year, and I thought I’d post a couple pictures. My MIL made beautiful Russian princess costumes for all the girls and somehow Georgie schmoozed her into making a D’Artagnan costume this year, which he was rather ecstatic about.

Are they adorable or what?

I’m totally objective as you’ve surely noticed. And to think, we only had to take about fifteen shots to get a couple where everyone is smiling and the picture is actually in focus. Faithy kept running toward the camera and Georgie thought that “picture” meant “time to make weird faces.”

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So this last weekend was also Card Weekend 2007. Every other week for the last probably six years or so, me and a bunch of other women have gotten together every other Monday to play Dutch Blitz, eat lots of junk food, and just hang around with other people whose main vocabulary doesn’t begin with “Mommmeeeee…..” or variations thereof. It’s great and very relaxing.

Four years ago one of the gals decided that we should all go to the beach for a weekend in November since her husband’s family has a house out there, so we leave on Friday and return on Sunday. Her idea of a good weekend is one in which she gets to spend the weekend cooking for all her appreciative friends, which works well for everyone because she is a fabulous cook and we are all very appreciative. This definition of fun has always completely mystified me since my idea of a good weekend is one in which I don’t have to cook at all. I usually do dishes on card weekend.

On Saturday we drive down to Lincoln City (an hour south) where the all important outlet mall is to Christmas shop (ahem…) all day. Cards, shopping, excellent food, wonderful company, no kids ~ it’s great! I’ve been feeling much better the last week or so but my energy reserves are still a bit on the wimpy side, so I spent half of Saturday sleeping or reading in the back of the van while everyone else finished their shopping, but it was quiet and I rarely get uninterrupted reading time so even that was fun.

Over the last year we’ve managed to ensnare three more women in our collectively evil group clutches (moowahahahahaha!) and one of them made it card weekend with us, bringing our total number for the weekend to seven.

This was her first time away from her kids overnight even (she has four from ages 9 to 2, I think), and she did great! Actually, she did sort of had that semi-crazed, “Yay, I’m shopping without my kids” look on Saturday and accomplished considerably more at the mall than anyone else did. George said her husband looked a bit frazzled at church on Sunday. Hehe.

George was his usual wonder-husband self and even had the house tidy when I got home. Of course, some friends were over waiting for their mom to get home (she came with us) and they have two kids, so with the seven kids running around like maniacs the tidiness didn’t last, but I did get to actually see it which impressed me.

He took the kids out to dinner all by himself (! ) on Saturday night and made it to church on time and everything. Actually, part of that was probably because he forgot to set the clocks back so he was an hour early for church, but he still gets credit.

You know, every year I’m impressed with George’s response to Card Weekend. I tell him what weekend it is and ask if I can go, and every time he immediately says “yes” without hemming and hawing or making it sound like he’s doing me a humongous favor or acting put upon even on years when he’s obscenely busy (like this year).

He just says to go have fun, which I do, in part because I know he’s not begrudging me the time I’m gone and because I know he eminently capable of managing all the kids. The first time I went, he only had to mess with three and this time he had all five at home with him. I take them with me if they are younger than one year of age, but anyone older than that stays home (so far I’ve never actually gone without being either pregnant or bringing a nursing baby).

His thinking (as he mentioned last night when we were discussing it with our friends) is that men go off on business trips overnight and have many more opportunities to get out than their wives do. He seems to make it a priority for me to be able to get away for a couple days every November, which I am supremely thankful for. He’s such a wonderful husband, *brag, brag*.

Rachel