Christmas and Beyond

Chapter 1: Merry Christmas!

Our Christmas celebrations this year began Christmas Eve, with the early Mass. This was the first time we've done this, and it worked out well with the kids. After Mass we went to Abuelo and Abuela's house for a nice meal, and we got to open some presents. When Abuelo picked out Juan Pablo's gift, he apparently didn't think about the fact that Juan Pablo would want to open up his new playdough factory right then and there...

Juan Pablo spent most of the evening happily playing with his playdough while the rest of us opened our gifts. Ana Luisa got a pair of pink princess cowboy boots from Tia Padu, and she could not have been happier. She wanted to wear them to bed that night.


We managed to get the boots off and the kids to bed, and then it was time to finish wrapping and set up the rest of the gifts for Christmas morning.
Ana Luisa really enjoyed giving gifts this Christmas and had us all open our gifts before she opened any of hers. She's so sweet.

Their big gift didn't fit under the tree, so we hung a little note on the tree for them to find, leading them downstairs...
...to a Waldorf playstand! It's a little structure intended to encourage imagination and open-ended play. They love it.


We went back to Abuelo and Abuela's in the afternoon for more presents, including lots of dress-up clothes and new art supplies for the kids, and another great meal.


Chapter 2: A Handmade Christmas

This Christmas we wanted to keep gifts simple, and when possible, handmade. I made each of the kids a felt pencil roll to carry their colored pencils, and idea from this wonderful book. We each also got a blank art book (mama and papa too!) for our family art nights.

I wanted to get playsilks for the kids because they are always pulling out every blanket they can find and using them to create various settings for whatever they happen to be playing at the time, or using them as costumes. I thought playsilks would be great for this kind of thing (and not as heavy as blankets!), but they cost about $15 each, and it's at least $50 for the long silks that are made to be used as a canopy over the playstand the kids got. Thankfully, some crafty mama blogs led me to a company that sells undyed silk scarves for $3-5 each, and long veils, the same size as the canopies for $10. Much better. These same crafty mamas have tutorials on dyeing the silks with Kool-Aid...which is 20 cents a packet. Tia Padu came over one night and we had a playsilk dyeing party after the kids went to bed. It was fun, easy, and the kids love the silks and use them for all kinds of fun things.
I learned how to knit over the summer, partly because I was hoping to make each of the kids a sweater for Christmas. These weren't a surprise because I worked on them in front of the kids, but they seemed to like them anyway. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, anytime we talked about Christmas getting closer Ana Luisa would say, "And you're going to surprise me with my sweater!" I made hers in October so I had hoped she would forget about it, but no such luck. She seems to like it though. She picked out the bright yellow yarn.
I made Ana Luisa's sweater first, and when I got to Juan Pablo's, he had very specific instructions for me: it had to be a red sweater, with a hood, and animal buttons. I managed to fulfill all his requirements...it's hard to see in the picture, but the buttons are actually shaped like little zebras, giraffes and elephants.
Chapter 3: For the Birds

Because Christmas fell on a Sunday this year, Jeff had Monday after Christmas off of work. The weather was mild, so we had a wonderful afternoon together downtown. We started with noon Mass, then walked from there to go out to lunch. The kids had been talking about wanting to make bird feeders, so after lunch we went to Downtown Home and Garden to pick up some birdseed and suet, then stopped at the downtown library before heading home to check out a bird book so that we would be able to identify all the bird species that would undoubtedly be drawn to our backyard. As soon as we got home, the kids knew exactly where to go to get good pine cones, and we got to work!
Young children + peanut butter + bird seed = huge mess. But it was a lot of fun. Juan Pablo loved trying to spread peanut butter in every possible nook of his pinecones. Ana Luisa was not so into the peanut butter pine cones, and was more interested in trying to figure out why birds like to eat birdseed so much (at least that's why we think she kept eating it). So we got her to work pouring birdseed into muffin cups, while I melted down the suet to make birdseed "muffins" for the birds.

The birds didn't really get much of a chance with the bird feeders, but the squirrels provided us with some great entertainment over the next few days while they went crazy trying to get to every bird feeder out there.

Chapter 4: The Underwear Archives, cont.

Our potty-training philosophy thus far has been: not push it and make it as much a non-event as possible. With Juan Pablo, potty training looked something like this:

Step 1: Buy a little potty and 3-pack of tiny underwear because we've realize that his friends all have little potties and underwear, and figure it's probably reasonable to have those things around, just so he gets used to the idea.
Step 2: Spend about a year encouraging him to try to sit on the potty. Just one time, just so he knows what it's supposed to be for.
Step 3: He realizes underwear is an awesome fashion statement. Buy him new 3-pack of underwear in larger size because he has outgrown the original 3-pack we bought him.
Step 4: Let him wear said underwear around the house when requested. Clean up the accidents that inevitably occur. The beauty of only have 3 pairs of underwear at this step is that you pretty quickly reach the point where you can say "I'm sorry, all your underwear is in the laundry right now, you're just going to have to wear your diaper."
Step 5: With each little friend, including ones younger than him, that shows up to playgroup newly potty-trained panic a little bit and think maybe we should make a sticker chart or something, then remember what our child's personality is like and think about what a nightmare it would be to try to push him to do something he just doesn't want to do right now.
Step 6: Be shocked when all of the sudden, one day, he asks to wear underwear and does not have any accidents. Keep in mind this happened approximately one month after he got out of the bath, ran out of the bathroom to escape from having to sit on the potty "just to see if you can pee", somehow managed to pee while running on the wood floors, slipped on his own urine as he was still peeing and fell, resulting in having to take another quick bath. You can see why we were shocked by his very suddenly acquired ability to actually pee in the toilet.
Step 7: Start wearing underwear full-time. Realize some things just need to be learned the hard way. For example, you could just take mama's word for it when she says that you need to tell her when you need to use the restroom at Whole Foods...or you could figure it out yourself by not telling her, running into the men's room on your own, and proceeding to fall in the toilet.

With Ana Luisa, it's been a little bit more like this:
Step 1: Buy a 3-pack of girls underwear so that she stops putting on her brother's underwear because apparently all the cool kids in the house are wearing underwear.
Step 2: Let her wear said underwear around the house when requested. Clean up the accidents that inevitably occur. The beauty of only have 3 pairs of underwear at this phase is that you pretty quickly reach the point where you can say "I'm sorry, all your underwear is in the laundry right now, you're just going to have to wear your diaper."
Step 3: Try to ignore the fact that she's been wearing underwear around the house for about a week now without accidents, and is probably right when she insists that she won't have accidents if you let her wear underwear out of the house, because she's just so little. She can't get up on the toilet by herself (a stool isn't an option by the way...it gets dragged all over the house to be used in various games and would never be there when she needed it...neither is having her use a little potty...as she so puts it, "That one is for babies and I'm a big girl."), and after all she is only 2 1/2. She can wait until she's closer to 3 right?
Step 4: Finally come to terms with the fact that she is indeed, a big girl and ready to wear underwear full-time. Buy her a couple more packs of underwear for her Epiphany gift. The upside of having her be too short to get up on the toilet on her own is that she won't even try to use the restroom at Whole Foods on her own, which saves her from ever going swimming in a public toilet.

Our little girl is growing up.

Chapter 5: Language Lessons

Ana Luisa still doesn't speak a whole lot of English. She responds to pretty much every question with "Yeah." She says a few phrases like, "Mewy Cwistmas" and "Excuse me". She knows quite a few words, but it's become evident she doesn't quite know how to form them into phrases or sentences. So when trying to communicate some sort of thought our idea, she mostly said "I'm" and then follows that with whatever word best fits the situation. Sometimes this works, like when she says, "I'm two!". Other times it doesn't quite work grammatically, but she still manages to get her point across. For example, she may approach another mom at playgroup who is feeding her kids a snack and say something like, "I'm cookie!", meaning of course, that she would like a cookie. Most moms are able to understand this method of communication. Other times she's able to make it a little more obvious using visual aids. Like at the botanical gardens the other day, when she proudly announced to someone "I'm tattoo!" she simultaneously lifted up her shirt to showcase her new temporary tattoo that she happened to be sporting on her belly. The proclamation by itself probably would not have made a whole lot of sense, but along with the visual aid, the person she was speaking to was able to figure out what was going on.

Other times, however, this approach doesn't quite seem to work. Last weekend, to celebrate Ana Luisa's new status as a "big girl" we went out to breakfast at Weber's after Sunday Mass. Towards the end of our meal, Ana Luisa told me that she needed to use the bathroom, so we quickly headed off to find the ladies' room. There's a staircase leading from the restaurant area down to where the nearest restrooms are, and at the time we were going down the stairs, the only other person on the staircase was a man who happened to be going up. As we were about to pass him on the stairs, Ana Luisa looked right at him and said, very clearly and excitedly, "I'm poop!"

The guy looked a little bewildered as he continued his way up. I just laughed. She'll figure it out soon enough.