post update

i just published the last post early. i've updated it with text since.

not my favorite christmas

it wasn't all bad

that's an understatement. worst christmas ever would probably be a better post title.

december 23rd:
9:00pm - randy and i are about to go to sleep and hear the unmistakeable sound of one of our children vomiting. it was diane.
9:00pm-1:00am - intense vomitting from diane, which quickly became dry heaving for the most part because she refused to drink anything.

december 24th:
4:30am - 5:30am - diane throws up a couple more times.
10:30am - diane's final vomit.

we spent the rest of christmas eve taking it very easy. lots of media and lying around. i sanitized the whole house after the girls went down for bed.

december 25th:

6:30am - madeleine wakes up crying, which woke up diane. as soon as madeleine remembered that it was christmas and her birthday, she was fine and chomping at the bit to go do stockings and presents. diane was totally out of it. it was that fun position as a parent where you get to balance the excitement of one child with potentially ruining the experience for the other child. awesome.

diane during stockings and presents

we decided to just go ahead and slowly do stockings and presents, hoping that diane would warm up quickly. she didn't. about half way through her presents, she crawled into our bed and fell back asleep.

9:00am - went to church, had a great christmas program/sacrament meeting.

10:30am - came home and opened the rest of diane's christmas presents and the got ready and headed up to my parents. we figured that diane hadn't thrown up in 24 hours and none of the rest of us were showing symptoms, so it was worth being with family on christmas.

3:30pm - after all of my siblings and their families had finally arrived at my parents, we decided to do our christmas gift exchange. chaos ensued. about ten minutes into this chaos, madeleine looks at me and says, "mommy, some of my food just got in my mouth." five minutes later, she threw up.

3:30pm-8:30pm - madeleine threw up a lot. my girls spent the rest of christmas day quarantined in my parents' bedroom, watching a lot of dora. they were probably in heaven, except for the whole being sick thing.

i spent christmas dinner jumping up and down from the table to tend to my sick birthday girl. i may have had a couple of breakdowns during the evening. probably mostly a result of being absolutely exhausted from hardly getting any sleep the past two days.

we didn't end up doing any birthday celebrations for madeleine. we always save that for christmas night, but that didn't end up happening. as per madeleine's own request, "let's wait until this poor little sick girlie is feeling better."

8:30pm - the girls looked like they were finally ready to fall asleep, so we packed up our stuff and headed home (my poor family was probably relieved). we were supposed to spend the week up in sandy, but decided that it would be best to be on our own turf.

good thing.

8:30pm-2:30am - i puked my guts out.

merry christmas.

two little monkeys jumping on the bed.

 

but they're cousins...

madeleine has absolutely adored having a new baby cousin. the petersens swap kids with us a couple times a week (date nights and playdates) and whenever baby andrew arrives at our house, the first thing that madeleine wants to do is hold him. i am amazed at how long she will sit there just holding him and how long he'll put up with it.

after he leaves (and while he's there, as well), madeleine talks about how cute andrew is and how cute baby jonathan is going to be. i'm glad that she is getting so excited for her little brother. i'm more concerned about how diane will react...

rachel wanted to have her picture taken too.

anatomy lessons

i was baking something this afternoon and the girls were "helping" me in the kitchen. while they were helping, they were also looking at a book with the little mermaid in it. this is the conversation that i was only partly paying attention to:

madeleine: where are her eyes?
diane points to ariel's eyes.
madeleine: where is her nose?
diane points to ariel's nose.
...
madeleine: where are her booby traps?
diane looks at madeleine with a perplexed look.

at this point i perked up and said, "i think you mean 'boobs,' and the correct term is breasts."

madeleine moved on without missing a beat.

madeleine (to diane): where are her breasts?

diane was still perplexed.

another christmas outing

i rarely do anything in the evenings, but last week i not only went to white christmas with my mom, i also headed to the byu choirs christmas concert with my friend, robynn. randy isn't a big fan of choral or christmas music (i know...), so he opted to stay home with the girls while i enjoyed the concert with someone who might appreciate it a little more.

i had a great evening with robynn and loved the concert. i went most years when i was in college and it's always a fun way for me to celebrate the season. i think that my favorite part of the concert this year was when byu singers (byu's top tier choir) sang "angels we have heard on high." they stood up in the balcony and all of a sudden their voices softly poured down from above. it really did sound like angels singing down from heaven.

of course, i didn't take any pictures. it seems that if my children aren't involved in the activity, i'm not great about getting out the camera. but you can imagine a picture of two pregnant ladies in the ugly de jong concert hall, maybe looking a little tired because we rarely stay out past 8:00, but smiling because we were enjoying ourselves.

baby, it's cold outside

it has been freezing here the last few days. cold enough that i'm not even willing to bundle up and go outside. so these pictures are actually from a couple weeks ago, but i forgot to post them. it had snowed about an inch and madeleine was so excited to get out and play in the snow. diane is not as thrilled about the cold and lasted about five minutes.

 

a phone message

randy plays the organ in our ward every few weeks and i received this message for him on my phone yesterday:

"hi, this is sister _____. i am calling randy to let him know that i need to make some changes in the hymns for tomorrow because i didn't realize that it was the christmas season when i chose them."

at this point, i am thinking, "oh good, she is changing them to christmas hymns." but then i listened to the rest of the message:

"the opening hymn was supposed to be 'i believe in christ,'* but that is going to be used elsewhere later in the month, so we are changing it to 'because i have been given much.'* the other two hymns are the same."

the other two were not christmas songs.

all i ask is four straight weeks of christmas hymns in church. we only get to sing them in the month of december and i need my fill. 

*neither of these are christmas hymns.

a charlie brown christmas tree

this was not my year for the christmas tree. our living room is cramped as it is, so i decided to put a smaller tree in our kitchen bay window. i figured that it would be pretty sitting up there, out of the way, and maybe even a little cheaper.

not exactly.

we went to pick out a tree and it was freezing, so the girls were pretty done about thirty seconds after we got out of the car. the only small trees that they had left were pretty charlie brown looking and i was discouraged. i probably would have gone somewhere else if it hadn't meant packing up the girls and hauling everyone to a different location. plus, i just wanted a tree at this point. 

this is our tree. despite my attempts to get a small one, it still ended up being too big for the window seat. plus, because it was small, it didn't really work in the stand and we had to do some serious jerry-rigging to get it to even stand up. i may have wanted to cry a little by the end of the whole process. it's probably just the pregnancy hormones though. it cost almost the same as a large tree, it wouldn't even work in our stand, and it looks pretty pathetic.

but, the girls love it. they don't know any better. and as randy reminded me, it wouldn't fit in the corner of our kitchen that we have it in if it were a big, bushy tree. or really anywhere in our house, for that matter.

so, i'm going to suck it up and enjoy the smell and try not to think about the negative aspects of it. maybe it will grow on me.

it's beginning to look a lot like christmas

december 1st is finally here. true, i've been listening to christmas music since mid-october and i may have gotten out the decorations on monday, but december 1st is when the christmas season really feels official.

even though i was also itching to get out the decorations on monday, madeleine was really the catalyst for it actually happening. she begged to "decorate," grammy's house all thanksgiving weekend and as soon as she woke up on monday morning she asked when we were going to decorate. i was happy to oblige.

even though i love christmas, i actually don't have a ton of decorations. we have the stockings that my grandma has knitted for all of us and the advent calendar my sister and mom made a few years ago. other than that, i have a few other random little things that may or may not get put up, depending on the year. but as long as i have the stockings, my advent calendar, and christmas lights somewhere in the house, i am happy.

oh, and a tree. we still don't have it yet but will by saturday night. madeleine keeps asking about that, too.
 

madeleine helped me hang the lights around our living room on monday morning and they've been on since (except while we are sleeping). the lights aren't anything fancy, just a few strings along the ceiling line, but the glow is all i need. it pleased me to no end when madeleine went and turned the overhead lights off on monday evening and said, "we don't need that light on. it's so pretty with just the christmas lights." a girl after my own heart. i'm sitting here blogging by their glow right now. please tell me that i am not the only one that gets serious endorphins from simple christmas lights.

as if all of this weren't enough for me to get in the christmas spirit, my mom and i really kicked off the christmas season last night by going to see BYU's production of white christmas. we bought the tickets back in october and i have been anxiously waiting for it since.

i have to admit, i was a little worried about whether i would be able to enjoy the production because i love the movie so much and i knew i would be comparing them the whole time. fortunately, the stage production was different enough that they escaped too much scrutiny. the actors were all good and had good voices, which i always worry about. one bad apple can spoil a whole musical. the dance numbers were great and i was impressed overall.

the only thing that really bugged me the whole time was the wig situation. several of the female actresses had wigs and it killed me. they weren't even all that bad (although there were two that my mom and i couldn't stand), but they were obvious enough that it detracted from the experience from me. i know that they serve a purpose in musical theater, but it kept reminding me that i was watching a production and made the transportation into the story less possible for me.

even though i really enjoyed the play, it made me want to watch the movie right away. so i did.

i watched it today with the girls, a little apprehensive about how they would do given our experience with hello dolly. they loved it. madeleine kept saying, "this is my favorite movie!" (be still my heart). and she even got up and started dancing along during the "choreography," number and then asked me to play it again so she could do it more. maybe her experience with musicals will be alright after all.

thanksgiving in boise

we just got back from a trip to boise to celebrate thanksgiving with randy's family. i took very few pictures, and the ones i do have aren't great. oh well. the one above is lainey and madeleine eating thanksgiving dinner. as i predicted, my girls took a few bites and then ran off to go play. something about lots of people, cousins, and grammy's toys around made it hard to focus on food.

the whole group. there were twenty-one people and it was great to see so much of randy's family. 

even though i didn't get lots of pictures, i did get pictures of the centerpieces that randy's mom made. 

and the place cards that i made. they're little mayflower boats. get it? 

before we left, the girls got to open christmas presents from bob and jeanie, since we won't be with them on christmas. it meant that they were well entertained in the car. diane wasn't sure about what was going on at first, but saw madeleine tearing into hers and caught on pretty quickly. good practice for christmas day.

we had such a great time and loved being with family for the holiday. thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays - family, food, and a chance to reflect on the things that we are grateful for.