Merry Christmas!!!!

Well we had a fun Christmas! On Christmas Eve we read the Christmas story together and talked about Jesus and what Christmas means. Eileen learned "Picture a Christmas" this year in Primary and she has been singing it all month. This week she added a new verse. This new third voice goes something like this- "picture the evil mean king Herod and he wanted to cut off all the babies heads...." (They did a neat primary Christmas activity on Sunday and they had someone portraying King Herod and he was rather enthusiastic... ) :) For some reason Eileen was very curious about why and how Herod wanted to kill the babies.

So Christmas morning was also fun (aside from Aaron being sick and having a 102.4 fever) Eileen was so funny, she got so excited about everything. Anna got her stocking and found the cereal and pop tarts in the top and went to the table ready to eat, everything else forgotten! Aaron just wanted to play with all his sisters stuff! I had fun this year using up extra fabric and making Christmas presents. I made bags for the kids and put note books and colored pencils in them. We couldn't get Anna to open up anything once she found the book and colored pencils! Dan found a jump rope for the kids and the girls got very excited about that too. We went outside with them and they jumped over the rope while we held it. :)

After we had opened gifts and played for awhile, we went down to Grandma and Grandpa's house for brunch and gifts and dinner. We had lots of fun playing with Grandma Penny and Grandma and Grandpa Cox. That evening we had a yummy dinner and then went home for bed. Our wonderful day was capped off by a video call with Dan's parents from Malaysia. The kids had lots of fun talking to them and showing them some of their gifts.

The next day brought even more fun when Aunt Sandi and Uncle Jon and Great Grandpa Francone showed up! It's so nice to get to see family! Life is great. Now we just need to get ourselves ready for a marathon and get poor Aaron over this cold. :( Wish us luck!! Sorry there aren't more pictures, but there are so many cute ones that this post would have ended up being a book by itself with the pictures and their explainations! Maybe I'll get more up eventually!

Our Crazy Boring Week

It's funny, but the last couple of weeks have seemed both VERY busy and very uneventful. I'm not sure how we can be so busy doing nothing interesting.... So what have we been up to? Well, I managed to survive my concert season and even managed to get well enough to cover for the soloist who lost her voice. (yep it went through the whole choir) Dan has had his usual contingent of wrestling meets and tournaments. Eileen has had preschool. I've had soccer games. We've had all our church commitments. (which some how involves more at this time of year that all the rest of the year combined-at least for me) So now, school is out, music is done, and wrestling is off for the week. Do we get to breath? Of course not, it's the holidays!! :)
The kids are growing like crazy! Aaron has been taking steps by himself. He will only do it if it is absolutely necessary and if he only has a couple of steps to go, otherwise he plops down like a rag doll and refuses to stand on his feet at all. He has taken a much more active interest in climbing, much to my dismay. We have a couple of stools in the house to help the girls reach things and help with things. Any time I leave him for a few seconds with access to one of these stools, he is up it faster than I can say "Aaron, get down from there now!!!" The problem is he looks so cute there! The other day I heard him fussing a bit and I found him in the bathroom. He had climbed the girls stool and was trying to play in the sink, but the stool had slid back and he had gotten stuck. He was suspended between the sink and the stool, holding on to the stool with just a couple of toes. For once I didn't run for the camera.... :) What a crazy little boy!!
Anna has had an obnoxious back sliding in her potty training. She has had more accidents this week than in the entire potty training process combined. I guess it's just the crazy schedule that we have been on. I was afraid when we started potty training that the holidays would cause problems, but she was ready, and I was sick of changing diapers. She is learning so much and talking so much. She loves to imitate her sister. When Eileen says something Anna repeats it. So she is leaning many new words and slowly getting easier to understand. Her sweet smile and cuddly nature warm my heart! She always wants to sit with me and be cuddled with and read to. Tonight as they were getting ready for bed Anna told Dan that she doesn't get tooth paste. (she has been caught recently eating tooth paste, so I don't leave it on the counter any more!) She is a stickler for making sure that she and everyone else are following mommy's rules... (of course this is entirely selective!)
Eileen just amazes me. The other day while she was showering, Dan went in to check on her and he found ZOO in foam bath letters on the wall. Eileen sees him and says "Z-O-O that spells zoo! See daddy I spelled zoo!" I didn't know she knew how to spell zoo! So the next day she asks me how to spell dog. So we sat there and sounded it out together. Sure enough, the next time she was in the tub, she spelled DOG on the wall. Her next word was CAT. I am just amazed that my 4 year old little girl is already starting to read and write and spell! Today at church, she sat on my lap during the Sacrament and we talked quietly about Jesus. She told me all about how Jesus was born and how he hung on the cross and how he loves little children. It was so sweet to talk to her about these beautiful stories and see her understanding.
So there is what we have been up to! Now I need to go to bed and recover from the weekend... :)

Friends

John Lennon sang "I get by with a little help from my friends." I have a greater understanding of the truth of that now. This week has been kinda crazy for us. My heavy concert season has started as has Dan's wrestling season. Our family calendar for the week was filled up for every day of the week. We knew that it would be crazy and we prepared ourselves for it. What we forgot to prepare for was everything else that would go wrong.... Last Saturday I wasn't feeling so hot, but I kinda figured it was just tired from a crazy holiday and that it would go away with a good night sleep. I was wrong. It kept getting worse, until Wednesday, I ended up having to miss the concert because I had no voice. Thursday was no better. I was feeling run ragged and tired, sick and very annoyed at an internet connection that had been out for 2 days. I called a friend that I was going to hang out with this week to apologize for my lack of communication and to say that we would have to put off our playdate on the assumption that she didn't want my cold near her 2 month old son. :) Later that day, she showed up on my doorstep with lunch. Delicious soup, bread, cheesecake and warm cookies. I don't know that I can put words to how much this lifted my spirits that day, and in the day since just remembering kindness. I am so grateful for the people that the Lord puts in our lives to lift us up when we are feeling down. I am grateful for the friends and family who have helped me "get by"

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree

Saturday we went to a Christmas Tree farm to get our Christmas Tree. The girls loved watching the people shake the tree and put the netting around it after we had picked it out. We all had lots of fun with Grandma and Grandpa and the girls got a kick out of smelling the tree! So we took it home and set it up and then for FHE on Monday, we decorated. After Dan and I got the lights on, we all pulled out ornaments and started trying to hang them on the tree. Aaron mostly just pulled ornaments out and tried to eat them. Or he would pull off ones that had already been hung up and try to eat those. If those didn't work, he would just go after the tree! Oddly enough, Anna seemed to manage getting the ornaments on the tree better than Eileen. She would pull ornaments out of the box and then ask who's ornament it was. She loved looking at my old ornaments from when I was a kid. She was so funny to listen to. Eileen really struggled with getting the hooks over the branches. She too loved pulling out the ornaments and she wanted to tell everyone else where to put each ornament. So thanks to our three talented tree decoraters, we now have one beautiful Christmas tree in our house. Eileen is actually old enough this year to understand some of our talk about the real meaning of Christmas. As part of our FHE lesson, we talked about what Christmas is celebrating. We talked about how we give gifts just like the wise men gave gifts to Jesus. We told her how we give gifts to eachother to show out love for eachother. We then asked her what gifts we can give to Jesus this Christmas, what would make Jesus happy. She throught for a second then very seriously told us that Jesus wants a Littlest Pet Shop and that would make him happy. Dan and I had a hard time not cracking up, but what sweet innocence! Gotta love kids!