Homeschool. Nathan's sometimes resorts to sitting on the old TV console to keep his work out of Andrew's clutches. I've got to figure out a better solution there... But! there is a grand development on that front for next year: the new headmaster has been making changes, one of which is to offer a five day option for the early elementary kids! So I knew right away what I was hoping for (homeschool has just been SO HARD this year, mostly I will attribute that to Andrew), but I asked Nathan what he wanted to do and he was super excited about being with his friends 5 days a week!
We had some absolutely gorgeous and unseasonably warm days in December, so one afternoon we met lots of church friends at a nearby park. Here are a bunch of the boys doing what boys do best! (Nathan's in the blue striped shirt sitting partway up on the right.)
Of course after seeing the Nathan and friends up so high, Sarah wanted to climb up too. She needed a little help, but she sure wants to try her best to keep up with the older boys!
Before we left, Nathan wanted me to get a picture of him all the way at the top. There was a climbing structure like this at one of the parks in Boston, and it would always make me nervous to watch him climb back when he was Sarah's age. But now I'm so confident in his abilities I barely paid him any attention. Although that also be because I was chatting with other moms and trying to keep Andrew from eating too much dirt...
We had a really fun Christmas celebration for our church small group at the Ohler's house. Paul read the story of the birth of Jesus to all the kids...
... then they did an ornament exchange! I kind of expected there to be tears from kids "stealing" ornaments from one another... actually, to be honest, I figured it would be a disaster. But I guess all our good parenting paid off because only one of the kids chose to "steal" an ornament! Actually, I assume all the rest were too excited about getting to open a present to want to take an already opened ornament.
Sarah checked this learn-to-draw-fairies book out of the library, and spent one whole evening creating about 10 different drawings. I was pretty impressed with how well they turned out!
I'm the kind of person that likes to wait to put presents under the tree until Christmas Eve. That may be because I'm still buying presents up until the week before Christmas, and wrapping them on Christmas Eve... but also at these ages and stages I don't want to be saying "no, no, no" to the kids when they see presents under the tree and want to open them NOW. And with Fast Crawling Baby around, I wasn't sure how quickly he would turn into Destroy The Christmas Tree and Presents Baby (which actually didn't happen this year!) But the kids had a different idea about presents under the tree...
Our family spent one afternoon at the lake house with Gran and Pawpaw. Here's all the rock collectors scoping out the beach that's revealed when TVA lowers the lake in the winter.
Andrew and I stayed up on the dock. He loved swinging for a while, but then wanted to get down and explore. He made a bee-line for the stairs and wanted to climb up and then over the gangway (the sides of which aren't baby/toddler secure yet) and screamed and screamed when I wouldn't let him. He's definitely strong willed, just like his siblings and many other members of the family!
On Christmas Eve, reading "The Night Before Christmas".
Oh look! I was there too! :) And Andrew was already in bed.
One of Andrew's favorite "toys" are the baby washcloths or other small bits of fabric This particular day it was one of my socks that he snagged when we were sorting laundry.
Oh, naptime. I have such a love/hate relationship with naptime because of Andrew's crazy sleeping habits. This was one of the days that Andrew was sick, so he only made it until about 10 am until he crashed. But after a 30 minute snooze he was awake, and no amount of nursing or bouncing on my part would lull him back to sleep. So by the middle of the afternoon, once again he was exhausted but also just rested enough that he would wake up and scream every time I tried to put him into bed. So I adopted a new strategy - pull the mattress out of his crib and nurse him to sleep lying down (so I wouldn't have to transfer him anywhere after he conked out). So after a frustrating hour he was finally asleep, and then of course he looked too sweet not to take a picture!
The Oldsmobile is running again! Brian had to do some more work on it (fuel injection system), so we hadn't gotten a chance to ride in it since we moved to the new house. But we grabbed our chance right after Christmas after we had dried out from the rain but before the cold weather hit again. All the kids love riding in the Olds!
I was running errands with just Andrew and he was getting pretty grumpy sitting in the cart. Turns out he thinks he's old enough to drive instead!
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