Christmas Chaos

Hi!  I posted about Christmas over at Baby Bear Steals the Show.  Come visit over there.

And happy holidays to you!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

More pictures of these three little bears over here, with more Christmas posts to soon follow.

Christmas cheer

This year's Christmas cheer will be posted on my new blog, like this post about gingerbread houses.  The new blog is still "under construction," and I'm not officially closing shop here yet.  But I thought it was important that our first Christmas here in Cincinnati be recorded on the new blog.  I have a post or two yet to go here at MadGoneMom.  I will let you know when it's really THE END.

Merry Christmas!

See you later

Remember David's going away party (tucked into the middle of this post)?  He had a chance to say good-bye to his buddies.

Except to Bailey.  To BFF Bailey he got to say, "See you later!"  How lucky that his best friend moved to Columbus just weeks after we moved to Cincinnati!

Here are the buddies wearing matching Invention Club shirts that Bailey made.  (They've always called their play dates Lego Club, and during the last few months we were there Lego Club turned into Invention Club.)

This was just before we moved from Wisconsin.  What great buddies!

Instead of saying good-bye, they said "See you later."  And so they did!

Bailey lives about two hours away.  David played at his house one Saturday.  Bailey's family came down here for Mary's celebration.  And one weekend Bailey was here for a sleep over.  Here are the boys, dressed in their matching shirts, hanging out in David's room after the sleep over.

It's been great to have a Wisconsin family here in Ohio with us!  And our calendars are marked for a get-together with them in January.  Yay!

P.S.  Also, I think it's time to say "See You Later" to this blog.  I am going to be wrapping things up here at MadGoneMom.  I love this blog.  But, as you might know, I'm weird about blogging.  It has come to represent different chapters of our life, and the Wisconsin chapter is over.  As much as I may fantasize about finding time to blog more about books or my church or Montessori education or life in the Air Force or general parenting observations or travel or whatever, blogging is really about recording our family's story--for my family.  So, yes, that Wisconsin chapter is over.  Time to start building--and recognizing--a good life here in Ohio.

My birthday

One day after Sara turned 8 months old, I turned 36.  Years.

I have such great kids.  They made it a really special birthday for me.

Mary made me a multi-media picture of us, complete with string, hole punches, and staples.  Adorable!  (That girl is turning into a crafting/art project maniac.)  And she put it in a special envelope!  I love that David and Mary can do art projects completely on their own!  (It makes them way more meaningful.)

David wrote me a chant about me being great and awesome and loved.  He attached a page of 3-D pictures he had drawn.  Very cool.  Love that kid.

David posed for the picture of my "big gift"--a Bose speaker I can stream NPR (and other necessary things like The Nutcracker) onto from my phone.

(You notice my sweet dream baby in the back ground?)

I got lots of birthday cuddles with my kids.  The following is a series of pictures entitled "The Strand of Hair."

To celebrate my birthday, I got not one, but TWO, super fancy cakes.

We shared the cakes with my niece and nephews.  What a great birthday!

And the very best part was my three amazing children.  I love each of them more deeply every day.

Sara was once 8 months old

This has turned into the most chronologically wacky blog ever...though I prefer to think of it as an experiment with postmodern temporal narrative distortion.  Yeah, that's what I'll tell myself the next time I procrastinate.  So when you get your Christmas card in March, think, "Wow, what a magnificent specimen of temporal distortion!")

Here is my sweetie-pie at 8 months old.  What a dream baby.  With a smile that melts your heart.

Sara went swimming, really

We have a neighborhood pool!  It's just like the neighborhood where we lived when I was a kid in St. Louis--you take a path through the woods to the pool.  It's nothing fancy, but it gets the job done on hot summer days.

We were so busy unpacking during the month of August that we only made it a few times.  Isn't that sad?  And technically I never went--it was Greg.

One time he took Sara.  It was her first time swimming!  No pictures from the pool.  But Greg reported that she thought it was all very interesting.

Here she is all ready to go ...

No pictures from the pool.  But I do have pictures from the same time (when Sara was exactly 7 months old) of her taking a bath.  Does that count?

Chicago

On our way to Ohio from Wisconsin, back when we closed on our house in July, we stopped in Chicago.

We visited the Hancock Tower.  (We'd been there before.  But it was a long time ago, so David and especially Mary did not remember.)  It's pretty neat feeling like you're on top of the world.

We have also been to the Willis-formerly-known-as-Sear Tower.  It's taller, as you probably know, and the Skydeck is pretty cool.  But you can't beat the location of the Hancock Tower--right next door to the Lego and the American Girl stores!

The next morning we visited the Field Museum.  (Pictures are M.I.A.)  We said hi to Sue the T-Rex and visited a number of the exhibits.  David and Mary especially enjoyed the precious gems on display.  We have been dragging them to museums for years (mostly for our sanity than for their enjoyment), but now David and Mary are getting old enough to really "get" museums.  It's great.

After the Field, we climbed back into our cars and drove to Cincinnati to begin a new chapter.