Christmas morning

Here is our Christmas morning. My brother inlaw Steve and his family joined us this year. They stayed the week with us and we loved having them. Their daughter Palesa is the same age as Daniel so they loved playing with each other the whole time.

Santa brought Daniel a number of things this year; he's been interested in doctor things so he got a doctor set complete with blood pressure wrap, stethoscope and syringe.



He also got a car set with a carpet that is a city with roads. He loves his cars, he's been playing with nothing else since.


Rylie had a few things as well, but I think she was happiest with taking the paper off of boxes and chewing on that.



She also got some plastic rings from Grandma, she's been loving these since she's teething and has two teeth coming in. Consequently I, or, we all have been the recipient of much saliva.



Heidi handed out gifts from under the tree. Rylie just loved all the commotion and activity.





I think that TV station with the fireplace that plays Christmas music really completed the experience.


I hope everyone had a merry Christmas this year.

Christmas Eve Party

We hosted our family's Christmas Eve party this year. It was smashing! We had games and food and background Christmas music. All the kids also dressed up as shepherds and reenacted the manger scene from the New Testament. Stellar performances. I think this year was Daniel's first time participating. It's one of the traditions we do every year.

I took more pictures but I don't like posting pictures of other people without their permission so here are a couple of Heidi and Rylie. Heidi is trying to cut through a wrapped candy bar wearing leopard skin gloves and a hat. I'm not sure if she was playing a game or just making a statement.



Rylie had a fun time too. Can you tell? Every time I tried to take her picture she would begin flinching before the flash went off. It was funny, when that red eye light comes on she just starts blinking and making faces. So almost all pictures with her are with her eyes closed.



Here is the pile of gifts for the White Elephant exchange. I was disappointed that my framed and signed picture of George W Bush didn't get taken. :(

Santa

We got to see Santa last week when we were driving around looking at lights. He happened to be at one of the house displays so we stopped and talked with him. Daniel was a little timid at first but he warmed up as soon as Santa handed him a candy cane. Rylie was amazingly docile.

Another family picture

We had our church Christmas party a couple of weeks of go and had a family picture taken. I forgot about it till just now. I think it's actually a good picture of all of us together, maybe even better than the one we paid for at JCPenny.

I like Daniels style, he refused to take his shirt off before we left, so Heidi just put the nice shirt over the top. Rebellious already!

More Christmas lights!

There are a number of houses that participated in a Christmas light contest sponsored by the city. These were some pretty magnificently decorated houses. The first house we went to the owners dressed up as Santa and Mrs Clause and took pictures with the kids. We'll post those later when we get them.

Daniel was scared at first, but they were good. First they said to just let him walk around and look at the lights at his own pace, which we did and he really got into the excitement. Then when we came back to Santa he was better but still a little apprehensive until Santa pulled out a candy cane. Then he was completely happy and we got some pictures.

Santa also gave him a little toy. Later at home he was playing with it but didn't know that it was spring loaded, so I snapped it down for him and the first time that it jumped it caught him off guard so he was quite shocked when it jumped. The second time he caught on and just started laughing hysterically and thought it was the funniest thing to watch. Here are some videos of that.






I try to appreciate these times when Daniel is so easily amused by simple pleasures

Coloring

Lately Daniel has become obsessed with coloring. When I picked him up from nursery today at church his teacher said that he just colored all day and never really did anything else. That's about two hours. His picture looked similar to the one below except blue.

By the way his nursery teachers rock! They always have some fun activity they do with the kids and he has something fun to take home with him. Today he got a wrapped present in a box with a bow. Talk about enthusiastic teachers.

Daniel was impatient and didn't want to wait to get home where I could help him open it. It was just a box with a lid on it and the bow held the lid down, but he couldn't get the bow off so he ended up tearing the box up. A little over kill I'd say.... but he got the candy inside.

Later today I saw him sitting quietly at the table coloring again. Here is his picture.



Look how meticulous he is, he just filled in all the white space with color.

Spitting

Rylie has taken up a new hobby, spitting. It's cute to see her pucker up, not so cute to see dribbling spit all day long. Sometimes her spit takes distance like a llama. She's so cute when she spits that it's almost an instinctual reflex to spit back at her, only mimicking of course.

Daniel loves to spit back at her, especially after getting a good soaking himself, I think he feels the need to retaliate somewhat.

Here's a couple videos of Rylie spitting although I think Heidi does more spitting than Rylie. Which makes me wonder if she's really being cute or learning from her environment, hmmm.....

Friends

Rylie loves Daniel. She plays with him all day all the time. Where ever Daniel is she will sure to be or go to at her own speed. I think the feeling is mutual as Daniel is always interacting with her where ever she happens to be.

Here are some more videos, this one is of the two of them just playing together with Daniels train set.



I took this today, Daniel was walking around the island in our kitchen, around and around and Rylie thought it was the funniest thing. She would follow him with her eyes as he walked around the corner, then when she lost sight of him after he turned the corner her face would become serious as she tried to figure out where he went and find him, then he would appear around the far corner as he made his way around in a circle and as soon as she saw him she would just bust out laughing.

Eventually she caught on that he was going around in a circle so then began to anticipate him appearing around the corner. It's so fun to watch them interact with each other this way.



Even after Daniel walked into the other room she kept trying to follow him and craned her neck out as far as she could to keep an eye on him.

Mixer!

I recently participated in a Black Friday deal from Amazon. I was randomly selected to participate in a race to purchase a few heavily discounted items. There was a $400 Kitchen-Aide mixer on sale for $69. The contest was a race, when the countdown ended you had to be one of the first 500 to click the "purchase now" button when it became available.

After a lot of excitement and anticipation, I ended up not winning it. Heidi was disappointed too. But because we had that "I really want it" taste in our mouths we decided to go ahead and just buy it anyway since it was still discounted although not as steeply. We ended up getting it at about 50% off, which all things considered is still a great buy. We managed to figure out a way to be able to pay for it so we didn't have to needlessly charge it.

Plus, Heidi's hand mixer burned out almost two weeks ago so we were really in need of a new one. Was the timing coincidence or divine intervention? So we not only felt justified in making a onetime unusually more expensive than normal purchase, but blessed as well. :)

Heidi says that I always trump her when it comes to buying Christmas gifts for each other. Well, ok it's true, I do. But I'm grateful for everything she always does for me everyday.

The mixer arrived yesterday. Heidi's excitement was enough thanks. I said there was no need to wrap it and stick it under the tree for two weeks if we wanted to use it before then.

So here is our first usage of our new mixer!








mmm mmm!

Daniel the good or Daniel the bad

Monday: Daniel the bad.

I got a call at work regarding Daniel's behavior at home. It felt like a call from the principals office. He would not listen during preschool or hold still or cooperate. Heidi finally just had to let him be so she could finish teaching. Daniel took the opportunity to climb up on the desk, get the bottle of white out and pour it out on the desk top. It's now a permanent design on the desk.



He wouldn't take a nap in his room and because Heidi was so tired she let him stay in our room and he thankfully fell asleep on the floor.

But after I got home Daniel was just in destructive mode. In one moment Daniel runs into the bathroom to wash his hands so I go after him not wanting him to put half the toilet roll in the toilet or give himself a bath in the sink, both of which he has done before.

He had the tube of diaper rash cream all over his hands. By the time I got to him in the bathroom he already had it all over the soap dispenser and the sink and faucet. I didn't think too much of it and just washed everything up as well I could. Then I saw the couch.

All I can think is that maybe he thought the couch had a diaper rash and needed to be coated several times in a sticky, oil based butt cream!





After a little research online we were able to get it cleaned up. I'm sure the couch feels much better. Daniel knows better than to do that. I think of Bill Cosby in these moments. You tell your son not to do something. He turns around and then proceeds to deliberately do exactly what you just told him not to two seconds ago. Bill Cosby calls that brain damage.

Bill: I just told you not to do that, why did you do that!

Son: I don't know...!

Bill - that's brain damage.

What goes through a little kids mind when they do something like this is anyone's guess. At least we can take a picture and laugh.

Tempe light festival

Last Saturday we went to the Tempe festival of lights. We thought Daniel would especially enjoy this because he loves to see Christmas lights so much. And he did. We loved to watch the boats go by all lit up. It was kind of chilly that night so we all had our jackets on, although I still got away with shorts.

Rylie reminds us of Ralphie's little brother in A Christmas Story - her coat is so big and fluffy, her arms just stick straight out.





Here's a few videos of the night, some are pretty short.

Rylie Walking

Well, from pulling herself up on stuff Rylie is now working on the walking thing. It seems she wastes no time with forward advancement. Heidi stood her up with this walker and he started taking steps! This isn't the best demonstration on video, we'll get a better one and post it.

Naptime wakeup blues

There's a 50/50 chance that Daniel will wake up from a nap completely cranky. It will take him about 30 minutes to finally get over it. This was one time when he was taking an extra long time, and when he finally came downstairs and saw that I was playing a game on the TV and his cartoons weren't on, he flew into a new tantrum. He immediately went over to the game console and tried to turn it off. Rascal! We just thought it was funny so decided to share with everyone Daniel's wake up nap time blues.



Here's one more. He's resigned himself to just mope around on the floor. I think this day took him closer to an hour to finally get up and stop moping around.

Goofing around

We were goofing around one night tossing a little ball back and forth. I was impressed with how accurate Daniel can throw the ball. We're still working on him catching though:

Winter accessorized

It's finally cold in Arizona! Well, if the 50's are cold.... We finally had to turn our heater on in our house. We also started putting our kids in their onesies pajamas for night time.

Here is Rylies new outfit, sporting a fashionable beanie:





And here she is of course horse playing with Daniel. I sometimes think they are each others favorite toys.

Reading

Daniel loves to read. We read to him at bed time and at nap time everyday. Most nights after we say goodnight he will continue to read books by himself in his room. Unfortunately we've lost a few books due to someone biting the binding off and tearing out the popups, but he won't admit to it. He will just show me the torn page and say "look daddy, broken!" --Yeah, I wonder how that happened!

I noticed him being quiet one day and found him sitting at the preschool table reading a book to himself. Of course he can't really read yet though he can recognize numbers and letters and knows his primary colors, but he picks out the details on every page. He will pick out something yellow or red or blue then identify any farm animals he's familiar with and make their assorted sounds.

I had to take a picture of the moment, him quietly reading a book to himself. When he saw the camera he had to show me what he was reading.



He pointed out the colors on that last picture for me too.

Christmas lights

The youth in our church had an activity where they went to see the temple lights at the Mesa Arizona Temple last week. Daniel and Rylie got to go too because Heidi works with the young women in the church.

Daniel loves Christmas lights. We go on a walk almost every evening in our neighborhood to see the Christmas lights and he gets so excited. He will always run up and give all the inflatables a hug and a kiss, like a Santa and polar bear and a snowman in our neighborhood. It's really cute to see.

Pull ups

Rylie has advanced to the next stage of life after crawling - pulling herself up to a standing position. As elated as we as parents can be at her accelerated progress, we also realize that her curiosity and new ability to explore that curiosity will need to be constantly watched.

Now that she's mastered crawling and sitting up by herself, we call her our little vacuum. Just like a bug that uses it's antennae to examine things, Rylie uses her mouth. Anything she can get her hands on - right into the mouth. "Feelers." What a great excuse to always have our floors clean!

Daniel still hasn't moved past that "getting into stuff he shouldn't be getting into" phase yet. I'll have another blog on what he did just yesterday. Now the next one is entering into that phase, I'm definitely not ready for another explorer/trouble maker.

Here is Rylie pulling herself up on me then making faces at me.



Here is Rylie playing with Daniel, she pulls herself up on the toy drawer now so she can get to all the toys that Daniel plays with.

Rylie looks like Darin part 2

Here is a better comparison; there aren't any closeups of Darin, but you can see his long frilly hair right before it got cut.



Now look at Rylie's long frilly hair. The biggest difference is that Rylie has blue eyes and Darin has brown eyes.

Bath time!

Daniel and Rylie get along together so well. They are like two peas in a pod, or two buns in a tub. Or four buns. Whatever.

Rylie likes the water as much as Daniel does, she gets in and starts splashing around and just loves it. When Heidi takes her out she complains and cries because she wants to keep playing in the water.

She can't wait to go swimming this coming Summer with Daniel.

Ginger bread house

Here is the result of our gingerbread house project. It was a lot of fun. The icing apparently was designed to be a type of edible glue, once it dried it was like cement.

I think there was more eating than building but we sure had fun!





The frosting on his mouth speaks for itself.





The final house didn't last very long, a few days at the most. All of the gummy gum drops disappeared rather quickly, then the little runts like hard candy. Finally someone took a big chunk of gingerbread. It's not nearly as good tasting as it might seem.



Daniel would have been just fine eating it as to building it first. We tried to put it together as fast as we could before he finished off all the building materials...