Merry Christmas!!

Months are flying by and I don't know where they're going.  Did I really not update this blog all month?? Well, I can't let the year end without at least a little something.

Despite the horrors of November's illness, we've managed to have a wonderful holiday season.  We had several families over for Thanksgiving and had a fantastic meal and fun games afterwards.  Then we kicked into Christmas mode.  Christmas music played every day at our house, we made Christmas crafts and ornaments, drove through the festival of lights (a 4 mile stretch of road, shut down to outside traffic and decorated with over 1 million lights), celebrated Advent every Sunday after church, made gingerbread men, made paper snowflakes, went to the Nutcracker ballet, went to Holiday Nights at Greenfield Village, etc.  It has been so fun.  This year we also put up a big paper Christmas tree on our sliding glass door and decorated it with paper ornaments we made, each labeled with gifts we want to give Christ this coming year.  The kids put things like "be more reverent in sacrament meeting," "be nicer to my brother/sister," "obey mommy and daddy."  I enjoyed watching them think about what they could give rather than what they could receive.

Christmas was so fun this year too.  At the beginning of the month I showed them Elder Rasband's talk from the church's Christmas devotional in which he tells the story of a mother who had nothing to give her kids on Christmas except for some cookies she stayed up all night making out of juice she boiled off a squash.  The story says that the kids were thrilled to receive their little squash cookies.  I reminded them how blessed they were and that daddy works very hard to make the money for presents and that they need to remember to be grateful rather than demanding.  Several times during the month I reminded them of the squash cookies and apparently it sunk in because they were darlings.  Very grateful and sweet and seemed to genuinely appreciate their gifts rather than display the attitude I saw last year of "is this it??" and "why isn't there more?"

Christian was so excited about the first gifts he opened that he seemed to completely forget about the rest.  He ran off happily with his Jake and the Neverland Pirate ship and bandana, his toy phone, and his toy kitten and despite Bella calling, "But Christian, you have more!"  he didn't come back.  So I quietly took several large presents and hid them away again.  I'm set for his birthday!

On Christmas Eve we did our traditional nativity reenactment.  This year Kelly was a sheep. "Come along sheep-y, we have to find Jesus."  This was the first year that Christian wasn't the baby Jesus.  My little baby's growing up.  He insisted on being Joseph, riding his sword as a donkey.  In fact, he was so focused on riding the "donkey" around Bethlehem that Mary had to do all the talking at every inn.  "Knock knock. Can we stay here?"  I was angel/wise man/innkeeper/narrator.  Basically the star of the show. :)  As usual it was a blast and highly entertaining.

Other than holiday festivities, I've been enjoying just having two kids at home.  I love Benjamin to bits but he's a pessimist through and through and sometimes it's nice to just have my two optimists home with me.  They are endlessly creative and have very similar interests.  Their latest fascination is to pretend to be cats.  So Bella made them little cat ear headbands and every day they get out bowls and pretend to drink, make themselves little cat beds on the floor, and crawl around meowing and bumping my legs insisting I pet and brush them.

 The funniest was when Mumbo also drank from their bowls and they got fur in their mouths.  That kind of put an end to the water bowls on the floor.  They still love their Mumbo, though.

And so do I.  Although my heart still aches for the baby that never comes, he's been a wonderful addition. His favorite place is under Benjamin's bed where the heater vent is and secondly, our small couch.  Even when it was covered with presents on Christmas Eve, he made sure to claim a spot.

 Christian is on a quest to learn his letters.  Up to this point he's shown absolutely no interest and even resisted efforts I've made, so I laid low.  My other two knew all their letters (upper and lower case) and their sounds by the time they started preschool.  They both started reading by their second year of preschool.  So I was curious why he showed such resistance.  Not worried, but just curious if it was the effect of being a third child or just simply his personality. But recently he told me that he'd like to start learning them and so we've done a letter each week.  We decorate one window in the house with window crayons showing the letter and all things we can think to draw that start with that letter, we do a craft or two that week with that letter as the theme, we practice writing it in various mediums (shaving cream, paint, crayon, etc.) and we talk about it and point out that letter as much as possible during the week.  Results are mixed.  Some letters we've had to stay on for 2 or 3 weeks before I feel like he knows it.  We're on "I" now and it's still not really sinking in.  I asked him today to identify an I which I saw on a sign and he looked at me quizzically and said, "F?"  So we still have a ways to go, but then, out of the blue on Sunday during church he whispers to me, "how do you spell bacon?"  I'm homeschooling Bella this year and so the phrase, "how do you spell...?" gets asked a lot around here.  I figured he was just trying to imitate his big sis who was also asking that question from time to time as she composed a letter to daddy which she planned to give to him after sacrament meeting.  I was trying to listen to the talk, so I quickly rattled off B-A-C-O-N and turned away again.  "Wait, what?  Say that again, B and then what?"  I kept my eyes and one ear on the speaker and more slowly whispered the rest of the letters.  Not for a minute did I think he was actually writing the letters.  I figured he was making scribbles and just pretending to write.  Not until I got to N and he said, "I don't know how to write N," did I look down.

I was amazed.  I held his hand and moved it on the paper for the N and then I did a little happy dance inside and gave him a big hug.  Why in the world of all words, he chose bacon, I'll never know, but I was really proud of his first word.  I know this doesn't make him an Einstein, but it made me happy to see his progress.  Not only did he recognize the letters I said, but he knew them well enough to write them himself without looking at them first.  My little boy really is growing up.

Well, that's been 2013.  Looking forward to another wonderful year.