Happy Holidays

Jack's had a great 3rd Christmas. A Christmas which involved 3 separate "Christmases", to boot! Can't go wrong there! This year was our year to stay home for Christmas Eve and Day. Poor Nat was sick on Christmas Eve so Jack and I headed off without him to the children's service at West Shore with Gram and Bec. Then, a lovely C.E. supper and "first gift" opening. It worked well to go to the early service: Jack was home in time for bed and Nat and I had time to sit and enjoy our candlelit living room with presents under the tree. My favorite moment of the year. Sigh. We were actually pretty on-track this year with our shopping and wrapping, done well before Christmas Eve, but thanks to our present-obsessed little boy nothing went out under the tree beforehand. It was sad to not have a continuous display of presents-- but it was also very dramatic to go from a bare tree skirt to what you see above. As I sat there and looked at the display of consumer gluttony before me, I realized we were setting ourselves up for one very overstimulated boy the next morning!!

While that was certainly the case, Jack was pretty much angelic for Christmas morning. And, he appeared to enjoy himself tremendously. We started off the morning with just our little family, opening our stockings together. I think Corydon was among the most excited (if you don't count mommy who woke up at 5am unable to sleep any longer because it was CHRISTMAS!!) as she immediately threw her head back and sang when her stocking was placed by her on the couch. The smell of rawhide gently drifting out may have been part of it...
Jack enjoyed opening his own presents as well as helping us with ours. He was pretty focused on each individual gift, playing with them for a bit before being ready to move on. If only we could all be so deliberate.

Gram and Becca came over for tree presents and brunch. As always we overdid it with presents, and were pretty exhausted by the end of 2 hours of opening (brunch break in the middle to allow the boy to decompress a bit..) But it was great fun. I think the high point for Jack was passing out the present, even more than opening them. It was adorable, as he walked around the room with packages, some bigger than he was, saying "this one for daddy! this one for mommy!"

Yes!!

A short post to remember that one of Jack's recent speech developments is the word "yes". OK, he has said the word yes before! But he more often says "yeah". So in the past week when he began to say a very carefully enunciated "yesss", it was a change. I wish I could put into words just how adorable he is when he says this word. I will try to capture it on video..

Baker-man

Jack loves baking cookies. As Christmas season has moved into full swing, we've been busy making our annual batches of Christmas cookies, and Jack has been very excited to be a part of it. he has enjoyed cooking with us for quite some time now, and has really taken to baking. A lot of flour has ended up on the floor, and our cutout cookies are much more heavily sprinkled than in years past, but he's a pretty solid baking assistant, all told. He loves to do the cut-outs, and thinks they are ready to eat as soon as they have been cut... we've been working on the steps in the process! He can also roll a pretty mean snowball. Included are some pictures from our most recent baking event. He now thinks we should bake every day (first words out of his mouth this morning were "we bake cookies?") and is having a hard time understanding that really, 12 dozen cookies is enough! :) As in all things recently, Jack has been intensely 2 as a baker, wanting to do things right away, on his own, neither stopping nor starting when we ask him to. Luckily he's got that moon-eyed smile and a very cute voice, which keeps us all sane!

O Christmas Tree, part 2

If you thought getting the tree was fun, wait for trying to decorate it! Decorating a Christmas tree with a 2 year old is, shall we say, a very different experience from what I've become accustomed to. I should preface this comparison by noting that I tend to be very methodical in my approach to decking our tree. It is one of the few areas of my life in which I am extremely organized. Each ornament has his home, its box or its designated piece of tissue paper. Each one is carefully, nigh reverently removed and enjoyed before being placed, after some deliberation, in the perfect spot on the tree. Then the box is put back together and set carefully aside, to await repacking in January.
By comparison, last night was rather like trying to decorate with a small whirling dervish as an assistant. By the end of the experience our living room looked rather like a war zone for cardboard, hallmark boxes strewn about, tissue paper and packing molds cast aside and ornament hooks everywhere.
Suffice it to say the boy was very, very excited about the ornaments. In particular, opening the ornament boxes. "What in dis one???" After removing (and sometimes inadvertently tossing) the ornament he would then rush over to his "dool" (stepstool) which he wanted to keep in the exact same spot next the tree, and quickly "hang" the ornament. It was important for me to be there in time for the hanging as he has not mastered actual hanging per se; it was more of a thrusting of the ornament at the branch. Whereupon I would catch the ornament, reassign it to a different spot, and rush back to the ornament box in time to help with the next opening. It was exhausting, but pretty adorable, too.

O Christmas Tree

We went and got our Christmas tree this evening. It was delightful. We drive down to Bedford to go to Gale's Garden Center because we love Gale's Garden Center. It's this lovely, laid-back, family owned greenhouse with nice trees and nice prices and very nice staff. Jack had great fun running around amongst the trees, sniffing them almost constantly after we noted that they smelled so very good (there is nothing quite like the smell of a whole greenhouse full of firs. Except perhaps for our living room full of a magnificent Balsam...) Jack's version of sniffing, by the way, involves blowing puffs of air OUT of his nose. Very cute. He was also very, very excited about the little pictures on the signs for each type of tree, which had a little cartoon Santa and reindeer hauling a tree homeward. "Little timmas tree on sign! Tree like mine! Little for me! It has Santa too!" He also kept requesting a "Little tree por my hand." He is very into having things that are little like hin, as we have noted. Luckily he seemed OK with us getting a big tree (a rather big tree, actually-- we had to cut off about 3 inches of the top to get it to fit in the living room.) Much later in our evening travels, he stopped to say, "We have a Timmas tree. Tree on top of Daddy's car!" Pretty exciting stuff.

Holidays are approaching...

.. and quickly! December is blurring by, it seems. The second trimester of pregnancy has been hitting mommy kind of hard, at least in the energy department. I have been ready for a nap by 3 every day and because those can't happen, I am therefore ready for bed by about 9. Pair this with Jack's later bedtime these days (sometime between 8 and 9) and that doesn't leave to much time for blogging. Or much else. But we have managed to fit in some pre-holiday cheer and some of our holiday preparations...

The first week of December was spent on birthdays, mine then Nat's. It was a busy week at work for both of us, which we thought would mean our birthdays would be put to the side. In actuality we ended up with birthday celebrations that unfolded gradually over 2-3 days... Jack got a lot of present -opening fun, as each present on the table was "por Dack!" of course. Especially the little ones. He is very convinced that everything little must be for him.

Here's a funny little example of that:
The other night in the car Nat and I were saying something about needing to shop at Giant Eagle. We hear Jack muttering to himself and turn down the music to listen. This is what we hear: "Not giant eagle, little eagle por Jack. Giant eagle for Mommy and Daddy; little eagle is for Jack!"

This past week we decorated for Christmas and went to the Wintershow at the Botanical Gardens, where Jack's favorite thing was the train that went around the base of the tree. He showed no interest in seeing Santa so we didn't push it, not feeling the need to go home with a picture of Jack screaming on the lap of a stranger in a red suit. I think Jack is starting to get more and more excited about Christmas as the weeks go on, though. He is a big fan of Christmas lights, calling out Timmas!! when he sees them. We have yet to get our tree up but I think he will love it too. Hopefully we will be able to keep his hands off it... we have already determined that we won't be able to put any presents out before Christmas morning, though!

This makes me so happy...

That is one of Jack's new catch phrases. He has been observed to say this about a pair of pajamas and a waffle in the last 24 hours. It is the absolute sincerity with which he says it that makes it so incredibly endearing. Here's a little monologue from Jack this afternoon to help give you the picture.

(Upon waking from his nap)
"I wanna go out there. Get my black stool. I wanna stand on my stool first."
(Upon getting to the kitchen and getting out the stool)
"Waffles! I wanna waffles, get out An Jima (Aunt Jemima, of course). I wanna stir it. Look at the light, light turn red its cookin'. I wanna light turn green. Light red, mommy!"
(This continued during the entire cooking process. Each stage of the light turning green was pointed out enthusiastically.)
(Upon being served his waffle)
"I wanna eat on stool. Syrup! I wanna syrup. Right there. Mmmmm! This makes me so happy, this makes me happy mommy."

Good lord. You just have to love the kid.

Add to this that he has slept through the night for 2 nights in a row and really I think he can do no wrong...