Family Photos

We had a photographer friend do some family photos for us as a last minute Christmas gift. The kids were so squirrely! I really wondered what kind of pictures would come out of it, but my friend performed a miracle and managed to get some fantastic pictures of the kids and even a few decent ones of all of us together. I've seen a lot of funny family photos over the years, but now I truly understand that monumental effort to get the kids even to look at the camera, let alone smile. hahaha! We got so many good pictures of Genevieve, which is so crazy to me because I swear she had a stone face the entire time we were there. Like I said, my friend performs miracles when it comes to photography.

"Hey Spencer, give Genevieve a hug." Yeah, she thought she was getting pushed off the chair and just started screaming. :)

Hey look, we all look generally pleasant! 

Yup, this about sums up our efforts at a good family photo. :)

Blue Steel.

This photo kills me every time I look at it. All her sweetness shows here.

I'd say this was the best group photo of the bunch. Spencer's even smiling. Who cares where he's looking. :)

I can just see it in Genevieve's eyes. "What's so funny guys?"

Plastic bins and forts

Have I mentioned lately that Bill is a saint when it comes to playing with our kids? Well he is. He will do awesome things with them for so much longer than my short attention span can stand. And in return the kids utterly adore him, especially Genevieve. She literally cries when I try to hold her sometimes. Spencer is my shadow, so I have absolutely no problem with that little situation. She is welcome to every second she wants with her dad. Sometime this vacation he pulled out every kid's dream toy, a plastic bin. He tied a rope to it, filled it with pillows and blankets, and alternated pulling the kids around the house in it. They both loved it. Like they pretty much melted into it. They couldn't get enough of being towed around.

That's the look of utter relaxation.

Spencer wanted to get in on the fun.

And his look of total relaxation. :)

Then I think that same day he built the coolest blanket fort they've ever seen. We spent hours reading books and playing games under it. They were in heaven yet again. Good times folks.

Holiday Rundown

This was the first year Bill and I have been away from family for Christmas, and also the first year we had kids old enough to appreciate the whole experience. Last year Spencer liked opening presents, but he didn't get much else about it. This year he was way more into it, and it was so fun. It's been a really long time since I've enjoyed the Christmas season with kids around, and it made it so magical, just like when I was a kid.

Christmas PJs from the grandparents!

This is the smile I got when I asked him to smile for the picture. Cheeseball!

As is only right, this is the best photo I got of them together. Hand in  mouth, Spencer looking somewhere else. Awesome.

Since we were on our own, we sat down one night a few days before Christmas to decide what we wanted to do. We both have family traditions we like that we wanted to pull in. We wanted to try some new things too. We'd been doing an advent calendar of mine that I've done since I was a kid. It's a poem attached to a length of cloth with ties on it that have a piece of candy tied in each one, culminating at a bell for Christmas Eve. The poem is probably ten lines long. I've always been impressed with Spencer's memory. It's uncanny how fast he learns things. After just a few days he already had pieces of the poem memorized, and by the end he could essentially say the whole thing by himself with just a word prompting here and there. It was amazing. He loved it. He always wanted to know when we could do December the 1st, which is what the poem is called. It was fun. Genevieve knew it as the giver of Andes mints, and that was good enough for her. :)

We decided to try an idea online we found for Christmas Eve, called a Jerusalem dinner. Basically the concept was to have a simple meal that might have been like one in Jerusalem, and read the Christmas story from Luke to get in the spirit. Our interpretation of it was we purchased a bunch of fancy cheeses, sausage, hummus, grapes, crackers, made some simple fish (salmon with olive oil, salt, and pepper), and some sparkling juice with apple juice for the kiddos. We laid it all out on some ethnic looking blankets we have in our living room, plus a bunch of pillows, and lounged there while we ate. We did it mid afternoon when the kids are in their best mood and it was wildly successful, way better than I expected! The kids loved it. They loved the novelty. They ate a bit of food here and there while they ran around and I'm pretty sure to them it was heaven. Lol. Bill read Luke 2 and we had a grand old time. Later that evening we drove out to find some Christmas lights to look at. We live in a pretty rural area with no real neighborhoods to go to, but we discovered that the downtown section of a nearby city was beautifully decorated, and we had a lovely time checking it out. The kids like to take car rides, so it was perfect all around. After that we headed home and put them to bed.

Checking out the deliciousness.

Genevieve knows how to live it up.

Spencer is rightfully amazed by how awesome our meal is. :)

Then Bill and I got to help Santa for the first time ever. It was awesome, just like when I was growing up. Christmas morning dawned bright and early. The kids slept til 7AM, which was nice. They headed out to find awesomeness from Santa in the living room. The dollar store was a magical place of puzzles and dinosaurs and animal figures and balls and bubbles this year and Santa must have done all his shopping there. :) He brought personal boxes of cereal, peanuts, M&Ms, oranges, fruit snacks, granola bars, and gummy bears as well. The kids loved it. They ate more food Christmas morning than I've ever seen either one of them consume. Grandma and Grandpa sent a pair of personal recliners for the kids that are pretty much the coolest things they've ever had. They had plenty of fun gifts to open too. There were lots of books, a few games, some new clothes, you know, the typical Christmas haul. Bill and I got some great gifts too, which is always lovely.

I like this cereal...and this chair. :)

Guys, look at all the good food here!

See? Genevieve loves her daddy.

More cheesy grins for the camera.

Genevieve needed a little coaxing to discover all the awesomeness in her stocking.

Another attempt at a together photo. At least they're both looking at the same thing. :)

We spent most of the rest of Christmas just relaxing. We made the traditional Ashman family Christmas breakfast of crepes with butter and sugar, plus some bacon to round it out. The kids were so gut stuffed I don't think they even ate a bite. lol! We paid for that later in the day when they were crankier than anything, but heck, they had a great Christmas morning! We got to talk or webcam with a bunch of our family and it was just a lovely day. I really enjoyed not traveling anywhere. The older our kids get, the nicer it is just to be in the familiar surroundings of our own home with them on these holidays. Don't get me wrong, I love to have family around, but I'd just as soon invite them to our house these days. I've discovered I like entertaining. Any family want to come spend Christmas in South Carolina next year? I can promise lovely weather, a choice of at least three airports to fly into, great food, and three adorable kids to snuggle with. It might be a tad squishy in our apartment, but hey, the more the merrier.

They love their chairs. It makes me happy.

Discovering the wonders of the Hoberman sphere.

Genevieve loves it too.

There's something so tempting about putting it on your head. Bill is seemingly tempted by this too, though I didn't catch it on camera. :)

Movie time!

My kids love each other. They always sit as close together as possible. It makes me smile. And my new duvet cover makes me smile too. :)

Since Christmas we've had a fantastic week, with a few minor glitches. Bill has worked a bit throughout the break, but nothing too time consuming. He decided to read Lord of the Rings this break and I picked up a bunch of books from the library from my favorite authors. We've been voraciously devouring them and the kids have been surprisingly willing to let us read while they play. I call that a piece of heaven. :)
Spencer had an allergic reaction to something he ate on Christmas, and broke out with hives. Genevieve got an ear infection. I spent the day after Christmas from 10:30 to 5PM either at the doctor's office for one of them or shuttling back and forth. No sooner had I gotten home from taking Genevieve that Spencer had broken out in the hives, so back I went with him instead of her. Good thing I like my pediatrician and her office. They were slammed that day, which is why it took so long. I also unfortunately probably four days ago came down with a killer sinus cold. It's morphed each day, but the one constant is I've had some form of horrible headache the entire time. It's been awful, but Bill has been wonderful taking care of all the general running of things and I couldn't be more blessed to have him around to help when I feel so terrible. This is the first morning I woke up without a headache to speak of. I have a crazy cough, but yesterday every time I coughed it sent waves of pain through my head, so I'm not complaining about having the headache gone.

The best part about this break, though? We still have a whole week of it to go! Here's to getting over our sicknesses, Bill not getting sick, and hopefully getting out of our house a bit to enjoy the lovely weather and freedom to do a few things all together.

Christmas Program Sunday

We had our Christmas program at church today. It included four choir numbers. Bill and I both like to sing, so we both participate in choir, thanks to some lovely people in our ward that run a nursery every single week during choir practice. Bless them!

It's always a little tricky we actually get up to sing though as both of us are going up there so who's going to watch our two kids?  It's no big deal with Genevieve. She's just chill and will play with whoever happens to be holding her, especially if they're giving her food. :) Spence, on the other hand, is going through a hard core I-only-want-to-be-with-mom-and-no-one-else-if-she-is-around phase. He likes dad just fine, but if given the option, he will nearly always choose to sit or be with me. It's a little awkward on the rare occasion that I leave somewhere without him and he cries even though he's staying with dad, but hey, he's his own person and he's allowed to be bothered about things. He'll get past it eventually and we'll all be fine. He's totally okay being with other people if I'm not there. He just really, really likes me. It's touching. Lol.

So yeah, back to church today. Another trait about Spencer that is so very nice is that he's super reasonable. He has opinions and he will share them if asked. He decided a while back that he would rather come up and sing with us than sit and play with whoever we happen to be sitting by, generally my awesome friend Trisha who is so nice to take care of my kids. So today was no exception. I asked him if he wanted to stay and play with her awesome toys, totally trying to sweeten the deal, and he wasn't even slightly tempted. He wanted to come up with us and sing and he wanted to sit on my lap. He wanted me to hold him, not stand  by me. So that's what we did. He's getting over a raging cold/ear infection, which is mostly gone, but he's still tired from it, and he literally just sat quietly in my lap for the entire time from the sacrament ending to the meeting being over. It was amazing. I brought some toys up for him and he didn't even touch them. We had a great program. The choir numbers all went fantastically well, the speakers were lovely, Spencer was chill, Genevieve had a great time with my friend and her daughter, and it was just nice. Afterward we actually brought the kids home since Spencer could really use rest more than two hours in nursery. He absolutely loves nursery and I asked him if he wanted to go there or go home and he said go home, which is totally not what I thought he'd say, so obviously he's still not feeling 100%. It was an all around good day, particularly considering the circumstances.

And in honor of Christmas, the kids wore Christmasy outfits. This is how taking pictures of it went:

Hi Mom. I like my dress.

Hey Spencer, go stand by Genevieve and show your cute Sunday outfit. No, not in front of her!

So I moved over to see both of them.

So he squished her against the wall and thought he was so funny.

Then she cried and shoved him away. Yup, that about sums them up. He tries to squish her, she gets feisty, and really, they totally adore each other.