week ending dec 7, 2008:

Week ending Dec 7, 2008: This week I’ve been catching up on cleaning and Christmas shopping while the kids are in school, and much of the time when they aren’t. It seems sometimes that I only noticed what they are doing after they make a huge mess like the play dough and the little bits of paper they called “snow” (4 days before we got a dusting of the real stuff).

Also this week we did some catching up on fixing some of the goodies from Casey’s childhood like the remote control dune buggy and the electric train set. Last year I wiped all the dust off of all the trains, inventoried the track and made a list of what we’d need. This year we went out and got some plywood, some paper with faux grass on it, some track, a transformer/controller, and put it all together. Low and behold it works! The kids really liked getting to take turns making the trains go. Chloe can’t wait to get more buildings for our “village” (we told her next year since we’d invested in the platform and transformer this year). As for the r/c dune buggy, Casey got it working for the 1st time in 15 years and it sped around the yard faster than the kids could run after it.

Sunday was our annual trek to Frederick for the Gingerbread party hosted by our friends from college, Rob and Tina. Tina buys enough houses for each family to do their own, 8 houses this year. Although we only see that group a few times a year, the kids have really bonded and it is a great time for them to play while the grownups catch up. This year Alex said his favorite part was the gingerbread house, which surprised me since he did a lot of rough housing and pillow fighting with the other boys. Chloe said her favorite was playing the girls, and eating candy, and watching Christmas movies and… basically everything. Can you remember a time when you were so excited that your favorite part was everything? I think I felt that way on our cruise about all the parts that didn’t involve waiting in lines or doing other mundane daily chores.

We had some very sad news this week. Our next door neighbor’s 11 year old granddaughter passed away from an unknown illness. I’d heard a couple of weeks ago that she’d been hospitalized, but in this time of medical miracles I didn’t worry too much about it. I just can’t believe that she never got better and that her family is going to have to deal with this kind of loss. She was a very nice girl and despite the fact that she was 6 years older than the twins, she’d play with them while she was visiting her grandparents. She’d push them on the swings and hold their hands when the crossed the street to run up and down the hill, and she was very patient about playing hide-and-seek with them even though Alex and Chloe weren’t very good at hide-and-seek. She was having developmental issues at the same time that Alex was, so her grandmother and I would trade stories about their respective successes when we’d run into each other. I haven’t told the twins yet.