Merry Christmas

The Christmas Spirit

The Wooderson family has been in the Christmas spirit this month. We've been making Christmas cards, attending Christmas parties, finishing the holiday shopping, driving around at night to see lights, drinking hot cocoa and cider, making/decorating gingerbread cookies, listening to the Trans Siberian Orchestra, watching the holiday specials on TV, etc... This was also the first year that we put up Christmas lights outside of our home.

Avery has been having so much fun with Christmas. The older he becomes, the more he understands what is going on and enjoys experiencing the festivities. This year we let him help us decorate the tree. We strung the string to hang the ornament at one end of the room. Avery grabbed ornaments, one at a time, and raced to the opposite side of the room to hang them on the Christmas tree. When the ornaments were all hung, we realized that they were all "toddler height" around the bottom branches. A few days later, Avery had taken all of them off again and sorted them by color and finish at the bottom of the tree skirt. He did such a great job sorting, we decided not to re-hang them.

Our ornament-less tree is also pre-lit. Much to our horror, we left the room the tree was located only to return and find that our son had taken out the outlet plug cover and plugged the tree in by himself! He is more clever than we give him credit.

Avery likes to point out gingerbread men when he sees them. So, we thought it would be fun to make actual gingerbread cookies and decorate them with Avery. The icing came in a white tube. Before we put the icing on, Avery exclaimed "NO, NO don't put MUSTARD on them Mama!" We explained to Avery that the icing wasn't mustard, and we let him had a taste. (This was really fun to us since he hates mustard by the way.) He was then "Ok" with us applying the design. He asked for the gingerbread cookies "with toothpaste" many times later that week.

To bake the cookies, we used a kitchen timer. Avery likes to play with the timer too when we let him. He will tell us that it's "thirty-o-clock". Besides the timer, numbers on clocks, watches, etc... sometimes catch his eye as well. When we are in the store and discussing prices, sometimes he will tell me that something costs "forty dollars". Everything in his mind is "forty dollars". If he starts begging us to buy something, I tell him that if he has the money for it, he can buy it. He assumes that he does, and lets us know he has "forty dollars" and to go ahead and give it to him.

Having a child has brought a different and special meaning to us each holiday.