Merry Christmas

 

Wishing you a joyous Christmas and a wonderful new year from the Schaellings.

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Christmas Lights

On Monday, we made our annual trek to Salt Lake to see the lights. (And can I just say again how much I love Frontrunner. Taking the train downtown is so much easier than dealing with traffic and parking.) It was my mom's birthday, so we met up Nana and Grandpa Len for the adventure.

It actually wasn't too crowded, so I wasn't overly concerned about Lily getting lost. Last year, she refused to hold a hand and was constantly running away. Luckily, she adores Grandpa Len, so she stuck pretty close to his side all night. Timothy was pretty content in the backpack, even with all the bundling. I was so afraid he would freeze (and it was super cold), so he was dressed to the nines. When we piled everything on just before getting off the train, he wasn't too thrilled. He didn't fuss about all the layers, though. It was more of a silent protest with frequent escapes to his happy place. (That's what we call it when he closes his eyes to avoid us.)

But once we got going, he had a pretty good time and probably had a pretty good view of it all. After seeing all there was to see, we stopped for some (very) hot chocolate and headed home. Since Erik misread his watch, we actually left about an hour later than we planned. It made for a late night, but it was worth it. Lily had a great time, and since she's really starting to remember what we do for the holidays, I wouldn't miss this tradition for the world.

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Cookie Time

While I was making what seemed like a million cookies to give to coworkers and friends, Lily did some baking of her own. I gave her some dough and she went to town rolling, flouring, cutting, scraping, rerolling, flouring again, and finally putting them on the pan for baking. You've never seen a kid have so much fun. A couple days later, she frosted them in total Lily fashion. And now they're just waiting for their official moment in the spot light when Santa arrives.

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Gingerbread

It's become a tradition in our house to build a Christmas gingerbread house. This year, I went for a whole miniature village. And it really was miniature. Don't ask me what I thought was in the box that cost the same a one normal-sized gingerbread kit. But for some reason, it wasn't the tiny houses I ended up putting together. But they served their purpose, and Lily had a great time. This year, she realized the frosting was pretty tasty, so the whole project pretty much went like this: Some frosting on the house. Some frosting in my mouth. Some frosting on the house. More frosting in my mouth. (Not that I blame her. It was a Wilton kit, and their premade frosting is pretty tasty.) The candy itself was pretty terrible, so most of it actually ended up on the houses. Last year, my job was to put the frosting where Lily pointed, and then she would add the candy. This year, she did the whole process on her own and even helped with some of my houses.

This has become something I look forward to every year, and I hope she does, too. Next year, though, she can make a house. I'm making this:

(Instructions/template here.)

And I'm hoping that next year, Timothy can help. Instead of just eating gumdrops off rooftops like he did this year. (Sorry...it's kind of dark at the start. I guess I could have turned on a light. :-D)


 

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Nudist Baby

I was thinking the other day how boring our December must have been since I've only blogged twice this month. Then I sat down today to download pictures and remembered some of the fun stuff we've actually done. It's a good thing I have a camera, or apparently, I'd forget most of my life. At any rate, I'm going to post a couple things over the next few days in an effort to document some of this month...

This first one has nothing to do with Christmas or holidays of festivities of any kind. But it will give you some insight into what happens around our house. Timothy has decided that clothes aren't really his thing, and he will jump at any chance to take them off. He spends quite a bit of his time walking around the house Al Bundy style, hand in his pants trying to get the dang things off. One day, he actually managed to get a pair of sweats off. And he brought them to me. Like a present I was supposed to be so grateful to receive. Then he started tugging on his shirt. So I figured, what the heck...and I took that off for him too. So he wandered around the house - in the middle of winter - in nothing but a diaper, free as a bird and happy as could be.

Then he disappeared. And he got quiet. Which is never a good sign. So I went investigating. This is what I found:

Our budding nudist. Erik found the same thing a few days later when he got him out of bed. We've chucked the two-piece jammies...footies all the way. And onsies are once again our best friend.

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SANTA! I know him!

Last year, Lily finally got the whole Santa thing about the end of the season. I think it really clicked when she woke up Christmas morning and her mermaid had arrived, along with several other fun things. This year, she needed no reminding, and when Old St. Nick made his stop at Wal-Mart this weekend, I took the chance to take the kids to tell Santa all their hopes for Christmas.(Plus, having some connections, I wouldn't have to deal with ridiculous mall picture prices and less-than-ideal scanned pictures. YAY!!!)

As soon as Lily saw him, she ran right up to him, jumped in his lap, and gave this complete stranger the biggest hug EVER! (Stranger danger? What's that?) Luckily there wasn't a line because I can almost guarantee that would have happened even if there had been 10 kids in front of her. Ok...maybe not. But the girl was thrilled to be there.They chatted for a few minutes and I heard "bike" in there somewhere. So I think we're still ok on that front. Unlike last year when we had no idea she wanted a mermaid until we hit up Santa closer to Christmas. After all our shopping was done, of course. And with few mermaids to be found. But Santa managed to pull that out of his bag of tricks some how.

Once she was done, I went to hand Timothy to Santa. And I hadn't even held him out yet. For all he knew, I was changing hips. But he did know and started crying and promptly hid his head in my shoulder. A little disappointed, I figured we'd forgo his Santa picture this year rather than torture the poor kid. If anything, we would have a story about why there's no picture of Timothy with Santa in 2011. But when Erik could break away from actual work, he decided every kid should have at least one sad Santa picture and this was Timothy's year.

So here they are...both ends of the Santa-loving spectrum...

And yes...even with the sad face, I love this picture. It will be a good reminder of the year Lily really latched onto the magic of Santa. It will also be a reminder of the evil eye Timothy gave Erik when he got back safely to me... :-P

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Changes

Lily has had a couple changes in the last few weeks. The first one was fairly major. After months and months of asking her to not stand on the couch while watching TV and standing super close to TVs other than ours, I decided to take her to the eye doctor. Turns out the kid needs glasses. In fact, she's more nearsighted than I am - which compared to Erik's prescription, isn't hard. But still...the girl's only 4. So I'm sure we'll be getting thicker and thicker lenses for the poor thing until she's old enough to handle contacts.

So after two trips to the eye doctor (once for the exam and once more for dilation), it was official. We looked at a couple pairs of cute frames at in their office, but good heavens! They were so expensive for something that she's probably going to break...even with the warranty, I found it hard to justify spending that much. So we checked out our trusty Wal-mart...much more reasonable. And considering that when we told her to pick one from a few choices and she told us, "But I don't want to wear the same glasses every day," I'm really thinking cheaper is the way to go. We'll probably end up buying at least one more pair so she can change it up when she wants to.

I really do think it's made a difference for her. Of course, she didn't know she couldn't see. But now she can, and I think she's much happier. The first couple hours were a little odd, I think, since she almost tripped several times and she was very fascinated with the floor while she was walking. And apparently, "Everything is so shiny!" But she will now sit on the couch to watch TV (it probably doesn't hurt that we rearranged the living room so standing on the couch wouldn't help anyway) and I know she's seeing (see what I did there???) an improvement because after her gymnastics warm up the other day, she changed her mind and decided she wanted to wear them. She's been really good about remembering to put them on, and other than the small mishap of leaving them on the floor to get stepped on, she's been pretty careful with them. A little tweaking, and they looked good as new. And she looks so darn cute!

The second change, you can see in that picture, too. Lily now rocks bangs. Yesterday, she was walking around with her hair completely in her face. And this isn't an unusual occurrence. Gone are the days that she will sit and let me do something completely cute with her hair. We've reached the point that we're lucky if she lets us brush it every day. Although since we bought a hair bean (highly recommended for anyone with a daughter), we can usually manage a brush-through with little resistance. But since rubberbands is now a bad word, the sides and front just fall in front of her eyes. It would drive me crazy, but she doesn't seem to mind. Which does drive me crazy. So I opted to make the most of the situation. The hair that normally falls in her face is now short enough that she can still see. Problem solved.

With a new hair cut and new glasses, she's adorable, as always. But she also seems so grown up. She turns 5 in January, and I can't wrap my poor head around that. She's sure fun and is just growing so fast. She's suddenly discovered descriptive words, so everything is beautiful or cool or fantastic. She told me the other day that she wants to be a parent when she grows up...instead of a mail carrier. When I told her she could be both, she was so excited! And when she gives me a hug, she tells me she can hear my heart beeping. I hope I'll always remember this stage when she tries to show all she knows and is so eager to learn more. There's rarely a day when she doesn't make me proud of her in some way. She's definitely my special girl.

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