Cause it's my blog.
1. Last year we started a tradition of a Christmas countdown...but tied it into our Thanksgiving Day festivities.
Each person writes down things they are thankful for and we use those over the next month during dinner or at bedtime to talk about why we are thankful for said item (some examples include Daddy, our house, adoption, etc).
I have to give the boys more credit for this than myself. I make sure we do it, but then usually forget about it. Despite the fact that it's hanging on the wall so we don't forget... one of them usually has to remind me to take off an item each night before bed.
Last year we did a simple chain. I tried to get fancy with a pennant this year. Only thing fancy did was totally outlast the boy's attention spans leaving me to finish by myself and leave me with a string of thankfulness long enough to run across the front of the house.
But we made it work.
2. We of course continued our Waffle-House-go-pick-out-a-Christmas-tree tradition on Friday morning. It's always nice to be in a public place and have someone acknowledge how well behaved your children are...
I just didn't tell them it's because there was food in front of them and they'll do anything to make sure that food ends up in their bellies.
3. This year we started a new tradition. One that I feel certain will stick since so many people in this house LOVE food. (Anyone else noticing a food related theme with our traditions?)
We certainly did the traditional turkey and dressing, etc, etc on Thanksgiving Day. But on Friday, we ran by our local Ethiopian restaurant and picked up an order of injera and I made a small Ethiopian feast that night as we gave thanks for the boy's Ethiopian heritage.
Let's just say they fought more over these leftovers than the turkey. (And I may have too...it's sooo good!)
On Saturday, we hit up the local Chinese buffet to celebrate the upcoming Chinese part of our family. And we have at least one Ethiopian that thoroughly enjoyed Chinese food! Charlie even mastered chopsticks within minutes. I was impressed! But now I need to work on my homemade Chinese food since it's been requested for dinner several times since our outing.
4. Kentucky Horse Park's Southern Lights. Yeah, we've done this one for several years with the Jolly Family. Interestingly, the boys got more into the lights this year than usual. I'll attribute that to a few new attractions, including Star Wars and Transformer figures. Someone around there knows how to get the attention of little boys!
We let the kids choose a one thing to do and this year Grace and Sam chose to ride the camel. And Charlie and Emma chose to ride a pony.
I'll let that sink in for a moment.
And remind you that Charlie is nearly as tall as I am. I'm 5'3". Barely. And a pony is a basically a miniature horse. (In case you didn't know.)
You put a boy that tall on a pony that short and it was really all we could do to not laugh at his feet nearly dragging the ground! And his reason for not choosing the camel ride...it was too high. I told him next year he was gonna have to get over his fear of the camel if he wanted a ride because he was almost tall enough for the pony to ride him.
He didn't think it was funny.
Nicole and I also got kicked off the train ride by our own kids. Can you believe that??
We've always ridden in the same little car as them (see below). But it appears that they've all gotten too big for us to smash in one car. We warned them if they made us ride by ourselves we would probably embarrass them. And they did. So we did.
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| December 2009 @ Southern Lights |
We sang Christmas carols at the top of our lungs for the duration of the ride. Grace and Emma were absolutely horrified! We were officially the loudest adults there. The boys actually thought it was funny and sang along with us. But I'm not sure how much longer that will last.
Or the boys are just so used to my erratic and fanatical behavior that they totally expected something like that. That was probably the case.
The daddy's just entertained themselves while all this singing and train riding was going on...
I'm not really sure what was going on here. Grace seemed to have things under control. But Emma didn't exactly fit in her pants. And Charlie's foot was the wrong color. And Sam feel asleep.
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| Grace (12), Charlie (9), Emma (7) and Sam (5) |
And I'm totally pumped to add a stroller to this outing next year!
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