Holidays can be hazardous

Beware the holidays. They present numerous hazards to the young and those who live with them.

Hazard #1: The cookies
This is what happens when you let the two-year-old "hold" the green sprinkles while you pipe icing onto the cookies. Notice, though, that he matches his socks.

If you can get a glimpse of it, note also that the cookie sheet is mostly full of the green sprinkles that he poured onto one poor gingerbread man. We switched from sprinkling to dipping at that point--so we ended up with a lot of green cookies!


We had a good laugh. What's the fun of sprinkles if you don't get to apply them liberally? (By the way, Nathan is not green any more--these sprinkles, which are nothing more than sugar and dye, didn't stain Nathan like that darned popsicle did last summer. Makes me really wonder about the popsicle...)

As an aside, Rachel insisted that I take a photo of her holding her special favorite cookie. It's a princess crown, in case you can't quite make it out, and she molded it herself freehand. She wanted the photo to be of her looking at her cookie, and so here you go.


Hazard #2: The carols

We recently watched the video of Rachel and her "Gleria hat" from almost two years ago (two years! Egad--where does the time go?) and now, every time Nathan or Rachel takes off a bib, they leave it on their head and belt out a few Glorias. On the day I snapped this, he even switched his bib to costume mode before breakfast was over. (I wonder if he'll still be able to sing at church on Friday with no bib on his head. Perhaps we should bring one just in case.)


That's "Gloria in excelsis. Gloria," to those in need of translation to Nathanspeak.

With Rachel, there is no question what she's singing. She has learned all the words this year and loves to sing the whole song--in fact, she sang it all by herself to a party of seniors at the Y last week when her class stopped by to sing Rudolph. I wasn't there, but I wonder if she made this same mournful face for the partygoers... (Warning: It's rather long. Sorry if it takes a moment to load.)

Isn't she sweet? The very unprofessional cameralady apologizes from the shakiness of the image when she laughed, but at least it got Rachel to smile a little!

So what is hazardous about these sweet children singing? Well, the length of Rachel's Gloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooria should be your first clue, particularly when you imagine it repeated all day long. The other trouble is that some carols have repeating lines. When you just sing lyrics and haven't quite got melodies down yet, you miss the usual clues about when you should stop repeating. I stopped counting when "We wish you a Merry Christmas" came out for the 26th time in a row, with no mention of a happy new year. And the bells jingle at least three or four times before they go all the way. It's cute, and I know I'll miss it someday, so I'm glad to have these moments (and the videos!), but sometimes they are very looooooong moments!

Such a big boy!

Sweet Nathan has passed a couple of big milestones recently. He turned two last month. Actually, if we counted all the birthdays he has celebrated since then, he'd be about 130 now. He really got into the whole birthday thing this year (having three in our house in close succession probably helped!), and we sing and blow out pretend candles several times a day, most days.

Nathan became a cousin when Baby Natalie was born right before his birthday. It's crazy to me to think that this is just how old Rachel was when Nathan was born! Natalie is a sweet baby and we adore her. (Well, one of Nathan's early sentences was "I don' lahk baby cuh-yen," which still has David in stitches whenever he thinks of it. But that was just once, and he was in a mood. Most of the time he talks of her quite adoringly!)














AND--here's the biggie--Nathan got a haircut! He went from having a wild mop



to having a darling, fairly tame little 'do.



And it makes him look like such a big boy! Hard for Mama to get my head around, but really quite cute. It's already growing in curly again and a little wilder, which helps with his image, I'm sure.

People told me, when Magellan turned out to be a boy, that we would have fewer battles about clothes and colors than we've had with his sister. Not so! Shortly before his birthday, Nathan received a pair of blue socks from Grand-Merr and discovered how fun it is to choose his socks every day. He promptly began refusing to wear his usual white socks. Now he has a variety of colors to choose from, and the battle each morning is to persuade him that one of the several clean and attractive pairs is a good pair to wear for the day. I haven't quite got the rules figured out, but some of the colors are just less appealing on some days, and stripes are definitely a last resort. (As in, "Well, Mom, if you can't get it together to do laundry every other day, then I suppose I'll deign to put these striped monstrosities on my feet, purely for warmth.") Same for clothes--he's been choosing his outfits (often less enthusiastically than Rachel, to be sure, but not always!) for some time, which makes for some interesting pairings. He's a ton of fun, and now that he can talk so much more, he's become even more amusing--both to his parents and to his beloved Rachel!