I’m getting close to done with this project. Here are all the 2022 memories combined together.
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January
The big news for this week is the boys bought a car. They’ve been searching for a minivan for months, it’s hard to find decent used cars right now, and minivans are super in demand.
As soon as they picked it up, they put the Queen Elizabeth II sticker on that car, and were so incredibly proud of it. Even if Superman looks like he’d rather be anywhere but right there.
That bottom left picture is Superman cleaning up the Taco Bell he works at as it closes. They’re super short-staffed right now, and are being forced to close early. That particular day I had to go pick him up early (like 8:30) because they had to close at 8:00 because they didn’t have enough people to keep it open.
And the bottom right corner is my nephew. Tara came into town, originally we were going to go see Hadestown together, but it got delayed because of the Omicron Covid surge. Then she got news her Dad was in the hospital so she kep the tickets to come down, and we played babysit the baby as she visited her Dad in the hospital.
And this is where the story of Tara’s visit becomes sad. About a day after she got there, and she got to visit him once, he died suddenly. So what was originally going to be a fun visit, became a sad visit, and then it became a super sad visit. But, we watched her kiddo as she handled all of the sudden funeral details she had to figure out.
Baby T and Leezard loved each other. He crawled all over that dog, and kept trying to feed his food to him.
During one of the down times, we played a game of Clank with Tara, which she loved, and it was fun for me to play my new expansion I got for Christmas.
During one of the breaks, where Tara had the baby we did learn about Guatemala that week, and ate a delicious meal. That one I definitely remember because I found a gluten-free recipe since she has Celiacs.
February
I finished up the Power On book club that I was leading, and since I no longer was worrying about knowing spoilers, I went ahead and read the sequel, and then bought the parallel series and the silly spin-off, and I may have read about 7 books in a week, more or less.
The boys had their black belt tests for Kung Fu on Wednesday and successfully obtained their level 3 black belt, they are incredibly proud of this. and for good reason.
Leezard has upped her begging game, and was trying her very best to convince Superman that she super needed the food he was snacking on at the moment.
Saturday was supposed to be the boys’ Kung Fu demo team at the farmer’s market, but it was cancelled by suspected rain, which didn’t even happen, much to their frustration, but it was also super cold, so I’m glad they didn’t have it.
Instead, we more or less finished the Seafall Legacy game, and we kind of cheated our way to be done with the game because Jeff and I were super done with the game as it wasn’t the most interesting game to play all the time. Superman looked up more on how to find those final statues and we started reading the game ending. The boys are very excited to try it with the two of them as they fight the forces of hell, yep you read that right, after you find the final island you’re fighting hell somehow or other.
Then we watched The Zookeeper’s Wife as Batman had read it for his January book, the other two aren’t doing the English assignments for me since they’re taking a college English class. I both like the movie and don’t like the movie because it’s rather hard to watch emotionally.
All right, that’s our February! YAY! Two months done for 2022, another year is FLYING by.
March
This was our Spring Break, and it was a bit hectic. I set up way too many things to happen that week. We finished watching Lizzy Bennett Diaries with the Awkard Unicorns. The kids got together with the cousins at Mount Playmore for C’s birthday (bottom left picture).
We attempted to learn about New Hampshire, which didn’t go as well as possible because we were super busy, so we didn’t finish that until the 21st.
The Artist got her learner’s permit, which was quite the ordeal.
The day started with Leezard having several seizures, and she’d recover and I would go back to my desk to work on getting together all the paperwork and just having figured out the next step when another seizure would happen. Then we got there, and found out my STATE ISSUED DRIVER’s LICENSE doesn’t count as a valid ID to prove I live there. My insurance did, but not the driver’s license. So I had my husband send over the utility bill, but that didn’t count for me because it’s in his name, so we had to drive ALL THE WAY DOWN TO WHERE HE WORKS, so he could sign an affidavit stating she lived there. The only reason why he didn’t have to come down there was because he was on the birth certificate. So I drove about an hour round trip to get that, got back there, and she finally got her driver’s license.
At which point we hurriedly drove home, threw stuff in the car for her to go camping, drove an hour down to South Austin, only to get a text from our neighbor telling me Leezard had escaped into his yard. So I called him, told him where we lived and to shove her in the backyard and hoped Batman would be able to come home and put her in her crate before he had to go to work.
It was an exciting day…
But, while The Artist was camping we played lots of games together:
April
The last week of April was busy. The boys had a Kung Fu demo show at a foster home, and the kids watching were quite amazed. The very next morning we helped Jeff’s parents finishing moving into their new home. That’s the picture underneath. The kids were quite hilarious as we didn’t have an easy way to get into the building, so we usually jumped the half wall so we didn’t have to finish walking all the way around it.
The boys decided to steal The Artist’s favorite chair and she was arguing she should get her chair back, and I was arguing we should let them do their geography and history both sitting in the chair. She wasn’t in agreement.
We learned about Djibouti last week, and I made banana fritters, which turned out…. okay. But the recipe didn’t quite come out as expected. It was a whole ordeal getting those made.
Okay, that’s more or less our month in review. I’m sure I’ll think of something else in a few moments.
May
The top left picture is of The Artist’s Court of Awards and she earned the Presidential Service Award gold level with over 200 hours of service. Yes you read that right, she had over 200 hours of community service this year.
That happened right before Jeff and I headed off for a 2-week 20th-anniversary trip. We drove all the way out to South Carolina, stopping along the way at every welcome center and stopping at all sorts of really cool places as we traveled.
It all ended when we reached South Carolina and went to the wedding for the daughter of one of my best friend’s from high school. When they still lived in Texas we got together all the time, and her daughter babysat my kids, and she stayed at my house a time or two over the years, so it was a really special thing to be able to go to her wedding.
This first week of our trip we went by Washington, Arkansas and saw where the Bouie knife was created, it was a really cool historical village. The next day we went to Franklin, TN and toured the battle site there, that was fascinating.
We drove for an hour or so and toured the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s home, which was one of the few places I specifically wanted to go because I went as a kid and remembered it was really cool, and wanted to visit it again as an adult, and I was right it was really cool to go through.
Then we drove on and reached Pigeon Forge, TN and toured the Alcatraz museum, which was not as cool as I hoped. It was over-priced, and was a lot of general Wikipedia level information.
Then we went to the Biltmore and I got so many pictures there. I’m planning on turning them into some writing prompts.
June
All right, for Father’s Day because everyone wasn’t feeling super great we had a low key day (with no pictures) and we played Harry Potter Battle for Hogwarts with the whole family. That was a lot of fun to play together.
My friend’s book, Jabberwock’s Curse came out finally, so I happily got my pre-order and read it. I got to read an early beta edition, and it was fun to see the final version. I’m kinda curious to reread the beta version to see the parts where she changed it. I know some of them, but it’s been a bit since I read the beta version.
We made a meal from Kiribati, which is kinda amusing to try. For the longest time I couldn’t find any recipes, and then I finally found this recipe, but I’m not 100% convinced this truly is from there, rather than just something someone’s mom liked to make that’s imported from elsewhere. Even if it’s not, we found a new sauce seasoning that we like, Maggi seasoning. The sauce seemed thin, so if I were to make it again I’d probably make a roux, and then add all the liquids.
Jeff and I went out to lunch together since all the kids are off at kids clubs this week, and the restaurant was ridiculously cold, so I took The Artist’s jacket to stay warm and then texted her a picture to say, “Look I took your jacket,” and she was just vaguely indifferent to my teasing her.
I had lunch with one of my best friends from high school. She lives a little on the other side of Austin from me, so it’s over an hour drive to see her, so we meet halfway at an Olive Garden once a month for lunch. She’s moving to Virginia next month, so this was our last get-together. We’ll have to figure out how to transition our friendship to long distance, which I have to admit I’m not always the best at.
Mom and I went to lunch at the Taco bell Superman works with while he wasn’t working there, and had a very amusing 10 minute conversation with his manager about how much they love Superman there and what a great worker he is, and then we talked for a long time about how the Mexican Pizza is driving everyone crazy at Taco Bell, while we were talking he just handed us drink cups to get a free drink. And then as we ordered he’s like I’ll give you the employee discount, and then as we’re ordering he’s like, “I’ll just make it free, it’s Superman’s Mom and Grandma, we’ll totally make it free.”
It was very amusing. Then I told Superman all about it and he looked mildly embarrassed.
July
This is all in a mess, no sort of time order.
Jeff and I started July going to a wedding for his co-worker (bottom left picture), and we got a chance to go dancing for a little bit, but it was the world’s fastest swing song, and we were insanely tired after it, and right after the DJ played another of my favorite songs, but it was even faster, and we were too tired to dance to it. Sadness.
We came back and went to a friend’s house for Independence Day, and the boys happily played Smash Up, and we got The Artist to play Throw Throw Burrito, outdoor edition (with giant inflatable burritos).
We spent this week making insanely large amounts of foods for our Cooking Around the World. We cooked bread from Antigua and Barbuda, made a lemon chicken from Guinea, and then had a beef stew from Kyrgzstan. I also attempted to make a coconut turnover from Barbados, but I was not having luck with that and I stupidly tried to make two bread recipes when I was quite short on time, and just gave up on that.
Not pictured, but hilarious story. I’m trying to figure out how to better include the fun moments that don’t have pictures because there’s no way to get a picture to encapsulate the picture.
They started a short term weekly Bible study, and after the first week they had too many bagels left over from the “Bagels and Bibles,” so my kids grabbed a bag to take home. They got home and started turning the bagels into lunch. I wandered over to grab my own bagel and spent several minutes looking for the cream cheese, at which point I turned to The Artist and said, “Where is the cream cheese The Artist?” But I sounded so much like my Mom when she said the now infamous in our household, “Why are you giving me trash Ticia?” from her birthday (explained in January 2022 memories, if not I need to add that story in). Then Batman chimes in with this creepy version of “Where is the cream cheese The Arist,” said in terrible voice.
The next day as I’m driving home from getting The Artist from babysitting. We started joking all about how I’m never going to live down that moment. I said, “It’s now part of the Messing Family canon, the whole mythos.”
“You see,” I said, “I have it all planned out. The opening sequence is rather like how Avatar starts with the whole Earth, Air, so on and so forth. Only it’ll be each person of our family, and they’ll do something iconic for who they are.”
“Oh!” The Artist joined in, “Batman and Superman can have a sword and Nerf gun. One will shoot the other, and he’ll move the dart out of the way with his sword. You can turn around suddenly with a cup of tea and a stack of books.”
“We’ll have you painting something, it’ll look really cool for the animation.”
“But you turning around with a cup of tea isn’t very cinematic.”
“I can pour it out on the boys. Daddy can be writing on a computer.”
“That’s not very interesting.”
“No, he’s writing a story and as he writes the story comes to life,” I said.
“But who will narrate all of this?” The Artist mused, and with a stroke of genius she said, “Mimi! Mimi will narrate it!”
And that is how we decided we needed to write an anime for our family.
August
Apparently, this is the week of kids having fun picking on each other or the dog.
The top two pictures are Superman attempting to put sunglasses he found on Leezard, and her just laying there and you can practically hear her thinking, “This is my life. Why is this my life?”
And the middle picture of all three kids on the top is all three of them arguing over who is cuddling with the dog. You can’t see the dog, but I assure you, somewhere in that pile of teenagers, there is a dog.
Not pictured, but happening this week, we had all sorts of fun trying to finalize the kids’ classes for ACC. We got an email saying we hadn’t paid a bill that we never received a bill for, and because of that The Artist was dropped from her classes, but when we went to go see her account, it said she owed nothing. He showed us screenshots saying we owed $80, but no accounts we logged into said she owed anything.
While all of that nonsense was going on, the class filled up, and so she signed up for another class, which had a book that cost nothing, but the bookstore we are REQUIRED to use, was charging “to be decided” taxes. What does that even mean? And then I spent 20 minutes trying to get it to accept my payment for the free book with to be decided taxes because it kept saying there was an error.
At the end of it all I said, “Tea is not enough to deal with my frustration. I need a Dr Pepper.”
This was on top of my car going in the shop earlier that week and we kept getting non-specific answers of what was wrong before finally getting 3 days later, “Oh, it’s the battery.”
UGH
Then, Jeff got the news his entire department was being transferred over to India, and they were supposed to spend the next 3-18 months training their cheaper replacements, and they would be given other jobs elsewhere.
For a few hours, it was looking like we might have to move to Minnesota, which thankfully is not the case. It was less than exciting.
We learned about Venezuela, Uruguay, and Gabon for geography, the top 2 right pictures are our meals from Venezuela and Uruguay. Gabon was interesting because the recipe was beignets, and I’ve been amused at the number of former French colonies that claim beignets as a favorite national dish. This was one of the first times I think the recipe really came out well. So it’s my favorite beignet recipe.
And that’s week 3, my lasagna for dinner tonight should be coming out soon. This was one of those days where the recipe just was not going well. In case you’re wondering, no matter how much might say it tastes better if you pre-cook the noodles, DO NOT pre-cook oven-ready noodles. It causes so many problems.
September
Okay, so I’m totally writing this all out of order. I apparently forgot to write week 2, so here’s week 3 being written while I’m remembering all the stuff, and I’ll come back to week 2.
I started the week with Mexican Pizza Day. In case you haven’t heard of this little-known not holiday, it’s the day Mexican Pizza came back to Taco Bell. I had originally planned to go torment Superman at his work, but I accidentally ended up having people over for dinner while he was working, so I couldn’t go while he was working, but was forced to get lunch, his work was short of workers and the dining room was closed, so we were forced to go to another location. There was much sadness, but I got a Mexican Pizza.
Saturday the boys had another show and so we went to support them, I got a couple of fun pictures of their solos.
Our geography meals for the week were: Mongolian dumplings (I forget the exact name it was something like puzz?) and a Myanmar chicken. The dumplings were a hit, other than I would puree the onion next time because I cannot mince the onions small enough.
I continue to get pictures of The Artist and Batman tormenting each other. It seems to be their love language, that’s what she says. They happily poke at and torment each other.
And that bottom picture…. So Tara is coming to visit with her young children that are still at the put things in my mouth stage, so we were desperately cleaning so we wouldn’t kill the kids.
Let me share the conversation as it went during one cleaning moment:
Boy from upstairs: Mom, what do you want us to do with the boxes of books?
Me from downstairs: Be creative with them, but not too creative. [Mom you need to add that you went on for 5 minutes about be creative but not too creative, that was a 5-minute rant]
Unidentified boy: Okay (various shoving and moving sounds are heard from upstairs)
Girl from downstairs surprisingly next to me as I get tea: What? No, Mom, don’t say that! What are you saying? Put it in the attic! Don’t be creative! Why would you say that?
Me realizing my mistake as I hear excitement upstairs: Not in the attic and not too creative.
Giggling is heard from upstairs. Excited giggling as they move the boxes of books. Giggling like they are 5-year-old girls and not almost 18-year-old men.
Episode title: Creative moving
Alternative title: Creative cleaning
As I typed this up, I turned around to giant thud of something falling down the stairs.
Life in my house is never boring…
October
The week started with it being officially Jeff’s birthday, so I have that big middle shot of Jeff taking a picture of The Artist’s pie she made him (that’s up above in week 2). The weekend of gaming and movies was a big hit, and everyone was pretty happy, though tired by the end.
Monday The Artist had a “Women of Faith” fashion show (bottom middle), and we spent a very long time trying to pick someone for her to dress up as from the list because I didn’t have time to sew anything, and I didn’t really want to go buy anything, so she picked through it all and found someone who was vaguely from Regency/Victorian, and she dressed in something kind of sort of Victorian-ish and called it good.
I’m still in the midst of all my Halloween sewing, and as I went upstairs I realized the kids had been adding their cousin’s artwork to the empty wall in their room (top middle), this greatly amused me as it’s a much smaller version of The Artist’s art wall.
The first item finished was Batman’s updated vest. Two years ago when I made it for his Greymane costume, I did frog closures, which require tension to stay secured, and so it kept falling open and he really hated it, so I switched out for buttons.
I’ve got Superman’s coat pretty much done, it’s been sitting that way for over a week. I just need to complete the hand-sewing the lining at the armholes.
The Artist is helping me with sewing her costume, and we’ve had lots of “arguments” over pressing seams. I joked I was going to disown her if she didn’t iron her seams open, I even got all my friends to agree a perfectly reasonable decision. Then later as I’m explaining to her the next step on the waistband, I started going into a lot of detail on how to make it work, and then I stopped and said, “You don’t care. Why am I saying this?” She spent the rest of the afternoon teasing me about that.
The afternoon ended with her saying, “This is Mom, ‘Don’t do weed. Don’t do drugs. Iron open your zippers and stay in school kids.’”
Apparently my adventures in sewing and ironing is greatly amusing all of my friends.
On another note, that has absolutely no picture. Superman has recently been completing statements other people make by saying, “And lick it!”
Unfortunately for any sane person visiting our house, my response to that is usually, “Okay, let’s see you do it.”
This ends with him licking whatever item he was talking about. So far this week he has licked the ceiling twice, a sock, his brother’s foot, and then his brother licked a shoe. Every single time they claimed I was daring them.
Literally, one time I asked them to pick up shoes and socks from the floor and Superman responded with, “and lick it.” I just stood there staring at him, and he picked up his sock while staring at me aggressively and licked it. Then Batman, picked up his shoe and staring aggressively licked it.
Why boys? Why?
I have yet to figure out a response to this that does not end with Superman licking something and thinking it’s hilarious.
I gotta admit it is funny.
The handle broke off the driver’s side door and so Batman told me the new procedure to get out of the car is roll down the window, open the car from the outside, then roll up the window and turn the car off.
The Artist has slowly been working through the Power series, and since she prefers paper to ebook, I ordered the third book, Power Through, in paper copy. The author just posted in her Discord server you can order signed copies, and so I’m thinking of buying the last copy as a signed copy for her.
Oops, first time I uploaded this I hadn’t put smiley faces over everyone’s faces.
Thursday I went to watch my brother give a talk at a conference and he did great. It was also cool because I got to see an acquaintance from high school who I went to church with back then. We got to talk about all the things from our high school that people currently attending our church don’t have a frame of reference for.
Friday Superman, The Artist, and I went to a homeschool college fair and they went around and talked to all the colleges there asking about transferring community college credits, CLEP tests, what dorms are like, and things like that. They enjoyed this fair much more than the one for the school district, it was much better laid out, and more organized, not to mention significantly less crowded.
The weekend was the Great Pumpkin Hunt at the church and my high school girls (bottom middle) and I drove all over the city and did terrible, but it was a lot of fun.
Halloween the boys were determined to get a giant group for their last time trick or treating, with The Artist quite sure she didn’t want any more people than she could help there. Which ended with only a few more people than we usually had, and a great enjoyment was had by all.
I’d read this post online about a lady who’d put a potato in her candy bowl to see if people would take the potato, and outside of our group I had 3 kids take potatoes. One preschooler, a teen who took it ironically, and then an elementary kid who took it. Then various people from our mob of kids took it, including a 10 year old who took 3 (his Mom later told me he planned to use it for breakfast tacos). There was much laughing as they did so. Five pound bag of potatoes gone.
Later that night as Leezard escaped after we caught her we found one of the potatoes just thrown on the floor. It had clearly been thrown a couple of times by the kids before landing on the curb.
November
I think this is the only week where I have pictures that are at all vaguely related to schoolwork. High school work is just not as interesting to take pictures of for the most part.
We hosted Thanksgiving with my family. Batman cooked the turkey again and I happily cooked just the stuffing, which in this case meant I got up an hour or so before him to get the stuffing all ready and then I went back to sleep. He had to stay up and baste the turkey occasionally. It of course finished a few hours early, much to everyone’s frustration.
The day after Thanksgiving, the kids and I went to the Renaissance Festival. We had lots of fun dressing steampunk together and generally enjoyed going to lots of different shows and such stuff.
One of my high school girls had surgery so I made her a stuffed cat as a “get well” present, The Artist added a sweater for the cat which made it absolutely perfect.
We decorated the Christmas tree and discovered our tree topper was broken so we bought a new one Wednesday night, this picture is from adding the brand new tree topper and generally annoying their sister.
Always a favorite of the boys.
We had a field trip on Monday to the fire station, Batman asked several questions about what it takes and was reinforced in his plan to join the military and train to be a medic.
Okay, this is storytime. We studied Pakistan and the day before I made our recipe form it (that bottom picture). I carefully followed the directions and pureed the mixture and then tried to form it into meatballs. But, you can’t form it into meatballs because it’s way too watery. I tried adding in bread crumbs, still too watery. Then I thought, I can kind of form it and maybe I can fry out the moisture.
That was a lie.
Next, I thought to just bake out the moisture. At the end of all my attempts, I still had a disgusting-looking mush that looked like dog food.
Nothing like the picture. It had a good flavor, but the texture was… less than desirable.
Yeah, that did not go well. On the one hand I’m tempted to try the recipe again and make a few changes, but on the other hand I also don’t know that I liked the flavor enough to try again…
Sigh….
December
Most of the pictures here are from Christmas. Texas, just like the rest of the country got hit with a cold front, however we didn’t get any condensation from it, so it was cold for no reason.
I firmly believe if it’s going to be cold, then I sure better get snow. But I did not get snow, I was just cold. But it was only cold for a day or so, and by Christmas Eve it was warm enough for our planned silly string battle to commence (that’s the bottom left corner, I got a picture with The Artist and my niece, actually I got lots of people, but that’s the most obvious we had a silly string battle).
Oh, the giant picture is my kids leading their part of our Christmas Eve service. The kid were quite amused when I made them come forward for the children’s portion of the service.
It was a good Christmas overall. I got a sword cane for Christmas. I gave Jeff a 3D printer, and he’s still trying to figure out how to set it up and how to use it. There were several board games given, and we then played many of them on Christmas Day.
- Relative Insanity
- Pathfinder Level 20
- Last Night on Earth: Timber Peaks (found at Half Price books)
- There were a couple of other games, but I can’t remember exactly what they were
After Christmas, Batman went out and bought Cthulu: Death May Die, it’s a cooperative game and we’ve been playing it a bunch together, including The Artist who doesn’t usually like games.
We cooked a couple of recipes for around the world, we tried a Philippines adobo recipe, I was worried it would be too salty and it was not. Then we tried a Tongan dessert or maybe a breakfast food (?), that did not turn out well. I made everyone try at least one bite and the looks I got and the excuses made were pretty impressive. All in all it’s a sad waste of coconut. We pretty much agree we would like it more if it had been fried rather than boiled.
We finished off the year with a recreation of our very first ever movie marathon, Lord of the Rings movie marathon, recreating all of the snacks and meals from the day (which means I get to finally update that post with decent pictures. I forgot to ever update it with pictures when I first did it, as I posted it live before we’d done the actual marathon to post with other people each month).
As we watched Two Towers I worked on that applique down in the bottom. A former student of mine (and The Artist’s friend is due in January). The top is all done except the gold on the cup I decided to add in, and today, January 1, I’m hoping to get it all pinned to be ready to quilt.
And that finishes out 2022. It’s a bit weird to me to realize that we are almost 1/4 of the way through this century. Does that feel weird to anyone else?
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