Advent Activities

Every day in December I plan an advent activity.  Some are bigger affairs, some are movies or crafts, but the kids always look forward to opening the box and finding out the special activity of the day. Though, to be honest, most days the kids would run downstairs to look and then yell, "Mom!  You forgot to put in today's activity again!" Oops.

Here are some highlights:

**Going to the annual Celebrate the Nativities event hosted by our Stake.  Bryce and Thane were both fascinated by the gingerbread house nativity.

Aubree liked a fancy, glass nativity.  

My favorite this year was a stained glass nativity.

The kids are really getting the hang of this dressing up thing...

The cookie room is always a favorite place.

**In lieu of a violin recital this year, Aubree and another student performed Christmas music at a local Old Folk's home.  

**Gingerbread playdough - always a hit.

This year Thane was eager to try to duplicate the santa sleigh and reindeer that Bryce made last year.

**Ward Tacky Christmas Breakfast: ugly sweaters & Christmas pajamas.

The kids had their one and only chance to visit with the Jolly Fat Man.  None of them particularly cared.

**Decorating sugar cookies - a holiday favorite.

Aubree was promoted to the "cookies are decorated well enough to be delivered to friends" level, and was very proud.

**Minivan Express.  Nobody puked on our trip this year, so I think that immediately qualifies it as a success.

**Sugar cone Christmas Trees.  Just because we were a little light on the sugar consumption (haha!)...

This about sums it up...

Nov/Dec Preschool Parties

Since I neglected to blog for weeks, I have a lot of backtracking.  

As always, preschool is busy and packed with fun stuff.  For one of our themes, the kids learned about theater and put on a very short series of Aesop's Fables skits.  They learned all the different stories, chose parts, and made their own (glittery) masks.  

One evening all the families gathered to watch them perform.  All together, I think the whole production lasted less than 10 minutes.  Kind of perfect for that age.  Here's the song they sang at the end:

The next big event was our Thanksgiving party.  The highlight there was the feast.  

Graham thought the drinks were the best, and when no one was looking, he'd sneak sips from his neighbors.  

December brought our final party of the calendar year - Christmas!  What a cute group of kids.

As seems to be the pattern with Christmas, sweet treats and activities abounded.  Like this marshmallow snowman craft, for example...

And apparently no preschool party is complete without cookie decorating.  Num, num...

The kids were completely sugared out by the end, but they had a great time.  

When Christmas Comes to Town

Oh, December.  You blast into our lives with a whirlwind of activities, obligations, illnesses, guests, and merriment, leaving no time or motivation for normal tasks, like blogging.  Now I have a pile of pictures and memories nagging to be documented.  I guess I'd better get started, and where better to start than Christmas day?

The rule in our home is that no one can get up before 7 am.  This year Thane was the only one who struggled with that requirement; I first heard his little pitter-patters around 6 am.  By 7, everyone was up and eager to run downstairs.  They did manage to stand still just long enough for me to grab a Christmas morning picture (Aubree purposely chose to wear the same pajamas she wore last year to try to confuse us when we looked at the pictures).  

Heading down the stairs, semi-patiently waiting for everyone to join us.

First up, everyone got to open their stockings.  This is the free-for-all section of Christmas morning and involved lots of squealing, excitement, and candy-eating.  After opening stockings, the kids agreed to take a break for breakfast.  At Aubree's request, we had french toast.  I was impressed with how patiently they waited, both for the breakfast to be ready and to begin the present portion of the morning.  

Generally, I try to limit each kid to 4 gifts from Mark and me (we don't do Santa).  This year I think I ended up with 5 gifts per kid, plus a couple whole family gifts.  They all agree they had a very generous Christmas.  

Aubree's biggest, and most favorite gift was a sewing machine.  She wasn't expecting it at all and was extremely pleased and excited.  

Within a couple days she'd arranged to have her best friend over and the old ladies got right to work on a new project (a little quilt for their dolls).  

Bryce's favorite gift was a fish tank.  He'd been asking for a fish for months.  He even made a long list of potential fish names (verrrrrrry unique names).  

We'd gotten a little goldfish for a science unit earlier in the month (which Aubree named "Aunt Jin" from the book "Where the Mountain Meets the Moon"), and the little fish moved happily into her new abode.  When Aunt Jin passes, Bryce will be able to choose a Betta fish as a replacement (and I'd be lying if I said he wasn't looking forward to Jin's death).  We've maintained a strict "no-pet" policy for 13 years, so this is a big step.

Thane refused to stay still long enough to snap a picture during the present opening, but he says his favorite gifts were a Lego Batman set, a backpack, and a take-apart airplane.  I got all the kids a swivel-car to share and miraculously Christmas day brought bright sun and mild temperatures, so we were able to go outside and try it out.  

This was Graham's first year to really start to understand the gift concept, and he jumped right into the fray.  He seemed most excited to get a pillow pet (all his siblings already had one) and a little toy shaving kit.  

Hurray for the sun!

Aunt Kira got my kids a doorway puppet theater.  Aubree and Bryce immediately put it to good use and put on a show for the rest of us.  What a fun idea!

It was a great Christmas.

The First Rule

When Aubree was less than an hour old, she stopped breathing.  I was holding her, and Mark and my mom were standing right next to me admiring this beautiful new person.  "Hmmm," I said, "her hands are blue....  Wait, her face is turning blue!"

A nurse walked in and I called to her.  She calmly walked over, but when she saw Aubree, her eyes got big, and she quickly grabbed her and started rubbing and moving her around.  Aubree responded by gasping, and quickly regaining her color.  Somewhere, we have this whole scene on video.  Even knowing the final outcome, it's still fairly terrifying to watch.

This experience prompted Mark and I to implement the First Rule in our family: You must keep breathing at all times.  

Baby Blue

 Last month, Bryce decided it was his turn to try to push the limits on rule #1.  Early, early in the morning of the Sunday of our Primary Program, he woke up with a terrible, barky cough and a fever.  "Bummer," I thought, "it stinks he's going to miss the primary program!  He was really looking forward to it."

Mark stayed home with him, and by the time the rest of us got back from church in the afternoon, Bryce had totally lost his voice.  As his breathing became more and more labored, I decided to give him a dose of Graham's Albuterol.  Within five minutes, Bryce was sitting up, happily whispering, "Mom, I can talk again!"

His improvement didn't last as long as I'd hoped.  Well before the time lapse necessary for a second dose, Bryce's breathing returned to being extremely labored and wheezy.  When he could get air enough to cough, it was the classic Croup cough, and made him vomit.  

Six year-olds getting croup??  Especially six year-olds with no history of any respiratory issues??  I made a few phone calls and found out that other big kids like Bryce had similarly been struck ill  recently.  

We decided to watch him carefully, have him sleep with us, and continue to give him breathing treatments at the appropriately spaced time.  Thankfully, by the next morning, he showed marked signs of improvement, and was able to breathe again.  

At that point, my big fears turned to Graham.  If the croup hit big, strong, very-rarely sick Bryce this badly, what would they do to little, respiratorally-challenged G?

A few days went by and I thought we might be in the clear, but then Thane got a fever and the classic barky cough.  Though he lost his voice, Thane's breathing never became more than just slightly wheezy, and he recovered pretty quickly.  I should add that Thane is a very pleasant sick kid.  He's calm and sweet and compliant and... it was kind of a nice change.

Miracle of miracles, Graham avoided getting any respiratory issues at all!  He did get a cold, but that was it.  Hallelujah!

Snow Thankful

I've been studying the last month about thankfulness.  What I've realized so far is that I'm just scratching the surface.  What seems like such a simple, obvious concept has layers of meaning and purpose that I think I've underestimated for far too long.  I'm grateful for the Thanksgiving holiday that brings the focus back every year, but I also know that I can't let my study pass just because we're now in December - there's way too much I still haven't wrapped my brain around!

For Thanksgiving day we had the pleasure of visiting at my Aunt Deanna's house.  Aubree, my tradition officer, reminded me that I had to make rolls and fudge.  The fudge flopped (no big deal that we have to eat it with a spoon, right?), but at least the rolls turned out.  I do sometimes wonder how many my kids end of eating once it's time for dinner though...

Lovely Aunt Deanna

There are always lots of people at holidays with the Hoyt's.  When we pulled in around 2pm, Graham had just woken up from a short, uncomfortable car nap.  Walking into the whirlwind of faces and noise was a little overwhelming for him.  He sat in a daze on the rocking horse for the first half hour, before shaking off the short-nap-haze and becoming his normal happy self.  

Aubree, Bryce, and Thane dealt with the noise and the crowds by sticking around the appetizer/munchies table.  Chips, cookies, shrimp, crackers ... all beckoning to their taste buds.  They later joined their cousins watching 'How to Train Your Dragon 2'. Dinner was great, the company was even better.  

We'd hit a lot of traffic heading up, and worried it might be even worse on the drive home.  Unintentionally, however, we left during the Seahawks football game.  I've never been fonder of Seahawks fans - there was no one on the roads!  Clear sailing all the way home.  

**********

The Saturday after Thanksgiving we woke up to a dusting of snow on the ground.  By 9am, it began to snow harder and soon we had just enough snow in which to play.  After the overwhelming, laborious task of pulling out and putting on snow gear for four kids, I was super grateful we lived in a place where it only snows a couple times a year.  How do people in snow-lands do this regularly?!?

Once we were outside, it was all worth it.  I made the kids stand together for an outside picture before I let them run off to play.  Graham is grumpy because he kept falling down and hadn't yet figured out how to stand back up on his own.  

Bryce stayed outside the longest.  He played around for a little bit, then met up with his buddy Asher and together they decided to make a snow fort.  Though they didn't have much snow with which to work, they diligently persisted.  

Thane liked tasting the snow.  He also really enjoyed making and throwing snowballs and trying to jump into the antics of the bigger kids.  

Once he figured out how to maintain his balance and get up after falling, Graham loved being outside.  Not long after we got outside, he got his mittens wet.  I quickly grabbed him some extra gloves, but they were too big.  They fell off pretty regularly, which turned into a game of him laughing, pulling off the second glove, and running over to sit down on the steps for me to put them back on.  

Aubree and some of the bigger neighborhood kids had a drawn-out snowball fight.  They were disappointed there wasn't enough snow for sledding.  

Perfect time for a snow day!