Friday: Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

We started out the day by discovering that the animals finally found Jesus.  Isaac took a few additional pictures too.

We opened some presents as a family.

We went to Ben's parents' house and had brunch and opened presents.

Joshua was very excited to have his own alphaberry.

 Isaac's favorite was the pirate ship.

Playing the the paper was also a lot of fun!!

The whole day was excellent and truly merry, but my favorite part was at the end.

They went around and around and around.  Sometimes Isaac joined them and sometimes Isaac was a half lap behind singing "We wish you a Merry Christmas".  It was so cute.  At one point everyone stopped following Joshua and he turned around with a puzzled look on his face, wondering why no one was behind him.

Thursday: Joshua

Joshua has really had a change in personality this week.

*He has sat with previously unliked grandparents.  (They found out the way to his heart is through food and exploited it.)
*He started waving to everyone, even strangers in the grocery store.
*He blew kisses to his grandparents.
*He started saying mommy instead of mama
*He started saying choo-choo.
*He identified three different trains.  (One in a book, one mega-block one, and a duplo one.)
*After identifying the choo-choo in the book, he went around to all the grandparents and told them it was a choo-choo.  I've never seen him so social before.

It's been fun and cute.

Wednesday: leaves

Well, we finally finished our raking today.  Our neighbors have some trees that don't lose their leaves until about two months after normal trees.  It was slightly wet but rather warm.  We were all in light coats without hats.

Tuesday: pictures

It turns out that camels like pomegranates.

...so much so that they sneak into your refrigerator to be close to them.  (It even happened that Isaac found the camel and he is rarely the first person in the fridge in the morning!)


This happened when Isaac decided to clean the front of the refrigerator and Joshua decided to stack the groceries.  It was loud and messy.  I don't actually mind the grocery stacking, but coupled with the magnets it was a bit much.

I do really, really love my kids, but I also enjoy being away from them.  I pondered that quite a bit today and decided it is just one of life's paradoxes.  And I'm ok with that.

Tuesday: houses and movies

We made graham cracker houses today.  Well, Isaac and I did.  Joshua just ate the ingredients.

He was too busy eating in the picture below to look at me.

This evening we brought Isaac to his first movie, The Good Dinosaur.  He got some money for Christmas and said that he wanted a movie or maybe dinosaurs.  So we got this one in before it left theaters.  (It wasn't really that good.  The plot was pretty standard.  Not bad...just not great.  However, prices dropped at the Star, so we were pleasantly surprised about that.)

Isaac did well at the movie and seemed to enjoy it, although there were some scary parts.

Sunday: double squish

Saturday: morning

Last night was a bit rough.  I think I finally got to sleep around 3am.  First, I was up a little late. then Joshua has moved his night wakeup back to 1:30/2 and that just doesn't work for me so I let him do more crying, but still had to check on him a few times.  Then Isaac started crying because he didn't have his wipe.  Oh, 7am is going to come so early.

So imagine my surprise when I woke up at 9am!  I got up with Joshua (he woke me up) and then went to Isaac's bedroom to at least open the door.  Hmm...he wasn't there.  I felt as though I had heard him getting up, but he never came to find me.  I looked at the couch, and there was a big quilted lump...oh no...I hope he hasn't been hiding from me for over an hour!

Nope.  He had just fallen back to sleep in the light of the Christmas tree.  He slept until 10am, which meant he had a record streak of about 14 hours.

We also took some in front of the tree pictures.  They're both smiling and Isaac doesn't look like he's strangling Joshua!  Also, Joshua's shirt was actually 3/4 sleeve, so most of the day it felt like he was in a girls' shirt.  But luckily it doesn't look like that in the picture.