Such a Merry Christmas

A letter to our lovely lambs, Maddie and Ollie, on Christmas Day, 2010:
In years to come, you'll look back at all these posts and photos and will remember some of your earliest Christmas memories. We hope that recording funny details and silly stories here will be another gift for you, one day. So, here goes! Ollie, your excitement has been mounting for weeks and weeks. On December 1st, you and Maddie each got a personal email from Santa, with a video from him showing your actual photo in his "good book" way up at the North Pole. You were quite struck with this video message, a bit taken aback, really... partway through watching it, you looked up at me and said, "Santa knows everything." All this month, we've been talking about Christmas and Santa and being a good boy - once or twice, Daddy even had to call Santa from his cell phone to let him know that you were teetering close to the edge of bad boy status. You were not happy when it came to this, but the truth is, you are one of the best boys on the planet, and your ocassional slip-ups could never really set you back. Early on, you decided that you'd like to ask Santa for a baby dinosaur for Christmas, and soon after, you added "lemon holder" to your wish list. Yes, a lemon holder. We know you like the flavor of lemons, but even we were surprised with this unusual request - a request that persisted right up until Christmas day. We just had to wait and see if Santa would be able to meet such a wish. Maddie, meanwhile- you're still too young to know what's coming from day to day, but I will say that as it approached, we'd exclaim, "Christmas is coming!" and you would respond excitedly, "Yay!!!!" So you must have known something was up.
After nearly a week in Maine, it was Christmas Eve, and the excitement reached a fever pitch. In fact, you were so overcome that you barely made it through dinner, Ollie, and Daddy took you to the sofa to lie down, where you promptly fell asleep, just before 7pm. Maddie soon followed, and your dad and I had an unexpected super-relaxed evening with the rest of the family while you both slept upstairs. We had dessert, then moved to the living room for our Christmas Eve pajama-present opening (you were both sorely missed for this), Grandma's famous glug, and our traditional reading of A Child's Christmas in Wales. It's one of the most peaceful times of the year, sitting all together and sharing that beautiful story aloud, a story that fills your mind with such vivid images and your heart with the wonder and whimsy of childhood. You'll enjoy it differently each year as you grow up, and you can remember that it connects you to so many generations of your family. I can still see and hear my grandfather reading it aloud, and this year Grandma Patty read it masterfully, probably hearing her father's voice in her own head all the while.
Eventually, we all headed back to our little house down the road, which had gotten a bit chilly from neglected woodstoves. We hung up the stockings and left out treats for Santa and his reindeer, and were amazed in the morning to discover that, once again, he had remembered to fill the stockings here, but leave all the big presents at Grandma and Granddaddy's house. How he keeps track of all this, we'll never know. After inspecting the contents of your stockings, and having a great webcam with Grandma Carole in England (Granddad was outside tending to his dead car battery, poor thing), we sped over to G&G's house to meet your cousins and Ian and Suz and have a great frenzy of stocking-opening (see photo). Ollie, your stocking included a stuffed hedgehog, an old-fashioned tabletop bell, like you might see at a post office, a chocolate Santa, a Chuggington bowl, a make-it-yourself straw kit, a mini Simon game, a kaleidescope, and more! Maddie, yours included a shiny gold zip-up bag and some sparkley play necklaces, a can of spray foam soap with a duck dispensor on top, a little soft babydoll and an even littler ballerina doll, a wind-up robot girl, hair bands, cute socks, and more! We all bounded downstairs to a big breakfast of cheese-sausage-egg strata (a new favorite!), coffee, juice, and Grandma's wonderful stollen and Finnish coffee bread (Mommy's favorite). After that, we spent ALL morning opening presents in the big living room. We fantasize about opening one present at a time and admiring them all slowly, but that never happens, does it? Maddie's favorite presents this year were your babydoll and stroller and little toy purse, and Ollie's favorites were a huge Playmobil airplane, a toy cash register with shopping basket accessories, and a remote controlled Robo-Raptor (who makes an appearance in the group photo). The rest of the day was spent playing and playing, and getting ready for our big dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, which was somehow even more delicious than usual this year. Loads of Christmas cookies for dessert, and then two VERY sleepy lambs heading back home to a cozy, happy sleep. Ollie and Maddie, thank you for making Christmas day, and every day, so joyful for us. xoxoxo

YUM

This post is just for mommy, because I'm really proud of these pretty cookies I made!! I call them "poor man's truffles," because they have this super crazy rich soft chocolate filling, which is made NOT with the finest Swiss or Belgian chocolate, but with Oreo cookies blended with cream cheese! And they kill everyone with their yumminess. It's tricky to get the melted chocolate over them without making a huge mess, and to decorate them quickly before the chocolate hardens... Ollie, Aidan and Eli helped with that. Maddie helped by trying valiantly to eat all the little ornaments before they went on the trees. Very pleased with them... with our big crowd at Christmas, I'm sure they'll disappear in the blink of an eye!

Sleepykins

Beautiful Maddie, asleep in the car while Dad and Ollie run errands, and Mommy sits with you, snapping photos and trying to figure out her new phone.

One Busy Day

This year, the big Christmas party for the "Moms Around the Lake" group I'm in fell *exactly* at the same time as my Messiah concert, and I was really bummed! It's a great party - so many families and friends there, including all the dads, a huge potluck dinner, and even Santa comes! So I was actually a little bit pleased that we couldn't find a babysitter to watch the kids, which freed up Andy to take them to the party rather than attend my concert. They had a lot of fun, although Maddie had a royal freak-fest when she saw Santa, and apparently it took her ages to calm down. Nor did the kids eat anything at all, despite there being enough food there to feed a gazillion people.

So, although I was sad to miss the party, my Messiah concert with the New Jersey Conservatory was FANTASTIC!! We sang our hearts out, and by the end of "Worthy is the Lamb," I actually started crying, it was so beautiful and AWESOME. Here's a teeny tiny photo of me with my pearl-bedecked choir buddies, Laura and Lora... I took this with my new phone and I'm not sure why it's so tiny. Anyway, what a concert. So good!

First Big-Girl Haircut

My post on October 19, 2010 is called "Boy Cut," and I was chastising myself for giving Maddie the same haircut that I always gave Ollie. I thought, "Never again!" I'll take her to a real hair salon, and she'll get a girly cut. So that was my mission when we went to Snip-Its in Rockaway a week or so ago. As you can see from photo 1, she wasn't too pleased with this idea at the beginning. She cried a bit, but at least she pretty much stayed in one place. The lollipop helped a lot (photo 2). By the end, she sat resignedly in the seat, just waiting for the ordeal to be over. She looks quite dashing in her "after" shot, especially in her super snazzy outfit, for which I got a lot of amused comments on facebook! But she was wearing a cute sweatshirt over that top for most of the day, I promise. Anyway, by the time I got home I realized that it was actually a really BAD haircut - pretty much a blunt bowl cut that made her look Amish. I spent the rest of the day chasing her around with scissors, trimming a little bit here and there to get the hair off her ears. She's back to the boy cut, which looks incredibly cute on her, and I've learned my lesson: for now at least, Mommy's haircuts are just fine.

Best Buddies

How can I resist publishing these photos?!! Look at those silly girls.... this photo was taken right before they both stood up on the table and started dancing. Ryan and Addie hang out with Ollie and Maddie just about every week, sometimes a few times a week, when we're lucky. It's fun to see them grow and change together; Maddie is only saying a handful of words now, but when she hears Ollie talking about Ryan, she shouts out - "Addie!!" The boys are getting a lot better at playing together without having meltdowns about sharing toys, etc.... the other day, they closed all the doors to the living room and were in there for nearly an hour - no shouting or drama!! When Carol and I finally got around to checking on them, we found they had been "decorating for a birthday party," and had stuck dinosaur stickers all over every imaginable surface in the room, including walls, windows, lamps, pillows, you name it. Thankfully, they weren't very adhesive stickers - phew.

Wayne!

One of my best friends from college, Wayne Perry, was passing through town a few weeks back, and made time for a short visit before continuing on to Rhode Island... we calculated that it's probably about 16 years since we've seen each other!! I literally don't think he's aged a day, and we picked up right where we left off, laughing and sharing stories. I'm looking forward to next time, and hope it might include both of our families... having Wayne for a dad, I can only imagine his kids must be a blast, just like Ollie and Maddie. Sooner than another 16 years would be GREAT!

Candycanes and Smiles

After admiring lots of glamourous Christmas light displays around our neighborhood, it became clear that the candycanes were Ollie's favorite thing, and we decided it was high time to get some outdoor decorations up at our house as well, for the first time ever. Ollie was SO excited when we bought them, and we set them up in the afternoon with lots of help from Daddy, who used all of his Daddy skills to refrain from swearing repeatedly throughout the process. It was bitterly cold out, and he had to hammer little plastic spikes into the frozen ground, without breaking them or splitting the candycanes when they were pushed down on top of the spikes. We marvelled at how much work some people must take on to put up the crazy light displays we've seen around town, and here was Andy fussing over 12 candycanes!!! So, here is the fruit of our labors; maybe we'll add a few candycanes each year, at least enough to make it all the way to the front door. Meanwhile, we found a few miraculous displays a couple of towns away, in particular one that features a HUGE tree that's hung with lights so it looks like a firework - it's amazing! They must have used a crane to do them, or something like that. Seriously impressive. I know our modest candycane effort holds a sweet and righteous place in the world of holiday lighting, but I'm grateful for the occasional INSANE light displays that pop up here and there, full of silliness and joy; they make us smile.