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2006-12-18 - 12.20am (again!) previous entry next entry
Christmas!! And my little playmates :)
I'm sure everyone American has already seen this (it was on America's Funniest Home Videos or something), but OH MY GOSH, this little video clip is toooo cute and had me laughing and laughing :) I must have watched it like TWENTY times today. It feels nice to laugh so healthily at such cuteness! :)
Thanks Esther for pointing out the problem with my video clips from YouTube - I can't believe nobody else mentioned that they couldn't see them! I had one on a previous diary entry a week or so back as well, and I guess that couldn't be seen either! I did have my settings on "private" so I have changed them all to "public". Hope you can see them now!
We are doing fine here. I still have a cough by I'm finally feeling better from my coldy throaty thing. It's crazy how mild it was for the boys! Matthew had a crappy night and day but otherwise it was mild. I am pretty run down though, and they DO get my antibodies in my milk, so maybe that was it. I couldn't throw it off till the weekend when I finally got chance to rest a bit more with Neil home from work. Talking of home from work, Neil has got quite a few days of holiday time left (somehow!) at work, and he has arranged to lump them all around Christmas and New Year. With the automatic days off around that time anyway, he is going to be off work from THIS FRIDAY - woohoo!! Thursday will be his last day, and he won't go back till the 8th of January!!!!! I am sooo excited that he'll be home for so long in one stretch! I'm beginning to relax about Christmas a bit more and actually look forward to it now.
Christmas, for me, has to be a family thing or else it just feels not-like-Christmas. This year we have too many small people to go travelling and visiting family (who all live miiiiles away), and nobody is coming to us, so we are just the four of us this Christmas. At first that idea made me feel blue and like it might be better to just not really "do" Christmas. I mean, the boys are too young to really know much about it this year. Arthur won't be next year though, so I thought maybe we'll just try not to focus on Christmas much this year, with no family around. I did not have any urge to decorate the house or anything Christmassy. We haven't had a Christmas tree up in this house for 2 years, at least. Maybe 3 now. We have never spent Christmas here properly, as we've always been spending Christmas week with one side of the family and New Year's week with the other side. We come home in between to unpack, do laundry, get sleep, and re-pack, before setting out somewhere else. It doesn't feel like Christmas at home, and there seems no point in making effort to make it so.
Two Christmasses ago we were at home, but not by choice. We were supposed to be going to France to spend Christmas with my family, and Arthur was only 6 weeks old. We all got flu really badly (except Arthur who had the marvellous wonders of breast milk to help him only get an extremely mild case!) and couldn't go anywhere. So, no Christmas at all for us that year!
But last week I finally stopped having that mild irritation that comes from seeing people putting up Christmas trees when you feel like it's WAY early for Christmas yet. I usually get that till a certain point, I don't know why it bugs me, but it does. Eventually I start to feel like it's getting to be Christmas time, FOR ME, and then it stops bugging me and I want to put my own tree up! I was one of those kids who used to BEG their parents to put the tree up on the first day of December too :) My parents always said no, it was way too early. I bugged them every single day after that till it went up, but most years that was the middle of December. By my teens it was like during the week before Christmas. I LOVE Christmas trees. I have such fond memories of spending hours upon hours just sitting on the sofa with my knees hunched up under my chin and staring at our twinkly Christmas tree with the lights out and the tree lights on. I remember I could hardly breathe for the feeling of magic in the air. I never wanted to switch the main lights back on, or the tree lights off, so I just stayed there for ages. I used to play "Christmas morning" with my brother, and put fake presents under the tree and pretend it was Christmas morning :) Christmas morning was just sooooooo awesome when I was a child. I totally believed in Father Christmas (which he is called far more often than Santa here - I hear "Santa" a little more from kids these days but I figure it's because it's American and in the movies a lot now, etc. I LOVE the name Father Christmas!) - even when I knew he wasn't real (can't remember when that even was), I still chose to play along for the fun of it for years!
The BIGGEST excitement of Christmas morning was the complete lack of presents and the almost unbearable anticipation leading up to Christmas, and then putting out pillow cases (with our names pinned to them in case Father Christmas got confused, heh), and leaving mince pies and sherry for Father Christmas on a little stool next to the pillow cases. And then feeling all jittery going up to bed. I always woke at like FOUR am on Christmas morning, and would go and wake my poor little brother (who was always a much better sleeper than me!) to drag him downstairs and see if Father Christmas had been!
The one snapshot moment of the BEST excitement at Christmas for me, is the bare and empty room with just the pretty tree in my memory from the night before, and then opening the door to the living room in the dark of that early Christmas morning, and not being able to see if Father Christmas had been and left any presents yet or not. My heart would beat soooo hard in those few seconds between opening the door and reaching the light switch. Then with a snap, the whole room was lit up and my brother and I would be DAZZLED with what seemed like a bazillion shiny, colourful, wrapped gifts, a whole FLOORFUL it seemed! Our pillowcases would be stuffed and presents would be on the floor around them too. New tiny presents would be on the tree, and presents for grown-ups underneath it. I never saw such bounty in all my life!
After sweeping my eye across that wonderful sight, I would always notice that Father Christmas had drunk all but the last few drops of his sherry, and left only a crumb of the mince pie crust - the official "sign" that he had definitely paid us a visit! :) I love the contrast between the no-presents and suddenly that breath-taking sight! It was all we could do to just stand there and gasp with our jaws hanging for a few silent moments, and then we'd tear upstairs to my parents' room, yelling as we ran, "HE'S BEEN, HE'S BEEEEEN!!!" Even when we were teenagers and not doing that any more, my parents would still smile and say, "He's been, he's been!" when we all came down on Christmas morning to open presents! :)
My parents had a rule that we could sit and LOOK at the presents if we must, before 7am, but we were not to open any until then. They did not get up till 7am on Christmas, as they would get too tired otherwise, catering for family later in the day and coping with two over-excited kids all day too! I like that rule. I think when we our kids are old enough to really get into Christmas, we'll have that rule too. We never did open any presents, even if we sat for two hours looking at them and stroking the wrapping paper and handling the odd one to see if we could figure out what it was! It was lovely enough to just sit amongst all that magical joyfulness and anticipate opening everything!
When we got older, in our teens, and we started buying presents for our parents and other family members with our own pocket money, the presents would gather under the tree in the days leading up to Christmas. Nothing new appeared on Christmas morning, and we got up at a more leisurely time to open presents and eat breakfast together. I liked that too, but for little kids I absolutely want to do what my parents did and have just the anticipation of presents right up till Christmas morning, and then THERE they all are!! Nothing beats that feeling, for a child, such excitement! That's the thing I most want my children to have, from what I had at Christmas as a child.
My parents did not do anything religious at Christmas. None of my family are Christians, in fact some of them are very ANTI-Christian. In my teens, I would go to church on Christmas morning on my own, after we all opened presents, just to our local CofE church. I don't even know why. I guess I was curious about Christianity and since I did not dismiss it as being untrue, I felt a bit hypocritical not going to church on Christmas morning if I was going to celebrate it. I don't know what made me do that, out of such a non-Christian family. Well, now that I am a Christian, I know that it's because God had his hand on me even then, and always had plans for me to come to him. I love looking back and realising that! :) My parents never said anything bad about me doing it. They were always open to me choosing my own path, that is until I actually went and turned into one of those happy clappy Christian types (!!) and then they got rather unsupportive and made life kind of hard for me at home for a while. I know they were scared that I'd got myself into a cult or something, but they are less like that since I married someone LOVELY from church and seemed happier for my relationship with God, and they met a couple of my friends from church and they were normal people, hehe!
I don't know why I'm on this path of memories! I didn't intend to. I just started to write about Christmas and went off on a tangent!
Oh yes! So last week the Christmas feeling finally hit, and I was suddenly desperate to put up a tree and some pretty lights, get my Christmas cards sorted out and sent (STILL haven't done it, urgh!), marzipan the Christmas cake that my mum made for me in October and brought over with them at Arthur's birthday, and have Christmas music playing allll the time, you know the kind of thing?! I love Christmas carols. My mum loves them too, from when she learnt them at school, and we used to sing them for weeks either side of Christmas, just doing things around the house, but especially as we were doing Christmassy things like making the cakes or decorating and stuff! It is one of my warmest cosiest memories from my younger years. We both know all the words to most Christmas carols, and we would sing them in harmony together. How I loved those times. Once, in my teens, when I thought I was going to have to move out or something and be a normal teenager (!!), I made a tape of my voice singing one part of the harmonies for all these songs, and then I could sing along with the tape, singing the other part of the harmony! I just didn't want to lose that. It's been ages since I sang like that now, but when Mummy and I are together, sometimes we sing those carols, no matter the time of year!
Anyway. So we have a tree now! Yay! I figured we couldn't have one, what with a toddler who would probably not leave the tree alone for a second, and a baby who would make a beeline for it and roll right over and pull stuff off it! We also have no space for a tree, anywhere. But in the end I figured I could put a small one (say 3ft tall) on top of the big chest in the living room, and then it would be more out-of-reach, and wouldn't take up extra space. All the shops had sold out of that size by then, but then I remembered that we bought a huge-arooney fake tree the year we got married, for our first tree together! It was NOT cheap, but we saw it as the perfect tree to see us through small spaces in small houses, large spaces in large houses, curious toddlers, and large family gatherings with older kids. It's 7ft tall I think, and it comes in 3 parts. You can use the top section by itself, or the top and middle together, or all three together. Our ceiling in this house is actually too low to get the whole tree under it! The year we had a tree in this house, we used the top and middle sections and it looked lovely. This year I got out the top section and it is just the PERFECT size for where I wanted to put it - about Arthur's height and a nice shape too. Arthur is not at a stage where he is going to be a help with decorating a tree! Next year maybe? But he would have just run riot with the decorations and maybe broken some of them, and he would have been just toooo excited and energetic to do anything about it, so it wouldn't be fair to involve him this year. So I put the tree up and strung coloured fairy lights round it and over the mirror next to the tree. We have white lights too, but enough to thoroughly encrust the whole 7ft tree! So that would have been too much for this little tree! I put some ornaments on it and secured the base. I did it all in the evening after the boys were in bed. It's so lovely and Christmassy and cosy downstairs now, with the tree there! I love it! Arthur's face was a picture when he came down the next morning! He kept making these sweet gaspy noises and breathing, "Ohh WOWWW! Look dat! Shiiiiny lights!" :) He loves the tree and the lights. He has always loved fairy lights, since he was newborn. Matthew likes it too, but he doesn't seem as taken by them as Arthur was as a baby.
Anyway, yay! I discovered I have NO Christmas music on CD or cassette!!! I can't believe that! I know I did have some but I guess it got chewed up years ago and I threw it out. So I ordered a children's favourites Christmas CD :) It's got carols and other stuff. I had a similar compilation on tape when I was little, and if it wasn't all wow-y and chewy now (but still in its box on my shelf, because I can't can't bear to throw it away!), I would still be listening to it RIGHT now. I have been singing a LOT though, hehe! The Christmas cards are coming along at last, and the presents for the boys and Neil are pretty much sorted, put away to be wrapped nearer the time (nearly time, yay!). But I still need to marzipan the cake, and that's supposed to be done 3 weeks before Christmas! Oops! And I am making the boys a Christmas stocking each. I have some lovely Christmas fabric left over from nappy-making a couple of years ago, and I'm going to add a sort of panel-type-thing and embroider each boy's name on their stocking :) Those will be the right size for smaller gifts and stocking fillers. I want them to have bigger gifts around the tree and on the floor, like when I was little.
We ARE doing Father Christmas with our children. I have no experience of how to bring Jesus into Christmas more for children, but Arthur knows the story of when Jesus was born, and I plan to teach him that it's why Christmas is celebrated in the first place. We'll go to church at Christmas, of course. But I also want him to have the magical, imaginative side of Christmas, the one with the excitement and Father Christmas, and reindeer, and presents, and the various traditions of the actual day. Those were so wonderful for me, and I want to pass that on to my kids.
Today we received a Christmas card with Father Christmas on the front. Arthur wanted to know who it was, and I told him it was Father Christmas. I gave him a basic explanation - wish I'd thought about it first though, as I don't know if I gave a very good explanation for a child his age! He got enthusiastic about the idea and ran to the window, shouting, "Far Kismass COMING!!!" as though he expected him to be coming up the driveway or something, hehe! I kept explaining that he's coming SOON but not yet, but that's when I wished I had thought it out first, because Arthur's not old enough to understand timings and stuff yet, I think.
My goodness this entry is long and waffly already!!! I meant to write some stuff about the boys and post a million photos again.
Matthew has started banana, after I finally bought some organic ones and let them ripen a little:
He LOVES it! He isn't eating much of it yet, but I am beginning to notice the telltale signs of some of it going down, as it's coming out the other end now :( I feel so sad that he's no longer just on mummy milk! Silly of me, but I still do. The poo-poo changes were the ultimate confirmation that was feeling all sad about, and here they are at last. *sigh* Oh well. He has to grow up, I suppose! :) He isn't choking or gagging on things at all. He makes faces as he tries to sort out big lumps of banana in his mouth - he keeps gumming these huge bits off! But they don't pose him any problem whatsoever. The first time we handed him a big ole piece of solid food, Neil and I just stood back and watched in amazement! We couldn't believe he was eagerly chomping away like that on something really SOLID, and having no trouble with the big pieces he gummed off it! He mostly spits them out, but he takes down some of them, or mashes them enough with his tongue and gums to swallow them. It's amazing, at only 6 months old and just a few days into solids! I love baby-led weaning! I wish we'd done it with Arthur really. I haven't decided what comes next, but I'm thinking maybe a nice sweet tender parsnip to chomp on! I soooooo love parsnips (the edible kind, yes yes!) - so much that my mouth is watering just typing this!!
Oh, that reminds me to ask - are parsnips really a British thing?! Only, I mentioned them in an American parenting group I'm part of, and everyone there was like, "Parsnips?! What are those?!" and those that knew just had this idea of them as bitter roots!! Wha?!?!?!!! They told me it must be a British thing. I am boggled at the thought! They are seasonal - that's the important thing to know about parsnips. They are crap things out of season. At best they are utterly flavourless, and at worst, completely bitter. DO NOT attempt to buy, cook, or eat parsnips when there has not been a recent frost. Sweet delectable parsnips depend on frost to make them so. I am always drooling with anticipation of the end of autumn, for the frosts that I know will bring parrrsnips, mmmm!!! And sure enough, they are to DIE for right now. I know Matthew will love them. They beat sweet potatoes hands down :) Oh, and parsnips should be roasted for ultimate perfection (but not for too long otherwise they dry out too much) or boiled and mashed like potato. Gaaaagghahhaghhh.... I sooo love parsnips!
Arthur is talking sooooo much. Every day I can not believe how much more he is talking than the day before. It's accelerating all the time lately. This morning he ran to his welly boots and shouted cheerfully, "Come on weh-wee! Let's go out!" whilst trying to ram one on his foot! His sentences are getting longer and much more clear to understand.
He also plays imaginative games more and more these days. This morning he was running around as usual downstairs, and Matthew was on the floor in the living room. He rolled onto his back and Arthur suddenly lay down next to him, staring at the ceiling, all quiet. After a moment he looked at me and said, "Ah-yah wie down Ma-Ma! Wot cowds!" (trans. Arthur lie down with Matthew, watch clouds!) followed by much gazing in wonder at the blank ceiling and pointing, saying, "Ohhhh!.... Look DAT!.... Pwetttty!.... Ohhh, shiiiny!" etc :) He's so funny!
He bashed his nose up quite badly yesterday :( He went for a walk with Daddy to see the sunset - how cute are my boys?! Anyway, on the way home, he tripped up a curb and fell flat on his nose. Neil said it was an awful sound, and he was scared he would have broken his nose or have it bleeding horribly, etc. But he didn't even have a nose bleed which is pretty amazing. He does have some bruising though, and he skidded on his nose a bit, so it's scraped and cut pretty badly right up the full length from the very tip! Poor baby! The cuts were superficial and we checked carefully that nothing was broken. He cheered up pretty fast once he got home and had some mama milk :) I cleaned it up well, but today it is weeping a little (there's a fair bit of skin off it so there are some open patches) and the wounds are all brown and trying to scab. Today he caught sight of himself in the mirror and looked surprised. He said, "Oh no!" and put his hand to his nose, looking at his reflection. Then he giggled and said, "Dot pay-doh on!" (it's got playdough on!) and giggled again! Funny boy :)
Ohhh there's sooooooo much more that I have been trying to make mental and actual notes of, to write here, but the boys both woke since the last paragraph and Matthew was weirdly wet through his sleepsuit so had to be changed, and then of course he was WIDE awake and beaming and chatting, so it took a while before he was asleep enough for me to start typing again in the same room as his cot! Arthur did not ask for milk just now. For the first time in his. whole. life. I almost want to cry! But of course it was what I was trying to achieve, the night weaning. And he has night-weaned before, but he never stopped asking for milk if I went to him at night. The first two days that I went to him recently and said that Mummy's breasties were asleep, he cried a little and tried asking again and then cried some more, and then gave up and asked me to pat his back. The third night, after I said they were asleep, he coaxed, "Dus' liddoo bit?" (just a little bit, hehe!), and then didn't get upset when I said no. The next three evenings he only woke two of those, and both times he asked for milk and didn't bat an eyelid when I told him the breasties were asleep. He just rolled over and asked me to "bup" (burp, or pat) him to sleep, and went to sleep quickly. And then tonight when I went in, he didn't even ask for milk! Obviously it's what I wanted, but it's crazy of me - I felt so sad that it wasn't part of his "program" to ask any more :(
Anyway, so the boys have been up and now it's really late, tsk. So I can't write any more like I wanted to. I guess this entry is long enough anyway, but I do have a lot of photos getting more and more out of date the longer I leave posting them! So I'll post a few now to finish the entry.
Oh but first, here is that video clip of Matthew's latest vocal sounds, before they get to be old news! It's working at YouTube at last. Sorry it's so dark:
We got Arthur's "school" photo back today! It's the one he had taken at playgroup a few months ago. I'm very proud of it because it's the first of many school-type photos in that official frame that every British school kid's photos go in! All mine are in ones like that too. The difference with Arthur is that nearly all of his will have his brother in too, since they are so close in age and will likely be at the same school throughout. I went to a girls' school from age 11 so my brother stopped appearing in my school photos then! I can't WAIT to proudly display a photo of my two boys in their school uniforms! What a weird thought. School uniforms, yeurgh. All that to look forward to yet! It used to drive my mum bonkers getting those sorted every August ready for school in September. Fun fun.
Anyway, photos! Here are my boys reading Thomas the Tank Engine with Daddy (who will hate that I've posted these photos as he is wearing the hideous trousers that his mum bought him for Christmas 2 years ago, and which he only wears in the house because they are comfy!):
"I can eat with two spoons at once!!"
Just Arthur being himself just before a late afternoon walk in the cold the other day (before the nose bashing incident):
The other evening just before bedtime, Arthur was running like a crazy thing around the house as fast as he could with a vest on his head! No apparent reason except that it made him laugh and laugh! My silly sausage ;)
My lovely boys are playing together more and more. They are each really excited by the other one's company when playing with toys and stuff, which is so sweet to see. I love watching their friendship unfold as they get more able to share things. I find them playing together a lot, just spontaneously. Matthew will roll somewhere, like to the Duplo tub, and start pulling bricks out of there to play with (he is keen, this boy!), and Arthur loves that. He comes running to "pay Dupo Ma-Ma!" and then I take photos, of course :) It's mostly Arthur initiating the "joining in" as he sees Matthew doing things, but Matthew also rolls and squiggles to get to some place that Arthur is busy playing, just so that he can join in too. Today Arthur was trying to get Matthew's attention away from eating one of his jigsaw books (!!), and he was running one of his toy cars back and forth on the floor to entice him - he had even chosen one of the ones that Matthew likes best. He was saying, "Ma-Maaaa! Ma-Ma, LOOK! Brumm, brumm, bruuuummm! Look, Ma-Ma!!" Matthew was too interested in eating the jigsaw so I had to intervene, but it was very cute anyway :)
Here are my sweet little playmates!
I love them to BITS! I feel so happy lately.
I have so much more to write, but another time. Emails too, but I will get to them one day! Tsk. Thank you for the lovely notes as always! :)
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