Newsletter: February 2010 Archives

02/08/2010

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DECEMBER

We had a whirlwind December.  It seemed like one day it was the first of the month and the next Christmas was already over and we were headed into the new year.  We put up our tree the first Saturday of the month and it was a little sad this year.  The top strand of lights didn't work and I was just not in the mood to unstring it, find a strand that did work and then restring it again.  So we just left it.  The kids did all the decorating this year too.  I usually let them decorate the bottom and then redistribute the ornaments once they are done, but this year we just left all the ornaments on the bottom.  It seemed fitting that since there were no lights on the top that there were no ornaments either.  It was also funny that Seth's highest reach just happened to coincide with the spot where the lights no longer worked.  Each of the boys got to have a turn putting the star on the top.  They were very proud of their work!  This is the last year we will be using this tree.  We got it when we were newlyweds, it was one of the trees that flanked my Opa's coffin when he died right before Christmas in 2000.  It's been a great tree, but the time had come to let it go.  My parents gave us one of their pre-lit trees that they no longer had room for.  Hopefully next year I'll be in a better mood at Christmas and the new tree will be done up right!



SINTERKLAAS

We celebrated Sinterklaas at Marrisse's house this year.  We just had desserts and candy.  The kids were all hepped up on sugar by the time the presents showed up.  It was extremely noisy and chaotic!  The kids enjoyed all their presents and couldn't wait for the next day for Sinterklaas to come again to put more presents in their shoes.  I did a little Sinterklaas presentation for Jacob's preschool class.  We made paper wooden shoes, talked about who Sinterklaas is and then at the end they had some treats in the shoes we made.  I think they liked it, but it's hard to gauge what a bunch of 3 year olds like.



CHRISTMAS

We had a quiet Christmas Eve this year.  Marrisse's family was out of town and Amy was celebrating with Christians family,  so it was us and Chris and Andrew.  We watched "A Christmas Story" and let the kids open their Christmas eve presents.  We have been trying to follow James' family tradition of giving jammies on Christmas Eve, but this year the kids had so many pairs of jammies alread I decided to get them slippers instead.  Jacob got light-up Buzz Lightyear slippers, Lia got some pink strippey ones, and apparently no stores wanted to carry slippers for Seth's size this year, so he ended up with a pair of slip-on shoes.  (It was probably a good thing that there were no slippers for him.  We've gotten a lot more use out of the shoes than we ever would have gotten from slippers.) 



We nearly had a catastrophe this year with the boys and "Santa".  We don't make Santa a big secret around here, we let the boys believe what they want to believe. They ask us, "Is Santa Santa real?" and we say "What do you think?".  We try and help them see that Santa came about because of someone who was trying to be Christlike.  Anyway, "Santa" usually leaves the boy's stockings at the end of their beds on Christmas Eve so that on Christmas morning they have something to play with before they come barging into our bedroom at the break of dawn.  This year I took the stockings in at about 10:30 thinking that the kids were pretty well asleep by that time and they were.  I left the stockings there and tip-toed out.  At about 11:30, just after I had finished laying out the Christmas tree stuff and was heading to bed myself, they both woke up, saw the stockings and thought it was morning!  We are extremely lucky that they were both still quite tired and we were able to talk them into going back to sleep without opening their stocking presents.  It could have been very bad! 



Christmas Day was nice and relaxing, the boys didn't wake up too early and we took our time opening our family presents.  The boys got two more Imaginext sets and Lia loved playing with the wrapping paper, but was not very interested in any of the toys she got.  Then we headed over to my mom's and had breakfast and more present opening.  Then we had the traditional Henderson family lay-about.  We gave my dad an air-compressed rocket launcher so he and the boys went out and shot a few rockets together.  It was bitterly cold so they didn't stay out long.  We had a nice dinner of sandwiches with smoked roast beef (that James froze his butt off preparing) and some left over turkey and ham.  It was a good day.



NEW YEAR'S EVE

We had fun ringing in the New Year with John and Courtenay.  Lia made it until 9:00 and the boys stayed up all the way until midnight.  Jacob kept himself busy making a huge track with our Geotrax set.  Seth burned his brains and the night away playing on the Wii.  The adults played card games and talked.  I took a pretty cute video that I might post on Youtube for you all to see, but it probably won't happen today.  The boys were pretty proud of themselves for getting to stay up so late.  Unfortunately, we paid for it over the next few days with bouts of extreme crankiness. 






JACOB TURNS FOUR

Jacob turned four mid-way into January.  He had a friend party with his preschool friends and a family party on his actual birthday.  He decided on a submarine theme, because the toy he really wanted for his birthday was an Imaginext submarine.  For his friend party we had some fun "underwater" games and I attempted to make submarine cake pops (they were a visual disaster, but tasted good).  We had both sides of the family over for a spaghetti dinner to celebrate on his actual birthday.  We made two kids of sauce, regular meat sauce and a delicious sausage-pumpkin sauce.  For the cake, I made a really cute submarine.  Jacob thought it was awesome.  I also made him an appliqued shirt that sort of matched the cake.  Our house was filled to the brim with people.  Jacob loved all the attention.  His favorite presents were the submarine (of course) and a super hero cape that Courtenay made that had a "J" on it for Jacob. 





MAKING QUILTS

I made two quilts and a baby blanket for charity so that we could get a free day a Disneyland, for their "Give a day, Get a day" promotion this year.  Seth helped me pick out the fabric and sew the baby quilt.  The quilts turned out pretty cute.  We just got our certificates for the free day, so you know what that means... Disneyland here we come!  We have a trip scheduled for the end of this month.  I'm putting together a special treasure hunt for the kids to do while we are there.  I'm so excited.  I'll let you know how that goes in our next letter.

 LIA'S UPDATE

Lia is growing so fast.  She is so cute and chubby right now.  She has been teething up a storm, sprouting at least 7 new teeth since I wrote last.  She still isn't walking yet, but she's getting closer.  She took a tiny, falling step just the other day and can stand up on her own for a few seconds.  She still isn't talking much either, well I should say that she "talks" all the time, we just can't understand her yet.  Her favorite things to say are "Hi", "Uh-oh", "Mama", "Dad", and "No".  The boys have been working pretty hard to get her to say their names, but they both have pretty hard names for a baby to say.  She also learned how to fold her arms for prayers and does it better than the boys sometimes.  James was teasing me the other day, when he unloaded all the pictures from the camera, that we have other kids besides Lia.  I'll admit that I take a lot of pictures of her, but I can't help it, she's just so darn cute!!  I've made a pact with myself that for every 10 pictures I take of Lia I'll take at least one or two of the boys. :)



JACOB'S UPDATE

Jacob became a Sunbeam in church this year.  He had nearly a whole extra year in Nursery because of his January birthday.  He likes being in Primary, especially because I'm in there with him.  He is so good at learning the songs, even though he doesn't actually sing in church.  I'll hear him later singing his heart out, on key and he usually remembers most of the words too.  Jacob has a great imagination.  He loves to be the super hero and has an outfit to go with whatever hero he is being that day.  He also loves to talk, but only when he has you all to himself.  Then he just jabbers away non-stop.  He gets really frustrated with me when he thinks I'm not paying enough attention to what he is saying.  "Mom! Listen! I'm talking to you!!!"  Jacob also surprised me one morning by writing his first name on his white board downstairs.  We had never even talked about writing letters so he just wrote it from what he remembered his name looking like.  Of course he wrote right to left and backward, but it was still pretty awesome.  He is so fun!



SETH'S UPDATE

Seth is the big man around here.  He loves to help me take care of Lia, and also loves to think up games and adventures to play with Jacob.  He is doing really well in school.  He's very good at math (even though he hates it), he's right on track with where he needs to be with reading, and he loves all of the history and science and Art lessons we do.  He has been playing once a week with his friend Dalin from church.  Their family is made up of two boys and a girl just like ours and they are all nearly the same ages too.  It's been good for Seth to have someone besides Jakes to play with.  That's one thing I worry about with homeschooling, whether or not he'll have some friends, but so far he seems to have no trouble fitting into whatever social situation he finds himself in.  He's such a nice boy.