Christmas in Cowtown, a Synopsis of the Sparkly

I've planned to write a blog post everyday since last week, but there was champagne and friends and family and fun until the 26th, and then there was a Trumpertantrum over an idiotic $25 billion wall that no one with any knowledge of border security thinks will do any good and that American taxpayers now have to pay for and so the government shut down and my agency ran out of funding and I stopped being paid yesterday and I've never not been paid as an attorney since the day I graduated law school and even though we have some savings and parents who can help me and we are SO MUCH luckier than so many in this awful position at this awful time of year, particularly the government contractors who don't get back pay, and those who have had their leave canceled to be forced to come to work and STILL aren't being paid and who have far more precarious financial situations and I seriously get so mad about this I can't type and that's why I haven't been, and also, even with everything I said, it is so fvcking stressful to me to not be paid that I have basically watched The West Wing for two straight nights in a catatonic state. So I haven't blogged.

My happy mental place

And now we leave for Colorado first thing tomorrow morning to go see my sister and have a mini-Christmas, and then to see my parents and their new house, and THEN the meet friends for a group ski trip we planned back in February when a third shutdown in one year when one party controlled every arm of government never even occurred to me. But here we are. The car is packed, the lift tickets and ski rentals were long since purchased, and we've packed all our food and my Prozac and it's really going to be so fun and I'm only going to check Twitter for legislative updates every hour.

But back we go to December 21st. The last day of school for the kids, it was full of caroling, class parties, and parents reading stories to kids in pajamas. I came to both kids' classes to read, as I do every year, particularly when I realized with a pang that this was Landon's last year! Six years of pajama reading days and this is the last time I'll read him Christmas Delicious in the front of his class.

This is also the first year he didn't wear pajamas, but did stick with the theme with his festive Dinosaur shirt. Claire went all in on the PJ's AND got to bring giant Pua to class and it's possible she was more excited about that than about me coming to read to her! (Except not really, her excitement was exactly equal for both.)

That night was our traditional cookie decorating party at a friend's. Always one of our favorite nights of the year, this year was made even better by another friend bringing her AMAZING homemade Pho for all of us to enjoy. I'm jealous of the me I see in these pictures eating it.

By Sunday, all the Christmas snacks were made, the barre class was taught, and we were very excited about Papa and Gigi and Uncle Eric and his girlfriend coming to visit on Christmas Eve.

So much yum, if I do say so myself

With the house clean and sparkly and ready for guests, we headed out to visit Santa with a five-year-old who was SURE she'd be happy to see him this time.

And she was. "Mommy, isn't it so nice that I like Santa now?"

Indeed.

On Christmas Eve morning I made these delicious cinnamon rolls one of you recommended in the comments to my Christmas cooking post from last year.

My family arrived in the afternoon and we got to meet my brother's girlfriend who we LOVE and have adopted. We played, went on a walk, and inflated the queen air bed in the TV room to fit 9 people into our 3-bedroom house. We got dressed for church and enjoyed a beautiful service near TCU.

We got back to a tasty dinner for which I used both the "Delay Start" AND "Cook Time" buttons on my oven for the first time ever! After dinner was PJs and more snacks and wine and cookies and presents! Staying up late with family to open gifts and eat snacks when it's dark outside and cozy inside is the VERY BEST THING.

Except seeing Landon's face when he opened the Nintendo Switch he never believed he'd get (and nearly didn't because I've so enjoyed our video-game-free lifestyle). That might have been even better.

The other big hits this year were: Cora getting her own big giant Pua from Uncle Eric, Claire getting the hair and makeup doll of her dreams, and all the kids getting two years of Photobooks because I'm ALL CAUGHT UP.

Those books are such a pain in my arse, but I adore them when they're finished, and it's worth every carpal-tunnel-inducing-hour I spend on them because they love them too. Landon has read his cover to cover at least three times and Claire was snuggled on the couch reading hers when I got home from yoga today. They are very special to all of us.

Gifts done (we all got sweet and thoughtful things, more on mine below), we tucked the kids in bed, cleared off the couch for Santa to come, and toddled off to bed ourselves.

Christmas morning was the bleary-eyed delight it always is. We told the kids 7:30 and 7:30 is PRECISELY when they knocked on our door. Landon got his Fort Builder set; Claire a new bike (her legs have grown so many inches in the last year!), and Cora a fairy play set.

There was brunch and games, both indoor and out, and lots of really great, really relaxed family time. And also a walk, completely with much overhead drone flying thanks to James and Eric's gifts from Papa and Gigi.

My parents managed to beat us all at corn hole and we've demanded a rematch in the snow when we get to Colorado. James and I had never been beat before. Mostly because of my graceful, one-leg-up form.

(Little time out for the ladies to get a picture. My brother's girlfriend is from Brazil and she brought us a traditional chocolate chip Christmas bread and is the sweetest and the kids love her and we enjoyed her so much.)

One of my favorite moments was in the early afternoon when we were all playing yard games in the front yard and Cora would leave my brother alone (she ADORES him) and then he put her in his truck bed and closed the top for a (brief!) break and she thought it was hilarious and climbed out and onto his feet and yelled "Mom, Uncle Eric is my BEST FRIEND" and I couldn't stop laughing.

After a delicious early dinner (mostly because I bought six kinds of cheeses to go with it), my brother and girlfriend headed home (he had to work at 6 a.m. the next morning) and the rest of us headed out to see Marry Poppins Returns! We totally loved it, mostly because Emily Blunt can carry off anything, and it was a great way to end the day.

And now I need to go to bed because we begin our road trip in precisely 8 hours, but I most make note of my most special present this year. You see, two years ago I told James I would love to one day do the 200-hour yoga teacher training, but I knew with the expense and time commitment I'd need to wait a while before making that particular dream a reality.

But a year later, and without me knowing, he started saving a painful little extra from his swim school profits every month. And on Christmas Eve this year I opened an envelope of cash, money that had been carefully tucked away every month for twelve months, along with a note to follow my dreams.

And while that money may well go to pay our bills in the short term while the government refuses to pay me for my real job, the ability to one day follow the job of my heart is the most precious and thoughtful gift I’ve ever received. I can't even put into words how much it meant to me. And while I'm currently waging an internal war between feeling stressed and yelling at myself for feeling stressed because we don't need to be stressed yet and other people have it so much more stressful, I'm taking a little break to feel pure gratitude to my thoughtful husband who worked so diligently to help me pursue my passion (and who has wanted to invest in a new swim product idea for the last year and I now realize why he didn't) just as he has said I enable him to pursue his. It'll be a little while before I can work the training into our schedule, but I simply can't wait to be a student again and begin.

Patents and Pink Puffy Hearts

While I continue to adjust to my medication and drown in incompetent rage every time I obsessively check the news, let's take a moment to talk about James.

We'll start with Father's Day this past Sunday. He is a wonderful dad and works hard and thinks a lot about how to be a good one. When we got Landon's daily writing journal at the end of the year it was so fun to read all his thoughts and stories over the last year, but most fun was to see how prominently James was featured. As Landon wrote on one day, "My dad is important to me because he is my best friend." He also wrote a lot about swimming and how having James as a coach makes it so fun for him. And James is a phenomenal coach- hard and tough, but always trying to make swimming more accessible and fun. Possibly the thing I love most about the swim school is that he gets to coach all of our kids three times a week. It's been such a blessing for all four of them (and me!).

We managed to make Father's Day James's perfect day. Not too fancy, not too planned, and not too expensive- just him doing his favorite things with his favorite people. He woke up early and went to swim practice. Five minutes after he got back we were off to his favorite brunch buffet full of delicious foods and as many plates as he could eat. (That is many, many plates.)

Post-brunch he got to take a nap while I taught barre (oy, never do that after a brunch buffet) and the kids played semi-quietly. Post-nap was a movie! In a theater! His favorite thing! I'm just in it for the popcorn and candy, but James eschews both those things and is just there for "the movie watching experience." We saw The Incredibles 2 and we LOVED it. So cute and so fun, and I didn't take any pictures because that's how James would want it.

[No pictures.]

We got home and he ran to the grocery store (not very Father's Day-ish, we do have some time constraints) while I baked his cake (funfetti with dark chocolate icing!) and his pizza that was his whole present.

Oh yes, deep dish pizza shipped to Texas on dry ice from Giordano's in Chicago. And it was SO. GOOD.

In the words of James, it was just as good as the restaurant. It was the perfect present. He doesn't like when we spend money on him, but food is his one indulgence.

That night as we sat cuddled on the couch he said, "thank you for the perfect day." I've decided we're just going to do it all again next year and all the years ahead.

Then on Monday he was interviewed for an article in the Fort Worth paper for his work as President of the Fort Worth Drowning Prevention Coalition! It's a cause he's passionate about and a role that demands a lot of his time, but I'm so proud of the work he does with the Coalition. After the article was published our local Fox station asked for a TV interview.

That aired last night at 9 and 10 p.m. in Fort Worth and apparently again in Austin this morning! (And possibly elsewhere.)

We let the kids stay up to watch it and while you can watch the actual video here, you can see our version where I'm sitting too far away from the TV and you mostly hear Cora yelling, "That's Daddy! How did you get in that show Daddy?!!" in my ear.

And THEN also yesterday- his patent arrived in the mail!!! Almost exactly three years after he invented The Brick, founded Fike Swim, and started a retail swim products business out of our house, he has his patent!

It's so shiny and pretty. I'm not even sure where it's going to go yet. I did a USPTO search just to see his name pop up and I nearly cried. Fike Swim is his baby and now his baby is official and protected and has a shiny ribbon.

We're so proud of him. I'm SO proud of him. When I met my goal of someday dating a UT Swimmer on my first day of college, I never imagined that my adult life would STILL revolve so much around swimming, but it's a huge part of who he is and I love so much that he's been able to combine his passions for swimming, coaching, inventing, selling, and business and entrepreneurship (and spending time with our kids!) all together in this life we're living together nearly 17 years later.

I love him so much and can't wait for the inevitable fancy date night to celebrate our first patent! (Because two of my passions he's come to share are fancy date nights and finding reasons to celebrate things. Cheers!)

Like a Phoenix

You guys, the swim school has risen again from the splashes of its former self! James has a pool and reopened for business today and I am so happy and relieved that I can't even share his stress over the fact his registration numbers are down from this point last year. All numbers are higher than zero and he has a pool!! A beautiful, 8-lane, indoor, year-round pool that is exclusively his from 3:30-8 p.m. Monday through Friday. HE HAS A POOL! The swim school lives!!

It's been in the works for nearly a month, which is why I've probably sounded less stressed and sad lately, but it's also been sloooowly working its way through all those works for a month and after being burned twice on other pools that "had room" only to actually not, I just couldn't announce or celebrate until it was final and it's FINALLY final! There are some hurdles, some (several) additional expenses, his margins will go down, blah blah whatever HE HAS A BUSINESS! I've already had a few glasses of champagne to celebrate for him since he's too busy answering registration emails to do so on his own behalf.

Remember when I would sometimes complain about the swim school? about his evening schedule? his endless late nights working on registrations? the uncompromising nature of teaching private lessons and a lack of room to reschedule them for anything ever? Well, staring down the road to a dark swim school-less future has really shifted my perspective on that. All of sudden I realized how much I loved the swim school. Obviously, I love that James loves it and that he built it from nothing and poured his heart into something he's passionate about and incredibly good at. But I also love that it enables him to be home in the mornings. That he gets the kids off to school and can then be home for deliveries, doctor appointments, and other home-based to-do's. I love that he never ever travels and is home with us every night and weekend. I love that all his nighttime work can all be done on the couch while sitting right up next to me. I love that he was making good money and we were killing our grad school debt and growing our long-term savings and contributing everything I wanted to the kids' college accounts. I LOVED that he coached our own kids and that I could trust him implicitly to improve their technique and build their strength while still fostering their love of swimming. I loved that I didn't have to take the kids to swimming or pick them up. I loved that "Coach James" was known by so many in the community and we ran into clients everywhere we went. I loved seeing the fruits of his labor and love of swimming pay off, literally and figuratively, and I was truly devastated that he was losing it. After years of the occasional bit of complaining I now wanted to give the swim school a bit sloppy kiss and it was disappearing on me before I could do it.

And of course, watching James watch his dream circle the drain was terrible. The one good thing going for us this time around was that it wasn't financially stressful. Back in 2012 when he was a victim of the Dell layoffs, it was awful on so many levels, but particularly the financial. I had just taken a job with a substantial pay cut, we'd just paid to move here from Austin, and we'd just used our savings to renovate the new/old house we'd just bought in our new city. Nothing makes an already emotional and difficult situation worse than staring at your bank account and calculating the number of months left that you can pay your mortgage. It made it impossible to be the supportive spouse I wanted to be during his job hunt because I was as stressed as he was depressed and oh my god it was fucking awful.

SO! This time was better. The swim school situation sucked and it was sad, but it wasn't stressful (for me; James was totally stressed, but that's okay when only one of you is at a time). We're in a totally different place than we were in 2012 and I didn't have to worry about anything other than James himself; I could just be supportive- positive, calm, long-term looking... basically the partner I've always wanted to be and that James always is for me. So that was nice. And then he found something! Or rather, the wife of the law school best friend of a partner I used to work with in Austin who is on the board of a local community college found something. Huzzah! It was a long process with a lot of back and forth and then a lot of waiting, but lessons started up today and they can't kick him out now ! (At least not without 90 days notice...)

And because the swim school can continue on, so can Fike Swim Products! The swim school funds all the prototypes and large order minimums for the swim products business, so the death of one meant the likely death or at least a total lack of growth for the other which... sucked. But no more! Which is great because James's sales of The Brick continue to be brisk and his (amazing!) swim bag is getting great reviews. In celebration of the new swim season he made a new commercial. Given that it was made on an iPhone and Landon was the cameraman for much of it, I thought it was pretty awesome:

And in final James news, he's on the board of the non-profit Fort Worth Drowning Prevention Coalition and they had their annual banquet last night. It's such a great organization doing such important work, I'm so proud that he is part of it.

Their programs have become a model for other organizations around the country and this past summer they reached over 1,000 kids and adults and got them life vests and time with instructors in the water. They've also started a pipeline for teens who show an interest in the program- learning to swim, gaining comfort, and ultimately earning an option to obtain their lifeguard certification from the Red Cross free of charge so they have a path to a summer job at one of the city pools or local YMCA's, continuing the cycle of saving lives through water safety and instruction. Pretty awesome.

So it's a happy day around here today! Our beloved nanny Tara is back in our lives, we're back on a regular after school schedule, the big kids are back in the water and Cora starts back up with her own lessons on Thursday! Yays for everyone! But especially James, I'm so incredibly proud of him and all his work in and out of the pool. Cheers!

Fort Worth Fun and Fancy

Thanks to the discount shopping gods, I found a dress in my closet that covered my wounds for our anniversary dinner Saturday night. Purchased at Ross for $12.99 about 4 years ago, the halter drape perfectly obscured any and all oozing. Which is good because nothing says "I bet you can't wait to get home and get this off me" better than what looks to be a highly contagious skin condition.

I could be hiding anything under here

And dinner was wonderful. So crazy delicious, we started with an appetizer I still don't understand but was called "House Made Stracciatella" with "local peaches, golden beets, local radishes and fennel pesto." My previous experiences with stracciatella has always been the vanilla with chocolate chip gelato flavor, so we were pretty confused when our waitress so highly recommended it to start, but we always try something new when we go and her description of "it's what goes inside burrata cheese" convinced me and OH MY GOD it was amazing. Best thing I had all night until the dessert, which is really saying something when it was followed by my favorite salad of all time and a perfectly cooked filet covered in crab, Bearnaise sauce, and asparagus. If you have a chance to add house made non-gelato stracciatella to you life, you should do it. And you should add more of the gelato kind too.

EST 9.3.2005

Dessert was Bruléed Goat Cheesecake with bing cherries, port wine, pistachio gelato and kumquats. Zomg. I had no room left, but I managed half. They made a cheesecake with goat cheese and they bruleed it. It's like a triple threat of my favorite things and it was extraordinary.

Besides the food, the company wasn't bad either. Fifteen years after we met and had our first date and then openly talked about getting married (all in about two weeks; I do wonder what our reaction would be if any of our kids did the same at 18), I am still crazy head over heels nauseatingly in love with this guy.

2001; baby faces

The morning after our hot date celebrating our eleven years of marriage, we slept in... waking up in stages as the soft morning light filtered in through our sky lights. Curled in each other's arms, looking forward to a round of leisurely morning sex... Except, lol, no. We have children, and they never sleep in when they're supposed to.

I woke with a start at Claire's insistent tapping on my arm at 7:04 a.m. while she repeated "Mom, Cora went pee pee in her bed. Mom. MOM!" over and over, heedless of the fact I'd had most of a bottle of champagne the night before. James, deaf to the repeated calls of "Mom," FLEW up out of bed at the phrase "pee in her bed." The best part was Cora actually had not peed in her crib; she was dry, she just told Claire she was wet because she wanted to get up. She's wily.

So, since we were all up, we went to the zoo nice and early. Feeling generous, we splurged on the $1 carousel tickets for the first time ever and it was probably the best $3 we've ever spent. Look at Cora's face.

I mean, my god. Pure glee; bliss; JOY. There aren't words for this look.

She patted her horsey, bounced up and down, and maintained that level of excitement for all 12 revolutions. It was hilarious and exhausting just to witness.

The zoo train was also deemed pretty great.

So fun. I love our zoo. The kids are experts thanks to their weeks of zoo camp, Landon's nature club meetings, and our one million visits and we get lots of inside scoop from them as we walk around. We stopped for our favorite pizza on the way home and despite the harsh wake-up call, it really was a lovely bookend to our anniversary celebration.

Then I spent about an hour in the bathroom with Cora reading her books and trying to convince her to go poop in the potty. 11 years and that's all I wanted for my anniversary.

Though I can't complain, she's doing really well - no accidents and no pull-ups except for overnight sleeping since Friday. We went to the Zoo in Zootopia panties, which Cora found delightful and we found mildly terrifying, and when we got to the restaurant after, she politely requested the bathroom, peed on demand, and returned to our table. She immediately told our waiter she went pee pee in the potty and was getting her "n&m's" when we got home. He accepted the news with all due gravity and congratulations.

Which seems like a nice transition to the discussion of this week's menu:

Sun: Turkey tettrazini (really good! I doubled everything except the milk and it was perfect), served with crescent rolls
Mon: BBQ quinoa salad (our fave: quinoa + bbq shredded chicken + black beans + corn + tomatoes + avocado + cilantro + queso fresco cheese, topped with a swirl of bbq sauce and Ranch or Italian dressing), chips, salsa
Tues: Pioneer Woman's beef with snow peas (my favorite stir fry recipe, by far, though I always add broccoli and carrot too); rice
Wed: Leftover tettrazini, more crescent rolls because they're delicious and one classic deserves another
Thurs: BBQ enchiladas (with the leftover chicken, rolled in tortillas, topped with sour cream and cheddar jack cheese); refried black beans; avocado
Fri: Pasta with tomato cream sauce (so simple, but SO good; one of those recipes I always have the ingredients for and can make without looking anything up which is handy on a Friday)

BBQ quinoa salad!

I taught barre 3x this holiday weekend and it felt SO good! This week I get back to my usual 2x Orangetheory, 5x yoga, and 1-2x barre routine, but it was fun to hit so heavy on the barre and embrace the shake for a few days. But after 4 days without yoga - my longest gap since February - I am deeply missing it and am excited to return tomorrow. Less excited to return to the office after- holidays off are just the best, but I have some new and fun cases right now, so I can't really complain about that either. May you all have a short and wonderful week ahead!