Wednesday:

Yesterday Isaac got to wear the birthday hat at rock climbing.  He was not excited to wear it, but the others were insistent and I think he gave in without too much trouble.

He also got this red route, which involved some very specific foot work running up to it.

Ok, today.  Today was a normal get stuff done day with nothing special.  I was pretty successful though!  Our main area is mostly back to normal except for some extra chairs and a tower of boxes.  It feels amazing.  I love the Christmas decor, but I also love not having the Christmas decor in January.

Christmas Day

Merry Christmas!

The animals found baby Jesus right away on Christmas day.  Phew.

However, by the time I woke up the Christmas Ruiners had come along to ruin Christmas.  Baby Jesus was put in a jail (although they didn't fit very well.)  

I said "no, no! Jesus is for everyone, even Christmas Ruiners." and moved everyone back to a better position.

In the afternoon we went to Larry and Cheryl's house.  We started with brunch.  It is one of my favorite meals of the year.  We opened presents.  We played games.  We ate a ton of delicious food, and it was a lovely time.

Christmas Eve

Nathan and Liz left after an early lunch.  The morning was pretty normal: they did some packing, the kids did some playing, we all did some talking.  Isaac got his birthday present early.

Both children are getting taller and it seemed extra noticeable this Christmas.

After nap time we opened our presents.  I guess I didn't get many pictures, but everyone was very generous!  

Creeper's ...squares?  toes? were cold so he went in one of Joshua's new slippers.

Christmas Tuesday: DeYoung Christmas day 2

 I forgot to mention it on the day my family arrived, but at one point Evelyn and JJ played their recital pieces.  They were excellent.  And then Joshua played through his whole Christmas book. :D  It was cute, but a few details to make it more interesting.  1) He had a play list.  2) He had been practicing these songs for a while.  He had a plan of giving a performance.  3) The songs were on the easier side for him, but it worked well because he was able to figure most of them out himself.  I think he decided to bring the book to piano lessons, but most of it was just him.

So, back to Tuesday.

The kids horsed around in the morning.  It is nice not to have to have someone on child-duty anymore.

Aunt C came over.  Dad had a picture of the old farmstead and so that brought out some stories.  The garden was farther away from the house than I would have guessed.  It was (mainly) beans, tomatoes, and strawberries.  Although it was primarily a dairy farm, there were also some pigs and chickens.  The milk was stored in the milk house next to the barn and someone came to get it regularly.  (I feel like it was every day, but I'm not sure on that now.)  Julie would line up the calves and play with them.  I think they moved into the city when Mom was in middle school -ish.  Before high school for sure, due to logistics of getting to Muskegon.

We had lunch and then nap time.  We were going to Hope to work on a project, so when my alarm went off I came out and found a lot of people had joined me in nap time.

Our project of the year was wind-up cars.  Dad found them in his office as he was cleaning it out.  It was a nice project because it required the use of the bandsaw and drill press and the kids were old enough of use the tools by themselves (but with supervision!).

The cars worked ok.  They moved down the hallway, but for the amount of effort needed to wind them up they didn't move very far.

There was the annual "run to the end of the hallway and back" run too, going on for at least 35 years.

When we got home Pat had already gotten there.  (Cars took a bit longer than I expected, so she had been there for a while.)  So she and Ben got out our most complicated game, some wine, and she learned a few key words so that they could tease us.

Dad made spaghetti for dinner - it was lovely not having to cook.  Isaac still went to rock climbing practice, so Nathan and I went to pick him up and watched him climb a few routes.  The other kids watched a movie and had popcorn.

Monday: cleaning

I received these texts yesterday...after two weeks of Christmas break.  I really wish there wasn't quite such a big push on perfect attendance - there are some good reasons to not go to school sometimes.

I got a lot done today.  Maybe I could have done it with people around, but it is so much easier with everyone out of the house and not distracting me.  I finally got the kitchen fully cleaned.  I put away all the laundry.  I packed up the remaining Christmas decorations.  (Below is a picture of all the stuff that needed to go back downstairs.  There were more items, but my pile had gotten obnoxiously large and so I needed to bring some things to the basement.

Sunday: New Year's resolution

This year's resolution (and honestly, it might bump into next year too) is to eat as many different pasta shapes as possible.  Well, not as possible.  We usually only have pasta once a week.  I'm also not going to have tons of partially filled pasta boxes, so once in a while we'll need to have repeats to use up the pasta.  Once we get through the easy shapes that are at Meijer, I'll need to decide how much I want to search for shapes or if I just don't care that much.

Today's pasta is...rotini!  I do like the rotini.  It is easy to stab and easy to eat.  I'm not very consistent with my pasta shapes, but this one shows up frequently in the pantry.

Saturday: doors

 We don't actually need to get in any of those three doors, right?

Wrong.  Very wrong.  

The groceries have been put away (except for one bag).  I finished more laundry but it stayed in the laundry room.  The whole house feels a bit like this, but the family has been working on getting the house back to normal levels of cleanliness.  Sometimes you need to make a mess before you can get an area cleaner.  At the same time, sometimes playing games is the priority and so the messes just stay...for now.

That being said, I'm also hoping to make a lot of progress on Monday.  We'll see how it goes.