Getting ready for the holidays!

I had a big report due on Monday at work and then I was off Tuesday and yesterday. So I'm back at work today and ready to blog ..er...work. Right. Work.

I don't have anything really profound to say, so I guess I'll just get down what's been going on the last several days.

Last Saturday, we went to our friends Mark and Kelly's house and made reindeer cookies with Naomi and the boys!

I love that Kelly tried to get Naomi to eat a sandwich first. (She's shoving M&M's in her mouth by the handful.) Ha-Ha-Ha!

It was so much fun, we're going to do it again with a few other friends -- with more kids, yikes! -- this weekend at our house! Although I doubt it will be as fun as it was with Kelly and Mark because 1) Kelly is so laidback and cool about everything, that it was just really relaxed and nice and not manic like it probably will be when it's at my house, because I'm crazy and 2) Kelly made super delicious coquitos -- coconut eggnog with rum! Yummm!

It was so nice to see them all. I wish I lived closer to all my friends! Sniff.

Lester's big Christmas present this year was tickets to see Lauryn Hill at the 9:30 Club on Sunday!
We went to dinner in D.C. first and marveled at how much the neighborhood around Howard University, my alma mater, has changed. Things are developing/gentrifying so much that this restaurant we went to had only been open a week. And it was packed! And there were only a handful of black people. People who know anything about the Shaw/Howard U. area know that that is CRAZY.

Here we are, out. Alone. No kids. Alone. Having a drink. Alone.

The concert was really good (despite it being at the 9:30 Club, a standing-only venue which is impossible for shorties like me). For those of you who don't know anything about Lauryn Hill, suffice it to say that she is this incredible talent who got totally plowed over by her good-looking, charming cad of a baby daddy (Bob Marley's son Rohan) who left her and their FIVE kids to go off and marry some model. After that, Lauryn went cuckoo for cocoa puffs. She shaved her head, acted loopy at concerts (when she showed up at all), got in trouble with the IRS, went to JAIL!! and just seriously had a really hard-to-watch, broken-hearted breakdown.

But she's making a comeback and Lester absolutely loves her, so we took a chance and bought tickets to see her perform. I'm so glad we did. She sings with so much passion -- even moreso now that she's been through so much. It was a really good night, spent rockin' out with my baby. :-)

Before the concert, our friend Callie invited us to the Baltimore Museum of Art to hang out and make instruments during the museum's arts and crafts time. So we trudged over there and got to see the boys' friend Spirit, who Dean just loves. And we met some other very nice families and made a big mess with glue and scissors, construction paper and ribbons.

The boys surprised the heck outta me by being able to cut! I had no idea. In my house, we stay far away from scissors. Good thing their teachers are more adventurous. Also, Clair glued her lips together, using the glue stick like Chapstick. My kids are so creative.

And, lastly, I really made the most out of my days off.

Tuesday, I spent the day with Lester, hanging out and picking up a few things we needed to finish our Christmas decorations. And yesterday, I rode the school bus with my boys to their field trip (a play at Goucher College), came home, had lunch with them and went out and got my hair done!

I also got to just spend quiet, middle-of-the-day time with my kids, playing Christmas music and witnessing moments like this:

Which was really, really nice, because you all know how it is when you get home from work - all the harried task-completing, and end-of-the-day meltdowns. It's nice to get to see my children during a more relaxed time, warm and comfortable, safe, happy and loved.

If I didn't get another thing for Christmas, just having had this time with them would be absolutely enough.

Caught in the act, and I don't care!

You know those celebrity tabloids that show photos of your favorite stars looking schlubby or doing something embarrassing, like walking around with a wedgie or dripping mustard all over their clothes?

I feel a little bit like a celebrity today.

Last night, we dragged the whole family to Target to buy a few things we needed for the house and for a cookie-decorating thing we're doing Saturday with our friends Mark and Kelly and their kids.

It was right after work, so the kids were hungry for dinner. Lester bought hot dogs and grilled cheese and popcorn (dinner of champions!) and set up in the store's little dining area, while I power-shopped. I couldn't find one item I needed, but my check-out lady told me where to find it, so after paying for all my other things, I lugged Clair back with me to the far end of the store to get it. When I came back to the dining area (still without my item), Cary and Dean were spastically rolling the shopping cart into empty tables, spilling popcorn everywhere and just generally bouncing off the walls. There was NO settling them, so I just ditched the hope of finding chocolate-covered pretzels and said, "Let's go!"

We hustled out of there (to get our tree, yay! Which Dean picked out. Of course.) and got home so late that it was all we could do to wrangle the three over-tired crazies into bed and CONK out. No Scandal. No Game of Thrones. Just sleep. (Well, Lester folded two baskets of laundry, awesome husband that he is, but *I* fell flat on my face.)

Anyway -- it was all just another day in the Davis household. Until I got a message this morning from a colleague on Facebook who said she thought she'd seen us at Target and wanted to know if we'd been there the night before.Why, yes. That was us! Awww, we could have stopped and chatted. Aww.

But as the morning wore on, I started thinking: What exactly did she see?? Did she see Clair pick up that stray chunk of hot dog from under the table across from us, and me do the TV-slow-motion dive to knock it out of her chubby little hands just before she chewed on it?

Did she tsk tsk at how I had lazily clapped Clair's hair into a frizzy 'fro on the top of her head - and that she had "runch" all over her shirt? (That's what she said when I asked her what on Earth she spilled all over her clothes. "Runch.")

Did she judge me about the veritable carpet of popcorn we left for some probably-pissed-off employee to clean up? (I did whisper "Sorry about the mess!" to the random Target employee who was sitting there taking her break, but she just glowered, so I don't know if that means "You're forgiven, poor harried mother of three" or "Eff you and happy new year!" But I digress.)

Could she hear  -- all the way from back in the section with the Christmas trees -- my boys' complete and total inability to use anything close to an inside voice? Ever?  [Seriously. WHY are they so LOUD? Dang.]


I thought we had been anonymous in Target -- the ragtag bunch of us, all hastily bundled in mismatched hats and gloves, ketchup-stained, loud, hungry and unable to find chocolate-covered pretzels or mini M&Ms, despite two trips to the back of the store! DAMMIT.

But we had been spied. By someone who knew us! This must be how Oprah feels!

If I had written this blog post in my 20s, the moral would have been, "And this is why you must always look your best when out in public!"

Thank GOD I'm no longer in my 20s.  Because I didn't care one bit. This is the blessing of getting older and less concerned about what the world thinks of you.

And I know that my colleague truly wouldn't have judged -- she's a cool person, and a Mom herself, who was running late to pick up her own kid.

But even if she did judge, it wouldn't have mattered. My kids are not always magazine-ready; they don't always behave well in public. Hot dogs are messy; popcorn even moreso. The gloves that match the hats sometimes get lost.

And so what?

As a mother in my 40s, the moral of THIS blog post is: If you want chocolate-covered pretzels from Target, to make reindeer cookies for your crazy, messy kids, you'd better get 'em early, because they sell out.