Our Christmas Pagent

So obviously this post is WAY late, but I had uploaded the video sometime in December and never got around to sharing it.  And then recently at church we were reminiscing with one of the ladies about Sarah's heart-felt performance of "Go Tell It On The Mountain" and it reminded me I needed to post this story.

To back up a little, our congregation puts on a Christmas pageant every year (by the kids, for the kids) and I was excited for Nathan and Sarah to get to be a part of it!  However, from the very beginning Nathan was very adamant that he did NOT want to dress up for the pageant.  He was actually pretty upset about it one week - I (and I assume the other adults) thought we could convince him to dress up if we just tried the right tactic, but after one Monday when he kept bringing up over and over that he did not want to dress up I reassured him that it was his choice and no one would make him dress up if he didn't want to.  I was worried that at the last minute he would change his mind and regret not getting a costume, but turned out he held fast to his proclamation (though he was sure to dress up "fancy" for the occasion).  Sarah, always eager to imitate her brother, also claimed not to want to dress up, but then at the last minute I convinced her to dress up like an angel to be just like her favorite big girl S.

The kids and I practiced the couple of songs they were supposed to know pretty intently during the week leading up to the pageant.  Sarah was pretty half-hearted on most of the songs.  Nathan especially loved "Gloria" (Angels We Have Heard on High) and the second verse of Away In the Manger ("the little Lord Jesus no crying he makes").  The song that both of my kids (as well as all the others in the play) loved the best was the chorus to "Go Tell It On the Mountain", the grand finale of the show.  And when it came performance time, Sarah wasn't interested in singing any of the songs until we got to the finale and she went all out!  She was dancing and belting out the lyrics "...go tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ was BORN!"  So funny!



Side note: Brian was sleeping at home post-call this particular Sunday and we had just had our first big snow the days before, so I found myself lugging my backpack, camera, tripod and CARRYING Sarah while we trecked through the snow to church (I knew it would take hours to get there if I let her walk).  I got ready to set up my camera and realized that I'd taken off the attachment on the bottom of the camera where it clips to the tripod - I could have kicked myself!  So since I knew I would be wrangling Sarah during the performance, I balanced the camera on the pulpit which had been moved to the side of the auditorium.  I was bummed about the angle, but just glad that I got the performance on video. 

A Few More Snapshots from December

For a long time I've felt guilty/sad that I don't ever print ANY of the thousands of pictures that I take every year. So whenever family members receive pictures in the mail, please know its not just you who almost never have current pictures of the kids, its us too. In fact, when I print for grandparents and other family members, I usually don't add extra prints for us because I don't have a plan for what to do them and I don't need any more clutter in my life. The only exception to the "no prints for our immediate family" is the yearly photo calendar I make for myself - my dear friend Jennie made me one for my birthday a few years ago and since then I've made one for myself and the grandmothers every year for Christmas. The kids LOVE to look at the photo calendar, but they tend to fight over it and/or accidentally tear it down from the fridge so I try to discourage them (which is just sad). So I knew that they would LOVE it if I ever got my act together and figured out a good system for getting prints made and organized for them to look at.

Last week I ran across a blog post talking about the "Project Life" scrapbooking system and after some research I decided that I would spend some Christmas money on the supplies to get started.  I know that I'm currently in the "honeymoon" phase of excitement about a new project, but in the last two days I've gotten most of my pictures from December and January sorted and edited and even resized to print and I'll be picking them up today!  That's 50 prints, which is probably 75 photographs (since I'm printing some of them 2 per page to make them smaller), which is way more photos then I've printed since I stopped trying to turn my blog into a book back in 2010.  (Which I've decided needs to be a whole separate project for me to figure out, though I did finally "back up" my blog for the past year in word documents this week).

All that to say... here are some pictures (mainly from December) that never got up on the blog.  Enjoy!

Starting sometime in December I have been eating salads almost every day for lunch - typically baby spinach and mixed greens, feta, craisins, and walnuts with homemade vinaigrette.  After a couple of days, Sarah asked for a bite and to my surprise really liked it!  So I started sharing my salad with her, every day still surprised that she wanted "more!".  After a much longer time, Nathan asked to try my salad and said he liked it as well!  So for a while I would make us all salads for lunch!  But it turned out that Nathan's interest waned quickly and Sarah ate much better when I fed her from my bowl.

One day Nathan and Sarah decided to use their watercolor paints in a new and exciting way!

The kids still love the Children's Museum!  This day they dressed up in the construction uniform for the first time (hardhats and safety vests) to drive the Bobcat.  There was also a new display of "percussion" instruments, which both kids enjoyed playing for me.

Some favorite books from December (and Nathan helping me document them using the camera on my ipod.)

I Just Fine Reading My Books

Sarah spent quite a bit of the day like this...

I read to her lots in the bathroom and she read quite a bit to herself.  I think her favorite though is to be looking at one book while I'm reading another out loud to her.  And when I try to steer her choices, she tells me "No I pick book Mommy!"

But the best was this exchange, when I left her on the potty while I went to work on dinner.  After a few minutes I called back "How are you doing, Sarah?" to which she replied "I just fine."  Laughing, I walked back into the bathroom where she looked up at me and said "I great.  I just fine reading my books."  Then bent her head over and continued reading.  I guess that meant I was dismissed to continue cooking. I love how her personality is blossoming!

This and That (January 2014)

When I think about things I want to blog about, lots of times I am pondering "What am I going to forget about life right now that I'll want to remember later?"  I love documenting the bigger activities, trips, events, etc, but part of me thinks that these little tidbits about life might be my most treasured reading in the years to come.

It's started snowing again and I think we're expecting around a foot of snow.  I guess this is our third big snow of the winter?  Sheesh!  Brian actually drove to work today since he was assigned to a satellite surgical clinic.  On the way home someone on the radio said it was "Snow-mageddon", so for the hour after he got home Brian would randomly (and loudly) call out "Snow-mageddon!"

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Nathan has been my great vacuuming buddy for years.  He loves his little toy vacuum that Nana bought for him when he was two.  We have become a good team over the years: I'll start on one side of the room and work toward the middle then call out "switch" and he'll run around me to the other side so I can keep going.  These days he usually anticipate me and will ask "switch?" before I have to tell him.  For a long time he's always asked to turn the vacuum on and off, and lately I've started letting him plug it in and unplug the cord from the socket (and he gets irritated with me whenever I forget to let him do all of these things).  When we first moved to Boston, Sarah was still scared of the vacuum so I would close the door and she would wait outside until Nathan and I were finished with our chore.  Lately though she's been "helping" vacuum as well - using the toy stroller as her pretend vacuum.

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Nathan has fallen into the bad habit of picking at his nails all the time.  I NEVER have to trim this kid's nails!  A few weeks ago his thumb nails were becoming so terribly tiny that Brian decided we needed to take some action since verbally reminding him wasn't making any impact.  So we started having him put band-aids on his thumbs before quiet time (since I can just imagine him spending his whole quiet time absentmindedly picking) and at bedtime (same deal).  Sarah, of course, wants to do everything like her brother so she is also putting on bandaids at naptime and bedtime, though we limit her to only one.  We are seeing improvement on Nathan's nails - they just look short but not grotesque, though Brian is now lamenting the cost of all these bandaids the kids are using!

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Sarah has developed a fascination with checking her feet for toe lint and asking me to help her clean it out.  This usually occurs when we're sitting on the loveseat reading, which is a perfect opportunity for Sarah to clean between toes and for Nathan to pick at his nails.

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Whenever a timer goes off in the house, or the oven beeps, or almost any alarm sounds, apparently my usual comment is "That's me!" as I dash to take care of whatever needs to be done.  I didn't realize that's what I say, but it must be since now whenever any alarm sounds around the house the kids tell me "That's you!"

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With the forecast of brutally cold weather on top of the snow we're supposed to get over the next 18 hours, I woke up this morning with the plan to start potty training Sarah.  We spent a little time on the potty this morning before Nathan made a last-minute decision that we needed to go to the science museum today.  I think the process may not be too difficult since Sarah was loving sitting on the potty while I was reading book after book to her.  She thinks she's getting a great present of having Mommy read lots and lots and lots of books to her AND getting to wear big girl underwear on top of that!  I foresee lots of the three of us crammed into the bathroom reading over the next few days (since Nathan's not one to miss a chance to read either!).  She did actually have success once this morning before we switched into a diaper for our outing.  On a side note about reading, Sarah's usual plea of "cuddle" when she's feeling sad or grumpy is slowly being replaced with the plea of "read book".

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Sarah has some "tenacious earwax" according to Brian.  He will periodically check the kids' ears with his otoscope and a few weeks back was worried about some wax that was impacted in Sarah's ears.  At the time she was NOT interested in sitting still for Brian to try and clean them out.  We ended up trying again last weekend and Sarah amazed us all by being super cooperative!  She literally spent half an our laying on her side while Brian scraped and prodded and flushed her one ear to get it clean.  And Nathan was such a sweet helper - he gave her one of his special little cars he got for Christmas for her to hold and look at, then later he was reading her a book and singing to her to keep her entertained.  Boy did that make my heart want to burst with happiness!

I'm Back for a Minute

Apparently I've been on an uplanned blogging break, as evidenced by the minimal number of posts I've put up this month.  I'm definitely blaming it on the challenging three weeks of Brian working in the ICU plus the holidays plus all the snow we had earlier this month.  But mainly the ICU schedule - which meant two weeks where Brian was gone all the kids' waking hours plus one week in the middle with a noon-midnight schedule (which again left me alone with the kids in the evening, which is the hardest part of the day for me).  At the end of these days, I'm just so emotionally drained that the only thing I can manage to do is stare blankly at the TV or computer screen, and the thought of trying to put together coherent sentences for the blog is too overwhelming! Oh, and I forgot to mention that Brian was sick with "the plague" for the whole three weeks!!

Of course the difficulty of these weeks was magnified by Sarah's decision to initiate nap-time and bedtime revolts beginning on Day #1.  This meant that every time I was THIS CLOSE to having a bit of quiet, I ended up spending 20 minutes in and out of the kids' rooms asking her to stay in bed, please stop making noise, stop jumping in bed, stop kicking the wall, JUST GO TO SLEEP!

During nap-times I would finally pull Nathan out of the room (to his immense displeasure) for quiet time in the master bedroom, or I could circumvent the whole process by lying down on the loveseat until Sarah gave up and fell asleep.  And bedtime?  No good solution, which only made me more and more angry as the days went on. 

After I had completely lost my patience with Sarah's shenanigans, but slightly before I lost my sanity (somewhere in the middle of week 2) Brian and I brainstormed and implemented some new strategies to help.  Because, when I'm with the kids ALL DAY LONG, those minutes of Nathan's "quiet time" are immensely precious for me to regroup during the day, and by the time 7:00 rolls around I am grumpy with a short fuse.  So for nap time, Nathan's out of the room, no questions asked (almost always in the master).  And for bedtime the kids would go in their room around their normal bedtime, but then I would let them read or play quietly for 15 or 30 minutes or more before I turned out their light and they were expected to stay in their beds.  The bedtime quiet reading time was actually a huge hit.  After the first night, Nathan asked me to put them in their room early at nap-time and again at bedtime so they could read quietly for a long time!

Brian's been out of the ICU for a week now and things are getting back to normal.  For one, Sarah's falling asleep better at bedtimes - she must have been going through some weird stage where she needed less sleep for a week or two.  But tonight when Nathan had a screaming fit as we were getting ready for bed (thanks to almost no naps for him these days), I backslid and had to browse Pinterest for an hour and a half before I could come back and finish this post.

Whew, it really has been a pretty rough last few weeks.  But I will say that I am daydreaming about next year and the HOURS every week where I will be kid-free thanks to the amazing combo of doting grandparents and preschool.  I totally believe in "absence makes the heart grow fonder" with my kids. 

On a lighter note, the kids and I picked out helmets two weeks ago for them to wear with their scooters.  And they LOVE them!  Helmets are the perfect accessory for playing with playdough (which both kids are doing an extraordinary amount of lately)... 

...or triking inside.

And I finally remembered to get a picture of them on their scooters, though they decided to trade for some reason.

Brian and I hadn't really talked to the kids about needing helmets before they could ride their scooters outside, but the very next day after we bought them the kids wanted to ride their scooters to the library... and then to buy milk at the convenience store across the street... and then to the park.  And since then, they've scooted to church and again to the library.  Nathan started out with pretty good skills but now he's getting even better and faster.  For Sarah, she's still working on her coordination with scooting and steering, so she's being pulled/guided by an adult on our outings.  But yesterday on the way to the library Nathan was ahead of us (as usual) and Sarah told me "I catch up Na-fen" and put on a surprising burst of speed!  I was almost jogging to stay up with her! I'm thrilled that the kids love their scooters so much!

As for the blogging break, I'll probably continue posting less often for a while at least.  You've been warned.

Blizzard of Jan 2014 - Sledding

So I'll blog about the blizzard later, but I wanted to share some video montages from sledding Saturday afternoon with the family.  Thankfully after our first snow a few weeks ago, I drove by some kids sledding on a hill not too far from our house so I knew where a good hill was.  We all had tons of fun!

We hadn't bought a sled before the storm, so Brian and I were brainstorming what we had around the house that the kids could use.  Brian came up with the idea to use our boogie board, which worked out pretty well.  Not knowing how well it would go, we started the kids on the "bunny slope" side of the hill.  We had a few false starts but as we learned we also progressed towards the steeper part of the hill.



Brian had spotted some broken sled pieces that had been discarded by someone, so we decided to put the pieces to work for us, which increased the speed (and therefore fun) factor significantly!



After quite a bit of sledding, Sarah lost interest and decided she wanted to play on the playground right next to our sledding hill.  Then she decided that her feet hurt (I imagine they were cold), so she and I headed home while the boys continued sledding.  I figured Nathan wouldn't last too much longer, but boy was I mistaken!  It was almost 45 minutes later when they came through the door.  Brian told me that after quite a bit of sledding he asked Nathan how many more times he wanted to go down the hill, to which he replied "11"!  It ended up being 12 more runs, then apparently Nathan was so exhausted he wanted Brian to carry him home.  His actual words were "I wish we had two Mommies and two Daddies so that someone can carry me home!" 

The Day of Gingerbread, Part 1

Brian was on call one Saturday mid-December so I decided it would be a good day for the kids and I to do some of the pre-Christmas baking projects I had planned.  Unfortunately with Brian's schedule this year there wasn't many days that he could have participated with us, so I figured a long Saturday with the kids was the perfect time to fill the day with Christmas projects.

In the morning we made gingerbread man (boy) cookies.  Nathan and I did this last year after reading "The Gingerbread Boy" which turned into one of Nathan's absolute favorite books.  We had checked it out of the library a few times in NC, so this year I just bought ourselves our own copy before Christmas.  Nathan was thrilled when I pulled it out with the Christmas books!  And he was also thrilled when I proposed that we make our own gingerbread boys to eat.

This is their excited expressions...

I helped Sarah some with the cutting out of the cookies but she didn't want any help putting the raisins on the cookies!

Nathan pretty much had the whole project under control by himself (though I did help with rolling out the dough).  

Excitedly waiting for the cookies to finish baking. 

The finished masterpieces.

Nathan LOVED the cookies but Sarah was underwhelmed.   

After nap the kids and I started work on our gingerbread houses, which I'll post about next time.  

Christmas 2013

This Christmas season has felt extremely un-holiday like to me.  I think it has to do with lots of factors: our first year without celebrating with extended family, all Christmas shopping was done via Amazon and not seeing stores decked out for Christmas, Brian's tough ICU schedule, not seeing Christmas lights on houses and the minimal amount of Christmas decorations we brought with us. I even didn't have Christmas music on as much as I usually do!  Thankfully Brian did have Christmas Day off, so we were able to have a good day as a family opening gifts and playing together.

The kids made off like bandits with some really great toys from very generous relatives.  The big assembly project that happened during the morning was the art easel.  This has been a huge hit with both kids!  On a related note, if anyone needs to know how to get non-washable dry-erase marker out of clothes, I had luck with Murphy's Oil soap on three of Sarah's shirts.  We are working on being better about putting our aprons on before starting to color!

Sarah has enjoyed carrying things around in her new purse.  Its just the right size - big enough to carry quite a few things but still small enough to not be too heavy.  Though she hasn't quite figured out how to keep it on her shoulder without having her arm in the air...

Nathan playing with a new set of blocks.  As you can tell from his expression, he didn't want me to take a picture of him or his tower.

After dinner I was chatting with the kids and asked Nathan if he got any great presents for Christmas - just to see what he would say.  He replied "Mommy, I got a very exciting present today - the snowman!" and then later, "Mommy, I always wanted a snowman to have in my bed!".  Sarah is also in love with her new bear, which is almost as big as she is!

We ended the day with the whole family playing with our Geomag magnetic building set, but found out quickly that the 120 piece set does not have enough pieces for four to play at once!  I have to admit that I long ago lost interest in building block towers with the kids, though they beg me to build with them on an almost-daily basis.  So Mommy may be buying (herself) another set in the near future so we can all enjoy building together again!

Though I still don't have a picture of the kids playing on them, Brian and I bought the kids each a super-cool Maxi Kick scooter (orange for Nathan and pink for Sarah, you can see them in the picture of Sarah holding her purse).  Nathan especially rides his all the time and was so sweet with words of thanks throughout the day for his present.  Mid-morning he glided up to me and said, "Mommy, I love my scooter.  Thank you!" and then later he told me "Mommy, this boy loves his scooter!"

Finally, the food: we had our typical breakfast of cinnamon rolls and sausage balls - a beautiful combination of Brian and my traditional childhood Christmas breakfasts.  Then for dinner Brian made steaks to go with mashed potatoes and green beans.  And to finish the meal, dipped chocolates/chocolate balls were enjoyed by all.