A few highlights...
My grandma is here! We all love having her, and it means even more to me to see my boys with her. Anderson remembers and talks about her when she's not here, so he is able to pick up where they left off for the most part. But it had been over a year since Brady had seen her, and I'd really looked forward to the two of them reacquainting. Brady was a little slow to warm up, but now they are buddies for sure. Brady loves to run back and forth giving "Gray Ganma" a hug every time. I had my camera handy yesterday and caught a couple of really sweet pictures.
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Most of the decorating either I, or Ryan and I, did ourselves. But a week ago on Thursday night, all four of us decorated the tree. I was definitely chief decorator (Ryan takes the lead outside), but each of my three boys stepped in to help some. We had both Charlie Brown Christmas movies on the TV, ate pizza, and decorated the tree. Anderson mainly helped by laying at the gate around the tree watching the train. But his little three year old self did have strong opinions on a few of the ornaments. Mainly he wanted these 4 ornaments (he liked the bells because they made noise) directly in his line of vision as he lay in his usual train-watching spot. I thought it was cute, and so we have this little cluster of apparently his favorites hanging at the very bottom, center of the tree. In the order he specified. Ha.
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We haven't been too ambitious with advent activities. No elf on our shelf (although I've seen a neat alternative I would like to do next year.) One of our advent calendars was home-made and involved magnets and slips of paper. This was fun until about December 4, when Brady had a grand time opening all of it and assembling it into a pile. He was so happy, so I accepted defeat and helped him finish disassembling it. Maybe next year. My mom had gotten the boys a couple of traditional advent calendars, and Anderson has enjoyed those. He's good at keeping up with the date, and I do think it's helping him understand that Christmas is coming soon.
But the one thing I really wanted to do this year is the "25 Books of Christmas". Friends at church told me about it last year, so I'd been planning ahead. And we've all loved it! Between Christmas books we'd already accumulated and books I'd found on clearance last January, we had about 20. I bought a few more and wrapped them all just before December. Each night one of the boys gets to pick one of the wrapped books out of the basket, and we open and read it before bed. The boys really look forward to it, and so do I.
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| The basket as of tonight, about halfway through |
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| A sampling of the books we've opened so far. |
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Last, not actually related to Christmas, but something that has been at the top of my wish list... Anderson has worn underwear all day except for naps and bedtime since Tuesday. That means two days of preschool with no accidents. Yippee! He had been doing great at home, but when he wore his pull-up out and about wasn't consistently keeping it dry. I thought after the new year we'd try underpants at school. But Tuesday morning when I went to get him up for school, he was very proudly wearing his underwear- inside out and backwards- and handed me his diaper. He announced that he put his underpants on all by himself. So I took that as a little nudge to go ahead and send him without a Pull-Up. :)
