The Christmas Season

Last Christmas I made a conscious effort to pare down the trimmings, traditions, presents and gatherings to focus more on the meaning of Christmas for me and my little family.  My soul searching and resulting efforts from last year smoothly transitioned into this holiday season and I am happy to say that despite circumstances beyond my control like a horrible flu bug, our Christmas was not only stress-free, but even had moments of peace, joy and great new memories too.

We started our holiday festivities by visiting a giant gingerbread house at a local hotel with friends.  It was a nice little *free* event, with cookies, hot chocolate and old fashioned Christmas candy.

We also went to an event at our local library entitled, "The Polar Express."  It was a great evening, again spent with friends, and we even got to ride a trolley down our town's Main Street to view the Christmas lights.  Here we are below with our friends Don, Jill, William and Grace riding the trolley.

Here Emma is looking at all of the sparkly lights.

To round out our holiday fun, we attended a Christmas party at our church.  The girls had a blast, and we are looking forward to making this an annual event.  Here they are below with their goody bags.

Here is Lucy decorating a gingerbread house.  This was a double bonus because Lucy had been asking to decorate a gingerbread house for quite some time and thanks to the church Christmas party, I was able to accomplish two things at once!

There were several arts and crafts projects for the girls to do at the church gathering too.  Here is Emma below decorating a "Frosty" ornament.

We saw Santa at the Polar Express and at our church's Christmas party too.  However, the impromptu picture taken at Bass Pro Shops one morning at the mall was the best one.  Each time Lucy saw Santa she asked for the same thing - twin baby dolls.  Emma would whisper "babies", indicating that she wanted the same thing Lucy did.  Lucy refused to sit in Santa's lap each time, and it took every ounce of her courage to tell him want she wanted for Christmas.  Emma only agreed to sit in Santa's lap at Bass Pro Shops.  After she saw the picture, Emma kept proudly squealing, "Emma!  Santa!  Lap!"

Lucy loves doing arts and crafts and one afternoon I found her with every craft item in the house strewn across the table.  She was secretly making our Christmas presents, and I was told to leave the dining room immediately.  It took great effort to walk away, especially after I noticed the open black ink pad, splattered glue and spilled glitter on the floor.

As a family we created snowflakes out of pipe cleaners and plastic beads to decorate Luke's grave blanket with.  This is one of my favorite Christmas traditions as it is a fun project that involves each member of our family.  Lucy loved every minute of it, and kept saying, "Mom, Lukey is just going to love this snowflake."

Emma was also able to string the beads on too.

Then we pulled out all of our ornaments we have made in years past for Luke, added this year's addition of the snowflakes and decorated his grave blanket.

Here we are at the cemetery, admiring this year's creation and talking to Luke.  I think we will need to get a bigger grave blanket as the years go on to accommodate all of our ornaments!

The first couple of Christmases without Luke were especially hard.   I would do anything to be able to have Luke here with us, and know what he asked Santa for this year and even see him open up presents in his jammies with his sisters on Christmas morning.  This year however, I can honestly say that the traditions we have put in place to remember Luke and honor him as a member of our family have really helped me to enjoy Christmas again.  Our Christmas tree has so many different ornaments to remember Luke by on it, and each one brings a smile to my face.  Seeing our stockings all hung in a row with Luke's in the middle makes me happy as does decorating his grave blanket and writing our annual Christmas letter to put in his stocking on Christmas eve.  No other holiday lends itself so well to the missing and the remembering of Luke and although I had a good cry at his grave on Christmas morning, the smiles outweighed the tears this year.

Going along with our simplified joy Christmas theme carried on from last year, we made very few Christmas cookies and somehow we still have a houseful of them.  I am going to have to put a note in the Christmas bins to remind me next year that baking is entirely optional since we seem to attract homemade cookies from the rest of the universe without putting in the effort of making them.  Here Lucy is below helping me decorate some almond macaroons which involved mixing ingredients in our food processor, scooping onto cookie sheets and decorating with almonds.  Super quick and super sweet!

Christmas eve dawned bright and early at our house when Emma woke up with a fever so hot it felt like we could get burned just touching her.  Her little heart was racing super fast and her breathing was shallow and labored.  We called our pediatrician's on-call number, who recommend we take her to an urgent care.  After showing up at the urgent care, we were told to go directly to the ER.  Will dropped Emma and I off at the ER while he took Lucy to my parents house.  Thank God they live only ten minutes away and are used to dropping everything, what with this being just another in a long string of ER visits this year.  When we arrived at the hospital Emma's fever was 105 degrees.  Five hours, a dose of ibuprofen, a red popsicle and a battery of tests later her fever was down to 99 degrees and they sent us home.  Diagnosis - virus.  We were relieved to know it was just a virus, and tried reminding ourselves that knowing all of the other tests for far scarier things came back negative was enough to discount the fact that we could have given Emma ibuprofen and a popsicle that would have been dye free at our own house.  This doozy of a virus is still with us as I type this post.  Lucy is currently laying on the couch with a 100 degree fever.  We have been sick since the Wednesday before Christmas and at the rate Lucy and Emma are going, they will have had fevers, coughs and runny noses for over two weeks.

Because of our illnesses, we were unable to go to Christmas Eve mass. I was super bummed, as this is one of my favorite traditions of the holiday.  The quiet hush of a church packed with people, the reading of the Christmas story, and sitting with Will and the girls all dressed in their Christmas finery is the pinnacle of Christmas for me.  All of the preparations are finished at this point, and finding a seat in the crowded church is the last thing we have to do to get ready for Christmas.  Emmanuel, God with us becomes tangible and as we sit down in the pew I can almost feel the peace of Christmas descend upon us.  In an effort to find a way to recreate this feeling, Will and I decided to bundle the girls up and take them outside for some fresh air around the same time we would have been heading to church.  When we got outside it was like we were the only four people on earth.  It was so quiet - no cars were driving on our usually busy street and snow flakes were just starting to fall as the sun sunk behind the line of trees to the west of us.  Time stood still as the girls put out some reindeer food to help Santa find the way to our house.

I was filled with overwhelming feelings of warmth, love and gratitude - much the same as if I had sat in church.

We even wrote "Merry Christmas Luke!" in the freshly fallen snow on our driveway.

Christmas morning, thanks in part to doses of both tylenol and ibprophen, our sick children found the energy to enjoy their gifts.  We made a point again this year to make each other something ourselves.  Will made me a wood insert to fit into our kitchen junk drawer so that it stays nice and organized (if you know me, you know that this is my favorite kind of gift - something for organizing!).  Lucy and I made Will clay garden markers and Will made the girls doll bunk beds.  I sewed the girls fairy wands and crowns out of felt.  Here is Lucy, handing me my favorite Christmas gift of all - the project she made all by herself with lots of ink stamps, sequins, glitter, glue and love.  It was completely her idea, and she hid it in her closet until Christmas eve, when she proudly placed it under the Christmas tree.

Here are the girls discovering their stockings.

Santa brought them their requested twin babies!

Opening gifts...

And Lucy figuring out how to use her new Kaleidoscope.

Favorite gifts the girls received included but are definitely not limited to puzzles, games, craft supplies, new back packs, dress up clothes, doll bunk beds and their beloved twin baby dolls making me the grandma to TWO sets of twins!  Lucy and Emma were watched by their special Elf on the Shelf Sammy, who reported back to Santa every night while they were sleeping during Advent.  We overheard Lucy tell Sammy that she wanted a pair of dress up shoes for her and for Emma so that they wouldn't have to share.  Will and I thought that was a great idea since the biggest thing they fight over these days is the one pair of high heel dress up shoes in the house.  Fortunately the Elf listened.  Maybe it was because of the secret we heard Lucy whisper to him on Christmas eve, his last day to watch the girls, "Elf, I promise to be nicer to Daddy next year."

By Christmas evening, the excitement of the day had definitely worn thin as Lucy vomited every twenty minutes to two hours throughout the night and Emma kept waking up from her horrible cough.  This past Sunday the girls were well enough (or so we thought - their fevers returned during mass) to have a Christmas re-do at our church.  They were the most well behaved we have ever seen them.  Note to self - somehow figure out how to induce fever like symptoms before mass every Sunday.

The girls loved seeing the Nativity scene up at the front of church, as well as finding the pair of snowflake ornaments they had made up on the children's Christmas tree in the church's vestibule.

We are still sick here and spent New Year's Eve last night at home.  Will and I made a dinner of different appetizers and filled wine glasses with white grape juice to toast the new year.  It was all we could do to get Lucy to join us at the table, and when I suggested she lift her glass to toast, this is the look she gave me...

This year has definitely had it's challenges and I think the above picture of Lucy sums it up perfectly.  We said goodbye too many times - to my brother, sister-in-law and niece who moved 14 hours west, my sister who moved four hours south, and friends who moved across the world to Japan.  We also said final goodbyes to two loved relatives - Will's uncle Bob in the spring, and Will's grandpa this past fall.  We had two hospital stays - first my four day stay in February and then Will's three day stay in October.  Not to mention two emergency room visits for Emma, three kidney surgeries for Will, two toe surgeries for me, a round of physical therapy for back pain for me and countless follow up doctor appointments and medical bills for the lot of us.  We were also saddened and grieve several events that took place in our country far more devastating than our own personal struggles this past year as well.

Yes, when looking back on 2012 while in the midst of the worst virus we have ever had it definitely takes some effort to come up with some positive memories, but here goes.  We gained a flock of chickens, learned how to care for them, established the garden of our dreams complete with veggies, berries and fruit trees, built a swing set in our backyard, finally got around to decorating four of the last five undecorated rooms in our house all while watching our girls grow.

We learned so much through our trials and tribulations this year and I have to say that we are starting 2013 not only one year older, but also wiser.  I am not proud of how I handled a lot of moments this past year, however I am looking back not with regret, but with appreciation for what I have learned and who I have now become.  I am grateful to have a clearer understanding of who I can count on in times of trouble, and who I need to move on from in my life.   I have been exposed to many great new people, ideas and books that give me a reason to hope for my family, our country and our world.  I am amazed at how God's solutions and timing were far better than anything I could have conjured up on my own if only I remember to put my troubles in His hands and have the patience to give up my need for control.

So, for 2013 my list of goals is short and sweet - good health and the accomplishment of several more dreams that we are actively pursuing and hope to relate on this blog as the year unfolds.  Here's to a HEALTHY and HAPPY New Year for all!

Emma at 20 Months

Emma's tummy is starting to feel better!  In the below picture, the girls are looking out from the seventh floor window of the hospital while we played "I Spy" and tried to guess which window belonged to the room Luke was born in.  Shortly after this picture was taken the doctor came in and all hell broke lose as both girls jockeyed for position at the window while I talked to the doctor.  Needless to say I left there with my sweaty head hanging low, and the girls left there with no stickers.

For most of this month Emma preferred to sleep upright in the rocking chair while Will or I took shifts holding her.  I'm sure frequent fliers can attest to the fact that the human body can become used to sleeping upright.  Now, when I go to rock Emma before bed, I usually fall into a deep sleep too and I'm guessing my mouth looks very similar to Emma's in the below picture.

 

Emma's sleep and appetite are improving and so is her mood and vocabulary.  When she is done having a crying fit she will look up at us and say, "Emma happy now."  When Lucy is sad or throwing a fit Emma will ask, "Lucy happy?"  And I have to admit, when I am done giving them a piece of my mind, Emma will ask, "Mama happy?"

I love kissing Emma's chubby cheeks and her little nose.  Sometimes Emma enjoys being smothered in kisses, and other times she will tell me, "NO!  Don't!"

Emma is really good at pretending to be asleep and she also loves playing peek a boo.  Here she is below, sneaking up on Will and yelling, "I SEE YOU!" when she popped her head out.

And here she is hiding behind a mask that her and Auntie Jane made.  She kept yelling, "GRRRRR!"

She is really good at Hide and Go Seek too.  A number of times this past month I couldn't find her and I started panicking.  She doesn't make a sound and comes up with really good spots.  One time she was wearing the same color as our bed's duvet cover and hid her face under the quilt that was hanging over the side of the bed.  She stood perfectly still and didn't make a sound.  The gate to the upstairs was closed, so I knew she had to be upstairs, but I couldn't for the life of me find her.  She never gave herself away, and to my relief I finally found her.  I just have to wonder what is going through her head when she is waiting so quietly and patiently in her hiding spot.  Lucy can hardly contain herself when she hides and giggles or calls your name before you are even finished counting.  

Emma loves to yell, "I'm coming!" when running around, like in the below picture.

Emma loves to ask, "Why?" and asks it after every single thing you tell her.  "Emma, get off the counter."  "Why?"  "Because you will fall and get hurt." "Why?"  "Because it hurts to go boom."  "Why?"  And on and on and on...

Either Lucy has influenced Emma's sense of humor or I am just doomed with children who have a genetic disposition to potty talk.  Emma thinks tooting is hilarious, gets a kick out of boogers and also loves to find toe jam between her toes.  Will of course eggs her on with questions like, "Who toots more, Mama or Daddy?"  Here she is below on the hunt for toe jam at the dinner table.

Emma is fascinated by babies.  Here she is below bonding with my friend Jill's little boy.  We soaked up their sweetness while simultaneously blocking out our respective three year olds' whining and fighting in the background.

Emma is finally smiling for the camera!  Up until now, she would turn her head away every time I tried to take a picture.  Here she is below trying out her new look.

Emma loves to help - flip the light switch on or off when we enter or leave a room, cut her own food, wash her own face, etc.  Here she is below helping me make vegetable soup.  It was a great recipe to make with her because it involved opening and pouring various bags of frozen veggies and containers of soup broth.  She even shook in the seasonings.

We finally switched Emma's carseat from rear facing to forward facing.  The first car ride with her facing the new direction was absolutely hilarious.  She kept enthusiastically yelling out all the things she saw for the first time - "Dada's keys!" when she saw where the keys go into the ignition.  "Feet!" when she saw Lucy's feet for the first time in the car.  And best of all, "Purple Lights!!!  Rainbow Lights!!!  Blue Lights!!!" as she can now see the Christmas lights.  That was the deciding factor to turn her carseat around.  We were commenting on all of the Christmas lights and Emma kept crying, "I don't see!  No, I don't!"  Now she can, and the excitement has not worn off yet.  It has made seeing the lights of the season even more special.

How did my baby get this old already?  When I ask if she is my baby, she says, "No, big girl!"  You are growing by leaps and bounds Emma, and while I am savoring what's left of your sweet baby cheeks, chubby thighs, excitement and cuddles, I also look forward to seeing the young girl you are quickly becoming.

November in a Nutshell

November was much like October in the fact that Will seemed to wear a hospital gown more than his own clothes, and Emma preferred to sleep upright in a rocking chair rather than in her own bed.  

 Will also spent a lot of time looking like this.

He just couldn't seem to stay warm.  Something about having a foot long tube with a corkscrew on each end to hold it in place stuck between his kidney and bladder gave him the shakes.  Actually, just describing it is giving me the shakes.  Let's move on!   The day before Thanksgiving he had his last surgery that successfully removed the stone and the awful tube.  We had a lot to be thankful for on Thanksgiving morning and started out in great moods.

 Somewhere between the start of the Thanksgiving Day parade and seeing Santa on TV, Will started having those same old pains again.  We were completely disheartened, as we were told just yesterday that finally the stone was gone.  I called my Dad to come over and watch the girls while I took a quick shower (think 60 seconds) and tried to mentally prepare myself for Thanksgiving away from the girls and hospital grade turkey and gravy.  Several minutes after my dad got to our house, the pain miraculously subsided.  A couple of minutes after that, Will peed out a giant stone.  The doctor on call that day said that there are usually fragments left from the surgery.  Good to know, and I'd hate to see what the actual stone looked like because that fragment was pure evil!  Needless to say, we had a wonderful Thanksgiving after that, and our entire perspective for the day went to a new level of happiness and relief.  Here are the girls below on Thanksgiving with their Great Grandparents, in town from Oklahoma.

Aunt Jane was also in town for the weekend from Ohio, so it was wonderful seeing her as well.

Aunt Jane even devoted the day after Thanksgiving to babysitting the girls so that Will and I could do some Christmas shopping.  The girls loved it and I am assuming that Aunt Jane swore off ever having children and slept like a rock when she went home.

Since that weekend, every time we sing "The Wheels on the Bus" song we have had to add a new verse: "Aunt Jane on the bus plays pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, Aunt Jane on the bus plays pat-a-cake, all through the town!"  The added bonus of this song verse is that Emma thinks pat-a-cake is referring to her Uncle Pat and Auntie Cate.

If laughter is the best medicine, Lucy doled her share of it.  Some of my favorite overheard conversations included:

-Lucy: "Dad, I want an American Girl doll for Christmas." 

Will: "What are American Girl dolls?"

Lucy: "Look it up on the iPad Dad."

-Lucy: "Dad, it feels like there is a bird in my bumbee."

Will: "Let it out then."

Lucy: {tooooot}

I also overheard Lucy whispering to Will, "Don't tell mom" and then giggle uncontrollably.  Later when I asked Will what I wasn't supposed to know he told me that Lucy loves telling "poop" jokes to him when he tucks her in for the night.  I told him to give me an example joke, and he shook his head.  I told him he is on my team, not hers and to tell me the joke.  Now I wish he didn't, because I am both highly disturbed and in awe of her creativity.  Maybe this is an example of how children gain different things from each parent, or maybe I should put a stop to it immediately.  I am also wondering if this is something that I need to let her get out of her system (quite literally) so that she can move on from this stage.  Ah, parenthood.

On a lighter note, we were finishing up lunch one afternoon when Lucy became inspired with this idea: "Dad, if you let me have ice cream your kidney stone will come out faster."  I thought this was hilarious so I immediately posted her comment on Facebook.  Big mistake.  Ever since that day, every time we laugh at something funny that Lucy said she tells us to "Post it on Facebook!"

One particularly sunny and unusually warm Sunday this past month I was feeling down and in the dumps.  When was our life going to get easy I kept wondering.  It felt like the house was closing in on me and I got extremely irritated when I looked out of the dining room window and could hardly see the sunshine through the dirt.  I decided then and there it was time to wash the windows.  Our neighbors probably saw me out there on the ladder and thought to themselves, "Wow, her life must be so together.  Who has time to wash windows?"  Ironic, isn't it?  It ended up being a great activity though because it got me out in the beautiful weather and thinking about something other than our rotten luck these days.   Will had a hard time sitting on the sidelines as you can see in the below picture.  I came around the corner after putting the screens back on the front windows and caught him.  He told me he was still following doctor's orders - Lucy was the one washing the windows, not him.  I can see right through you Will Timmerman - like a clean window on a sunny day!

My neighbors may be fooled, but trust me, we did little to no cleaning this past month.  Mostly we spent it caring for each other, trying to sleep, and dealing with the loss of Will's grandpa.  Here Lucy is below arranging and rearranging a flower arrangement from Great Grandpa J's funeral.  She spent over an hour in deep concentration with those flowers.

Lucy also has a long attention span with play doh.  On Thanksgiving morning when Will was curled up in the fetal position, Lucy spent over two hours at the table with play doh.  Here she is below, proudly displaying her artwork.  A psychologist might try to tell me that the red tube with purple circles represents Lucy's subconscious mind trying to work out Will's issues with kidney stones - the red representing an inflamed ureter and the purple circles the stones.  Let me be the first to tell you that what you see is simply a cake with sprinkles.

 

It has been quite a month and I'm not sorry to see it go.  Here's to a better December and good health all around!

October and Apples that Don't Fall Far from the Tree

It has been a challenging couple of months to say the least.  I feel like we are slowly but surely finding our way back to "normal".  Will is currently pain free and Emma's tummy troubles seem to be getting better as well.  I am now catching up on regular life and finally had a chance to go through the last two months of pictures.  Here's October...

The girls and I had a lot of time together this month as Will dealt with a stuck kidney stone.  We enjoyed many picnics together in the great outdoors.  I will miss these picnics now that the weather is colder, and I will miss the relatively mess-free clean up of meals eaten al fresco too.

 

Before Will's kidney troubles started, we purchased two apple trees, a pear tree and a pair of blueberry bushes on clearance at our local nursery.  We plan to train the two apple trees pictured below into an espalier form against the west wall of our garage to save on space.  I am itching to get at least two more varieties of apple trees for the east side of our garage, however I think we may have already bitten off more than we can chew - or store.  We now have six blueberry bushes, 15 feet of raspberry bushes, 16 square feet of strawberries, a peach tree, a pear tree, and two apple trees plus our seasonal assortment of veggies and herbs.  If I had done it right, I would have researched the trees first and figured out that it would be a good idea to make sure each variety of fruit we have ripens at different times so that we can have a steady flow of fruit instead of an overabundance at one time.  Nothing like trial by fire though, and I am steadily researching fruit tree care now.  I have found some very interesting facts including the seeds that Johnny Appleseed famously planted across the United States were actually mostly used for cider because no two apple seeds are the same.  His random planting of thousands of seeds created thousands of apples with just a small percentage of them edible to eat raw.  The apple trees we bought and that most fruit comes from are cuttings grafted onto roots that don't even belong in the fruit family.  That is the only way to ensure that a Red Delicious, or Gala, etc. contain the same qualities in each new generation of plants.

So apples and children grow much the same way and the saying that the "Apple doesn't fall far from the tree" is actually more about nurture than nature! 

 The girls loved playing in the leaves this year, and had a blast jumping in the leaves and taking "tarp rides" as Will took the leaves to the compost pile on a giant tarp.  We believe Will's kidney stone started moving when he was raking up the fall leaves.  Because of the kidney stone, I had to finish the fall clean up myself which was a serious workout.  Thankfully my dad and brother came by and helped me out.  My hat is off to Will for tackling the leaves each year by himself!

In fact, my hat is off to a lot of people this past month.  First, to Lucy and Emma for being so flexible with any given moment us having to drop what we were doing and rush Will to the ER for morphine when his stone decided it was time to try and move again.  My hat is off to my family and friends for being there for us for last minute childcare and meals.  If it wasn't for you, my kids surely would have lived off of hot dogs and mac and cheese and a steady diet of iPad videos in waiting rooms.  Here they are below, seeming happy and adjusted despite the chaos in our lives.

 In the below picture they are playing airplane.  They've never been on an airplane before, but I thought they captured the experience fairly well - doesn't the light from the window look like it is coming from a high altitude?

Will also did an amazing job maintaining his optimism.  I have always known that he was the optimistic one in the relationship, and not even a stuck kidney stone resulting in a three day hospital stay and three separate surgeries in one month could bring him down.  The other day I asked him if the chicken coop was wet.  The correct answer would have been, "Yes, it's wet."  His response is a classic example of the way his mind works, as he told me "It's mostly dry."

I think this next picture can be entitled, "Mini Me".  It turns out this apple doesn't fall far from the tree.  I hardly had to remind Will at all to take his medicine, drink water, not climb the stairs alone after surgery, etc.  Lucy would say things like, "Dad, what are you doing?!?  You can't pick me up and when's the last time you had a glass of water?  Sit down.  I'll get you a water."

Lucy seems to be a little adult this past month and now draws stick figures instead of just scribbles, can write her name and can recognize most of the letters of the alphabet and words like love, Mom, Dad, Luke and Emma.  She is also becoming quite analytical, as displayed in the following conversation after we watched Will's high school homecoming parade.  "Dad, why did your students throw all that candy at me?"  Will: "They must like you."  After a pause, Lucy then said, "But dad, you like me and you don't throw candy at me."

Stay tuned, I promise to post November in a nutshell soon!