I had Thanksgiving at my house last year, and I’m planning to do it again this year. Last year was the first year I was interested in other people’s posts about what they were cooking, and I took notes: one person’s baked mashed potatoes recipe, another person’s roasted root vegetables recipe, another person’s pumpkin pie recipe. I liked being in the kitchen and thinking of how very many of us were ALSO in the kitchen, all making the same sorts of foods.

One of the upsides of hosting Thanksgiving is that I can buy a few accessory pieces: I have enough place settings of my grandma’s china, but I could use some new decorative things for the center of the table, some pretty paper napkins, more salt-and-pepper shakers. I’m not rushing it: everything went fine last year without those things. But it’s fun to have a gap to fill. At a consignment shop I found a good price on a serving dish in my grandma’s pattern; before, I would have thought, “Oh, it’s great, but I’ll never have a chance to use it!” This time, with Thanksgiving dinner in the future, I got out my wallet.

And when I saw acorn placecard holders at the store, instead of thinking, “I never use placecard holders,” I thought “Hey! I could use placecard holders! To hold placecards!” So it has been pleasant, is what I’m saying.

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Last week’s post:
1. Puzzles
2. Thinning out the list
3. Valerian root
4. Smoothies

This week’s post:

5. Lavender stuff (photo from BathAndBodyWorks.com). This is similar to the superfoods thing: I have FAITH IN THE RELAXING POWERS OF LAVENDER, and so even if it’s NOT working, it works because it makes me feel like I’m DOING something, I’m FIXING it. Plus, anything that instructs me to inhale deeply is going to help.

6. Doing each thing in the right time frame (photo from Amazon.com). If I write when there are kids around, it takes me about five times as long to do the same amount of work as if I write when there are no kids around—and as I’m taking five times as long, I’m also snapping and resenting and feeling awful.
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Things are stressful right now. (Work/too-much-to-do kind of way, rather than personal/family-distress.) I feel like I’ve heard meditation and exercise and bubble baths and yoga advice mentioned a million, billion times; here are some of the other things I do (some of which may also have been mentioned a million, billion times):

1. Puzzles (photo from Amazon.com). I’m working on KenKen now; I’ve also done Sudoku. I find puzzles soothing and distracting: they take my mind off things, but also make my mind feel tidied up. They’re a good thing to work on in a waiting room, or if I have a few minutes between tasks. I like the feeling of a small accomplishment.

2. Thinning out—not necessary in order of priority. Sometimes when I am feeling very, very stressed, the issue is that I’m feeling all the many things I need to do buzzing around me in a cloud. And sometimes when that’s the case, there is a percentage of things that are low-priority but could be done in a short amount of time.

If I write down the twenty things I need to do, including even the small things like changing the battery in the bathroom clock or responding “Okay, I’ll do that!” to an email, not only does that let me stop rehearsing the list mentally, but also I can often do, say, five of the things in five minutes. Getting the list down from twenty items to fifteen makes a huge difference in how stressed I am—whereas if I’d done the things in strict priority order, I’d still be on the first item and still feeling the other nineteen looming.
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My eldest child has outgrown Halloween. Or, more likely, he’s between the stage of trick-or-treating/dressing-up and the stage of re-discovering it in crowds of teenagers who make everyone clench their teeth as they go to door gathering free candy dressed in a garbage bag.

The other four kids are still interested. We have a loose costume policy, which is basically this: I vastly prefer they choose a costume from the bins of clearance costumes I’ve acquired over the years. But if a child earnestly and fervently wants a different and particular costume, I am willing to consider it.

What we usually do is start with the Thinking About It stage, which is where we are now: the children are considering what they might want to be, and I’m looking up costumes and going “THIRTY DOLLARS PLUS SHIPPING? For something you’ll wear ONCE??” I wish it were easier to know THE YEAR BEFORE what costume the child would want to wear the following year. I KNOW I saw Star Wars costumes on practically-giving-them-away clearances last year, but last year none of them were into Star Wars.

William would like to be Luke Skywalker (image from Amazon.com). Unfortunately, William is 5′4″, so he will probably need the adult-size costume, which is even more expensive than the kid one. Also, when he saw the image I just posted, he said, “If possible, I want to be the black costume, when he’s a Jedi.” At first I was dismayed, as we scrolled through page after page of Jedi costumes and all of them were “No, that’s Anakin.” But then we did an image search to see what LUKE’S Jedi outfit looks like…and it’s black clothes. It’s really just black clothes, plus a light saber. And William thinks he can make the wrist thing out of cardboard and tin foil. So that’s manageable: I can buy the light saber and make sure he has a black shirt and that’s it.
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I recently bought some bird earrings, and in the comments section we started talking about how I have also been questing for owl earrings. The owl trend continues (my mom and me, while shopping: “It’s it REMARKABLE how stores are SUDDENLY CARRYING the VERY THING we SUDDENLY WANT? What a REMARKABLE COINCIDENCE!”), but I find owls a difficult thing to choose The Right One of: some are too scowly, some overly or insufficiently whimsical. So although a need for owl earrings has been created in me, my ears stay un-owled and the quest continues.

ZAD Vintage Silver/Crystal Owl Earrings (photo from Amazon.com). These are close to what I’m looking for. Good nostalgia quotient (my mom collected owls the last time the trend came around, and these are the type of owl eyes I remember), good owl feet, good basic idea. I wish there was a photo that gave me a better idea of how big they’d look on someone’s actual ears.

Sterling Silver Owl Earrings (photo from Amazon.com). I like that these have designed backs as well as fronts. But the eyes are a little too blank/ball-like.
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