New Bike

Luke got a new bike from Santa.  This bike wasn't pre-assembled though, and since Jared was sick on Christmas Eve and Christmas day, the bike didn't actually get assembled for a few days.  But eventually it was done, and the boys had a ton of fun "helping" to put the bike together.

After it was completed we took the boys to the playground at Luke's school to try it out.  Luke was frustrated at first trying to get the bike to go.  His little tricycle didn't have pedal brakes (I'm not sure it if had brakes at all, come to think of it,) and Luke would build up momentum on his tricycle by pedaling backwards a time or two and then jutting forward.  His new bike brakes by moving the pedals backward, so Luke's old strategy wasn't working, and that made him pretty mad.  But by the time he had made it once around the walking trail that surrounds the playground, he had pretty much figured out how to get it going.  That was mostly thanks to Jared who has much more of a sink-or-swim approach to teaching new skills.  Micah kept me pretty occupied near the slides, so I couldn't interfere and slow the learning the process with my coddling.  I'm so glad that Luke has D to help him.

 Jared took a turn too.

After 30 minutes or so Luke said his legs were getting tired, and he wanted a break to just play on the equipment.  So we did.  First he peeked at the weather machine.  Can you tell how much he loves it?

and then we did some climbing with Micah.

A pretty fun morning!

A very fun bike!

EXCITED!

After 10 months of waiting...

Is anyone else as excited for tomorrow night as I am?

Christmas Day

Luke woke up on Christmas morning a little bit after 5 am.  I tried putting him back in his room, but he didn't stay in bed.  So I finally crawled into the tent with him and we "slept" on the air mattress until about 6:15 when Micah woke up.  Luke was so excited to crawl out of his tent and see his presents.  Our bedroom is on the other side of the living room from the boys' room, so Luke had already seen some of the presents.  He told me, "I see a big bus out there!"  But we made him wait until Micah woke up.  The first thing Luke asked was, "Where is my candy fan?"  He found it in his stocking and was so excited that Santa brought him what he wanted.  Then he looked around for the elephant game.

Luke and his candy fan

Micah was a little bit more confused than Luke.  For one thing, he takes a bit longer to wake up.  For another, he hadn't actually asked for anything for Christmas, so he didn't have any expectations.  All he knew was that suddenly there were new toys in the living room.  He crawled right into the bus.  He would poke his head out and yell, "I see you!"  He also kept demanding that Jared, "Come in there!"

Both of the boys enjoyed ripping paper off of the presents.  And they were very happy with their new toys.

We got our first big snow Christmas morning.  Luke was very excited to go out and play.  He put on his new hat and gloves from Aunt Jennifer and ran outside to play.  His snow boots from last year were much too small, and he didn't have any snow clothes, so we did the best we could.  Luke, surprisingly, acted oblivious to the cold and jumped and laid and ran and rolled in the snow for quite a while.  Micah point blank refused to have anything to do with the snow, so I stayed inside with him.  There were 2 down sides to this: 1) I didn't get to play in the snow and 2) Luke kept opening the door to tell me things, even though he had Jared's full attention outside, so the cold air kept coming in as did lots and lots of drips of snow.  

After Luke and Jared came inside the boys asked to paint.  So we pulled out the paints and their new brushes and set it up.  I was expecting this to be an activity that lasted about 5 minutes.  That's about the record from the past.  But NO.  They painted for 20+ minutes AND have painted at least that long several times since.  We are running out of paint and need to get some more.

Luke picked out a puzzle for Jared for Christmas.  This is actually not the puzzle Luke picked out.  He picked out a giant Little People 24 piece.  And while that was fun, it took about 5 minutes to put together.  Maybe 10 because Luke was highly involved.  This one actually took hours and hours to put together but it was finished by the end of Christmas day.  Any guesses what Jared did most of the morning, afternoon, and evening?

It was a very low-key, very relaxing, and very perfect Christmas day.

Hope you had the same!

Christmas Eve

Jared was sick on Christmas Eve, so he spent most of the day in bed.  The boys and I played in the living room.  I tried to make the day "Christmasy," so we listened to a lot of Christmas music and watched a few Christmas movies.  The favorite by far had the least to do with Christmas.  It was Merry Christmas, Thomas and it was really just a winter themed video.  Basically every episode had snow.  But whatever.  I tried.

Thanks to years of gifts from the Herreras we have a lot of Christmas books, so we also read a lot of Christmas stories.  Having read them throughout the month of December, the kids knew their favorites, so we stuck with the favorites on Christmas Eve.  This was the top book of the month:

followed closely by:

Mortimer's Christmas Manger

About 5 we started our special Christmas Eve activities.  We first had dinner.  It is an Orton tradition to have danish pancakes and little smokies on Christmas Eve.  As Jared was sick and wasn't eating and I have yet to figure out how to make a gluten free aebleskiever, I broke the tradition and made the kids' favorite-- meatloaf.  Luke eats incredibly slowly, and I quickly figured out that if we were going to do everything we had planned we had to start while Luke was still eating.  So we read a few books that we had saved for the night while Luke finished dinner.  Jared came out to join us as the boys were finishing dinner.  He was such a good sport because I only had to look at him to tell how terrible he felt, but he wanted to be with his family on Christmas Eve.

After dinner we sang Christmas carols.  Luke, of course, had to play them on his stereo.  The only problem was that most of our christmas CDs have been scratched or lost over the past few years, so we had pretty slim pickings.  After singing a few primary christmas songs, Jared played others from the internet and we sang along.

Then we went back to the table to make thank-you letters for Santa.  We made pictures instead of cookies.  Afterwards the boys wanted to hang them up where Santa would be sure to find them.  Luke suggested that the ceiling fan strings would be the very best place to hang them.

Micah's picture

Luke's letter

Then we had our Christmas treat!

 Read the Christmas story

and sent the  boys to bed.

Jared looked close to collapse by that point, so he crawled back in bed and I got Christmas presents ready while I watched the all time best Christmas movie ever: The Muppets Christmas Carol.

Luke's presents from Santa:

a bike (still in the box!), Elefun, and a candy fan (in the stocking.)

The ONLY things Luke asked for for Christmas were the elephant game and a candy from Walgreens that has a little airplane with spinning propeller and lights on top.  Good thing Santa came through!

Micah's presents from Santa:

Presents from all the people who love us, ready to be opened the next morning:

Overall I'd say we had a good Christmas Eve, given the circumstances.  I think this was the 4th out of 6 christmases that Jared has been sick.  Poor guy!  Luckily he was feeling quite a bit better the next day.  The boys had a good time, and that's the most important thing!

The Sickies

I feel like the last two weeks I have done pretty much nothing but this:

Loads and loads of puked on laundry!

Luke woke up early early on December 17 throwing up.  It lasted for 2 days.  The first day really scared me because a couple of times he woke up and acted a little bit delirious.  He told me that a bird was flying in front of his eyes, and he also told me that a bus hurt his wee wee.  But after a few minutes he would talk rationally again, so I assumed it wasn't a reason to rush to the ER.  Anyway,  he seemed better the third day, so he went to school but then he threw up again that night.  Micah caught it after that.  Then I got it on Saturday (22nd.)  Jared got it Sunday, and it stayed with him through Christmas Eve and most of Christmas day.  Everyone was fine for a few days.  And then last night (Sun, 30th) Luke threw up again and today Micah is running a fever.  

So what have we done during our Christmas vacation?  A whole lot of at home fun.  In our jammies.  A few of our favorite activities have been:

1.  Playing dump truck

Here's how to play:  Cut up lots and lots of little pieces of paper and throw them all over the floor.  Then drive the garbage trucks/ dump trucks over to pick up the papers and take them to the dump.

Our dump was right in front of the door to the laundry room.  (side note:  Luke named his garbage truck "Penguin.")

Our papers have been reused over and over again.  I cut up old book order papers a long time ago.  When we are done playing we just put all the pieces in a ziploc baggie and put them away for next time.

2.  Playing with the leap pad.

3.  Listening to youtube songs on the ipad and dancing around the room.  (This is after the Advil has kicked in and the worst of the stomach bug is over)

4.  Sitting in front of the space heater and trying to stay warm.

 

5.  Cuddling with blankies

6.  Reading lots and lots of books.  The current favorites are "Where is Maisy?" for Micah and "Press Here" for Luke.

7.  Watching lots and lots of Thomas the Train.  This is definitely Micah's favorite show right now, although he only wants to watch 2 episodes over and over again.  We're breaking him into a few others now.

8.  Rocking and rocking and rocking some more in our good old glider.  Best investment EVER.

9.  Drawing pictures

10.  Practicing Luke's sight words and doing a little bit of reading and writing.  Luke is getting pretty good!

A few December Adventures

December 1 was our church Christmas party.  It was breakfast with Santa.  I like morning parties a lot because they don't mess up bedtime.  And 9 times out of 10 pancakes taste better than ham.  Luke was excited to talk to Santa and tell him that he wants a candy fan for Christmas.  I expected Micah to cry, but while waiting in line he realized that Santa gave candy, so he went up to talk to Santa very willingly.  Micah liked Santa's beard.

One of the women Jared works with printed off an article from the newspaper listing Christmas activities around town, and she sent it home with Jared.  I marked off several activities and we had fun trying some of them out.

Amarillo Botanical Gardens had a free light display during the first week of December, so on Wednesday (the 5th), we went to check it out.  It was very pretty!  All the trees and other plants were decorated with lights.  There was a choir singing, and there was free apple cider.  The boys had a blast running along the paths.

 We are not starving and destitute, as you might think by this picture.  Luke just REALLY likes his "pants with a hole" and insisted that he wear them.

Micah liked the red lights the best.

It was pretty cold that night (Oh, the wind in Amarillo!) so the greenhouse felt really good after running around outside for awhile.  There was a big waterfall in there that the boys liked and lots more pretty lights.

 (in front of the waterfall)

We wished we could have stayed longer, but it was nearing bedtime and we thought Micah might not be warm enough.  Also, Micah hurt his finger pretty badly earlier that day (he stuck his finger in the vacuum cleaner when it was turned on,) and he had pulled off his band-aid during the trip.  We didn't want the scrape to get dirty and infected, and Micah was starting to get frustrated that we weren't letting him touch everything.  But it was a very fun evening.

Then on Saturday (8th) we went to the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum.  I had heard this museum was really fun and had wanted to go see it, so when they had a Christmas food drive on Saturday that allowed can food donations instead of an admission fee, we went to check it out.

There was an entire room of windmills!

And old cars

And little cars

We spent most of our time in the pioneer town at the old water pump.  I think Luke pumped water for about 20 minutes straight.  Well, he actually stepped away several times when another kid looked like he or she wanted a turn to let them try it out.  But the other kids usually pumped once or twice and moved on, and Luke could reclaim his spot.  Which he did.  Micah spent most of the time looking for staircases to climb.  

We went to look at lights one time.  I think the one and only thing I didn't like about Williamsburg was the disturbing lack of Christmas lights.  But here there are lights on many of the houses, and in the nice neighborhoods almost all of the houses are lit up and pretty.  The boys enjoyed that.  Micah would yell things like, "Gosh! Look that!"  He is becoming quite the play-back button, repeating whatever he hears.  He sure is cute!