Frosting, Sprinkles, and Syrup...an "Elf" Christmas

I think we must have been channeling "Elf" this week with the amount of frosting and sprinkles we all consumed.  It started with the extra frosting I had bought for our CC cookie decorating party.  Somehow a jar got open and then we had to eat it every day.  On Monday, it started off the normal way, on a cookie.  Josiah actually finished all the vegetables on his plate so he could eat dessert.  (I never thought he'd follow through with eating them all, so lesson learned on that one!)

By Tuesday, the boys put frosting and sprinkles on Fritos.  Josiah made me one and it wasn't half bad.  The saltiness helped cut the super sweet frosting.

The best part of this picture is that the floor was as equally bad as their plate and the table.  I asked Josiah to dustbust up all of the sprinkles.  I watched from afar as he turned the dustbuster on, sat it next to him, and then proceeded to pick up and eat all the sprinkles off of the floor.  Not exactly what I had in mind.  I didn't take a picture because I didn't want to distract him since he was technically cleaning up the floor.  :)

Do you think he licked the sprinkles up from the plate?

On Thursday, Josiah ate his tiny sliver of zucchini so he could have more frosting and sprinkles.  He ate it first on a cookie, but then moved onto Caroline's apple slices on her plate.  Henry covered his zucchini in frosting and sprinkles and announced how great the zucchini tasted.  Caroline got in on the action and ate her apple slices with sprinkles on top.  All I have to say about that is my boys ate zucchini.

Tonight, Josiah made us "patties."  I have no idea where he got the idea of "patties" from, but he's been making us patties all weekend.  Usually it is a mayo & cheese sandwich.  Tonight, however, it was a dessert patty.  He got a wrap out, spread some frosting on it with sprinkles on top, folded it over and voila.  It is tastier than it sounds.

At this point we just need to throw the frosting away.

We also enjoyed a bit of syrup.  The boys wanted to make pancakes that looked like an elf and Rudolph (thank you for the pictures Aunt Kathy).  So we went out and bought blueberries, strawberries, grapes, & bacon.  They ate way more berries than syrup for this meal, so it was a win.  Caroline ate some blueberries as well.  I would give her two at a time and she'd pop them in and say, "more please."  She is speaking in two word sentences more and more.  Caroline also likes to feed herself with a spoon and will push my hand away if I even attempt to help.  She is able to do really well with it most of the time, but if she's distracted there's a lot of food everywhere.  It's a lesson in patience for me.

She provides me with all sorts of lessons in patience.  I have noticed that when Caroline is quiet she has either found my phone and is playing with it, or she has gone to "play" in the boys' dresser.  Her favorite activity of late is to sift through their pajama drawer and mess up all of my nice folded piles.  This may not sound like a big deal, but most days I feel like the only thing clean in the house are the clothes drawers.  And even now they are torn up.  At least the bottom two that she can reach.

Henry provided another lesson in patience with playdoh this week.  They have not played with it much since we have been here, so when Caroline went down for a nap, the boys played with it.  I prefer to play with it neatly, not mixing colors, and picking up all the little pieces as I go along.  Henry...not so much.

He mixed four colors together and squeezed them through the small holes to make a snake.

Can you see the floor?  It was everywhere.

I literally had to just keep walking away from the table to keep calm and realize it is not a big deal in the long term.  Besides playdoh is very easy to dustbust up when it hardens.

Our neighborhood has great Christmas lights.  Today it was 75 out, so after dinner we walked around the block to see the lights and blow up things on people's lawns.  Caroline ran a good portion of it and was very excited to see them.  She'd point at each house and say, "uhhhhhhhhhhh uhhhhhh uhhhhh."  Earlier in the week we drove around our little neighborhood to see the lights.  Every time I slowed down so the kids could see the lights Henry would say, "Did you run out of gas?"  Every time.  We were two blocks from our house.

Saturday was a big day for the boys.  In the afternoon we went to a small theatre play of "Busy Town."  Busy Town is the one show they watch on t.v. most days, so I wasn't sure how they would do with a play and real live people playing the parts.  They loved it.  It was super low budget and I think most of the audience were family members of the cast (half the cast were kids).  They had homemade cookies and cupcakes for $1 each, so the boys had a snack and a show.  They really enjoyed it and kept asking about other characters that were not in the play, but in the books.  Definitely a good first experience.

The Busy Town show they watch on t.v. is on the Qubo channel.  I despise the station because of its commercials.  The boys want all the toys they advertise and they can quote the sales pitches verbatim.  Josiah was sitting with Todd the other day and said, "You have no hair on top.  Hair Club can fix that."  Thank you Qubo.  He also wanted to get me beads for my hair as a Christmas gift.  Again Qubo.

We did do our school lessons this week as well.  We are still doing the Civil War.  Josiah painted a picture of a Civil War soldier with a rifle in his hand.

He looks every so much like a Revolutionary War soldier, but still good.

We also made a pictograph of eye color in our family.  We tend to favor blue.  We had to change Grandma's eye color from hazel to green, as well as add Green Lantern and a boy from Josiah's class to our chart just to give ourselves a bit more variety.

This semester we learned all the states and capitals and the last two weeks we've started learning mountain ranges in the U.S.  We started off with the Appalachian Mountains.  Our map has Mt. Mitchell colored red which turned into a discussion as to why that was.  (highest peak in that range)  That turned into a discussion of all the "red" mountains on the map.  We ended up looking up most of them on the computer which turned into a small, but persistent, obsession with Mt. St. Helens.  Let me just say there are a ton of You Tube videos on the eruption (on May 18, 1980 8:32 a.m. in case you're wondering).  We also got a book about Pompeii (unrelated to school) from the library so we have had a lot of discussion about volcanoes, eruptions, ash, rock slides, people not listening to the police and still going close to the mountain, on and on.

Henry's picture - "the man is smiling because he won't leave the mountain and he's going to die."

Josiah's picture

Some more artwork:
Josiah drew big pictures of Caroline & Henry.

Caroline holding her beloved blanket and screaming.
Henry holding a donut and he has his toothbrush at the bottom of his shirt.

Henry drew the Cat in the Hat.

All of these pictures are now decorating our front room. I'm not so sure we'll ever need to buy real artwork for the walls. They will have the house decorated in no time.
And I am including a picture of Josiah's lego helicopter that he made because I had no less than 27 pictures of it as well as a video he had taken when I uploaded my photos.  Clearly he is proud of his work.

Having a late night snack (9 p.m.) with this little girl.

Cookie Decorating & Christmas Concerts

Last Sunday night we were greeted by a Texas snake coming in under our back door.  It was part way in the house when Todd called me over to see if it was a real snake or what (b/c it wasn't moving at the time).  It clearly was a snake as we pushed it back outside with cardboard.  There is no doubt that "fully sealed doors and windows" will be on our list for when we purchase a house.  Eeek!

Our week started off shaky with Todd & Josiah getting the stomach bug on Monday.  Josiah wanted me to spend the day with him on my bed watching TV.  So, every time I left the room he'd say, "Why aren't you taking care of me?"  Every time...  Uh, because I have two other wee ones who are a little too happy to have their run of the place.  Fortunately their sickness was short lived.

By the end of the day Monday, our house was closed on in Virginia.  Henry was pretty sad to hear that.  It's tough for him to hear that someone else will be living there now.  He misses his room there and from what I can tell, he'd prefer not to have bunk beds (even though he has bottom).  So, I think we'll unbunk them when we move again.  Right now there's no room with all 3 in the same room.  We all want a house "with stairs" (two stories).  We're making out our wish lists for the house hunting come spring.

For school, we learned about pioneers heading west to explore.  We read some great books about the wagon trains and so we decided to make covered wagons out of popsicle sticks.  It took much longer than I anticipated, days to complete, mostly because we'd have to do all our gluing when Caroline was sleeping and allow it to dry in between.  I thought the boys would enjoy pulling things around in them, but Josiah played with it only for about 10 minutes.  I don't think Henry ever played with his.  Although, he had to put his up high because Caroline had woken up just as he had finished.  

Even though he didn't like the covered wagon, Josiah did like gluing the popsicle sticks together to make things.  He ended up making this helicopter using popsicle sticks and cardboard.  It turned out really well and ended up being his presentation at CC this Friday.  It was a rescue/fire helicopter and when the back opened up, he had cotton balls fall out as the water.  

This was our last CC for the semester.  To celebrate they had a cookie decorating & pizza party after school time was over.  The boys had a very good time decorating their cookies and eating an unknown, but far too large, quantity.  The best part of the cookie decorating party was that the whole day exhausted the kids so much that by the time we got home they were all asleep.  And they stayed asleep for about 2 hours.  It was bliss.  :)

This cute little girl loves to copy every thing the boys do.  And I cannot emphasize EVERYTHING enough.  If they run around, she runs.  If they sing or talk a certain way, she copies.  If they eat a certain way, she follows.  When we're outside playing and Josiah sits on the sidewalk, gets back up and runs around, she will do the exact same thing.  It's been a lot of lessons about, "See if you make good decisions, Caroline will too." (and vice versa)  She can now say "no" which is always fun.  She loves applesauce.  For every meal she will go and get herself a spoon; even if she's eating a piece of bread, a spoon is required.  I am very happy that all she can reach so far are the spoons because she can leave a mess in the drawer.  She also likes to count, "2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3..."

We got an explanation for all of her screaming.  I was finally able to see that her two back top molars were pushing their way through.  At least there's an explanation and the screaming isn't as bad when I give her some Tylenol.  :)

Saturday was nice enough to play on the playground.  Caroline thinks she's a 5 year old on the playground, so she requires extra supervision!  

And the best part of the week was the boys' Christmas concert tonight at church.  The boys were so excited.  Josiah wanted to shine his shoes beforehand so that they were nice and shiny for the concert.  Henry followed suit.  Josiah also decided not to wear his suit because he wanted a cupcake afterwards and didn't want to get his suit dirty.

Shining their shoes with baby wipes.

Henry's group went first and sang two songs.  There were five kids and for the most part they stood there slightly frozen, not really singing and not really doing the hand motions.  All except Henry.  He did all the hand motions for his songs and he stole the show.  I was videotaping it and my video kept shaking because I was laughing so hard because he was doing such a good job.  Josiah did really well.  He sang both of his songs, but neglected to do the hand motions.  He told us beforehand that he wasn't going to do them and that he was going to focus on singing.  So we praised him for the singing.  They had a dessert buffet afterwards which is always awesome to give children a bunch of desserts at 7 p.m.  After two spilled drink cups (separately) and Caroline running away twice it was time for us to make our exit.  

Chillaxing and eating a few desserts afterwards

Josiah woke up early Saturday morning and made the Grinch before the others had woken up. He and his 5:30 a.m. wake up calls. When he was younger I thought he'd grow out of it, but he's been waking up in the 5 o'clock hour for almost 6 years now so I'm thinking it is never going to change.