Whew, Christmas is intense! In other words, this post is intense. We’re back home again and things are calming down a little bit [2 Bones worth of laundry-folding, cleaned/organized kitchen, toys put away…almost vacuumed floor] so now I can write about it all.
On Thursday, (Dec. 23rd), we drove the 3 hours to my family’s house for Christmas. My sister Mel is the last Brown kid at home, and this was her first holiday without Kyle (mission) so we had to go give her some sibling-ly support and niece-neph love at Christmas. As usual, we have a few pictures of the happy holiday.
Even though it’s not exactly Christmas-ish, let’s start with a picture list of Rose’s personality—she’s got a lot of that lately:
Ahh, asleep. Rose had a hard time adjusting to sleeping in a port-a-crib in an unfamiliar room. She cried and wailed for at least an hour before every sleep for the first 3 days we were at my family’s house. It made me so sad. Often we just gave up on naps and let her stay up and get too tired to protest for long when we did put her to bed. My sweet little homebody.
And for good measure, here’s the boy—asleep on Christmas Eve. He never took a nap while we were there, and he kept waking up confused in the middle of the night. Let’s just say I was supersleepy by the time we left.
Bytheway, after a few too many disgusting experiences, (that word is underlined, bolded, and italicized on purpose), I gave myself an early Christmas present and said adios to potty training Jay. After 6 weeks he was NOT catching on at all. So I decided to wait a few more months. Sigh. Oh well.
On Christmas Eve, my mom (Ramah Meri to Jay, of course) gave Jay and Rose an early present—a pony! He’s blue and bouncy and blowable (inflatable). And he can carry up to 200 lbs…
Double duty!
[I forgot to add that our new pony is tasty too]
Of course, Dad and I had to go on our Christmas Eve RUN too. I missed out on that as a giantprego last year. I love running with my Dad. We sweat. We squelch through mud. We talk and laugh. We shout “FRED!!!!” on a certain part of a certain trail. When we’re done, we wash our shoes in puddles.
Christmas morning came at last. I interviewed Jay right before we went to look in our stockings. I think he was pretty excited—we talked about toys in our stockings all MONTH.
Just so you know how it goes, we Browns like to savor the day on Christmas. First, we open the stocking stuff and play with it. Then, we take turns giving gifts to each other. On your turn you give a gift from you to someone else to open. My parents started that tradition when I was little to accentuate the giving part of Christmas. I love it. Needless to say, it takes us lots of time to open presents on Christmas. Add an hour of Church and an hour of real-time emailing with a missionary and we had an all day event! Oh—and we eat lots of yummy cookies and watch Christmas movies and listen to Christmas music all around that and in there too.
Jay got really good at RIPPING open his presents. He tried to teach Rose to RIP them, but she preferred to gently tear them and then play with the paper scraps.
Rose didn’t last long playing with her stocking—she wanted FOOD! So we parked her little booster chair on the floor so she could see the action while she ate breakfast.
After breakfast, Rose came back in all bare and shared her toy with Jay.
We had a quick intermission with present time to go to church at 11am. Mel gave a very good talk ON CHRISTMAS, and my parents sounded quite melodious in the choir.
Jay adores his wooden train track. He played with it all afternoon on Christmas (predicting this exclusivity, his strategic mama poised it as the last present he opened). It’s so fun when a carefully chosen gift is loved.
Eventually, Jay and I created a whole highway/railroad system with the felt road strips I made for him. I’m so glad that Jay has some toys now that I like to play with too!
Jeff and I did a joint gift to US this year. We got an Amazon Kindle Fire. It’s like a half-sized iPad. Jeff loves it so much that I haven’t had time to really figure out how to use it!
Every year I wonder if I’ll be able to think of gifts to MAKE, and so far I’ve managed to whip up some fun ones without too much difficulty. I was going to do a separate post for the crafts, but I’m on a roll-why stop now? I know this post is getting long, but what did you expect from a Christmas post anyways?
THE HOMEMADE GIFTS:
“Hanging out” bookmarks (I made 4—2 sets, for the grandparents of these cuties)
Mini fleece owls (I made 3)
A fleece kitten for Mel.
I organized an extravaganza of truth and collected all 14 of my family members’ testimonies. Jeff helped me put them into 4x6 photo albums, with a picture of each family member next to his/her testimony. It worked pretty well.
See, I can be serious SOMEtimes!
And last but not least, my most recent pet invention, the Beard Bonnet. Jeff and I have always joked about making some sort of protection for his ever-present rough chin, so I finally refined our idea. I whipped up a little tag and invented a company, all in the name of soft, scratch-free smooches. I gave one to each man in my family.
Brad is the only one I have a picture of in his Beard Bonnet.
Ah, no more morning scruff scratches! Jeff has tried on his orange Beard Bonnet and I have tested it. It’s dreamy. Maybe I should to apply for a patent and found a company or something.
I was the only one taking pictures, so I’m not in any of them, and I never took pictures of MY gifts or anything. Let’s just say that it was Merry Christmas to Shaina’s kitchen this year. I was seriously in Kitchen Nirvana on Christmas. My parents gave me a beautiful set of shiny pots and pans that I’ve been drooling over for a lonnng time. Hello, stainless steel! I’ll never eat teflon chips again.
Ahhhh, yessss. Christmas treats. Since I was a tastebud torn pregnant lady last Christmas, I deeply enjoyed the goodies extra mucho this year. Probably a little too much, in fact. But mmmmm.
Jeff enjoyed making impossibly thick hunk-o-ham-wiches. Yes, that’s a single HUNK of ham on that sandwich (I tried to type piece, but it is so much more than a flimsy old piece of ham).
We walked to the park one day for a little fresh air.
I’m slightly in love with stacking both of my kids together and taking pictures of them. Is it vain to say MY KIDS ARE ADORABLE?
I really wanted to take a nice, Christmasy family picture of all of us in our Christmasy Sunday clothes, but alas. It never happened. So we took a quick shot at the Whites’ house after Christmas.
Here it is—our Merry Christmas from the Whites picture. Imagine it with a personalized note, in an envelope and your name addressed on the front and a festive stamp in the corner. Maybe next year I’ll manage to do Christmas cards?
Merry Christmas!
