Mrs. Smith

So these are basically all the photos I have from the Smith-side family gathering on Friday.  I’m the most camera-happy of all the family over there, and their not-as-picture-crazy-ness rubs off on me when I’m there.  It is what it is, and it’s always a great time when we get together.  There just isn’t always proof later.

The super-cute little Santa up there is Twin#2 – well over 6lbs now at a month old and doing great.  They both are.  And their parents are surviving, even without much sleep. 

AND!

That charming turquoise polyester suit with matching slippers is –GUESS WHAT!– John’s blessing outfit!  (!!!!!!!!!!!!!)  My mother in law found it just in time.  Freedom fit it then, but it probably doesn’t fit now that it’s been a  few days.  Can’t tell you how tickled pink I am about that 30 year old outfit.  I was hoping to snatch a photo of John, Freedom, *and* his mommy – but said grandma was holding Twin#1 during my window of opportunity.  Rough life, having so many sweet little grandbabies to hold.

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The smile.

The reason

Sorry about the fuzziness, Pearletta.  We might stage and retake this to give you the credit your beautiful long hair deserves.

Still smiling. Not one, but TWO porceline dolls. If she could smile bigger, she would.

And yes, C’s nighty turned out just a tad bit too big.  Like, it could fit me.  Whoops.  Looks like I’ve got her covered next Christmas as well!  By then D’s should fit E, and E’s should fit F… All I’ll have to do is find more blue snowflake fleece to make D another, and we’ll have matching homemade jammies next year too!  Sweet!

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The mess.

The culprit.

Ho ho ho.

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What a wonderful time of year!

Confessions:

I started humming Christmas carols in Septemer.  Yes, Septemeber. 

When the $1 store started putting out Christmas stuff before Halloween, I thought, “Cool!”  It was weird to see Christmas stockings next to creepy masks, sure, but still my thought was not, “What the?” but “Cool!”

Finding Christmas music on the radio in early November was a happy, memorably joyful discovery.

I planned on getting cards & packages out immediately after Thanksgiving.

That’s how crazy I was this year.  It was new for me.  Last year I caught the Spirit of the season somewhere around the 20th.

Results?
Well, I still haven’t sent 80% of the packages I meant to send.

Cards made it to (most) of their destinations just last week… except for those that are still sitting here with me in the office.

Which just shows to go ya that even 4 months of planning is not enough.  Remind me to post about my new solution to that “problem.”

Another confession:
By the time we actually bumped into the week of Christmas, I was sick of it.  (Shhh! Don’t tell Santa!  I want my slippers&socks installment again next year!)  Done with the carols.  Done with the present-planning, done with goody-making, card-writing and house-cleaning and all that.  John and I had a nice little chuckle about it together Christmas Eve. 

You see, he forced himself into the holiday mood the day after Thanksgiving mostly to humor me.  He does that a lot, you know.  (humoring his wifey – not the Christmas Spirit thing.) And some of it was Bishop-guilt.  He didn’t feel like he could hope the ward members would get into the holiday spirit and enjoy themselves if he wasn’t willing to.  Sound logic, I think.  And it got my Christmas lights hung without my even asking!  Woot!

3 weeks of it did to him what it took 3+ months to do to me — We were at the “AHHH!  GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY!” climax at the same time.  Love it.

Yes, it’s true. 
Much of my joy on Christmas Day was the fact that the was ending.  A beautiful, peaceful, love-fostering, testimony-growing, relationship-strengthening time, coming to a close.  And I was glad.  Very glad.

Don’t mean to be a Grinch about it, of course, but it was also a house-is-a-whirlwind, never-see-John-cuz-he’s-doing-tithing-settlements season. 

Or maybe it’s just that our tree died somewhere around 2 weeks ago.  By now it’s…. yeah.  I’m a little teeny bit excited about getting that firehazard out of our living room.  Mm-hm.  That might be part of it.

On a different note…
I’m *extrememely* grateful my family (parents, siblings, grandma) humored me this year and let me host the Christmas-Day gathering.  Normally we go to my parents,’ which totally makes sense: their’s is the bigger, more put-together, easily entertain lots of people sort of home.  It’s got all the decorations I grew up with, and in many ways has lots of my “feels like Christmas” tied up in it.  And they don’t have munchkins underfoot & undermining any special holiday decorating/cleaning going on.  Helps.

But I just craved our family in our house this year.  Christmas Eve day all we did was play together.  The kids played on jungle-gym daddy all morning long.  We made gingerbread men for Santa, tidied up the playroom so he could come, and finished up our advent calendars.  The kids went to bed at their normal bedtime, after acting out the nativity and having a special family-night sort of evening.  It was a slow, wonderful day at home with daddy.  Not often we get to do that.  I loved it, even if the cookies turned out a little on the hard side.  (Darn.)

And Christmas morning they came to us!  (My family, anyway.)  We didn’t have to rush off anywhere, we could let the Christmasing kinda linger on all morning, and just wrap my family into when they rolled in around 10.  What a blast!  I’ll save more details for a later post when all the pictures have been gathered.  Later that day -after Eagle’s nap- we went down to John’s folkses for the bigger Smith-side gathering.  Way fun.

And thus it went.

Emphasis on the past-tense.

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Doesn’t that post title just make you grin inside?  These are indeed happy days for the residents here in Smithtopia.  We’ve had all four children healthy and well for two weeks now! (…although that statement may be invalid as of this evening… here’s hoping it was just something Eagle ate and not something contageous.  Eww.  Nothing like a stomach bug for Christmas, eh?  All the other nursery kids will LOVE us for it.) 

I’ve had some pictures needing posting with their stories attached.  Took me a while to get to it, but I thought I’d take a few minutes to catalog them here now they’ve made the arduous journey from camera to computer.  Forgive me, I’m not inserting the pictures into the text like a good blogger should.  You’ll have to click on them to get a better view yourself – and I just saved myself a half-hour of playing with this stupid thing.  It’s astounding anybody visits my humble site with the lack of visual appeal.

Someday I really will fix that boring banner up there.  Really, I will.

YOUNG LOVE

Did I mention that Cinderella came home from church one day talking about her “boyfriend?”  Yes, she still has this little crush on a little boy in her Sunday School class.  No, I am not really okay with it… But I remind myself that I fell in love with a kid named Derrick in Kindergarten.  I even fought over who got to sit next to him in the storytime circle and got myself in trouble.  Me!  In trouble!  First and last time.

Anyway, she wrote him a Christmas card all on her own as we were getting into the holiday season.  Very sweet, except that she was using a card someone had written to the Bishop.  Whoops.  That’s okay, though.  She was quite happy to do it all over again with a real Christmas card.  Go ahead and click on these to see the details of her artwork.  It appears she is quite smitten.  She gave me the interpretation thereof when she was finished.  The arrows are so he’ll know to look at the picture of her.  Cute.

(Should I tell her I found out that Mr.C has lots of “girlfriends” at school, too?  Quandary.)

The following really should be its own post, but I don’t know how to get the sleeping kid pictures out of this gallery.  So…. oh well.  Here it is.

SLEEPING LIKE A BABY 

Oh, how I love our bedtime routine!!!!!!!!!!  Now if I could just get myself into one, we’d be set.  I promised the secret of how I get to Freedom to sleep through the night, so here it is.

When C was ~9mo’s old and a nightmare to put to bed, my friend recommended a book called Babywise.

I hated it.  Passionately.  Never have I wanted to throw a book through a window, before or since, but that one… Mm.  Still a fantasy of mine. 

Why?  I was a severely sleep-deprived new mother with no clue as to how to get my baby to sleep well for naps or at night.  It was all a hodge-podge of whatever-she-seemed-to-want.   Bleh.  And here was this book – supposedly the solution to all my problems – and all it did for the first 60 pages was talk about how wonderful their plan is, how smart they are, and how glorious a well-rested baby can be.

AHHHHHH!  Get to the point!  Preferably using small words and short sentences!  Please!

So here is my summary of their brilliant and effective plan.

Ready?

Sleep – Eat  – Play.  Repeat.  (Note: DO NOT feed baby to sleep.)

There ya go.  I just saved you 150 pages.  Or something like that.  (It’s been 5 years, y’know.)  You’re welcome!

At any rate, you try to get your newborn into that pattern as soon as you can (although a newborn is going to do quite a lot of sleeping).  During the day you try to keep them up to play after they eat – At night you let them go right back to sleep if they will.  When you get a baby to go to sleep w/ a not-full tummy, it means they have less likelihood they’ll wake up prematurely with tummy pain or diaper needs.  (Translation: Longer naps!  Longer naps!  Yay!!!!)

Somewhere between 9-12weeks old they start skipping their night-time meals and eventually go for a nice solid 8 hours.

It’s beautiful.

And thus far it’s worked for the three babies on which I’ve subscribed to this plan.  Yes, they get sick and throw off their groove.  Yes, teething can be disruptive.  But usually they snap right back into their healthy sleep habits.

Disclaimer:  My three boys (even as babies) were *all* significantly less “spirited” (read: colic-y, persistent, and extroverted) than their big sister.  Who knows how this would have panned out if I had tried it on her.

And ironically, Freedom is now done with his later-ish nap.  He’s experimenting with different kinds of cries and it’s kind of cute, actually.  I shall stop writing now, of course.  This post is already too long as it is, though.  Goodness!  What are you doing still reading?!  Don’t you have better things to do?

Just kidding.  I love that you’re here, that you read all my ramblingness, and that you are thinking how much you’d love to leave a comment.  You’re wonderful and I love you!  Merry Christmas!

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In love with who? My husband, of course. But also his job. Mm-hm. I love what he does, even if he’s bored with it.

Have you seen the new websites our church has put together? Seriously, folks, it’s awesome stuff. Awesome, wonderful, SOOOO much better than the old stuff with which you may be more familiar.  My talented and intelligent sweetheart is involved with creating this stuff somehow. (Not content, though.  If you have problems with content, he’s not the guy to hound.)  John tells me, but I immediately forget how to relay what exactly it is he does with computers because I don’t understand much of how it works.  IT something or other.  One of these days I’ll get it down.

Anyway…

Their Christmas site, for one, I love.  (Christmas?  They have an entire site just about Christmas?  Yes they do.)  Can you believe this has been up ALL MONTH and I just now found out about it.  Sheesh.

Their new site for youth. 

Fabulous, even if it is still getting the wrinkles smoothed out..  I wish I was 12 again.  Well, okay, I don’t.  I (think) I’m a much better person now, and I love my life too much right now to trade places with anyone – even myself… But still.  Check it out.  What?!  You can’t go there?  Okay.  Sorry, folks.  False alarm.  I got to see it -lucky me-when John was logged in to work.  Silly me.  I thought the “labs” version was available to everyone.  But it’s not.  Boo… Good news, though.  It’ll be public in just over a week.  Whew! 

The jesuschrist.lds.org site.  Very nice. 

Just for the record, I can.not. wait for lds.org to get its facelift too! (!!!!!!!!!)

PS:  Not that you *have* to, becase of course that’s up to you — But if you have input for John as to how these sites could be better, feel free to leave some feedback here.  He’d love to hear it.  And if you have input along the lines of “Dude!  This is supercalafragalistic!  You so totally ROCK!”  That’d be nice for him to hear too.  He thinks my opinion is a bit biased.  Which it is. 

PPS:  To members of my stake – You can go to http://labs.lds.org, sign in, and get a peek at that facelift I was talking about. 

Their new ward directory is a huge improvement, and the Conference stuff is great. 

I love how you can highlight things in the talks, make notes right there, tag different topics… Welcome -finally- to the present, lds.org!

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The following is a letter I wrote to my best friend Kim last night.  I’d love to edit it a bit and make it a “real” blog post… pictures, more witicisms (or my attempt at them!)… but John is working from home today and is about to boot me off here. 

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