Merry Christmas

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas! Ours was nice and, like most of America if CNN is on target, was pretty low key. The kids continued their tradition of sleeping by the Christmas Tree to try to catch Santa in the act. Peter swears he was awake all night but somehow didn't manage to see him. We made our normal chocolate dipped pretzels, banana bread and brownie cookies to give to neighbors, but somehow we never managed to distribute them. It is a testiment to either our good intentions or our strong will power that we haven't devoured them yet! We'll have to give them a taste test tomorrow to see if we can repurpose them as New Year's Treats instead.

Wayne and I both have off this week and have been enjoying the slower pace. We've played a lot on the Wii, lots of new family games (thank you for those!) and with the weather being nice even played outside a lot. The kids have integrated their new toys into their old games - amazing how many variations of 'little girl toy' meets the 'action hero' game they can come up with!

Abby and I made some cute toast/birdseed ornaments yesterday to hang on the Christmas tree (which we always put out by the birdfeeders after Christmas to give the birds extra cover for the winter). We are hoping that some of the Tufted Titmice and Carolina Chickedee's will find them before the squirrels do!

Couple of good kid-isms this season (nothing quite as good as the 'why was Baby Jesus crying so much' or Abby's forgotten reindeer from last year):
Peter: Mom, what does 'hark' mean?
Me: Well, it is a word people used to get someone's attention.
Abby: Like when when the teacher's say '1-2-3, all eye's on me?'
Me: Yeah, that's right....or when they tell you to 'catch a bubble' (if you haven't seen this in action, the kids all pretend to catch and hold a bubble in their mouths...aka not talk)
Peter and Abby then dissolved into giggles as they started to sing songs like "Catch a Bubble the herald angel sings..." or "1-2-3 all eyes on me the herald angels sing" ....then later started saying things like "Hark, Mom I can't find my socks!".

Another time we were just pulling into school during the Little Drummer Boy song. I'd turned off the car in the middle of the tune and was asking the kids about what they thought the song meant (I was on a kick this year about how cool it was that the news was given to ordinary people first, not kings or rich people and tried to point out variations of that whereever possible). I asked them what gift the drummer boy could give and they answered 'he could drum his drum'...then I asked 'and what did the baby Jesus do?' and Abby chirped "He DANCED!?".