First off, Mary had a lovely birthday party. We took some of her friends to a pottery-making place up the road a bit, and they all had fun stamping and glazing clay pieces. (It will be interesting to see how Izzy's turns out since she changed color mid-glaze and seemed to be coloring in a preschool fashion. Urgh.) We put this party together a week before her birthday, after a swim meet, so she was pretty busy that day and showed up for her own party with wet hair. Several girls we invited couldn't come due to the crazy-madness of the sports and holiday seasons, but we still had enough to get the party going. And her one oldest friend stayed the night.
Mary's Christmas Eve Eve birthday was lovely, too. She was totally thrilled to receive an ipod nano from Mom and Dad. Dad was having a ball downloading songs for her the night before. (He forced himself to only download approved songs instead of complete albums--that's just WRONG, but necessary.) Mary has pretty much only listened to the same seven songs over and over again, but she promises to start sampling the other tunes soon. Mary's other best friend stayed the night while Izzy got to go to stay with the friend's sister--not a bad deal, really!
Chirstmas Eve I completely wore my pregnant body out doing that cleaning, laundry, baking thing. But at least the presents were mostly wrapped, and the only reason I was up until 1:30 was so that I could take a relaxing bath to ease my fatigued body.
Christmas the kids were thrilled to find that Santa brought each of them a 3DS. So now we have two spare DS lites hanging out (one isn't in the greatest shape, the other *I* have claimed for my own). And now between her b-day and X-mas, Mary has three new Zelda games to play (*I* have almost solved Phantom Hourglass myself). And we have several more Wii games. And Keith was only disappointed that there weren't more Legos under the tree (dude, you have a birthday in two months!).
We went out the day after X-mas to buy even MORE games with the money that Grandpa and others sent. so now poor Izzy has more DS games than just the ONE that was under the tree. Sure do love those buy two used, get one used game free promos!
We've spent this last week doing absolutely NOTHING but play games. It gets to be a bit of a hassle when we do need to do a few essential things--like take Mary to swim practice or even go to the grocery store to stock up on our milk and cereal--but they have been WARNED that this is the only week that non-stop DS playing will be tolerated (that goes for Mom, too). It's been a lot of fun, tho.
I've managed to try to get the kids back on their food-prep and dishes schedules that sort of disappeared a few weeks ago. Why is it that the kid who most enjoys doing dishes is the worst at actually washing them? Poor John has been working all week to attempt to fix our apparent plumbing problem that is keeping the dishwasher from draining correctly (and so we've been doing dishes by hand for almost two months now), but he is starting to admit that he may need professional help. Ka-ching!
Each kid got a new cookbook for X-mas, so we're going through picking out recipes to try--and hopefully expand those kid-palettes a bit. Tonight Keith helped me make some fried rice, and it wasn't even his night to be the prep cook!
Speaking of cooking, Mary has used some of her Home and Careers skills to good use here and has now prepared eggs on toast for her family twice just within the last week. I really could get used to someone else cooking! When do they learn how to make lasagna?
Another post up at the baby-brewing blog where I discuss the typical aches and pains present during the third trimester.
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