Wintershow and Wonderful days...

December is off to a wonderful, wintery start. December 1st, in fact, brought our first snow of the season, with a mix of sun and snow-filled clouds and perfectly acceptable December temperatures in the 30's since then. This week has brought us two birthdays and if the rest of our year is as lovely as our birthdays have been, the mid-thirties will treat Nat and I well...

Some recent events, photos, and anecdotes about the stars of this show...

Thursday night we went to the Botanical Gardens for what has quickly become one of our traditions of the holiday season: attending Member's Night for the Wintershow. A chance to walk through the glasshouses at night (magical) and show off the kids in a wonderland of decorated trees and gingerbread houses. Complete with cookies and cocoa and 20% off in the Garden Store. Could it get any better??? This year we were joined by Melinda and Naomi, and had a grand time wandering, chasing Jack, and watching the model trains. It was also fun to have a little girl to show off, all decked in her holiday finery. She was called, at one point, "Santa's little doll baby." She was pretty cute, actually.
See?


(her daddy's not bad either...!)

Here's Jack enjoying his favorite part of the evening...


and being generally cute himself...



Melinda and Naomi...

Mom and the kids..




Yesterday for Nat's birthday we had what we hope will be a monthly tradition: Do Nothing Day. Many thanks to Gram, who bravely took on the challenge of our 2 kids for the day so we could go out to lunch, browse aimlessly in stores on Coventry, sit around on computers, and go out to coffee with Melinda and Will. It was lovely. We spent most of the time, of course, talking about our kids. We also spent a lot of time saying, repeatedly, "Really? This was what our lives were like, ALL the time? Just 3 year ago? Really??" Unreal to think about having so much time. With so little to do with it. Unreal and pretty delicious. We did realize about an hour before picking up the kids, though-- those kids are the reason we were so completely focused on fully enjoying every minute of leisure, the reason we appreciated it all so fully. Don't know what you've got til its gone, and all... And the kids have been pretty lovely themselves the past few days, so it felt pretty good to see them again at the end of the day.

Jack has thoroughly enjoyed the week of birthdays. He stated yesterday at Nat's special day breakfast, with his worried, earnest face on, "I was HOPING for it to be Daddy's birthday...!" He loves frosting, and candles, and his rendition of Happy Birthday is getting pretty good. His verbal skills as a whole have really gotten pretty impressive recently. It's hard to really summarize his developments in this area (I kind of miss the days of easy updates, capturing his new words in a sweet little list....) But there has definitely been a shift recently-- perhaps since preschool?-- with increased articulation and longer sentences and this fascinating logical synthesis he is starting to experiment with. A new area of interest for him is "getting to be the same size as..." For instance yesterday in the car he told me, "When I was the same size as Daddy, I could lift my 3 drawers in my bedroom." He also reassured me that when I get to be size of Daddy I'll be able to reach things in the backseat. :) He's a very encouraging young man! (Complete with patting our back, can I tell you how cute that is???)
Another fun quote-- today at lunch, as we talked about dinosaurs, Jack disagreed with us about Brontosaurses being bigger than T-Rexes (because in his mind the T-Rex is the ultimate dinosaur). When we tried to explain it, he said "No, because in that dinosaur book I was reading, there was a picture of a T-Rex and it was bigger than the Brontosaurus." Seriously. The kid is supporting his thinking with evidence from the text.

Along with his amazing language and adorable face and charming self, he is also a bit of a maniacal, hyper and impulsive, opinionated and obstinate 3 year old at times these days. Without warning, he's yelling at us to listen to him or running and climbing like a banshee or refusing to eat or do something else with a loud "No" and an exaggerated mad face. Experimenting with being his own person in the world, I imagine. And when I step back from the behavior I can see it as a fascinating stage in his development. But to be honest much of the time I am ready for "3" to get a move on, to see if 4 is any better...

And then, a moment later, he'll say something so funny and perfect and back in love with him I go...