Dan Zanes

On Saturday we went to NYC to see Dan Zanes and friends. I think I had mentioned in a post a long time ago, we are big fans of him. Ever since Chip heard a song on Sesame Street that he sang, we were hooked. Chip's sister lives in Manhattan and when she saw that they were coming to New Victory Theater, she knew we would want to go. We bought tickets the end of the summer and went on our way.

First let me say that I have realized that I am not a city girl. I like the idea of the city, I like what the city has to offer, but whenever I get down there, I think, let's do what we need to do and get back to the fresh air. I like my space and peace and quiet here in the Catskills I have come to realize.

We took the train out of Poughkeepsie and went into Grand Central Station. When we got off, we scoped where we needed to go which was right down the road, it was perfect!

It really was a very nice day. Let me tell you that I LOVE the New Victory Theater. If you ever want to bring kids to a show, I HIGHLY recommend this place. It is either very new or just renovated. And I want to say just newly renovated, I was reading something in the book about it being a XXX theater a few decades back. Ha! But now it is just for kids. It is a very small theater, smaller than our Tri-Valley School theater if you are familiar with that, and smaller than Sullivan County Community College theater as well. The seats are new, they gave us boosters for the kids, downstairs there was a snack area for kids with juice boxes and fruit snacks and the bathrooms had little step stools for the kids. LOVED IT! I told my sister in law today, I want to make it a point to go at least once a year since the theater is just for the kids and it is so easy to get to.

It was our cultural experience for the day that is for sure. It was a Holiday Dance Party but they sang Hanukkah songs in Spanish, sang Spanish Christmas songs, sang 2 Christmas songs, Korean Songs, Arabic songs (which were our favorite honestly) and some others as well. It was a very good concert. Dan Zanes came down the aisles to dance with the kids but Adam was a little freaked out, I think it was the hair. And Van fell asleep for the last part of it. Poor little friend. But it was a great day, Van's first trip to the city, and I hope to go again sometime.

Cookies for Santa

I guess I uploaded the pictures in reverse order! Oh well. This is going to be a two fold post, one about the things Adam and Van left for Santa and then just Christmas food in general. The above picture show the things they decided to leave. My snack cabinet has gotten a little out of control. I decided to clean it out and in the process, wanted to get rid of all these Halloween popcorn balls from the Halloween party. They were sitting on my counter and when Adam saw them, he decided Santa wanted one. Also, he said that Santa had a lot of reindeer so he needed a lot of carrots. I thought it was pretty cute. Chip wrote a letter to the boys from Santa that morning.

Do you have any foods that just seem to be associated with Christmas? I do. As long as I can remember we used to have breads and fruit cup growing up Christmas morning. My mom made a lot of breads, cranberry, banana, date and nut, zucchini, and fruit cake to name a few. I made the zucchini, cranberry and banana now because that is what I like to eat. And before Christmas dinner we also have fruit cup, that consists of fresh grapefruit, oranges. bananas and grapes, and then canned peaches, pineapple, and apricots. I realized that I really enjoy it and look forward to bringing some home after Christmas to have with my breakfast each morning. I just ate the last of it last night. Some other foods that mean 'Christmas' to me are fudge, and balsamic pearl onions. The onions are a recent side dish from Martha Stewart, maybe the last ten years or so and then fudge ever since I can remember. It is funny to me though when you talk to people what their favorite holiday food is. I think it has to do with how you brought up and what your memories are.

Christmas

Here are just some fun pictures of Christmas. I love the one above of Adam looking at the Christmas tree- with Elmo of course. If you notice, it is still dark outside. Chip actually woke the boys up. He had to work that morning at 7:00 am and since he has switched barracks, and is working out of a smaller one, he can bring the car home. He brought it home Christmas Eve and then just got dressed in the morning and 'called in' that he was working, but still needed to be ready in case he did have to leave. He woke the boys up at 6:30 so in case he had to leave, at least we had a little time before he was really 'on'. But anyway, it all worked out.

I also love the pic of the boys by the tree. They look so big unfortunately but I think they are just adorable. We did Christmas at our house in the morning and then were at my mom's by 10:00 am. My in laws go there as well so it really works out perfectly.

I was writing on facebook, if you ever want a truck that doesn't have the million things that tie it down into the box, look at Bruder trucks. They are made in Germany, I got them off of Amazon and I thought a few days before, if I want them under the tree just sitting there, I better get them out of the box NOW knowing how long it would take. But, they just slipped right out. Everything else pretty much needed a screwdriver or scissors or something but not these babies. I kinda found that Van would open the present, get excited and then realize, it is going to take mom 10 minutes to actually get to it!

We had a wonderful day though. And next year, we'll have another one opening!

Cruise

We just got back from a 9 day cruise to the Caribbean. We left out of Bayonne, NJ so we didn't have to fly and we took Adam with us. It was a very relaxing time and it was great to have Adam with his. We didn't really miss a beat, we went to the main dinner that we usually go to and went to all of the shows as well, having him with us was really no different than going by ourselves. If we had Van with us though,, that would have been a different story, as much as I love him and did miss him, it wouldn't have been the same experience at all.

It was different cruising down as opposed to flying. When we fly down, we hit the warm weather right away. This time we didn't hit warm weather until the third day and then had 2 days of cold weather on the way home as well. There was a lot to do on the ship though, we played mini-golf and went ice skating and went in the hot tubs as well.

They have this kids program on the ship and it looked really really cool. It is sponsored by Crayola and there were a lot of different things to do every day. Call us crazy, but we weren't about to leave our three year old with a bunch of strangers that we would never see again, whether they 'had college degrees in Political Science' or whatever you want to say, we weren't risking it. So I go to sign him up and tell the lady, I want to stay with him when he does the activity or whatever is planned for that hour (even though the program went all day) and she said, oh, this is a drop off program, you can't do that. But you can stay with him for a few minutes until he feels comfortable though. But of course I didn't, that wasn't the issue. If someone came to the house right now to take him, he would go, he would have no problem staying there, it was the issue we had with him leaving him. So he hung out with us the entire time, and he was happy with that anyway, he didn't know what he was missing.

We went to Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, Dominican Republic and Haiti. Each island was more beautiful than the next honestly. We went to the beach at each of the islands except Puerto Rico because we were really only there for the evening. The beaches were beautiful and it was hard to remember it was December. At Haiti, Royal Caribbean owns like a beach or something, so we got off the island and it was only our people from our boat, lunch was set out for us, and they had a little water park you can see me and Adam standing at. That was our favorite island, it was so nice that they did that.

Unfortunately there were a LOT of sick people on the boat. On the third day, Adam got a stomach virus with both ends of his body not functioning. It said in the book, if you have GI issues and don't notify the med department you can get kicked off the boat or something. So we thought, we better tell them, they made us bring him down to the office and then made us give him a shot so he would stop throwing up! We wouldn't normally do that, but it did work. His stomach still wasn't right for a few days but at least he wasn't throwing up. I ended up getting it on the last day of the trip and still have it a little bit, just not the throwing up part. But I guess it is a virus and just has to run it's course.

We did have a good time though and couldn't believe all the snow when we came home! We ate and relaxed a lot and now are ready for Christmas!!

Christmas Crafts

don't worry, Adam does have 5 fingers on each hand, he just got a little carried away with the scissors

Just a fun photo of Van being crazy with my strainer on his head

http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/

I know I have mentioned the above website before but I just want to mention it again. I try to check this blog out everyday, she always has a craft and a book to go with it and sometime a song. I don't do the crafts everyday but I have been doing a few lately. We did one a few weeks ago that was a turkey and it was made of a paper plate cut in half. Last week the boys made these reindeer hand prints. If you scroll to the bottom of the site, you will find them. She has a cute snowman on there too, I just don't have any glitter. And today we are making the bow Christmas tree. Van loves to paint and apparently, this woman does as well because it seems like almost every craft involves painting. I guess you don't have to do the paint but I know the boys enjoy it. It's just quite a clean up process for me. And my paint is gummy, I need to get some more. I realized that we don't have any green because we made a frog puppet this summer and used it up, so I mixed blue and yellow. Our painting projects are drying right now because it is nap time, but when the boys wake up, we'll start with the bows.

Advent Calendar

Sorry about the lack of blogging. I haven't been taking too many pictures lately, and we haven't been too busy. My plan was to go to this winter wonderland last night and I was going to take a bunch of pics of the boys and post about our experience. But a friend told me that it wasn't worth the hour and a half drive, and it was supposed to snow anyway. Most of you know that we are going on a cruise on Friday. I will be sure to post that. But I am really bummed that I have no pics of the boys and Santa Claus. Van has his little social schedule when we are gone and has plans to see Santa at least three times. I packed all his Christmas outfits today for my mother in law. I doubt I will post pics of him though because I have people taking them for me. I am REALLY REALLY hoping that Santa will be on the cruise ship and Adam can chat it up with him.

Anyway, I want to share with you about this advent calendar. We always had an advent calendar growing up, it was paper and you would open a little door and there would be a picture. I remember my brother and I taking turns every other day opening the little window. Well, my mom got this Advent calendar for the boys a few years back and I LOVE it. Here is the website below if you are interested:

www.constplay.com

And they have lots of cool toys too, I did a lot of ordering for the boys last year for Christmas out of the magazine, I LOVE the playdough thing they have too.

Anyway, I really like how this Advent calendar shows the true meaning of Christmas, and you can use it from year to year. Every day you open a little box and there is something magnetic that you stick to the scene, whether it be a star or a sheep or whatever, and then on Christmas, it's baby Jesus. It's good quality and Adam loved doing it last year.

With that said... we aren't doing it this year!! Two reasons we aren't going to do it: number one, we are gone 10 out of the 25 days and I don't' really want to come back and throw 10 magnets on there, and I like the idea of Adam knowing what day of the month it is too. And the other reason is we are going to do our family Christmas the day afterwards and that will throw things off as well. Chip has to work Christmas day and I really want him to be home when Santa came the night before. So we will go to my parents on Christmas day, may say something like we forgot to put the cookies out or something and put them out Christmas night, and we will have the boys' presents under the tree the next day. They really won't know the difference.


But, if you are in the market for an Advent calendar, this is really one worth looking at.

The Sex of the Baby

Long short.... we don't know. But I will tell you the whole story. As I have mentioned before, this is my fourth pregnancy and with each pregnancy, I have gotten at least one sonogram per child, and usually more than one with each child. With this pregnancy, this is my third one so far. And I have to say this was the worst one yet out of all the ones I have ever had ever. We got this young tech which I thought was going to be great because I thought she would be all bubbly and happy which wasn't the case at all. We get in there and she asks me questions, tells me it will take about an hour also tells me that she is going to get the pictures she needs and then will show me the baby. So I thought, OK, she is going to look at the cervix like they usually do and then show me the screen as she is looking at the baby. No such luck. I asked her at one point if the baby was moving because I couldn't see the screen at ALL. She could have been looking at my gall bladder for all I know, I saw nothing. Oh, and before we started she said, do you want to know the sex of the baby and we said yes. So at one point she showed me the screen because the baby had hiccups, and that was cute. Then she continues on, Chip could see the whole thing from where he was sitting so that was good. And I guess I should have been more assertive and asked if I could see the screen a little, but I really didn't think she was going to do the ENTIRE exam with the screen away from me. But anyway, she asked me what we have at home and I told her two boys and she asked me what I think this baby is and I said, I have no idea, this is a totally different pregnancy and I asked, do you know what it is yet? And she said, no, I have an idea but I am not sure. So we continue on and she said, well, I am pretty sure it is a girl, I see no boy parts, but I can't get some readings that I need to so I will have you come back next week. Then she went on to do a few more things and we were done. Well, she then moved the screen to me and was like, ok here's the head, here's an arm, I was kinda like, c'mon lady, I can see that. And I said, OK, so I will come back next week then? And she said, oh, no, I got what I needed to get, and we were done. And I had to ASK for pictures of the baby, which I have never had to do before.

I WISH I would have said, so if you were me, would you go painting a pink room and buying new stuff? But I didn't think of that. And it makes me wonder, did she think we WANTED her to say girl because we have two boys or does she really think that? And I feel, just because you can't see the boy parts, don't necessarily mean they are not there.

So that afternoon I had my OB appointment and he had the results already and everything is completely normal, which is a blessing of course, everything is right on track, etc. So I was like, can you send me back for another ultrasound? And he said no, since everything is fine, you won't go again until the end of the pregnancy. I was bummed. I told him the story and I told him that I heard if it is a girl, you see three lines, it's not just not seeing the boy parts, and he told me I was right, it is like two hamburger buns put together. I went home and told Chip the story and he was like I totally saw hamburger buns, that is exactly what it looked like. But like we both said, why didn't the tech see that then? She knows what she is looking for. So I don't know what to do. Chip knows it's a girl. But of course before the ultrasound he also knew it was a boy. :) He tells me that this is God's way of not letting me go shopping. :) But if you know me, you know, I am totally ready to start looking at birth announcements, scrapbook pages, room decor and clothing. I like to be ready. And this sets me back. I sort of feel like it is a girl now. But then I think, what if I convince myself of that and then in like 3 months find out it's a boy. I will be totally shocked. I don't know how you people do it out there that don't know. But honestly, I would have rather her said, I really don't know, than, I am pretty sure but not 100%. It gets ya going.

So, I'll keep you posted, but that's what happened. Adam was soo excited to know too, but he just keeps saying, we don't know what the baby is.