Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Quality time with the kiddoes leading up to Christmas.

While I'm having a blast with the new project, the kids haven't been the biggest fans of my absence.  18 months of hanging out with me, traveling, building the house, putting up fencing, fishing and generally enjoying life has spoiled all of us, and now being away from 8 until 5:30  during the week has earned me notes like these: 


So in the Christmas break season, with both kids out of school for two weeks, Alexe and I have each signed up for a work-free, hang with the kids stay-cation of sorts.  I'm going first, Alexe has next week.

It's Christmas Eve, the kids are napping, and Alexe will be home in an hour or so at which point we'll pack up cookies and head to town to deliver them to all our friends.  

In the meantime, some of the things the kids and I have been doing:

Annaliese's Christmas present this year are new shelves in her room, to help organize her clutter, courtesy of the collector gene. Last night I fired up the wood stove in the workshop and put these together.  They are a lovely clear oak, heavy, hard, and hopefully they'll survive living in a kid's room.

They were smooth as a baby's bottom and ready to go last night.


By 8:30 this morning they were up and ready to be loaded down.



Between this picture and the next, Annaliese had a meltdown because the present hadn't been wrapped. 

Not exactly the response I was looking for.  After she came through the emotional storm, she and her brother spent over an hour organizing her stuff. After that helpful and kind little boy told me how much he loved the shelves, she admitted she kind of liked them too.  Grrrr.  




Yesterday we spent several hours making Christmas cookies. 


Hmmm, oh yes, this was Saturday, when we headed over to Pontotoc to pick up feed for the cows/pigs/chickens, loaded up some produce for the BTC, and stopped for a junk food lunch at BK.  My only excuse, there was an indoor playground.


We stopped in Oxford to pick up a book for Christmas Eve at Square Books Jr., and the kids bailed on the book hunt to play in the back of the store with an adorable french speaking little girl.  Our two did not utter a single word in French in over an hour.  We miss their french tutor.



Sarah and Eat Cow are doing fine. They look adorable with their thick winter coats.



Saturday night we spent some quality time under the kitchen counters as a storm system raged through.  No tornadoes, but some crazy straight line winds threw a few things around in town.  We passed the time singing Christmas carols and telling stories.



And making faces.



This is what the storms interrupted: family movie night. We've been working our way through the Harry Potter movies over the last six weeks.  There are two to go...



Annaliese in her new winter coat, strolling onto the bus like it's nothing special.  In some ways it's nice to have this big girl hiding behind the couch wailing about the lack of wrapping paper on her presents.  She's not all grown up just yet.



Not sure which day this was, but we made play dough.


And Annaliese made cookies out of it.



And then served lunch, a partially imaginary, partially edible and delicious smorgasbord.  



A little quiet time to finish my book and enjoy the winter sun shining over the back pasture before the Christmas Eve activities kick in and we juggle visits and church with fondue and present wrapping and story reading.  

Merry Christmas everyone.  

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

ho Ho Ho!!!