Christmas

Let's just start by saying that I love Christmas. We live in a house with a 4 and a 1 1/2 year old so it's hard not to get excited. But even if we didn't have them, I still get pretty worked up around the holiday, having kids definitely legitimizes my excitement. Sam has been asking for the same gifts for a while. I thought he might keep adding to the list, but he stuck to his little trio of gifts bravely. He wanted a Saxophone, trumpet and a clarinet. He was almost as adamant as Ralphie and his gun. Luckily the instruments can't "shoot his eye out".

We decided to have our first ever Christmas at our house. We've always traveled before and it's nice to get away, but it was nice to be home too. Although there was a serious amount of cooking. Next year we'll have to borrow the elves (if they moonlight) and get some help. It was a lot of work. Since we are usually in Asheville, it always feels little like a long holiday. It was great and much easier (cooking aside) to be here, but it felt more like a day. There was a lot of ..."we can do it on Friday". It's fine but if we were in Asheville it would be more... it'll have to wait until we get home.

So, the Christmas Eve pageant. Our church has a family service at 5:00 on Christmas Eve. We've never been in town before, so we've never been. All of the kids meet up about 1/2 early and get dressed up as animals, angels, shepherd or wise men., Mary and Joseph have to rehearse. Mine were a lamb and a recorder playing donkey.
It was hysterical. I was asked to lead the animals up the side isle and they could go up to the manger and be with Mary and Joseph. Well I didn't give very much stage direction because they all went up and stood smack in front of the manger and didn't move. No one could see anything. Oliver decided to upstage everyone so whilst everyone was looking at the baby he walked towards the congregation sat down facing us and put his finger up his nose and stayed like that for the last 1/2 of the play. He wasn't really picking his nose, he sort of seemed to be letting his fingers hang out up there. After a while he changed fingers. So, as I mom I know that they are very talented actors, but a little more practice is probably what they need.

Sam was more into Christmas this year and he had more questions. He would mention that Santa probably couldn't get down our chimney and that if it didn't snow, would his sleigh still work. The best part was putting the cookies out the night before. We put out the cookies, milk and a carrot for the reindeer (only 1 carrot not 9 - hopefully some other people thought about them too). The best part was that on Christmas morning the fact tat the cookies, milk and carrot was gone was the evidence that Santa had come. The fact that the tree was no longer visible behind the presents didn't really seem to tip him off. He ran up and got me and showed me the crumbs and said he knew Santa had come because the cookies were gone.

So everyone got together Joel, Sam, Oliver, me and Joel's parents and we got started. Sam was very excited with Santa's presents and Oliver - who is a little easier to please) was happy with his Wiggles guitar.

For the rest of the day we ate, ate, ate and all was well with our world.
Merry Christmas!

Oh, the fall

Fall is clearly my favorite time of year. It gets chilly, but not too cold. The leaves change. There is a lot of outdoors things to do. It has Sam's and my birthday in it, Halloween (not a huge fan but it's fun) and Thanksgiving. Our fall has been great we traveled to Asheville for fun, Pawley's for Thanksgiving and otherwise, just stuck around here. Sam's birthday was scheduled to be at a park (nice and easy, little clean-up or chaos) around 4:00. It was a great day, but it started raining at 3:36 - seriously, when does that happen. We had it our house instead which was fine, the kids stayed in the basement and didn't get up to too much mischief. I iced the cake again, this time Sam branched out - it wasn't Thomas, it was Gordon - makes sense I guess Gordon is number 4. If the stay at home mom thing doesn't work out. Clearly I should go be an artist on the island of Sodor.He had a great day, I wonder if it'll be a train theme next year.


Halloween was hysterical. Sam was a SWAT team police officer and Oliver was a tiger. They fully understood about the candy this year and they took it all very seriously and got heaps of candy.





Enter Peter Pan - Sam is now Peter Pan. It all started with a book on tape that I had had for ages and he never wanted to listen to. Then he wanted to hear it all the time. Then came the movie and last but not least, the Peter Pan costume.
So, I am Wendy, Joel - John, Oliver - Michael. If he comes across a woman she is Tinkerbell and if it's a man, that person is usually Captain James Hook. He flies to Neverland (the top of the fort in the back yard) it's great but as you can see, even Peter Pan needs a rest sometimes.










We headed down to Pawleys for Thanksgiving. The whole Lavelle clan was there and we had great weather and the cousins got along for the most part. Liliana and Oliver had some tuffs, but other than that

the summer and Italy

Very busy summer. It creeped by and then before I knew it, it was over. It involved a lot of traveling. Those kids are destined to be truckers of some sort because they have already covered a lot of miles. We went to Asheville for the 4th of July. The boys paraded in the Biltmore Forest parade from town hall to the park. Sam decorated his tricycle. I unfortunately managed to get a lot of sunscreen in his eyes and he couldn't really see for the journey (he's not squinting at the sun in the picture, he can barely have his eyes open =(. Poor thing. But in the end it all worked out and he ran around in the fire truck spray for the most of the time.

We went down to the beach for 2 weeks. It took a while for Sam to get used to playing in the waves again, but before we knew it, he was a surfer again. Oliver never really got comfortable with the ocean. There's always next time...

In August we went to Italy. Joel's family rented a sort of villa compound about 5 miles outside of Assisi. It was wonderful. Joel flew the boys over to England on his own (pretty impressive I thought) I made an emergency trip down to Asheville. We both flew out of Dulles and were able to get through security together, which is probably the hardest part. My flight was uneventful, but on his flight, Oliver cried so much that another passenger offered Joel a baby sedative. It didn't last long though and Ollie slept most of the way after that.

I joined them 2 days later and we spent our lovely week doing day trips to Sienna, Spoleto, Ovieto and Assisi. The boys were real troopers. When you take into accoun the fact that they couldn't care less about a beautiful duomo or walled city, the were fantastic. We're just really lucky that there is gelato around every corner. I think that it was the only food Oliver ate. Sam nearly turned into a spaghetti noodle.

After we left Umbria we spent 2 days in Rome. This was hard. I have no idea how people live in cities with children. It felt like everywhere we went was some sort of hazzard - cars, breakable things, too many people, child snatchers (that last one was really only in my head). At the end of each day they looked like street urchins (sort of like the original Oliver), they were filthy.
On our first day we thought it would be a smashing idea to do a Rome bus tour - disastrous. Don't recommend it. It's best to adjust your expectations and try not to do so much. The bus was fun for the first stop or so, but we had to pick and choose carefully about what we wanted to see. We were on the top of the bus taking pictures of things as we drove by so that we would look them up later when we got back home. Clearly, this was not the plan to have. The boys fell asleep and we decided to get out at the colosseum, not the brightest move. The colloseum is in the middle of nowhere in the Rome sense and unwalkable to our hotel and we struggled to squeeze onto the bus so that we could get back to where we were staying. Good thing is that people take pity on 2 dirty, exhausted and obscenely irritable tourists pushing a double stroller of sleeping kids and they let us squeeze on. That was something - there were a lot of kids in Italy, but you never saw someone with 2 of them. They always had 1 kid or the kids were a lot older. I will remember that in the future, no kids in the city (or 1 nanny per child).

After we left Rome we went back to sunny England, which was actually 65 and rainy). I went straight to London to meet up with my dear friend Roz and spend a lot of money on Kensington High Street. Joel got to meet up with some friends and we all got to unwind before heading home. We flew (delayed) safely home and waited for fall. It was a great summer!