Friday, November 29, 2024

7 Quick Takes about Thanksgiving Pants, Closing the Open Loops, and New Ways to Decorate Your Car for the Holidays

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

1


Happy Thanksgiving!

Phillip and our 13-year-old did the cooking. I washed the dishes and tried to keep the kitchen a workable space as they piled up more dirty dishes in the sink. Everyone else tried to make themselves scarce so they didn't get an assignment to help out, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn't.

We had mostly our standard favorites (I love the cranberry-pear sauce more than anything), but the 13-year-old really wanted to make some kind of fancy fruit salad so she asked ChatGPT to design her a recipe. She made it and served it in a trifle bowl and I am all for innovation.

Thanksgiving dinner at the Evans house.

Let me talk about these pants for a minute.


They are the best Thanksgiving pants because they look dressy, but they're stretchy and feel like pajama pants... there could be no better pants to wear on a holiday that revolves around eating and taking a post-dinner nap.

2


This Thanksgiving was just me, Phillip, and the four remaining Evans kids still at home, which is just the way I like it. 

Sometimes I think people feel like they have to invite us over (because no one should be alone on a holiday!) If I was completely alone, I'd probably appreciate the invite; as it is, I've got my husband and 4 kids, and this is one of the few weekends a year when we just get to hang out together, instead of briefly waving to each other as we separately run to a million practices and banquets and meetings and appointments. Socializing with others is great, but this holiday weekend feels like a family vacation and I want to preserve that as much as I can.

This weekend is going to be heavenly. We're going to watch movies, do some projects with the kids that we never ordinarily have time to do with them, and possibly go launch the model rocket the 8-year-old got for his birthday and we also never had time to do. Maybe we'll get a Christmas tree, who knows? Phillip even went running with me this morning, although at 6'2" he barely had to trot to keep up (he probably could've just walked quickly if he didn't mind making me feel bad).

3


Sometimes it takes a while, but almost everything I've ever listed on Facebook Marketplace has sold eventually, no matter what it is. 

I just sold an ancient floppy disk drive that we found in our basement for $5. Which immediately made me think of this joke:


To be fair, I did meet the floppy disk drive lady at the grocery store instead of my house. Because I hate to judge, but if you're buying a floppy disk drive odds are that something isn't quite right with you.

4


I've been doing this new thing where I start every day by closing the "open loops" around the house after getting the kids off to school. 

Instead of starting on the to-do list in my head, I look around and check off the to-do list in my house first: what's left out on the counter or the table because it's in the middle of a project or because I don't know where to put it or because I've been putting off the next step I need to do with it? Before I start anything else, I need to do that stuff.

Closing those open loops first thing in the morning feels good because then I don't have to look around and see what the Minimal Mom calls "the silent to-do list" staring at me all day long. 

5


On the highway the other day, a car passed me that was fully decked out in colored LED Christmas lights. 

I tried to take a picture but I was a little slow and my camera isn't great at night and I was also focusing on other things like driving 60 MPH, but you can kind of see it here:

Better than plush antlers and a reindeer nose attached to your van.

Watch this video if you want to see more clearly what it looks like (and how they did it).

6


Although I haven't quite reached the level of the driver that spent hours fully wrapping his entire car in Christmas lights before it was even Thanksgiving, I've been pleasantly surprised with how on top of Christmas preparations we are so far. 

I've already ordered and received our Christmas cards and decided on several presents for extended family and experience gifts for the kids (a few of theses have even been bought!) 

Of course, it always starts out this way and I think, "Yep, this year I am totally going to be on top of everything" and then the perfect storm of unpreparedness comes later. But I can enjoy this feeling while it lasts.

7


I got sucked into reading this crazy followup piece on a family who sued their I.V.F. clinic for switching their embryo with another couples', and both of them birthed and raised each others' babies for several months. The long-form article is about a million pages long, but it was so interesting I couldn't tear myself away.

The way the couples chose to handle it, and the complicated emotions they went through in doing so, were so interesting that I kept talking about it over dinner, so the 13-year-old asked if she could read it, too. 

I gave permission but she only made it about a third of the way through before getting bored and petering out. I guess you have to be a parent to really get invested in the story.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I read that article too! Fascinating. I think I would have handled it differently, but I'm grateful I didn't have to go through it!