On the road to Christmas...

Don't blink or you'll miss Meredith's Christmas Concert...

This is the best, and by best I mean only, photo we have of Meredith's Christmas concert. She did great, the whole group of Kindergarteners made it on and off stage without crying, and were the cutest little pack of elves. They were only on stage for maybe 90 seconds total by the time the got lined up, sang their song, and filed off. We have video of the event, but this was the only still picture that was captured. I can't even find her in the picture!

The kids found all kinds of ways to entertain themselves while I was tidying and baking and wrapping. Most of them involved turning the house upside down, so imagine my pleasure when they discovered the joys of iPods and headphones!

Houston, we have silence.

Headphones are a beautiful invention. Until your five-year-old decides to have a conversation with you while wearing her headphones, not realizing that her voice is TEN TIMES AS LOUD AS NORMAL.
Since that time, Aaron has started saying one of his funniest phrases too. I was trying to get his attention that day to tell him something and he couldn't hear me because of the headphones. Eventually I knelt down beside him, lifted the headphone, and spoke into his ear. Ever since then, if he doesn't hear what I'm saying he channels his inner octogenarian, runs up beside me and says "Talk in my ear Mommy." It cracks me up every time.

I walked into Meredith's room the weekend before Christmas when Dave had the kids out running an errand and found this interesting scene. All of her favourite stuffies were lined up in rapt concentration on something. What you can't see in the picture is that they're facing the lovely little Christmas tree she has set up on her dresser. I concluded that they were having a tree-gazing party. Meredith informed me later that she'd been teaching them 'school things' like how to count to 20 in French, and what sorts of things make your friends sad.

Before I knew it, it was Christmas Eve. Santa continued his annual tradition of popping in for a visit before the kids went to bed.

He was a hit, to say the least.

This was a tremendous relief to us, as our 'photo with Santa' from the mall this year features an angelically smiling Meredith, and a demonically howling Aaron. He was terrified of Santa at that particular moment. The elf working at the photo booth was a kindly soul who confided her children were now in their 20's and their very favourite Santa picture from their own youth was a crying one.

When Santa left to begin his rounds, he reminded our kids that he wouldn't be back until they were sound asleep. Bedtime has never gone so smoothly! They left enough cookies to add another inch to Santa's waistline, a full glass of milk, and a handful of baby carrots for Rudolph and then it was off to bed in their new Christmas jammies.

At what age does the sleeping-in-on-Christmas-morning phenomenon begin??

Rewind: Fall forever

We had the most spectacular fall this year, after a rather cool and sunburn-free summer. The lovely weather stretched on and on. The grass stayed green, the trees held onto their leaves, and we began to believe that winter might have taken a sharp left at Albuquerque. Eventually we got a frost, and then a little more and the leaves started coming down.
And down.
And down some more.
At some point, I think people started hoping for snow so they wouldn't have to rake the leaves yet again.
But not my boys. There's nothing more fascinating to Aaron than machinery at work, and he quite enjoys it when Daddy is 'lawning' as he has named the act of mowing the lawn.



His fascination with all things mechanical continues to amaze me. He will drop whatever he is doing to run across the house and stare if he hears the blender or mixer start up. He delights in watching the can opener work. A car backing out of a parking spot is almost as good as Thomas the Train on TV.

Nature versus Nurture? Game, set and match to Nature as far as I can see!

Rewind: Birthday Bonanza!

I've got a lot of catching up to do! Much of it involves cake.

The fall is a very busy birthday season in our family. None of the four of us actually have birthdays in the fall, but many of our favourite people including aunties, uncles, cousins, great grandma and friends celebrate October and November birthdays. Meredith has declared she doesn't really like birthday cake and would rather have just ice cream next year for her birthday. Aaron has no such reservations, and can devour an adult-sized piece of birthday cake in less time than it takes me to put some kind of stain treatment on his shirt afterwards.

One particular birthday party involved two uncles, and a cake that did double duty!

Happy birthday Uncle Brad!

and Uncle David!

To blow out the next set of candles we travelled much further than our own living room. At the end of November, my grandma celebrated her 92nd birthday! Don't tell her I posted her age on the internet, or it's curtains for me. She graciously allowed Meredith and Aaron to help blow the candles out.

Two year olds and candle blowing are just such a moist combination....surely that's why the cupcake was invented?

The trip out to Deloraine was one of the highlights of our otherwise somewhat sick and bleak November. Minus the drive-home-at-night-so-the-kids-will-sleep part wherein Aaron slept for 15 minutes of the 3 hour and 20 minute drive.

Delerious with fatigue? Who me?

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

After a slow start, preparations for Christmas seemed to ramp up this weekend. There's still shopping to be done, cookies to be made and wrapping, wrapping, and more wrapping to complete. But it finally smells like a Christmas tree in our house, so all is good with the world. We always had a real tree when I was growing up. I don't remember ever going out to cut a tree, my dad usually brought one home from the Co-op store in town. I don't know whether he waited until the selection was poor, or just had a thing for Charlie Brown Christmas trees, but we had some seriously sad looking trees! It got to be a real joke, waiting to see how miserable the tree would be from one year to the next. Fortunately Dave loves a real tree too, so we've had one ever since we had a house with space to put one up. He and Aaron set off to the tree lot on Saturday and picked out the nicest tree we've ever had. The star touches the ceiling and it's so broad at the base that you can barely squeeze past it. It's gorgeous and soft and fragrant.

We set it up yesterday, let it thaw out, and got the lights on before the kids went to bed. I had been telling Meredith a few days earlier about the thing I loved to do best when I was a kid at Christmastime. After the tree was set up, I loved to lay with my head under the bottom branches, looking up at the lights, wallowing in that delicious scent, and feeling the cool breeze on my face as the tree continued to thaw. She asked if we could do it last night, and it was a thrill to share that pleasure with my own kids.

And yes, Aaron is naked.

We got the decorations on today and that was another trip down memory lane. Memory lane detours to the nut house if you take the wrong turn and have a two year old who insists on using a step stool to reach 'UP HIGH' in the tree....

This afternoon we set out to make gifts for the kids' teachers - the special people at daycare, school, and lessons that make their lives so much richer. We transformed these empty jars:

into Holiday Candy Cookie Mix.

Not without running out of ingredients part of the way through the task, of course!

After the size-small helpers were fast asleep I finished off the tags and they're ready to go. Sealed to keep salivating mouths from swiping any more M&Ms!

This week is the school Christmas Concert, so we've got another first to look forward to. Hopefully we'll sneak some more moments under the Christmas tree amidst the frenzied pace.

The world according to Meredith...

I am a delinquent blogger.
Again.

But sometimes, something happens that just cannot go unnoticed. I have lots of things to catch up on here in chronicling the last month of our lives for our collective memory. Suffice to say that the Sick Day turned into a sick 7 or 8 days, very first report card came home, very first parent-teacher interview was attended, potty training (and emergency pant wearing) began at daycare and everyday life continued in this midst of it all. Lots of details to record as time permits!

But tonight is an ode to the tender heart of my sweet Meredith. She was having trouble settling down to sleep at bedtime. She called me back at one point because she said she had an "emergency" to talk about. This would be my own words coming back to bite me. :) Of late it seems that she is in a stalling pattern at bedtime and will call us several times for tiny little things until after about the 8th or 9th trip into her room I tell her, "Unless it's an emergency, I don't want to hear from you again. Please close your eyes, lay down, and go to sleep."

Tonight's emergency involves her morning bus driver, Veronica. We hear lots about her lunchtime bus driver, Ron, around here because he apparently gives the Kindergarten kids TicTacs on the bus, and one day brought his dog for them to meet.

Rock star status.

Veronica has more than just the Kindergarteners to deal with, as she has a full bus in the morning, so we hear more about how Veronica had to tell the older kids to sit down lots of times that day, or that Veronica really liked a particular dress Meredith was wearing one day. Tonight's news was that Veronica won't be driving this bus anymore, as she's going to drive vans now (a mysterious concept which neither Meredith nor I understand, but to which I nodded solemnly).

Meredith was sobbing with the idea of not seeing Veronica each morning anymore. What made her even sadder was that she hadn't known beforehand so she could have made her a card "to make her feel better".

I'm so very thankful for the compassionnate empathetic heart my firstborn has. It may cause her no end of pain in her life, but it will also bring her the greatest joys of love, and relationship, and kindness. I'm also very thankful that she is still young enough that a good long hug and a promise that together we will find a way to get the card to Veronica was enough to soothe her sadness.

Tonight is a fleeting moment I couldn't stand to forget!

Sick Day

Today is the reason rocking chairs, and moms, and cuddle blankets were invented.

Poor Aaron has a doozy of a virus/illness/piggy flu and is capital M miserable. He's sicker tonight than I've ever seen him. Yesterday when I picked him up from daycare, he had a massive, no-holds-barred tantrum about getting into the car. Those kind of tantrums mean one of two things around here - sick child or tired child. He had a rough evening and was into bed early in the hopes that the magic of sleep would cure what ailed him.

Sadly, he's sicker than sleep alone can fix. We started and ended the day in the rocking chair.


There were a few bright spots, bursts of energy and smiles.


The walk to and from school with Meredith was a nice break from being in the rocking chair, and the kids did manage to play together for about half an hour in their new favourite toy - a cardboard box!

For all the bickering they can do at times, Meredith can be so empathetic towards him. Today she told me her heart felt broken that her brother was so sick, and she imagined mine must be cracked in a lot of places too.

May we be blessed with a quiet home and a night of that magical, restorative sleep tonight.

Spooky sweet!

Happy Halloween! The kids traded roles when we carved pumpkins on Halloween eve. Mr. Two Minute Attention Span sat through the carving of two of the three pumpkins and tried to clean the pumpkins out one seed at time. Meredith was interested in using the serrated pumpkin sharp knife to cut the tops off the pumpkin and refused to get elbow-deep in the pumpkin guts.

She got a lot more interested when it came to hitching her ponies up to Cinderella's carriage and finding a driver who was just the right size. Sadly, I forgot to take any nighttime pictures of the masterpieces!

Aaron's pick was a Thomas pumpkin.

As the sun went down, the costumes came out. Meredith was so excited and it was contagious! As so often happens, Aaron followed her lead and was raring to go. We are so fortunate that she is such an amazing big sister. It's not always rainbows and sunshine, but for the most part the example she sets for him is one of kindness and compassion. Aaron adores her!

The tiger bares her true identity! When I asked her a month or so ago what she wanted to be for Halloween, she asked what the "scariest" thing she could dress up as would be. I told her there's lots of time later in life for scary stuff, and we'd stick with non-scary for now!

When the sun finally disappeared, they were off! Aaron made it to about 10 houses before he was more interested in laying his head on my shoulder than looking in his bag for Smarties. After a pit stop at home to drop him off, Meredith shifted into high gear. She and her friend ran from house to house until they were gasping for breath!

It was a much busier Halloween than we've had in recent years. We saw lots of kids on the street, and ran out of treats at our house after around 100 ghosts and goblins had been by. It may sound strange, but I love the feeling of community that comes with Halloween! We seem to spend so little time in this day and age walking up and down our own street, knocking on the doors of neighbours and saying hello to everyone we meet.

Yet one more experience in life that has taken on a fresh new perspective as seen through the eyes of my kids!