Rainy Days and Sundays

A sad milestone: Today Little Man said, "mo-tor-cy-cle."  My heart wept a little.

Yesterday while the boys were napping I made sugar cookie dough.  It's never as rewarding as I hope, but I insist on making and decorating cutout cookies every Christmas.  Today we baked and decorated.

The boy's rock-and-roll face.

This year I used Martha's sugar cookie recipe and royal icing recipe.  The cookies are not super-sweet, they're almost like shortbread, and the dough is easy to work with.  The icing has the texture of antacid.  It does harden up nicely, but it makes me think "My doctor said Mylanta."  Ew.  Is it because I used dried egg whites instead of the real thing?  We'll eat them anyway.

And Sprout fell asleep in his saucer.  I love it when they fall asleep playing, and Sprout hasn't done it yet.

Decorations

Although we still have our Thanksgiving pumpkin on the front porch, we are gradually getting Christmassy.  Yesterday we pulled the decorations down from the attic, so the mantle is decorated with all our stockings (except Daisy's - Sprout's new stocking is on her usual stocking-hanger).  A lot of the decorations wound up in Little Man's room this year as he was helping me unpack.

We have 2 Christmas Charlie Browns and one Christmas Snoopy, which were the highlights.  There was a Santa, and a small nativity.  The nativity is just a kids' craft thing - something like a shoebox for the barn and some wooden peg people with marker faces and fabric glued on for clothes.

I showed him how the nativity scene goes and told him who everyone was.  I showed him that the angel has wings and told him that the angels sang when Jesus was born.  He picked up the angel in one hand and Joseph in the other, made them fly around, and sang, "I've been workin' on the railroad!"

Later we were in the car and Silent Night came on.  I told him it was about Jesus' birthday (since most of the Christmas songs on the radio aren't!), and the next verse I told him was about angels singing.  After the song was over the jingle for the radio station came on and Little Man said, upset, "That is NOT angels singing!"

It is still a tree-less Christmas.  We usually cut our own tree, but the place where we usually go has closed.  Last weekend was snowy and we didn't want to stand out in that or bring home a snowy tree.  Yesterday was relatively nice but Daddio had other plans, and today it's freezing rain.  So it may turn out that we pick up a tree at Lowes on a weeknight.  Worse things have happened.

Little Man did remember that we have a Christmas train, so I set it up yesterday.  By the end of the season last year it was moving at snail's pace, and so far this year it's not moving at all.  I need to get oil for it.

Kitchen Update: Granite

Today I went to the warehouse with our designer to look at slabs of granite.

The contenders:

Ocean Blue (patterny):

Mahogany Blue Eyes (not patterny; also not as shiny blue as it looks in the flash):

And in 3rd place (in case the other 2 come back too expensive):

Tan Brown

We asked the guy at the warehouse for a High, Medium, Low on price range and he said that Mahogany Blue Eyes is "very very high."  Of course.  He didn't know about Ocean Blue.  Tan Brown is mid-range, so it's our backup.

I fell a wee bit in love with this green one.  Maybe someday if we redo our bathroom.

Bear Butt

For Little Man's first Christmas one of his gifts was an impulse buy teddy bear, and even though he has a lot of stuffed animals (and sleeps with them ALL) I'm glad he has a classic soft bear from me.

So I decided to get Sprout a teddy bear for his first Christmas (don't tell him!).  It came the other day, and it is big and soft and cute like I hoped.

Only.... It has butt cheeks.

I hope the stuffing fluffs out to take care of this anatomically correct problem.  Otherwise I'm going to have to get the bear pants.

Glory Halleluiah!

Last night I put Sprout down around 9:30, and Daddio had to wake him up this morning at 6:45.  So, Ladies and Gentlemen, that is 9 hours of sleep!  The longest stretch he'd managed recently was 7 hours.  Which some people would consider sleeping through the night, but not me.  He's eaten a fair amount of "solid" food in the past couple of nights, which may have helped.

Next on the agenda: Train him to nap.  At daycare he takes a few catnaps throughout the day.  This will have to change once they're home with me.  Mama believes in naptime!

Oh, and he turned 5 months, and yes I need to take a picture of him.  I wonder if they sell giant sock monkeys?

Weekend

Since it has lent itself to several blog posts I know this must've been a busy weekend, although it felt relaxing.  Success!

Snow pictures from yesterday afternoon:

Little Man and I were able to go to the basketball game this afternoon.  I must work on choosing more photographically-savvy strangers so we can get some in-focus pictures when we go places.  Oh well.

Little Man says some funny things, and he's gotten to where he greets and talks to pretty much everyone we see.  On our way to the coliseum he told one of the parking lot attendants that we were going to the basketball game.  Then a ticket scalper was yelling, "Anyone need 2 tickets?  Save some money!"  And LM asked him, "You've got money?!"  The guy said, "I'm working on it."

During the game he asked me, "Do cheerleaders go in houses?"  Then when the teams came out after the half to warm-up, he said, "Where are all the white guys?"  Umm... I don't know?  We're not genetically designed to be good basketball players?  A few minutes later I realized that the Hokies were wearing white, but after the half they had on maroon warm-up shirts.

He also got the girl behind us to offer him some popcorn.  Luckily we had popcorn of our own so we didn't have to beg off of strangers.

We capped off our weekend by meeting Daddio and Sprout for good pizza.  Yay pizza!

Christmas

Our town officially kicked off the Christmas season yesterday.  Our new Farmer's Market was revealed and they had a Christmas Market and Tuba Christmas (tubas playing Christmas carols) to break it in, Santa was at the movie theater, they did the tree-lighting, and there was the Christmas parade.

Little Man is picking up on Christmas from lots of sources it seems.  The other day we were driving and saw Christmas decorations on a house.  Daddio said, "Are you excited for Christmas?"  Little Man said, "yes."  Daddio asked what he's the most excited about.  Little Man said, "Toys."  I asked him where he heard that there might be toys as part of Christmas and he said, "TV."

He also seems to think that Christmas is a person - I think he thinks Santa Claus is called "Christmas."  I've been telling him that Christmas is a season - a time of year. I figured if I tried to explain that it was a day he'd get confused that it goes on and on.

Yesterday morning Daddio asked him why we celebrate Christmas, and was telling him that it's Jesus' birthday.  We got him to repeat it back.  But his level of comprehension was revealed when his next statement was, "I don't want Christmas to take my teddy bear."

I picked the boys up at school yesterday and took them downtown.  I don't think I mentioned on here that I took LM to his first movie the night before Thanksgiving at this same old theater that Santa was in yesterday.  I told Little Man while we were waiting that Santa might ask him what he wants for Christmas.  He told me "popcorn."  And in fact, that is what he told Santa he wanted.  Santa said, "That's easy, is there anything else you want?"  I asked LM what he likes to play with and he told Santa, "Toys!"

Then we went to check out the new Farmer's Market.  On the way we saw some tuba players.  Little Man said, "I smell tubas!"  The market was great.  I fulfilled LM's wish by getting us popcorn.  We didn't stay for Tuba Christmas but went home to eat dinner with friends, add some layers, and head back out for the parade.  We didn't take any parade pictures, but it was a great small town parade.  Approximately half the floats were boy scout troops (tribes?  packs?  dens?   whatever they call themselves).  And one float was a woman who I assume is the president of the Downtown Merchant's association SINGING, like on a karaoke machine, that old song "Downtown."

And, my deal of the day!  We have a new Goodwill store in town and I stopped by because I want to get Little Man a Hokie sweatshirt but I don't want to pay $25 for something that will fit for a year.  (I know, I need to go to Wal-Mart, but I don't wanna).  I didn't get the sweatshirt, but I found these:

Pancake molds!  For $0.35 each!