I’m gonna miss this…too

Since our children are always well-mannered, it was certainly not in our home that a certain curly-haired two year old burped loudly at the table and then excitedly asked everyone “Hear that??” LOL

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more.
I’m going to jump around a bit as I remember things so this may not all be in chronological order.

December 20, 2009 brought about Tom and I’s 13th wedding anniversary. We are usually pretty low-key in our celebrations and just enjoy a nice dinner out together. Sophia joined us this year but was so sweet to sleep through the entire dinner in her carseat. Tom and I chose to go to The Keg, our once-a-year treat. We both chose steak but I chose a seafood topping for mine (mmmmm…lobster, baby shrimp and scallops!) It was a nice time, to talk and reflect on all that God has lead us through in the past 13 years.

December 29th brought the arrival, once again, of our friends Shane & Cheryl and their 6 boys. I may not have blogged about this back in November (can’t remember or be bothered to check right now) but they spent the night with us then and liked us so much they came back again! LOL This time Cheryl’s teenaged sister also accompanied them. Our little house really can step up to housing a bunch of people when it needs to! We put all of our 5 older children in the biggest bedroom with the bunkbed and air mattress on the floor, the Cheryl, her sister, Dayn & Lyan (6 mth old twins!) slept in Adriana’s room. Tom, Sophia and I were in our room. Aydan and Dannan were in Sophia’s room using the bed and playpen. Dylan and Lyndan each slept on a couch and Shane used an air mattress on the floor. Wow. Not too shabby for a house under 1,000 sq ft eh?
We had a great time visiting with them and were treated to dinner of Chinese food courtesy of Shane & Cheryl. The order was huge though and fed all 17 of us supper, as well fed us for 3 more meals as well as my parents and the Muellers! It was tons of food! I did take a photo and I’ll add it here. It was like our own buffet!
Once all the children were in bed for the night we enjoyed Starbucks (mmmmm Eggnog Chai) and played another round of Carcassonne. The next morning I got to put my massive griddle to work serving up pancakes for 17! (more about my griddle later…) About an hour later they were packed up and off again! With a 12 hour trip home they needed to get an early start.

The morning that the Edwards were here something sad happened to Isabella. We have a solid pine kitchen table that has two extra leafs that hang from each end of the table, and when needed, you flip them up and slide the support beams under each leaf. In the busyness of our breakfast time Adriana was trying to get the leaf up but was unable to, so she climbed under the table to flip it up. In doing this, she wasn’t able to see that Bella’s pinky finger was in the hinges. When the leaf was flipped up Bella must have panicked and instead of crying so that we could have released her finger, she just pulled it out of the still closed hinge. I shall pause a moment while you all cringe and wince.
Poor, poor girl. She just started screaming and we all tried to figure out what happened and what the damage was. At first it looked as if her entire pinky nail had been completely yanked from the nail (cringe) and her finger was so swollen that it was hard to tell. It didn’t really bleed at all. So it was bandaged up, and our poor sweet girl just whimpered for so long. I eventually gave her some Tylenol as she seemed to be in a lot of pain from it. We kept the bandaid on until the next day when Sophia accidentally pulled Bella’s bandaid off leading to more screams and tears. Oddly enough that happened while Tom and I were both trying to clean up and calm down Kellen who had just smashed his face into the kitchen floor and had a swollen bloody nose! We turned our attention to Bella’s finger once Kellen was settled and were able to see the true damage now that the swelling had gone down a bit. What we thought was the nail was actually a large piece of skin from the other side of her finger (the finger pad) and it was flipped over her nail (gag, cringe) Tom put the skin back and saw that the nail was still cut deeply just at the cuticle. We then bandaged it with gauze for a few days. It is healed pretty well now, though still pink and a tad swollen at the tip. She lost the nail the other day and we are trying to keep it bandaged and clean for the new nail to (hopefully) grow back. Poor Bella.

New Years’ Eve was really fun. We had the Muellers’ over for lunch (Chinese food! LOL) and they helped us hang the awesome framed photos of our children. Am and I had fun playing with her new Nikon D700 and awesome lens! In the evening we joined the Fletchers’ and their family/friends at the church for a party. So fun! There was lots of food and we enjoyed visiting with our friends. Amethyst and I played a 2 rounds of Bonhanza, one in which we played by the wrong rules and one in which we found out the right rules and Am won. The children had a great time and we only saw them as they ran in and out for food. LOL We got home about 1am I think…they children were just wiped.

We slept in a bit on New Years day and then headed to Dad & Mum’s for the afternoon and supper. We brought out Settler’s of Catan and had another go with that. Dad wasn’t super impressed with his hand this time though. LOL We had a great time relaxing with them. Oh! I almost forgot! When we first arrived I decided I was going to (under Mum’s supervision) cut Isabella’s hair to give her bangs as her hair is always hanging in her face. Well one thing led to another and next thing I know Tom has given the “okay” for me to cut Amelie and Erilyn’s hair! You may remember that I did cut their hair last spring and did well but that was after days of “talking myself into it.” This time I was more nervous but I think I did well again! Erilyn had several inches cut off bringing her hair to just below her shoulders. Amelie was the most drastic as I cut her hair to just above her shoulder in a longer bob. It looks SOOO cute! I really wasn’t sure that I was going to like it and nearly had a panic attack after I made that first cut in her beautiful long hair. But I do!

This past weekend Tom and I had the pleasure of spending the evening with our friends, the Neesons. They taught us to play Texas Hold’em which was pretty funny as Tom was trying to demonstrate his knowledge of the game which pretty much boiled down to several viewings of Bond movies and Vegas Vacation. Though mine was much better as all I could think to do was start singing some Kenny Rogers….”You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em…”
We enjoyed yummy snacks and played some games on their Wii. We really enjoyed hanging out with them.

On Sunday night we had Dad & Mum come over supper and a game of Dominion before Tom and I headed out to a movie. We went to see “Avatar” in 3D. Wow. Just wow. The animation was just amazing. I enjoyed the movie. This was the first time we had left Sophia, which is why we asked Dad & Mum if they would mind staying with the children as we weren’t sure how Sophia would be without me. She did fairly well and I left a bottle of milk for her which she (grudgingly) drank. She was pretty happy to see me when we got home though. It was so strange not having her with us.

Monday it was back to work for Tom and everything else for us. Though the children and I still slept in until 9 am for the first couple days just cuz we could (I love homeschooling!). The girls did AMAZING with their schoolwork this week. They got all of their work done and quickly too. Awesome.

Tomorrow (Friday) is our monthly Babywearing meeting and it looks like we will have a few new ladies with their babies this month. It’s so awesome to see our group growing! It’s grown from just Andrea and I to about 6-10 ladies per meeting, plus all their little ones. And we have over 30 people on our facebook group, most of which have come out to at least one meeting. Cool beans.

I’m going to pack it in for tonight but I shall leave you with this…

Some Randomness:

We order pizza once a week or so before Christmas and when the pizza guy came to the door, Bella came running to greet him yelling “Pizza man is coming to town!” ROFLOL

Claire was over and was trying to understand what Bella was telling her and finally said “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak “kid.”

I love when Bella tells me “Mama, I firsty” (thristy)

Kellen told me “Adrie closed the door in my face and that hurt my heart.”

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and so far a happy New Year!
I have wanted to do so much blogging lately but, as it always seems happens, have just been blogging in my head a lot. I have such a nice little blog running in my head – so cute and up-to-date and funny too! I am so witty in my head.

This is the week where everything/one tries to get back to normal, back to routine, and we are no different. So far things have gone really well. We are not exactly “on schedule” as I find the children and I are still crawling out of bed at 9am but we are being fairly productive once we are awake and getting done what needs to be. I guess I just need to bite the bullet one day and just wake us (me too?) up early and then try to get things back on the proper time. Sophia is still staying up late even. She’s only just fallen asleep shortly before midnight. Though she slept most of the morning away. I think she was in bed until almost noon today! Silly baby.

We have had a wonderful few weeks. We have changed things up again this year. Tom and I have been talking and praying about celebrating Christmas for most of this year and we decided to keep things simple and Christ-focused as is our goal with anything that we do. We enjoyed lots of singing, reading and acting out of the Christmas story in our home. Everyone wanted to be “Joseph” in our plays because he got a cool wooden staff that I found at a dollar store. LOL Amelie, Kellen and Bella were very fascinated with the angels. It truly is very cool and it was so neat watching their amazement and wonder when talking with them about the angels talking to Mary & Joseph then later to the shepherds. Bella loved the part in the story where Joseph and Mary look for a room in Bethleham. Whenever we talked about it, she would say “No rooms!” The children (except for Adrie and Sophia) sang a song at church that they learned that talked about Jesus’ birth. Both songs were very good and we had them on our ipod to listen to whenever we wanted. They still listen/sing them. I want to see if I can get a video of them, it’s super cute.
We did our Christmas baking this year for our neighbours, if you are interested in THAT adventure for me, see my previous post in which I discover that baking is not bliss. It was great though and the children and I delivered them all and sang to our neighbours. Everyone loved the cake pops and, glutton for punishment that I am, I am determined to make them again and not let them beat me! I shall win.

About a week or two before Christmas my Mum took Erilyn, Amelie and myself to a “sing-a-long” short version of Handel’s Messiah. Adriana was supposed to come but was sick on the night of it and Amelie came in her place. It was really so beautiful! It’s been so long since I’ve heard it and I wanted the children to experience it, so it’s beauty and, more so, for it’s power and bringing to life the words from Isaiah. I wasn’t sure that the girls were enjoying it at first. I’m not sure what they expected but that surely wasn’t it. I took them both to the bathroom a little over halfway through and I knew they were actually enjoying it as I stood outside the bathroom I could hear Erilyn sweet falsetto singing “and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
And the Hallelujah Chorus…wow.

Tom always has nearly 2 weeks off over Christmas and we loved spending that time with him. Also, for the first time in years, my Mum booked most of that time off too. We spent so much time with Dad and Mum, it was great! Tom was playing guitar for the Christmas Eve service at our church so we went there, it was such a nice service, a time to reflect on the awesomeness of Christ’s birth and the events surrounding. Our little ones sat very well through most of it. Afterward we headed out to Picture Butte to spend a couple of days with Dad and Mum. We decided to make it a “sleepover” just because we could! Why spend time driving when we didn’t have to? We arrived to their home and hadn’t been there long when I made the discovery that I had forgotten pretty much the only thing that we couldn’t get along without…Sophia’s diapers. Nuts. Since it was then about 9pm on Christmas Eve in Picture Butte there was no chance of running to the store to pick up disposables so Tom and my Dad drove back in to get them. I felt so badly. Thankfully everything went smooth from there on out. We spent 2 days with Dad & Mum and it was sooooo nice. We played games, this time it was “Carcassonne” and “Settlers of Catan,” enjoyed too much delicious food and had several opportunities to chat with my sisters (and brothers-in-law) on Skype. It really felt *almost* like we were all together for a bit.
Christmas morning was a special time. We did do gifts and we chose to draw names and exchange with my parents to just keep it to one gift each. We didn’t want the commercialism to sneak in or have the children overwhelmed with more than they need. It was great, everyone put a lot of thought into their gift for the other person though occasionally someone little had to be *helped* as their ideas might not have been….ummmm….well, let’s just say that Kellen had to be persuaded that Papa would really rather have a pair of leather gloves than the “wolverine gloves” that he saw in the store.

We spent time just together as a family, lots of lazy days spent playing board games or Wii.

……………..more to come.

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how Isabella says “ketchup,” she calls it “se-put” Just wanted to remember that. They grow so fast.

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