Once again, it’s the end of the month and I have a bunch of pictures that fell through the cracks. I don’t have anything meaningful, witty, or mildly clever to say, but I do have lots of cute pictures to show you. I hope I feel clever again soon. I miss the satisfaction and release of writing thoughts down just right. But currently it’s all I can do to remember I even have a blog with two or three people who like to look at it.
Every now and then in my sleepy haze I feel a little panicky about remembering this time of my family’s life. If I can manage to forget to shower, how am I supposed to remember how cute Rose was one day or a deep conversation I had with Jay, or Amber’s darling coos? I’ve written before about my quest for balance between living life and recording it. Now that I’m done having babies I feel like everything is so final—I know I’ll never have another time like this. It makes me want more details in my journal and more pictures in my folders. The pictures are easy. It’s the written details that are proving tricky. I have always been an avid journaler, but recently I have only even remembered to write in my journal 50% of the time. Even those entries are hasty and foggy and bland. They often lack the sweet details that I know I’ll crave later. I’ve been trying my best, though, and I guess that’s all anyone can do.
So for now, I compensate for my muddled words with PICTURES, PICTURES, PICTURES! My December file on the computer has 871 pictures in it, not counting all of the failed family photo attempts (ha ha). Lots of these pictures are series of Amber making various cute faces and I love them all so I keep them in their quantities. But still. I wonder if I’ll make it to 1000 pictures for December.
[Monster pants]
These sisters.
Jay had his kindergarten “Christmas Program” at school before Christmas break. The program involved the whole kindergarten singing 4 or 5 songs about Santa. While the songs themselves left much to be desired, the kids were super cute up there with their shining eyes and smiles. The whole thing lasted about 9 minutes.
All visitors at Jay’s elementary school have to sign in and get a visitor sticker. Amber’s bum wore ours during the Christmas program.
What is it about bare babies? I got the ole cloth diapers out this week. I’ve never used them on a young baby (I started using them when Rose was 9 months old). It turns out cloth diapering a 100% breastfed baby is the easiest thing in the world. No rinsing or scraping or anything—just chuck the diaper in the bin and wash them, because the poo from breastmilk dissolves in the wash. Awesome! And they contain explosive poo so much better than disposables. I still have a nice pile of disposable diapers on hand too, for convenience when I want them. I’m not trying to save the world by using cloth diapers; I just have issues with babies growing out of one size of disposables before we’ve used them all (what a waste!) and I don’t love buying diapers in general—too expensive! So we have these cloth ones. Amber doesn’t seem to care. They are a tad on the bulky side (can we say bubble bum?) but I’d say Amber is cute enough to outshine her bubble bum, ha ha.
Family walks are our favorite. Normally Rose walks too, but this particular day she was feeling emotionally incapable of handling a walk.
Any good picture I get of Jay is candid—the boy will NOT look and smile if I have a camera pointed at him.
Two words: baby leggings!!!! A friend in our ward has a 1-year old girl, and she’s giving us all of her old clothes. In those juicy bags were a large collection of the cutest baby leggings of all time! Amber has at least 10 pairs of these. I adore them. And they make diaper changes a breeze—no pants to pull.
Ayyeee! Sometimes Rose’s architectural ideas can’t wait. Post-bath bare building.
Happyface in the mini-mothers lounge at church. I feel like I’m cheating when I go there—I get to escape the uncomfy pews and keep my cute baby all to myself while Jeff sits on the hard bench in the chapel, keeping the peace between Jay and Rose.
I gave Jeff and Jay haircuts this week, and after a year with long locks, Jay decided to go short again. Goodbye bed head at last!
Oh Rose. She’s so funny—with all her new dress-up clothes, she still dug out this old homemade skirt-turned-dress that I gave her long ago.
Christmas break is great for filling the family room with blocks and BUILDING!
I’d like to add a video of Amber’s sweet little voice, but the only way this program will let me do it right now is to post a link: https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=589305022020&l=4393806763827623500
[product placement]
December: DOCUMENTED.
I hardly know where to start. Christmas was happy and fun and exciting and…exhausting! This is only the second year ever that Jeff and I have stayed home in our own house for Christmas. All the other years we went to my parents’ house. The last time we stayed home for Christmas I was pregnant with Jay—six years ago—when we lived in that attic nook in Missouri. That year we went to my sister’s house for holiday meals and I didn’t have to cook any of our favorite traditional Christmas food. So this year was full of firsts in the kitchen and out of it. I’m not sure I managed it all with quite the ease, poise, and patience of my mom, but I did my best. I’m sure it gets easier with practice.
We love relaxing together at Christmastime. I say it every Christmas and summer: being married to a teacher is the best!
So much for a Christmas miracle…I still can’t bundt. At least my sweater was awesome! The cake tasted great; it was just ugly.
Christmas Eve sleepover! Amber only snuck in for the picture, of course. After dinner on Christmas Eve, we read Luke 2 and various other Christmasy scriptures. I used some old paper-popsicle stick puppets that I made when I was little to do a small puppet show of the Christmas story for Jay and Rose. Then they took a turn with the paper puppets. We are so thankful for Jesus’ birth and all he did to show us the way. I hope my kids can start to understand a little bit about why we celebrate Christmas while enjoying all the actual celebrating.
Eventually we wrangled the kids into bed, after explaining explicitly that they had to wait for us before they ran out to their stockings on Christmas morning.
zzzzz…
Amber got to watch the stocking stuffing and brick building in the glow of our Netflix fire. This year I was excited to find the same cardboard brick blocks that I had as a child. They come flat and you have to fold them, which is relatively easy, but we had about 72 of them to fold. It was tricky to do that with a baby on my lap, but Jeff helped. I love getting my kids toys that I like to play with too!
Amber and I went to bed at midnight on Christmas Eve. Six hours later, all three kids woke up at the same time. A Christmas miracle! Jay left off his pajama pants so pardon any undie-shots, ha ha. I put a wrapping paper tube on the floor in the hall and that was the line the kids couldn’t cross until we turned on the traditional Jingle Bells music. Thankfully they kept that rule.
Presents! This year we gave two wrapped presents each plus some books and stocking stuff for Jay and Rose. There were the bricks set out and one wrapped gift for them to share. That’s less than last year and it still felt like so much once we added in gifts from extended family members! But we had fun and Jay got his dream Lego set of 50 fairy tale minifigures. Rose got a box full of sparkly dress-up dresses (which I snagged at Goodwill back at Halloween). Jeff and I don’t get each other surprise Christmas gifts beyond stocking stuffers anymore. Instead, we decide on one thing to get for all of us. This year I conceded to let Jeff get a new Wii U to replace our 6 year old Wii. He was rather excited about it.
Amber was so excited about her presents too. I couldn’t resist sticking some softies in her stocking, even though she doesn’t know how to pick things up yet.
Rosepunzel in her tower.
Amber was pretty excited that this was the last time she’d be forced to wear her velvet Santa dress.
On Christmas afternoon, we went for a family walk to get some wiggles out. Rose ran nearly the whole mile!
Later that afternoon, the White folks came over and we had Christmas presents part two, followed by Christmas family dinner crammed around our table. I definitely was too worried about heating the ham and cooking the cheesy potatoes to take a picture of the loaded table. The ham ended up lukewarm and the potatoes took twice as long to cook as the recipe said, but we all ate eventually.
Merry Christmas!