Early December 2010

Adam and Derek look forward to opening the little boxes in their Advent calendar each day

Adam puts on his holiday apron and uses his holiday cooking knives to help Mom bake some cookies

Derek works on some holiday songs

Over at Helen's family for a Thanksgiving get together that was delayed due to sickness. Here Uncle Paul and Adam are getting ready to race.





Our neices Brooke and Lindsay







We bought Lindsay a holiday snow globe at Macy's On 34th street when we were in New York for Thanksgiving


Time to put up the Christmas decorations

Every once in a while Adam will get out all of his puzzles and put them all together. It takes many days. He calls it his "puzzle store". He puts out a little clock each day that says if the store is open or when he will be back.



Derek and Adam start getting their Christmas lists together. What a special time for a kid.

The boys leave crackers and water out at night to try to entice their elf, Tinsley, to come and visit

Snowed In

Helen was a mess not knowing if she was going to have to go to school or not. It had not started snowing yet and she was irritated. We were headed to bed and she was letting the dog out when she came back in and said it had finally started to snow. The boys immediately ran outside and we had almost 3 inches within an hour. We had fun staying up late watching all the weather reports from around the city.

In the morning Adam was so excited that he ran outside without a jacket. Helen had to call him back in to put his jacket on. He was all jumpy and with the veins in his little neck popping out he kept saying, "Mommy, hurry I have to go!"



Helen and I went on a walk to check things out

The kids had found a decent hill to sled on



Somebody started a snowball fight - me against all the kids









Lulu didn't like the snow. If had to drag my bare belly through it I probably wouldn't either.

The best part - warming up in front of the fire with some hot chocolate


















Adam called this neighbor's driveway his penguin slide



Derek talked Helen into sledding down with him






Derek and a friend from the neighborhood used the down time to work on their Italy project for school

We're back to our regularly scheduled programming after a week off due to the snow. We were just starting to get some traction after the Christmas break when the snow rolled in. It was fun for a couple days, but then we were ready for it to be gone.

My employer required everyone to work from home so it wasn't as carefree as it could have been. Along with the usual distractions, I was dealing with my compulsion to keep things reasonably ordered and with everyone home as well as all the neighbor kids running in and out - restoring order required fairly constant vigilence on my part.

Every canceled day brought new worrying from Helen about when she would have to make it up. It's been a long time since she had to go back to school after Memorial Day, but it's looking like that will be the case...and she's not happy about it.