Christmas

We had a wonderful Christmas. On Christmas Eve we had the missionaries over for dinner and then recreated the nativity with a little people set. Emma and John opened up their pajamas and then went to bed. Oh and we did our family tradition for desert. This is something that they do in Australia. First you get a a cup of hot chocolate. Then you get Tim Tams - they are kinda a chocolate graham cracker with a chocolate cream center sandwiched between between the graham crackers and then all of this is covered in chocolate. So the closest thing that would be a chocolate covered Oreo but in a rectangle shape. So you bite off opposing corners and then dip it in the hot chocolate and drink the hot chocolate through the cookie like a straw. Then the cookie becomes this ooey gooey squishy cookie of chocolatey goodness. It is so rich that you can only eat about 2 before you go into a sugar coma but they are good.

On Christmas morning, Emma woke up and we kept her up stairs until John woke up. John actually slept in that morning. He doesn't really sleep in. Emma was about to die at the thought of waiting any longer. Finally we woke John up and went down stairs. Emma saw her bike and was elated. For months she has been waiting for Santa to bring her a bike with petals. She loves the color green so we scoured the internet to find a bike for Santa to get her. It was not an easy task because green is not pink or purple. I am thinking that the resale value of a green girls bike will be relatively low. But she loves it. She rode her bike in the kitchen for a while and wasn't interested in opening any other presents for some time. After that she opened all of the remainder of her gifts. Her other big gift is gymnastics lessons. She rode her bike three times that day. We went for walks a few times so Emma could ride her bike. One of the other presents we got her was a Mr Potato Head. Emma opened it up and said, "It sweet potato head!" Apparently we have been eating more sweet potatoes than regular potatoes lately. I have tried to correct her but it is in vain. There will be a come a time when she is playing with friends and they will be totally confused when she asked them to play sweet potato head. Oh well. I tried and failed and now she has trained me to say sweet potato head.

John got a variety of Christmas toys. None of which he has any interest in. In fact he won't even touch some of them. He got a walker thing that turns into a car to ride on. He used it a couple of times but would rather push a chair around. The one thing he did like was the orange that I put into Emma stocking. He put it in his mouth and I thought this would be a self correcting problem but he took 3 bites out of the orange peel. I think I give up on trying to find toys that babies like to play with. Babies are like the house in Vegas - you can't win when you take a gamble on toys. I am guessing that he will love them in a few months.

At the end of the night Emma said that her favorite toy was the sweet potato head. I could have been knocked over with a feather. I thought it would be the bike, but apparently I was wrong. She has loved playing with the potato head. She is funny and a stickler for for rules. You can't put a nose where the eyes go or give it two sets of eyes or hands. She also puts mustaches above the nose. Apparently she hasn't seen too many mustaches in her life.

We have started a family tradition of going to the zoo in December. Turns out nobody goes to the zoo in December so it was perfect!

Eleven Months

So John is now 11 months old. He now crawls with his stomach off the ground, except when he wants to go fast then he goes army style. He is actually pretty fast. John likes to eat Cheerios. In fact that is pretty much all he wants to eat besides paper. For a while apples and edamame rated high but he just keeps going back to Cheerios. All other food goes into the mouth and then back out again and this happens several times. John still chews on everything he gets a hold of. He lights up when he sees Emma in the mornings and after naps. John follows Aaron around the house until Aaron picks him up. He loves to read books. One of my favorite times is before naps when I read to Emma and John. As soon as we sit in the rocking chair, John turns his head toward the book shelf and is super wiggly until I open a book and start reading. At that point, he is calm and relaxed and just listens to the book. If there is a flap, he will try and lift it. John spends a lot of time sifting through the kitchen toys and through the bins of toys. John is also like Emma in that he calms down as soon as we get out and go on a walk.

Emma is going through the second phase of acceptance. When John first came home from the hospital, she had to learn to accept divided attention from Aaron and I. Now the second phase is that John wants to play with her toys and get in the middle of whatever she is doing. Emma is learning to love playing games. It is in her genetics to love games. She currently loves a game called the ice cream game. You spin a scooper and it will show the colors brown, white or pink for chocolate, vanilla or strawberry ice cream. Then you pick up a tile of ice cream to see if you got a matching color. Whenever Emma spins the scooper, she sniffs her nose. It is pretty cute.

Conversations

Me: Fee Fi Fo Fum I'm gonna get me some Emma bum!
Emma: No, that hurts [note I haven't done anything because we are driving]
Me: What hurts?
Emma: You can't eat my bum because then I wouldn't have a bum to poop.

A different conversation:
Emma: A big scary monster took panda's pacifier away from him. It was not nice. But it was okay because Panda asked nicely and the monster gave him his pacifier back.

Therapy and More Cute Stuff

So every parent is imperfect but it does seem like there are things that could land my kids up in therapy some day. For one, I called Emma to the table for lunch. She brought Froggy with her and I noticed that there was a trail of water on the table leading to Froggy. It turns out that she had washed Froggy's hands with soap and water. There are a few things that Emma will talk about during her play repeatedly and washing hands is one of them. I think that if she ends up in therapy later in life, washing hands will be a topic.

For John, it will be hair cuts. We gave him his second hair cut last night. The sound of the clippers just sent him over the edge. The actual haircut is what will land him in therapy. He just cried and cried. I felt bad about torturing him but I also felt bad that he long hair growing over his ears. As it turns out, I was willing to risk a life of therapy so that John could join society. I will say this, Aaron did a great job on his haircut.

On another note, Froggy has been top dog on Emma's animal list. She rotates through several animals as her favorite but this week it was Froggy. It took us a while to get into the car this week because Froggy had to go potty and wash his hands. Then she would put socks on him and then shoes. She put her shoes on Froggy and since her shoes are too big for Froggy, they would fall off a couple of times on the way to the car so she would stop to put the shoes on. Then she would buckle Froggy in the front seat of the car. This routine added about 30 minutes to getting out of the door so I thought I would do what I could to help this process along. So I found some of Emma's old baby shoes and gave them to her for Froggy.

Emma asked me to put her hair up in braids and she then put a headband in her hair, bounded up the stairs and said, "I look good!"

Emma went to preschool just before Thanksgiving and at preschool the teacher took kids out on a ride on a thing called a Ranger. It is like a cross between a golf cart and a minivan and all covered in deer hunting camouflage. It holds 6 people and obviously there aren't car seats in this thing. The teacher took the kids out for a ride and Emma was ecstatic. For days after this I would tall Emma to get into the car and I would find her in the front passenger seat or even in the driver seat. She was ready to drive the car. It took some days to convince her that she in fact had to ride in her car seat.

Broccoli

Tonight we received a knock at the door. It was a friend's little boys singing a Christmas carol and and holding a plate of chocolate chip cookies for us. I showed Emma the cookies and asked her what they were. She looked at them and said, "broccoli." In her defense, the plate had green cellophane plastic over it. Once I took the cellophane off she said, "cookies!" So after she ate her dinner we gave her a cookie, except that she didn't eat the cookie in a normal way. She picked out the chocolate chips and ate them. Then she ate the rest of the cookie. We will need to practice how to eat a cookie before she goes to kindergarten.

President Obama

Emma is calling John President Obama. Don't know why but it does indicate my radio selection in the car - NPR.

The Ocean

Emma slept in a little longer this morning and came down stairs before she had a chance to come to all the way. When she got to my room she *snuggled* up with me. This kid is my anti-snuggler. Yesterday I gave her a choice of going potty or hugging me and she chose going potty. She hates going potty. Anyway, so back to this morning. I told her that I love it when she snuggles me. She responded, "this isn't a snuggle." I asked her what it was since we weren't snuggling. Her response: "This is the ocean." I now love the ocean.

Ten Months

John is 10 months old now. He still smiles and laughs a lot. He explores the house and on occasion will come to me when he needs his diaper changed or if he is hungry or just needs some social time. Other than that he is off exploring and by exploring I mean chewing on stuff. He has teethed on our chairs and just about every toy in the house. Unfortunately he is a biter and I don't know what to do about it. I don't think I can bring my self to bite him or flick his face when he does it. Right now I am hoping he will grow out of it before we get to nursery. When John sees another baby, he gets super excited and has no concept of personal space. He will crawl on top of the baby and give the baby either kisses or bites. Social experiences for him are costly for the other person involved. John has made peace with formula and is taking it better now. He has also decided he really only likes carbs. He giggles at oatmeal for breakfast and at other meals he complains loudly until I give him cheerios. He won't do fruit even - just a little bit. He will sit in his high chair forever eating cheerios as long as you are sitting by him. If I walk out of the room, he just screams. So he is a social carbivor. He loves Emma and Aaron. He gets upset if Aaron comes home from work and doesn't pick him up immediately.

John lives for getting a hold of the broom to chew on it, finding an open bathroom door (especially when he can find my toilet cleaning gloves), and an open laundry room door to chew on shoes. Oh and the pantry is a special treat, as well as an open dishwasher.

John still army crawls. He can crawl with his belly up but I think he army crawls because he is faster. If he is on tile floor with just a diaper on he will crawl with his belly up to keep it off the cold floor. He cruses around things but appears to be a long ways off from walking.

He hates his car seat and high chair and anything confining. He likes walks though in the stroller.

Emma lives for playing with John under the table. She keeps asking for a bike with pedals and is hoping Santa will bring her one. She also thought about asking Santa to bring her a trumpet but I explained to her that Santa is nice to moms and doesn't bring children trumpets. So now Emma will tell people that Santa doesn't bring trumpets. The other day Emma asked if a tiger has a handle. I told her no. She then asked if they would get their tails dirty when they pooped. Emma lives for dressing up in ballet and gymnastics stuff, riding her bike. We also play a lot of blocks together and she is actually quite patient at building towers. She knows all of her letters and their sounds. She can write some of them like the letter 'f.' Emma lives for leaving the house and going and doing things. Her first question when she wakes up (ok, second, the first is "what are you doing?") is "where are we going today?" One time we were out running an errand and we were headed home. She asked where we were going and when I told her home, she said, "Don't we need to get John more medicine?" She was distraught that we were going home and would rather go through the Walgreens drive thru than go home.

Just Cute

Aaron and Emma were coloring on the kitchen floor and it was too cute to pass up.

Thanksgiving

We celebrated Thanksgiving with some friends and Aaron's brother Rex. It was a traditional Thanksgiving feast. I have thought about what traditions I would like to do in our family. One of them is that I want everybody to choose one menu item for the dinner. I want everybody to have something they love at the dinner. Aaron had given his input. Emma didn't really know what was going on so she didn't get input. She knew we were going to eat turkey but I don't think she really knew what that meant. She has eaten a lot of my rolls since Thursday so that can make it on the list next year.

On Friday we went to the Sam Houston museum. We were going to do our traditional hike in the Huntsville state park, but it started to rain so we changed plans and went to see the museum and statue. This statue is huge - 77 feet tall. Taller than the statue of liberty. Who is Sam Houston? He kinda founded Texas. You drive down the freeway and then all of a sudden there is ridiculous statue of Sam Houston. We have always wanted to go see it but we are always driving somewhere else. So, this statue was on my bucket list because it is so ridiculous.

After that we went to an area where there were a bunch of museums (more like historic houses) but they were closed. There was also a pond in the shape of Texas and a whole bunch of ducks, geese, and roosters. We had a picnic lunch and watched the birds fight. It was very pleasant.

On Saturday we went to a baptism. Emma loves to see baptisms. She always talks about how she wants to be baptized. I think she thinks it will be like swimming. Then we went to see the Nutcracker that was put on by a local dance company. I thought it was very well done considering it was a small local company and I have no experience with ballet. Emma loved it. She sat there glued to her seat until the very end and then she got a little wiggly. Then the most amazing thing happened. She whispered, "Mom, I am tired." Who knew she could utter those words. That is up there with "Mom, I am hungry." So I offered to let her sit on my lap and snuggle me. I was just that nice of a mom to take one for the team. It was just only too bad that there was only 15 minutes left in the ballet - it was the best snuggle time ever. So what did we do with John? We actually took him with us. Fortunately we went during nap time so he was so tired he didn't have the energy to wiggle too much and he had his pacifier so he didn't make much noise. I did have to take him out once. But all things considered, the kids did great.

One Minute or Two

I have a theory that all destruction can be done in one or two minutes tops. It seems like all stories from moms start with "I walked away for one minute and...." From there crazy stuff happens. I didn't have total destruction but I am amazed at how fast babies can move. I was feeding John dinner when I walked away to open the laundry room door for Emma. I came back and John had grabbed the spoon off of the table (which wasn't all that in arms reach, or so I thought...). He had also knocked his bowl off of the table splattering it everywhere. Apparently, John was concerned that he might starve so he took matters into his own hands.

John was also was feeding himself cheerios and ended up like this: