Family walk on December 30, 2010. Molly's Stick of Doom.

Christmas round-up

Ah, Christmas. In search of the meaning of Christmas, we cram our schedules with all the festive fun the month can hold. Wonderful, magical...and somewhat exhausting. Over the last few years we have come up with a plan to deal with our chronic schedule stuffing. We accept invitations and make plans up until the weekend after school gets out. Then we head to Point Roberts and try to do as little as possible. Aside from heading into town for celebrations with family, we are low key.

Here is a run down on a few of the highlights:

We went to Eric's union party, which the kids love every year. They open up the ice rink and
Gymnastics studio at a local recreation centre, cook hot dogs and have a visit from Santa. Finny had to suck it up and deal with an unwanted gift: a quasi Barbie, which she deemed too fashionable for her. She loved her facepaint, however. That's more than I can say for Molly, who won't get her face painted because it is too sad when it washes off. Same with balloons.



We decorated the Christmas tree at my parents house. The girls did most of it this year. My parents loved that. It was fun to explain the origins of all the craptastic old decorations that my brother and I foisted off on the parents.


I celebrated my birthday with a lovely dinner with all of us, my parents and brother. I won't bore you with the details, but one of the most entertaining elements of the evening was my son avenging a shrimp missile thrown by my brother. Let's just say that there might not be any cousins for Lukey.

You can see photographic evidence below.




Cake.



A bit of hockey.




Finny holding her new cousin (on the other side of the family :), Lars.



Christmas eve at Eric's sister's house.



Eric's Aunt Valerie with the family. Although Eric and I have been together for 19 years, I had never met her.



Santa arrived and filled the gorgeous handmade stockings that my mother has made for all of us (eric's and mine were both empty this year...we suck).




Joy.



Presents.




Eric describing how to perform the "Hindlick" maneuver...don't ask.




Playmobil. We basically didn't see Lukey or my brother for the rest of the day.



After a gluttonous and gourmet meal on Christmas day at my cousins' house, we headed back to Point Roberts. Back to sitting by the fire, reading, playing and watching movies.

Here is a live picture of Eric in our new Snuggie. That's right!




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Leading question

Lukey and I were sitting on the floor together, operating the bingo number cage. His job was to spin the cage and my job was to call out the numbers for the girls who were playing bingo for After Eights.

Out of the blue, Lukey says, "It smells like poo here? Do you think it smells like poo?"

I sniffed and agreed. I asked the obvious question: "Did you fart?"

He grinned and nodded. "Yep," he smirked. "Yep, I did."




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E-tubing with punks

My gift to Molly for her birthday was a day of snow tubing together at Mount Seymour's tubing park. It was great to get to spend the day together and get out of the rain and into the snow. Unfortunately with school out, lots of other people had the same idea and there was about a 15 minute line up for the rope tow back up.

After a couple of minutes in line, a group of 4 boys about 14 or 15 years old came to the line and just decided to go to the front. I was shocked to see none of the 50 people in line say anything so I decided I would see what was happening. I left Molly where she was, walked up to the punks and in a voice loud enough for the rest of the line to hear asked them if they had some reason for going ahead of everybody else who was waiting. They said no and I figured they would be embarrassed enough to go back. I was wrong.

They stayed where they were and even started yapping off to me. It was an interesting dynamic to be faced with a bunch of lippy kids who were clearly in the wrong and pissing everyone else off, but aware that Molly did not need to see me lose my temper dealing with this situation. Even when the park attendants talked to them they still kept doing the same thing until eventually a supervisor came down.

I have been a parent now for over 8 years but rarely felt like the scary adult that I remember fearing as a kid growing up. However, dealing with these totally disrespectful teenagers brought out another side of me as a parent....one that I can hope doesn't have to surface too often as my own kids approach that age in life.

Ages and stages

Both Molly and Finny have the same art teacher come into their classrooms once a week. His name is Rod and he works on perspective and using guidelines in art.

The girls both did Santas last week. Below you can see the difference between grade one and grade three.






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Check me out, I'm Martha Stewart

I have the kids' teacher's Christmas gifts prepared. I am feeling a bit smug.



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Christmas Bounty

Molly came home from school this afternoon with an overflowing backpack. She has been a busy little elf.

Here is a picture of the whole collection:




My favourite is the Fimo bear.



And motherhood has it's privileges, since I got my very own Christmas poem. Behold:



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School Bag Treasures

I am the opposite of the grinch whose heart is five sizes too small. My heart grows when I unzip the girls' school bags and dig through the half-empty ziploc bags to unearth a love note or special piece of art. Today I found both from Finny.



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E-Grow-ops keeping us in business

It ended up being a busy night after this grow op was ignited up for the second time in two days......there wasn't much to save at this house though.

Mmmmmm, dragon

We went to the Roaming Dragon food cart today in downtown Vancouver. Eric and I were surprised to find Lukey reluctant to go. When we asked him why, he said that he didn't think he'd like eating dragon.

We laughed, but when I brought the food into the car, he asked for his dragon meat hot dog. He cried when I offered him short ribs...

E-Lucas turns 4

All Lucas has talked about for his birthday is an electric ride-on vehicle......and we caved.  He is such a stereotypical boy.  He wants to play with trucks and balls all day and got 4 more cars to add to his already big collection of vehicles.  It would be a bit excessive except that he plays with them every day.

We had brunch with family two days in a row to celebrate but Lucas is still asking about his party.  He has it in his mind that there will be some big event....and has mentioned numerous times that a party at the police station would be preferable.  

Lucas is at a really fun stage.  He goes to school two mornings a week and hangs out and plays with us the rest of the time.   We go skating together 3 or 4 times a week, mostly at his insistence.  He prefers to use the bar so that he can go fast, but is getting better without it as well.  Last week, when I was skating backwards and holding Molly and Finny's hand, Luke decided to skate really fast at me and ram the back of my knees with the bar.  Because I couldn't see him coming, I took a pretty bad fall where I flipped head over heels over him and the bar.   Despite some initial tears, within minutes we were all laughing about the incident and pledging not to do that again.

At home Lucas plays a lot with his toys and likes watching Arthur, Franklin, Handy Manny and Mighty Machines.  He is always asking me to play hockey with him, not realizing how small our living room is. He is really good natured, goes anywhere we drag him and has a positive outlook on life.  I'll miss the three year old Lucas but am excited to see what the next year brings too.