T'was the week before Christmas and ...

I was wondering whether I should just skip this blog and go on but since I do this mainly for myself I really don't want to miss being able to go back to this in ... time.

Tuesday December 19 - well, actually the night before we got the phone call. Two of the children were suspected to have "pink eye". Since it is highly contagious there was no question about going to day care. James had arranged for a hike that morning but cancelled it. He decided there should be two of us. Good thing because we had all three and we had to be there at 6:45 am. Sarah and Wade had left us with their mini van with all the car seats so we could go to a playground. It was cold but the children enjoyed it for a little while.

Caleb enjoyed it when his brothers took a nap and he got all of our attention. We built the tower which was almost as tall as him. He stood proudly next to it.

Grandparents are allowed to use everything available for entertainment (only for a little while).

So cute. Almost time for the parents to come home.

Colin (the older twin by 5 minutes) is running all over already a while. Owen was a very fast crawler but was also pulling himself up on furniture and walking along that way, as long as he could hold on. This week he is taking his first real steps though. In the evening Sarah texted me these three videos (don't watch them, read more):

VIDEO A     VIDEO B     VIDEO C

Oh oh oh, I had wanted to combine the three clips into one as I had done before on uTube but guess what? In September they had discontinued Video Editor. How nice (sarcastic)! After wasting some time surfing the net I found a program so I could do it. 

Wow. If you are not proud of me I will be, ha-ha. Watch this:   VIDEO   (0:31)

This is something I saw on FaceBook and thought it is just so funny. We always have stollen all during Advent and until we run out after that. I think this is funny. German humor?

On Friday it is warm enough again to do a walk in my hiking sandals without socks. Nice!

James gave me an early birthday present.

Sunday December 24 - Since Sarah and Wade didn't seem to make any progress due to their oldest son being very excited about Santa coming soon, we asked whether he wanted to spend some time with us and picked him up.

What to do? Sarah had also given me some pants to fix so Caleb got very inquisitive about my sewing machine. We proceeded to make a card with fabric for his parents. He learned very quickly which button was doing what ... stitch backwards or forwards ... needle up ... needle down. He stitched around the two flowers to sew them onto the background having a really great time. Then he "wrote" to his parents on the other side.

James thought we should bake cookies but it was such a spur of the moment thing that I had no time to make dough in advance but we could quickly buy some. We used the alphabet and spelled the children's names. Caleb made sure that we also had the letters to spell S A N T A .

Before his nap time we brought him home ... with the cookies of course.

Just before getting back to our house James commented that we really needed to have some eggnog. We stopped at our Publix. While James went to the store next door to get the brandy to enhance the eggnog I walked back to the car. I could not resist taking this photo of the car with the reindeer on the roof. Now, that's the spirit.

And ... today is the last day of the Advent calendar. All 24 Chrismons in lace turned over. I will be happy to have a look at it for the next 12 days of Christmas.