Norah's dancing to Christmas music, now looking at library books, now keeping the beat with a kitchen spoon and paint stick on her school table, now playing under a makeshift tent with her marbles... Dwayne's working on his laptop. All my housework is done save a basket of socks to be matched, so I'd rather be blogging, even for the second time today, even if it makes me a looser.
I popped corn on the stove while dinner was in the oven and let it cool while we ate. After we cleaned up, we strung it and hung it on our littlest tree, the one with colored lights and candy canes, the one that I paid $15 dollars for six years ago when I was an underpaid professional educator, the tree I have dubbed "My Concession," where I will always gladly hang any ornament Norah brings home that she made out of too much paste, too few popsicle sticks and too little rickrack. This second tree allows me to be much more territorial about our larger, formal tree. It has become absolutely indispensable to me.
I had never strung popcorn, so I watched a how-to video a few days ago to get some guidance. I wasn't planning to string any raisins or cheerios, just popcorn, but Norah kept crushing every piece of popcorn she tried to string, so her strand became a combination of a few inches of popcorn (done quickly by me while Norah ate some of the decorations), then a few inches of raisins and cheerios done by her, then more popcorn done by me...
We used quilting thread and needles, the kind that are about three inches long, dull and thick enough to sew a wounded horse's hide shut. They worked well, since Norah is so young and inexperienced with needles.