Hayden: "Mom, I am the best dancer, right?"
Me: "You ARE a good dancer. Ginny is a good dancer too."
Hayden: "No Mom, I'm the BEST, because I'm from China and I know how to dance. That makes me the best."
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Happy Thanksgiving
I hope your Thanksgiving was filled with lots of yummy food, friends or family and many blessings.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Visit From the Tooth Fairy
Hayden lost his very first tooth yesterday! We aren't going to count his three molars the dentist pulled earlier this summer. However, we did save those and left all 4 of his teeth for the tooth fairy last night. We told him the tooth fairy only gets notified if the tooth is loose, not if it's just pulled. She was in for a surprise last night, and thankfully was well prepared for any surprises as she left enough money for all four teeth. I decided to make a special pocket pillow for the teeth, otherwise I knew Hayden would want them under his pillow and I'd never find them. He was super excited to find $4 this morning for him to put in his bank!
Wedding
We were lucky enough to move to Oregon just a few months before this lovely wedding today! Dirk's cousin Jimmy married a girl whose family is from just 30 miles away. They had a nice, small, quiet wedding at her parent's place, followed by a very fun reception. I drugged the kids with plenty of smarties during the wedding ceremony so they would be quiet, but Ginny still had to lean forward and let out a HUGE fart in the middle of the very quiet part!
The kids had a blast and were such good troopers during the reception. They both danced the night away until we decided to head home around 9:30. Hayden thought all the traditions of a wedding were so neat. He was very upset he did not catch the garter, thought the cake cutting should be first and most of all LOVED the toasts and was so excited he got his own glass of sparkling cider which he kept guzzling more and more of. It was kind of funny to watch him as other concerned adults would come up to him and make sure he wasn't drinking somebody's champagne. Hayden also lost his first tooth today which is why he his cheesing out in all these photos, so you can see his gap.
The kids had a blast and were such good troopers during the reception. They both danced the night away until we decided to head home around 9:30. Hayden thought all the traditions of a wedding were so neat. He was very upset he did not catch the garter, thought the cake cutting should be first and most of all LOVED the toasts and was so excited he got his own glass of sparkling cider which he kept guzzling more and more of. It was kind of funny to watch him as other concerned adults would come up to him and make sure he wasn't drinking somebody's champagne. Hayden also lost his first tooth today which is why he his cheesing out in all these photos, so you can see his gap.
Monday, November 07, 2011
Why I Love the Christmas Season Starting Early
Do you walk in to stores at the beginning of November and get stressed out, annoyed, or even angry that there are already Christmas decorations everywhere? Do you see your neighbors decorating or hear Christmas music playing and get annoyed and think bad thoughts about them? Do you just "hate it" when people start Christmas "too early"? If so, do you think you could maybe start thinking about the true meaning of Christmas a little more?
WHY I LOVE CHIRSTMAS TO START AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE...
I'm a firm believer that the Christmas season SHOULD start as soon as Halloween is over. As in, November 1st! I'm not saying I'm going to deck ALL my halls... just some... Don't get me wrong- Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I just don't think it's a holiday all by itself. I see it more of a sister holiday to Christmas... kind of like a starter holiday. I used to wait until the day after Thanksgiving to decorate, or even the first of December, trying to separate them entirely, but if you look at your calendar, you will see that this leaves very little time to enjoy the magic of the Christmas feeling in your home and in your hearts. If you think about Thanksgiving in more of a spiritual sense and less a literal sense, you will realize it's more than just a big feast representing the feast between the pilgrims and Native Americans. It is about giving thanks for all of your blessings in life, both big and small. It is about being thankful for all that you have no matter how much you don't have. It is about spending time with family and friends and realizing they are your greatest blessings hear on this earth. To me, what better way to enjoy the Christmas season than to give thanks to ALL things? This is why Thanksgiving IS a part of Christmas to me. This is why I'm okay with having the Christmas season start before Thanksgiving has even arrived. If you focus on Christmas and Thanksgiving at the same time, then it is easier to focus on all the many gifts our Father in Heaven has given us, including the greatest gift of all, His son, and our Savior, Jesus Christ.
I know the shopping malls aren't promoting Christ's birth, but every little bit of decoration helps get me in the mood and gives me little reminders of why we have the Christmas season. I try not to focus on the fact that the majority of Americans spend way too much money on useless gifts just to say they did. The giant pile of presents spilling out from under the tree in every which way, filled with gifts only to be discarded or forgotten about a month, week, or even day or two after they're opened. The mad rush to stores last minute and spending more than your bank account can afford just to make someone "happy"... It has all gotten way out of hand and I can easily see why people hate "Christmas". The problem is, they aren't hating "Christmas", they're hating the fact that Christmas has been turned in to a commercial holiday and less a spiritual, religious holiday.
If you live in America there is no way you can "hide" from all of this corruption of the celebration of Christ's birth. What you CAN do, however, is change they way these things affect you. Look at these corruptions as a way to teach your family lessons about Christ. See it as a way to make things a little more magical and spiritual in your life. One of my favorite parts of Christmas is going to the mad-house shopping malls and the chaotic traffic and finishing off the day in my warm, peaceful, home, surrounded by decor that focuses on Christ, enjoying the twinkling lights, listening to spiritual Christmas music and drinking a warm mug of hot cocoa while snuggling on the couch with my kids reading books. THAT is Christmas. To see the stark contrast from the outside world to inside my home is what I LOVE about the chaos of worldly Christmas. Without the chaos outside, my home would not be any less special, but it would be lacking that feeling of extreme contrast that makes it so much more inviting.
MAKING CHRISTMAS ABOUT CHRIST
Every year since we've been married we've been trying to find ways to downsize our Christmas gifts. When we first got married it was like a competition to see how many gifts we could find for each other, even if we didn't really WANT or NEED them... they were just there. After our first child was born, man oh man did we spoil him. We bought him toys and books that he wouldn't even be interested in for a few more years just because they were a good deal and we had the money. Year after year we've bought too much, even though year after year we've told ourselves we wouldn't do that THIS year. Last year we did pretty good, but still went miserably over-board. This year we are going to really try to stick to the 5 gifts plan.
I've heard of the three gifts plan, because Christ received three gifts, so you give to each person something they want, need, and something to read. Other plans have added a fourth so it's something they WANT, something they NEED, something to WEAR, and something to READ. We are going to do this 4 gift plan for the kids. These 4 gifts will need to be minimal and mostly home-made. This will help remind us all of the value of a gift, and less on the shopping/expenses of gifts. We will leave a 5th gift to be the "big" gift from Santa. The budget for this will depend on what we can afford that year. Only Hayden will get a "big" gift this year, as Ginny won't care since she's not quite 2 yet, and Dirk and I don't need anything like that and prefer to spend our gifting money on someone else like a charity, secret santa, or angel tree type of thing. We thought this was a great plan and we had it all figured out... Then I realized if we did this our stockings would be empty, so we are making a minimal limit of $10 per stocking plus we will give each of the kids $10 to put in their bank. We hope to keep this $10 a tradition for the kids as we think even when they are teenagers that would be fun to get on top of the gifts. When they are older and no longer believe in Santa, we will draw names over who gets to spend $10 to fill each other's stockings. This way it won't be another gift on top of the stockings. If you start the Christmas season early, you can get these things out of the way quickly and not be left to last minute worrying and wondering what you will buy. Also, if you make a game plan, write it down and stick to it, you will be less likely to overspend. If you are like me the stocking stuffers is where so much of the useless spending goes... but do the stockings really need to be stuffed... over-flowing... spilling out to a big pile all around them? Last night we went over our game plan and the gifts we've already purchased. We had already over-spent in a couple categories by just picking up things on a good sale. We have put these gifts in a "return to store" bag and plan on sticking to it! I just have my home-made gifts to get going on!
Okay, so that is our idea for keeping the gift giving minimal and more meaningful. Hopefully that might give some of you ideas... or if you have an idea for me to help keep this as a tradition and to make it work, please leave a comment.
Alright- so we all know there's more to Christmas than just the decorations and the gifts, right?... right?... There should be. How about spending time doing service and being Christ-like and giving small acts of kindness? Honestly, we should all be doing things like this all year long, but Christmas is a good time to get in the habit of it.
Another reason why starting the Christmas season early is it gives us more time to focus on the important things, more time to get organized, and more time to just take it slow and enjoy the ride. I'm hoping by really focusing on this we will be able to have more time to focus on service to others.
When I was growing up, one thing my family did every year, that left the biggest impression to me during the Christmas season, was doing the 12 days of Christmas to a needy family in our community. We would sit down as a family and talk about different families we knew who could benefit from a little extra love and kindness. We would choose at least one, though sometimes more, depending on what our family could afford. My mom would get some gifts and write up a cute little 12 days poem and each night we would dress in camo or all white (depending on the weather), and army crawl, sneak, and run a gift up to a door, ring the door bell and run away fast before they could see us! It was so much fun. Sometimes we got caught, but not very often. Sometimes we would hear the family at church talking about the anonymous gifts they were receiving, but not always. It was a wonderful way to give kindness and love to others who might need it. I remember one year we even gave a couple money trees to families who we knew would benefit more from some money than a few small gifts. These family activities along with sitting around the Christmas tree, squinting my eyes at the lights and hanging out with my family are the things I remember most. I honestly could not tell you very many of the gifts my parents spent so much money on over all those years.
Since we've been married, Dirk and I have been doing 12 days or Angel trees. No matter how poor we are that year, we always know we have so much more than so many others around us. This year we are going to try and add a few more things to our fun of giving.
One idea we are really excited about is have a family activity of random acts of kindness. I got the idea from THIS GIRL who spent her birthday doing random acts of kindness. We think it would be fun to set a time limit and see how much we can do with the kids, very little money, and maybe a small amount of planning. It might even be fun to bring a few friends along so we can split up and meet at the house with some hot cocoa and compare and share what we did. This is something that could be repeated another day and started very early in the holiday season.
Another idea we want to do this year, which will probably be where Dirk and I will spend most of our gift money is by doing a version of the White Envelope Project. We both really like the idea of doing something with our money and not telling each other about it until Christmas morning. I still need to do a bit of research on this and see if we can actually find a way to make it a gift to each other, but if not, it will still be fun.
Another idea we want to do is secretly dropping off treats to neighbors. Hayden had so much fun dropping off treats at Halloween for family night. We thought it would be fun to just keep doing this... maybe continuing throughout the year.
So if you've made it through this incredibly long post, congratulations! I think you deserve a prize, like some Christmas fudge or something... I wrote a lot of this down for myself, but also, because I've been seeing so much negativity toward Christmas lately, and it just makes me sad. Hopefully my thoughts may have changed some of your hearts on all that Christmas stuff being put up so early!... Also- I hope I have not offended anyone who might love spoiling their kids with mounds and mounds of gifts under the Christmas tree! I'm definitely not judging you. My parents did this for me, and boy did I think I had the best parents in the entire world for all those gifts! I'm just glad they also taught me so much about the true meaning of Christmas to go along with all those gifts! ;)
WHY I LOVE CHIRSTMAS TO START AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE...
I'm a firm believer that the Christmas season SHOULD start as soon as Halloween is over. As in, November 1st! I'm not saying I'm going to deck ALL my halls... just some... Don't get me wrong- Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I just don't think it's a holiday all by itself. I see it more of a sister holiday to Christmas... kind of like a starter holiday. I used to wait until the day after Thanksgiving to decorate, or even the first of December, trying to separate them entirely, but if you look at your calendar, you will see that this leaves very little time to enjoy the magic of the Christmas feeling in your home and in your hearts. If you think about Thanksgiving in more of a spiritual sense and less a literal sense, you will realize it's more than just a big feast representing the feast between the pilgrims and Native Americans. It is about giving thanks for all of your blessings in life, both big and small. It is about being thankful for all that you have no matter how much you don't have. It is about spending time with family and friends and realizing they are your greatest blessings hear on this earth. To me, what better way to enjoy the Christmas season than to give thanks to ALL things? This is why Thanksgiving IS a part of Christmas to me. This is why I'm okay with having the Christmas season start before Thanksgiving has even arrived. If you focus on Christmas and Thanksgiving at the same time, then it is easier to focus on all the many gifts our Father in Heaven has given us, including the greatest gift of all, His son, and our Savior, Jesus Christ.
I know the shopping malls aren't promoting Christ's birth, but every little bit of decoration helps get me in the mood and gives me little reminders of why we have the Christmas season. I try not to focus on the fact that the majority of Americans spend way too much money on useless gifts just to say they did. The giant pile of presents spilling out from under the tree in every which way, filled with gifts only to be discarded or forgotten about a month, week, or even day or two after they're opened. The mad rush to stores last minute and spending more than your bank account can afford just to make someone "happy"... It has all gotten way out of hand and I can easily see why people hate "Christmas". The problem is, they aren't hating "Christmas", they're hating the fact that Christmas has been turned in to a commercial holiday and less a spiritual, religious holiday.
If you live in America there is no way you can "hide" from all of this corruption of the celebration of Christ's birth. What you CAN do, however, is change they way these things affect you. Look at these corruptions as a way to teach your family lessons about Christ. See it as a way to make things a little more magical and spiritual in your life. One of my favorite parts of Christmas is going to the mad-house shopping malls and the chaotic traffic and finishing off the day in my warm, peaceful, home, surrounded by decor that focuses on Christ, enjoying the twinkling lights, listening to spiritual Christmas music and drinking a warm mug of hot cocoa while snuggling on the couch with my kids reading books. THAT is Christmas. To see the stark contrast from the outside world to inside my home is what I LOVE about the chaos of worldly Christmas. Without the chaos outside, my home would not be any less special, but it would be lacking that feeling of extreme contrast that makes it so much more inviting.
MAKING CHRISTMAS ABOUT CHRIST
Every year since we've been married we've been trying to find ways to downsize our Christmas gifts. When we first got married it was like a competition to see how many gifts we could find for each other, even if we didn't really WANT or NEED them... they were just there. After our first child was born, man oh man did we spoil him. We bought him toys and books that he wouldn't even be interested in for a few more years just because they were a good deal and we had the money. Year after year we've bought too much, even though year after year we've told ourselves we wouldn't do that THIS year. Last year we did pretty good, but still went miserably over-board. This year we are going to really try to stick to the 5 gifts plan.
 |
| (this is not our tree... I'm pretty sure our pile of presents has been so much worse than this!) |
I've heard of the three gifts plan, because Christ received three gifts, so you give to each person something they want, need, and something to read. Other plans have added a fourth so it's something they WANT, something they NEED, something to WEAR, and something to READ. We are going to do this 4 gift plan for the kids. These 4 gifts will need to be minimal and mostly home-made. This will help remind us all of the value of a gift, and less on the shopping/expenses of gifts. We will leave a 5th gift to be the "big" gift from Santa. The budget for this will depend on what we can afford that year. Only Hayden will get a "big" gift this year, as Ginny won't care since she's not quite 2 yet, and Dirk and I don't need anything like that and prefer to spend our gifting money on someone else like a charity, secret santa, or angel tree type of thing. We thought this was a great plan and we had it all figured out... Then I realized if we did this our stockings would be empty, so we are making a minimal limit of $10 per stocking plus we will give each of the kids $10 to put in their bank. We hope to keep this $10 a tradition for the kids as we think even when they are teenagers that would be fun to get on top of the gifts. When they are older and no longer believe in Santa, we will draw names over who gets to spend $10 to fill each other's stockings. This way it won't be another gift on top of the stockings. If you start the Christmas season early, you can get these things out of the way quickly and not be left to last minute worrying and wondering what you will buy. Also, if you make a game plan, write it down and stick to it, you will be less likely to overspend. If you are like me the stocking stuffers is where so much of the useless spending goes... but do the stockings really need to be stuffed... over-flowing... spilling out to a big pile all around them? Last night we went over our game plan and the gifts we've already purchased. We had already over-spent in a couple categories by just picking up things on a good sale. We have put these gifts in a "return to store" bag and plan on sticking to it! I just have my home-made gifts to get going on!
Okay, so that is our idea for keeping the gift giving minimal and more meaningful. Hopefully that might give some of you ideas... or if you have an idea for me to help keep this as a tradition and to make it work, please leave a comment.
Alright- so we all know there's more to Christmas than just the decorations and the gifts, right?... right?... There should be. How about spending time doing service and being Christ-like and giving small acts of kindness? Honestly, we should all be doing things like this all year long, but Christmas is a good time to get in the habit of it.
Another reason why starting the Christmas season early is it gives us more time to focus on the important things, more time to get organized, and more time to just take it slow and enjoy the ride. I'm hoping by really focusing on this we will be able to have more time to focus on service to others.
When I was growing up, one thing my family did every year, that left the biggest impression to me during the Christmas season, was doing the 12 days of Christmas to a needy family in our community. We would sit down as a family and talk about different families we knew who could benefit from a little extra love and kindness. We would choose at least one, though sometimes more, depending on what our family could afford. My mom would get some gifts and write up a cute little 12 days poem and each night we would dress in camo or all white (depending on the weather), and army crawl, sneak, and run a gift up to a door, ring the door bell and run away fast before they could see us! It was so much fun. Sometimes we got caught, but not very often. Sometimes we would hear the family at church talking about the anonymous gifts they were receiving, but not always. It was a wonderful way to give kindness and love to others who might need it. I remember one year we even gave a couple money trees to families who we knew would benefit more from some money than a few small gifts. These family activities along with sitting around the Christmas tree, squinting my eyes at the lights and hanging out with my family are the things I remember most. I honestly could not tell you very many of the gifts my parents spent so much money on over all those years.
Since we've been married, Dirk and I have been doing 12 days or Angel trees. No matter how poor we are that year, we always know we have so much more than so many others around us. This year we are going to try and add a few more things to our fun of giving.
One idea we are really excited about is have a family activity of random acts of kindness. I got the idea from THIS GIRL who spent her birthday doing random acts of kindness. We think it would be fun to set a time limit and see how much we can do with the kids, very little money, and maybe a small amount of planning. It might even be fun to bring a few friends along so we can split up and meet at the house with some hot cocoa and compare and share what we did. This is something that could be repeated another day and started very early in the holiday season.
Another idea we want to do this year, which will probably be where Dirk and I will spend most of our gift money is by doing a version of the White Envelope Project. We both really like the idea of doing something with our money and not telling each other about it until Christmas morning. I still need to do a bit of research on this and see if we can actually find a way to make it a gift to each other, but if not, it will still be fun.
Another idea we want to do is secretly dropping off treats to neighbors. Hayden had so much fun dropping off treats at Halloween for family night. We thought it would be fun to just keep doing this... maybe continuing throughout the year.
So if you've made it through this incredibly long post, congratulations! I think you deserve a prize, like some Christmas fudge or something... I wrote a lot of this down for myself, but also, because I've been seeing so much negativity toward Christmas lately, and it just makes me sad. Hopefully my thoughts may have changed some of your hearts on all that Christmas stuff being put up so early!... Also- I hope I have not offended anyone who might love spoiling their kids with mounds and mounds of gifts under the Christmas tree! I'm definitely not judging you. My parents did this for me, and boy did I think I had the best parents in the entire world for all those gifts! I'm just glad they also taught me so much about the true meaning of Christmas to go along with all those gifts! ;)
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
Ironic Artwork
Here is some ironic artwork by Hayden. "CTR" stands for "choose the right"... as in make the right choices... as in don't color on the table! *Sorry it's sideways... blogger keeps rotating it!
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Happy Halloween
We had such a fun night trick-or-treating! We started off the night going to all the houses in our cul-de-sac and chatting with all our neighbors- most of whom we hadn't met yet. By the third house Ginny had her routine down. I was very surprised. Hayden took a couple years to get comfortable with the trick-or-treating routine and to understand what he was supposed to do. Ginny took two houses. On the third house she walked right up, banged on the door and yelled "Eeeee". That's her version of "please". When they held the bowl of candy out for her she quickly took one piece, placed it in her bucket, then reached back for another! At every house she had to wave and say "bye". She was definitely an adorable little monster!
After our neighborhood we drove to the elementary school about a mile away and parked the car. Our friends had told us the neighborhood across the street from the school is the best place to trick-or-treat so we decided to meet them there. When we got there the place was packed! It was like something out of a movie. I've never lived in or been to a neighborhood that actually gets that many trick-or-treaters. There were kids running everywhere with big clumps going from door to door together. There is no way a car could have gotten down that street. It was just like a big block party! We met up with our friends and Hayden was excited to get to run around with Holly and her older brother Will. The kids quickly got the hang of things and just went at it all on their own with just a little direction from us. It was really fun to watch Hayden and Holly break out of their shy, mellow personalities and just start racing from door to door with big smiles on their faces! I tried to take a picture, but I they were just too fast and there were too many other kids around... I was a bit afraid I was going to lose them!
We were chatting with some other people who live on this street and they said when they moved in they were told to prepare to have enough candy for about 1,000 kids!!! A few houses had already run out of candy by 6:30! These houses went all out with crazy decorations. One house had even converted their garage into a fun little place to hang out, listen to creepy organ music with live singing!
After almost an hour of very energetic trick-or-treating from Ginny, she looked up at Dirk and said, "night night". Dirk picked her up and she fell asleep on his shoulder. So sweet!
We made it home by about 7:30 and put the kids to bed. I promptly turned on our lights and started handing out candy to kids who stopped by our house. I'm thinking I should have put candy out while we were gone, because there were a lot more people wandering the neighborhood, but by the time we got home it was getting late for a school night. We ended up with tons of leftovers. I'll be better prepared next time!
So that was our fun Halloween night. I hope you all had a fun and safe night too!
After our neighborhood we drove to the elementary school about a mile away and parked the car. Our friends had told us the neighborhood across the street from the school is the best place to trick-or-treat so we decided to meet them there. When we got there the place was packed! It was like something out of a movie. I've never lived in or been to a neighborhood that actually gets that many trick-or-treaters. There were kids running everywhere with big clumps going from door to door together. There is no way a car could have gotten down that street. It was just like a big block party! We met up with our friends and Hayden was excited to get to run around with Holly and her older brother Will. The kids quickly got the hang of things and just went at it all on their own with just a little direction from us. It was really fun to watch Hayden and Holly break out of their shy, mellow personalities and just start racing from door to door with big smiles on their faces! I tried to take a picture, but I they were just too fast and there were too many other kids around... I was a bit afraid I was going to lose them!
We were chatting with some other people who live on this street and they said when they moved in they were told to prepare to have enough candy for about 1,000 kids!!! A few houses had already run out of candy by 6:30! These houses went all out with crazy decorations. One house had even converted their garage into a fun little place to hang out, listen to creepy organ music with live singing!
After almost an hour of very energetic trick-or-treating from Ginny, she looked up at Dirk and said, "night night". Dirk picked her up and she fell asleep on his shoulder. So sweet!
We made it home by about 7:30 and put the kids to bed. I promptly turned on our lights and started handing out candy to kids who stopped by our house. I'm thinking I should have put candy out while we were gone, because there were a lot more people wandering the neighborhood, but by the time we got home it was getting late for a school night. We ended up with tons of leftovers. I'll be better prepared next time!
So that was our fun Halloween night. I hope you all had a fun and safe night too!
Golden Day
While waiting for Daddy to come home from school so we could eat dinner and go trick or treating, Hayden decided raking the leaves would be a fun idea. It was so gorgeous outside with the sun shining through the golden leaves. The wind was blowing, causing the leaves to fall magically to the ground like a warm, colorful snow-storm.
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| I know it's hard to see, but there are golden leaves falling in this picture. I tried to capture it on camera, but of course the wind would stop every time I was ready. |
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