Michigan Christmas

As we flew into Duluth this afternoon, we saw snow on the ground, meaning it probably wasn't in the 40s all week here like it was in Davison.  We had a rather warm Christmas at my parents' house, which meant no snowmen were built and no ice skates were laced up, but it was a fun and festive time regardless.  Caleb and Kai had a marvelous time with their cousins and loved playing around the house.  We were grateful to spend Christmas with my family!

We attempted to get a picture of all seven grandkids.  Naturally, this was the best we could get.  At least they're all in there.  Half the photos I took had at least one kid out of the frame.  Oh, the wiggles and the walking away, the sobbing and the spinning around...it all makes for a good memory if not a great photo :)

Between the train set, the presents, the horse, the toys and games and movies...there was lot of fun to be had at Grandma and Grandpa's house!

To cap off the week, we visited the Sloan Museum in Flint because they currently have a Curious George exhibit.  Caleb is crazy about Curious George so we made sure to get there.  He had a great time and played his heart out!

Now we're home, back in Duluth where there's snow on the ground and a chill in the air.  The boys are exhausted from the week and went to bed early.  But I guarantee that tomorrow morning Caleb will be asking about Grandma and Grandpa, and the cousins, and the spider monkey toys he clung to all week, and will be looking forward to the next time we can see them all again!

A Whirlwind Christmas

We were late in getting ready for Christmas this year.  Except for listening to holiday music on the radio as we drove around town, there was little in our life to recognize that Advent was upon us.  This week, however, we feverishly pulled ourselves together and began celebrating Christmas before it's too late!

We finally got a tree this week and the boys were elated!  The lights were glowing, the music was playing, the children were making a mess and breaking ornaments...er, I mean, the children were helpfully sweeping the pine needles off the ground and hanging the ornaments with care, right?

We eventually distracted them away from the tree by pulling out their Nativity.  This Little People set keeps their eager little hands busy!  Caleb loves to make the donkeys pull the wagon and put Baby Jesus on the roof while Kai loves to throw everything on the ground.

Then, yesterday we celebrated Christmas.  We realized a couple days ago that it would be our last chance to do so until after New Year's.  Between Eli's work schedule and our holiday travel plans, we're booked till next year.  So after a quick jaunt to the store for some last-minute stocking stuffers and a last-minute gift-wrapping session, we were ready to celebrate!

When we came downstairs in the morning and the boys realized something was different from our normal morning routine, they were a little confused, then moderately intrigued, then overwhelmingly excited when they realized there were presents to open.  "Presents, Mama!  Let's open it!"

It was a fun morning, to say the least.  Caleb's excitement and awe was amazing to watch.  Kai's contented interest and willingness to share toys was delightful to see.  They truly captivated our hearts!

On a different note, there was one other event sandwiched into our Whirlwind Christmas this week.  Our Small Group (that's reading through the Chronicles of Narnia) had a "Banquet at Cair Paravel" and we, naturally, decided to dress up for the occasion.  In order to dress like Narnians, I pulled out my old prom dress and Eli pulled out his hobbit costume and we decided to be Prince Caspian (as he might look on the Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and Ramandu's daughter who ultimately becomes Queen of Narnia.  It was a lot of fun!  (And yes, I really did wear this blue dress to prom my senior year.  Our prom had a Camelot theme and I wanted to enjoy it for all it was worth, so my mom made this dress for me and I loved it!)  The party was fabulous - everyone made food from a Narnia cookbook that someone had, so we ate great food while playing Pictionary and chasing the kids around.  We feel so blessed to be part of such a fun and engaging Small Group this year!

All that to say, this week has been a Whirlwind Christmas for us.  The holiday celebrations will continue next week as we venture to Michigan to see my family.  We haven't seen my parents and my older sister's family in five months, and we haven't seen my twin sister's family in a year, so we are very eager to get home and see everyone and let the kids play!

Time with Kai

Whenever Kai's afternoon nap doesn't line up with Caleb's, I get one-on-one time with Kai.  That's happened a few times recently and I'm somewhat convinced he does it on purpose just to steal some extra Mama Time :)  I love it, even though I can't get anything else done (like napping myself).  He's a pretty cool kid and it's fun to have him all to myself sometimes!

I haven't been taking many pictures lately, but this afternoon I brought out the camera to capture some of the faces of Kai.  I love his innocence, his honesty, his cheeks.  That boy has each of those qualities in spades :)

Maybe tomorrow he'll nap (and maybe I will too).  But today I was happy to spend nap time playing with my son, just him and me.

Fun at the Farm

Eli had a couple days off after Thanksgiving so we ventured to the Farm, a Horn family gathering place in Cambridge.  I forgot to bring my camera, but was able to capture some of the fun on my phone.  The Farm is a huge old farmhouse with lots of space to run around, so Caleb was in his glory.  Eli's mom even helped him make a "playground" inside and he was sliding and running and jumping all over the place.  By the time we left, Caleb was saying, "Fun at the farm, fun at the farm" over and over because, indeed, we always have fun at the Farm!

Kai also had a good time, exploring Grandpa Horn's new tractor and going for his first sled ride.  I was elated to find a toboggan in the barn because it reminded me of sledding at my grandma's house.  My Grandma and Grandpa Clark's house sits on a hill and I have many memories of piling cousins onto their toboggan and racing down the hill to see if we could make it into the woods and whether everyone could hang on by the end!

We also helped Caleb build some tiny snowmen on the porch during several rounds of the Battle of the Mittens.  That boy refuses to wear his mittens.  It's been a battle for several weeks because he apparently thinks that frozen fingers are just fine and he all-out refuses to wear mittens!  Sometimes he gets distracted enough to forget that we've just forced them on, but he always comes back to the realization that, woe is him, he has to keep his hands warm.  I find myself regularly reminding him that we live in Minnesota, as if that means anything to him.  Anyways, Caleb wore his mittens on/off while making tiny snowmen and throwing tiny snowballs, and it added to the fun at the Farm!

We're grateful we had time to be with family during the Thanksgiving holiday, and we're thankful for such a great place to gather.  We're looking forward to spending more time at the Farm over Christmas!

Creativity

On Thursday I spent the night by myself in a hotel in Canal Park.  It was the first time I've spent a night away from Kai and the first time in a long time that I've slept through the night.  Me + Benadryl + a cozy bed all to myself = bliss.  It was wonderful!

The reason I spent a night in a hotel was not to get a full night's sleep, however.  That was just a perk.  A major perk, but still just a perk.  Rather, I went there so I could be creative.

I love to create things: stories, pictures, songs, scrapbooks, afghans.  I've even tried my hand at pottery.  Being creative is a huge part of who I am.  I'm wired this way, and nurturing the creative side of myself is important not only because it maintains my health, but also because it's partly how I bear the image of God.

I do not pretend to have a comprehensive idea of what it means to bear the image of God, but being creative like the Creator who created me seems like a plausible way to bear His image.  God is Creator.  And I see myself as a creator too - a creator of words, of music, of pictures, and of many other things.  And although some of my creations are shown to other people, many of them are not, because creativity doesn't require a final product or a round of applause or an audience of any kind.  Creativity is a virtue in its own right.  I love to create for its own sake because the process of creating something makes me more like God.

But creating something takes time and energy.  It doesn't always happen on its own.  The ideas, the motivations, the passions - those occur all the time.  But sitting down to act on those ideas and do the work of creating?  It takes time and energy, which, as it turns out, is in short supply with a toddler and a baby running around.  So I don't actually create much these days.  In fact, I'm often suffering from creative constipation.  Ideas are constantly swirling in my head.  A lyric here, a scene there, a color combination in the back of my mind...  They're always there, churning away, begging to be released.  But the time and the energy required to unleash the pent-up creativity simply does not come around much.  So I regularly suffer from creative constipation.

On rare occasions, however, I have the chance to let some of it out.  And that's what happened on Thursday night.  My beloved husband offered to stay home with the kids so I could get away and have the time and energy needed to create.  I was originally planning to go farther from home, but ultimately chose to stay in town and save time driving.  So I stayed in Canal Park and settled into my room by spreading out all of my scrapbooking supplies on the spare queen bed.

I haven't scrapbooked since before Kai was born and I've been feeling the itch.  But if writing or crocheting is hard with little kids around, scrapbooking is impossible.  It requires lots of space and there are lots of things that little hands could wreak havoc on.  If there was any hope of being creative in this way, I knew I'd have to leave the house.  So I did.

I spent Thursday evening and Friday morning scrapbooking and it felt so good to be creative!  Cutting paper and arranging pictures and finding color schemes and placing stickers made my head recharge and my heart ignite!  I love figuring out what looks good on a page.  I love paying attention to detail and I love accenting photos with paper and stickers and explanatory notes.  I love helping photos tell a story.  And that's what scrapbooking is to me.  It's storytelling.

So I started telling a story by starting a scrapbook, and I was blessed by the chance to be creative for a night and a morning.  

Many thanks to my husband for encouraging my creative ways and for making a night away possible!  And thanks be to God for blessing me with this sunrise over the harbor in the morning!

The White Witch Has Returned

On Monday, mid-morning, it started to snow.  It was a light snow, falling slowly and delicately to the ground, but it snowed all day and into the night.  Our particular area only accumulated about 4 inches, which isn't much compared to parts of Wisconsin and the U.P. that got upwards of a foot, but still, it was enough to make the roads hazardous and enough to merit shoveling and snowblowing the next day.  And we weren't even halfway through November.

Welcome to Duluth.

It would seem that the White Witch has creeped her way into the weather yet again this year.  The past two winters have been fairly brutal here in the Northland and it looks like we're in for another long winter.  I'm already tired of it, to be completely honest.  Getting two little kids into coats, boots, hats and mittens and into the car and anywhere on time is quite a production.  But it does look like Christmas, and since we live in Duluth and not Narnia, we do have that to look forward to.

Speaking of Narnia, Eli and I have been blessed with joining a Small Group at church this year that's reading through the Chronicles of Narnia together.  I can barely express how amazing it's been.  It's a joy and a delight and a thought-provoker and an encouragement all at once.  It's a diverse group of people and it is life-giving for me and Eli to talk about books with other people!  And these books are, well, they're Narnia, for goodness sake!  Need I say more???

So we discussed the White Witch a bit last month as we read through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and this week we were confronted with her handiwork as the first winter storm of the season hit us so early.  Thank God Aslan is on the move and that, despite how much it feels like an eternal winter in the thick of it, Spring will eventually and certainly come.

The Day the Digger Came

One day in September, when Eli was gone hiking, I was standing in the kitchen and heard a noise from the basement like that of water gushing onto the floor.  I was doing a load of laundry so I went downstairs to investigate and discovered that, indeed, there was water gushing onto the floor!  The washer was on the spin cycle and all the water exiting from the machine was backing up from a pipe instead of draining down it because, as it turned out, our entire drainage system was having a rebellion.  Our landlord was marvelous and got a plumber in right away who was able to fix the problem temporarily, but who also discovered a bigger problem at hand.  We survived the next several weeks with only minor issues as we waited for an excavation company to do the major job of fixing the major problem.  Then the Day arrived.

Monday was The Day the Digger Came.

To say that our son Caleb was excited would be an understatement.  Nothing could have prepared him for the absolute jubilance of this momentous event.  A digger was in our yard!  AND a dump truck had come to drop it off!  Could the world get any better???

It was big and it was yellow and it was "working hard", a phrase Caleb always associates with machines at the construction site.  Thankfully, the digger didn't dig up our actual yard.  It dug a decent hole in the ground below our deck, where the workers ascertained the broken pipe to be.  They found the pipe in question and replaced what needed to be replaced and our septic system was back in working order before the day was done, which made me very happy.  Caleb, on the other hand, could've cared less about our water predicaments.  I mean, there was a digger at our house!  Did I mention that it was big and yellow and working hard???  Caleb didn't want to leave all the work to the construction guys either.  He found a shovel and started pitching in, as any good digger-loving boy would do :)

As if his life couldn't have gotten any better that day, the workers also invited Caleb to sit in the digger.  They even offered to take him for a ride, but that proved to be a little too much excitement for him to handle.  But sitting and playing in this big machine was enough.  Indeed, it was the apex of his digger experience!

It should be noted that Caleb toted his own digger and dump truck with him throughout the morning.  No man left behind.  Those machines were working hard too :)  Caleb loved watching the big digger as it drove off the trailer attached to the dump truck and he's been practicing with his own machines ever since.

We also discovered a hard hat in the digger.  He wouldn't wear it at first, but then he came around.  He was an official "construction guy", another phrase that's entered his vocabulary recently :)

Eventually Kai joined us too.  He was almost as eager as Caleb.  Almost.  He liked the buttons and knobs and handles even if he didn't want to help dig dirt.

Caleb didn't want to go inside, even when his cheeks were numb with cold and his hands could barely hold the shovel anymore.  He might have had a meltdown, screaming, "Go outside!  Diiiiiggggger!!!!!" when I carried him inside.  He might have asked about the digger the moment he woke up from his nap and stood at the window to watch it the rest of the day.  And he might have slept with his own digger and dump truck that night.  That boy loves big machines!

It was all very exciting.  Caleb had the time of his life on The Day the Digger Came!

A Super Halloween

The cold could not keep us away (either the temperature or the virus that each of our boys currently have).  It may have kept our trick-or-treating to a minimum, but we are brave folk after all.  We are superheroes intent on having a Super Halloween!  So bring on the costumes and candy.  We love dressing up and we love eating sugar.  So Halloween is a fun time in our house :)

Caleb is in a superhero phase.  He loves to "run so fast" like they do, and he talks about how they're "gonna get 'em!" (i.e. the bad guys) and then makes a funny sound that's supposed to be the superhero using an amazing power to save the day.  He also loves wearing capes.  We read superhero books on a daily basis that cover both the Marvel and DC Comics universes.  We are in the know when it comes to superheroes.  And Caleb's affection only deepens every day.

So it was easy to pick costumes for Halloween.  We chose Batman because the boys already had outfits.  Eli dug up an old Robin costume and I opted to transform my Catwoman costume into a Batgirl costume.  And voila!  Here we are!

Eli and I were happy to be the sidekicks.  We're not foolish enough to think we run the show around here.  Those two little boys call the shots most days :)  We're proud to be their sidekicks!

Caleb was captivated by our masks and he felt the need to wear mine most of the night :)

Even though we only went down one block and back, it was totally worth it to see this kid trick-or-treating.  After the first house, he quickly realized what this was all about and literally ran down the sidewalk to the next house.  He kept saying, "Trick-or-treating, Daddy!  Trick-or-treating!"  Once I heard him say to another kid, "Dressed up superheroes!"  Clearly, he understands the fun of Halloween :)

Kai was less impressed with the trick-or-treating experience, but was a trouper overall.  He took turns snuggling with me and Eli and made many a person smile :)

If I had to name one of Caleb's superpowers, it would be infectious joy.  We recognized it in him early on and we continue to see him use it to spread joy to others.  It's a worthy superpower and one we're proud to see him use!  

Kai's superpower is contentedness.  That boy rolls with the punches in a way that is rare and encouraging.  He uses snuggles to lure you in, then blasts you with a wave of contentment as he leans his head on your shoulder.  An amazing superpower indeed!

Eli's superpower is the ability to sleep through any and all noise at all odd hours of the night.  I have to wake him up whenever it's his turn to deal with a kid overnight (which is every night because, for the past three months, neither kid has slept through the night).  But Eli doesn't mind when I sock him to wake him up.  I envy his sleeping superpower!

And me?  My superpower is finding every lost toy around the house.  That, and consuming an incredible amount of chocolate without getting sick.  My tolerance for an inordinate amount of chocolate is truly amazing!

With these superpowers in hand, we bid you a Happy Halloween!

Birthday Party

We traveled to the Cities this past weekend in order to celebrate Kai's birthday with the Horns.  Before the party, Kai played in a leaf pile for the first time and loved it!

Then it was party time.  Since there's no better way than to party over football and pizza, that's exactly what we did :)  People gathered at Eli's brother's house to watch the Vikings game, and apparently Kai's birthday magic was working because our team actually won the game!  Afterward everyone headed over to Pizza Ranch for all-you-can-eat pizza and cupcakes.  Nothing fancy - just food and family and fun!

This particular Pizza Ranch had a basketball court.  Needless to say, the cousins had a pretty good time :)

Even though we stuffed ourselves, most of us saved room for a cupcake.  They were chocolate, of course, because everything else is less superior.  And I found these Viking cupcake rings to top them!

Kai had never eaten a cupcake before.  He was quite fascinated with the candle, and thought the cupcake was pretty good too :)

"Oooh!  Fire!"

"This is pretty good."

"Dare I say, really good?"

"Oh my gosh, I can't get it in fast enough!"

Kai was tired after all the excitement and started to hit his wall for the night, but we still had presents to open.  Thankfully he lasted just long enough to enjoy that part.

Then it was time to hit the road and head back to Duluth.  We got the kids in their jammies and they both fell asleep in the car sooner than later.  It was a great way to celebrate the milestone of our sweet boy turning one!