More to the story

There's so much want to remember about this Christmas (What? Christmas is long-gone and the last thing on your mind? Shocking!)

The way we made simple nativity scenes with the Activity Days Girls at church and Creed (forever thinking he is one of the 8 to 11 year-old girls) insisted on making his own (we only decorated the people and lucked out finding the stables at Target for $2.50)

 The way Creed's Mary looked starred eyed to say the least (I guess she just gave birthday afterall) and we carried those little people around all through the holidays.  I will forever treasure these sweet hand-drawn faces.

 The way Creed had to have this Rudolph hat, and I secretly had to have it too, because who can resist this?

 The way he proceeded to wear the hat all over.

 The way he was a dashing little wiseman in the live nativity at church

 The way it was the sweetest nativity I've ever seen.

 The way the reverence was smashed when they ushered all the cast onto the stage for a the last song and Creed desperately needed to use the potty.  I was wrestling with Ollie in the back so this is the only photo that we have, but oh, I wish you could have seen him hopping and holding his crotch through the whole song while earnestly singing with a look of desperation until Larry rescued him and ushered him to a bathroom the moment the song ended.

 The way both boys fell in love with their annual new Christmas ornament (Creed is oddly obsessed with the short cartoon Mickey and the Clock Cleaners, and watch are the chances we would come across this ornament?)

 The way he was not so thrilled in many of the holiday photos I took, and already has the look of a teenager obliging his crazy mom.

 The way Ollie knew which ornament was his and we found it in a new spot every day because he couldn't resist holding his Santa.

 The way the boys and I had a few adventures on our own like going on a scavenger hunt to find all the creepy elves around Gardner Village (Creed loved it so much that I swear he is already planning our trip back next year)

 The way their annual new Christmas books were loved to pieces.

 The way we came home with a million, zillion cookies that we planned to giveaway after my bookclub's annual Christmas dinner/cookie exchange and then we ate almost all of them ourselves.

 The way Creed glowed at his preschool Christmas program.

 And the way they still make four-year-olds sing the most random Christmas songs you've never heard of with a few classics mixed in.

 The way Creed was bursting with so much excitement as he left out cookies and milk for Santa that I thought he'd never sleep and he was out almost instantly.

 The way Christmas was on Sunday so we saw what Santa brought and looked through our stockings and then went to church without opening a single present and there were no complaints.

 The way Creed was thrilled to get exactly what he wanted.

 And ollie was happy to sit by bemused and not open a gift.

 The way we went to my parents' and met up with all my siblings families to open our presents and we could only get Ollie to open one.  After that if you approached him, he'd yell, "No presents, no!" and push them away so this bin of his gifts sat in our kitchen for the next two days until he got interested.

Christmas has always been a wonderful time of the year to me, but Christmas with kids is the best!

What I did wrong this Christmas

You know I love advent calendars.  This year we pulled out an advent calendar that I made a few years ago by adding numbers to a set of Ikea gift boxes and using command velcro strips to stick them on the wall in our entryway.

We usually just add a slip of paper to each day stating the Christmas related activity we'll do that day (drink hot chocolate and watch how the Grinch Stole Christmas, drive around the neighborhood to look at Christmas lights and leave an award for our favorite house, attend a live nativity etc.). After Christmas last year, I picked up a bunch of little Christmas things on uber clearance to put in our advent calender this year.  I had a few things that didn't make the picture, but I didn't have a trinket every day. Each box always had an activity listed in it (and i love having them in containers that I can sneak open and switch up, in fact, I filled each box the night before we opened it so I didn't have to worry about peeking) and sometimes it had a small treat or one of the trinkets.

 Sometimes the paper and trinket were just waiting in the box, but often Creed had to do some kind of activity to find it. Like follow quickly scribbled clues on a treasure hunt around the house to discover our activity for the day.

 Or follow a piece of yarn winding through the house.

 Which made it easy to gift items too big to fit in the box we opened that day.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't an epic fail, Creed loved the whole experience and was eager to open a box each day, and he was grateful and gracious and sweet, but the more I thought about it, the more I think I was going about things the wrong way.  Yes, it was fun, and I think Creed will remember it, but I think it set the wrong tone for our holidays.  There's already so much focus on the material side of Christmas, the last thing Creed and Ollie needed was to be getting more gifts each day up until Christmas.  How can I expect them to be focused on giving and to not have a case of the gimmes when I'm giving them gifts every day?  Ollie was oblivious and Creed actually handled things really well, but I think it would be so much better to put a part of the Christmas story in the advent every day or maybe every day should have some service or small item that the boys will have to help me figure out how to GIVE that day.  A few of the activities in the advent involved giving, like picking out toys for a sub-for-Santa program, but it wouldn't be hard to think of something small the boys could be involved in every day (Drive around on a cold day to find a Salvation Army beller ringer and drop off change and give the ringer some hand warmers, shovel a neighbors driveway, make teacher Christmas gifts, etc.). At any rate, it was sort of a missed opportunity to help the boys focus on the true meaning of Christmas, and I pledge to better next year.

I tell myself the boys are little and Larry and I have more time to figure out this parenting thing while they are too little to remember our mistakes very well, right?

Thursday night, we arrived home after a two week vacation.  I have way too much to fill you in on from the last month, but let's start with how we arrived home just in time for a snowstorm (finally, this has been such a warm winter). of course we had to build a snowman right away.  

 Creed has been talking to me about how snowmen come to life sometimes (maybe it was all those readings of Snowmen at Night by the Beuhners and The Snowman by Raymond Briggs).  So after our upside-down snowman melted, I snuck out and rebuilt him right-side-up.  Creed was amazed when he saw it.

That snowman is now surrounded by much more snow and I'm tempted to go out there and surprise Creed again by adding a snowdog.

Hello?

Dear readers,

Rest assured that I have not forgotten you, I've just forgotten where the charger for my camera battery is (or, more accurately, Mr. Oliver Danger decided to take the charger on a trip to a mysterious land and it has not returned yet). And what's a post without pictures?

We have all sorts of holiday loveliness and I pledge to share it with you when the new charger arrives, but I only got around to ordering it today so I'll see you back here in a week or two when it arrives!

Back to our regularly scheduled program

A week or so ago we headed out to pick up a Christmas tree.  We almost didn't buy one at all because Ollie is still at the age where Christmas trees pose a danger, and I drew a giant tree on a canvas in our living room so it feels festive enough, but it just didn't feel like Christmas without a real tree so we ventured out to find one.

Friends recommended Baum's Christmas Trees (1650 N. 1250 W.), a family owned business located right in their yard, and the trees were so fresh and cheap! (And I didn't know they still sold flocked trees like that. I haven't seen one in ages)

It was so fun walking around and we will absolutely buy our tree there next year.

This year, however, we headed to a different lot because Creed spotted some tiny trees on an earlier drive by and fell in love, and a tiny tree seemed like a good idea to us when keeping Ollie in mind so everyone was happy (the tiny tree actually cost about as much as a 6 ft tree at Baum's, which made me laugh, but they didn't have any that small at Baum's)

 So we found the tree that was just right for us this year.

 And as if the day wasn't filled with enough cheer, we ran into this site on our way.

 That's right, a race with hundreds of Santa.  It was awesome! We drove around the block and got stuck in traffic and it was totally worth it to watch the Santas for a few more minutes.

 Lighting and decorating the tiny tree was so easy that I might be tempted to buy a tiny tree every year.

All is Well

Thank you Secrets of a Stylist for the idea to make this map in our living room a little more festive!

Thank you so much for all of your prayers and support!  We've felt so much love these past few days and I'm happy to report, Ollie is back to his old cheerful self.

It turns out Ollie has Ketotic Hypoglycemia, which means that his liver doesn't fully function and provide him with the glucose he needs between meals so if his blood sugar level gets too low, his body goes into starvation mode and shuts down while he starts converting any fat he has stored, which was why he seemed comatose and also explains why he is so small so we'll be feeding him lots of small meals and loading him with protein before bed, and then we may have just a few of these episodes to deal with every year.  In extreme cases, some kids have to have NG tubes while they sleep, but we're hoping it doesn't come to that.  The good news is that he should outgrow it by the time he's five or six.  At any rate, his blood sugar can get so low it can cause seizures, but it's a totally different kind of seizure then he normally has so the two are completely unrelated, and it might just be the anti-seizure medication he was already on kept him from having seizures when we couldn't wake him up.  Crazy right?

In the meantime, we're supposed to do what we can to help this little guy build some fat up in his system.  My friend Kersten's dad just happens to be a pediatric endocrinologist who helped talk us through everything going on with Ollie and provided some advice to help him gain weight (Ollie is now almost up the the 50th percentile in height, but has fallen to the 3rd in weight and he can't keep a pair of pants on to save his life).  A few suggested changes for Ollie's diet: adding half and half to his cereal in the morning, adding melted cheese anytime he's eating vegetables, keeping brown gravy on hand to add to any meat that we can get him to eat, never giving him water to drink, and adding carnation instant breakfast to his whole milk which he will continue to drink well after the normally recommended age 2 cutoff.  

Things are going to be interesting around here, but this was actually the best possible cause of his low blood sugar that we could hope for and we're feeling pretty happy about the news.

We pause this program for a message

We're in the midst of embracing this holiday season around here, and I have so many fun things to share with you, but today all that is on my mind is this little guy.  Let's talk about how happy and friendly he all the time.

 And how adventurous he is.  He can NEVER be out of sight.  This week I told Larry that I needed to make a phone call and left him playing with the boys.  He had to answer a page and the next thing I know, I hear the sound of Larry's electric clippers in the bathroom and catch Ollie's hand just as he begins to shave his own head.

 What  fickle eater he is.  He doesn't have favorites and you never know if he will hate something he loved the day before. He would much rather survive on milk.

 How he still takes his little blanket everywhere he goes and cannot sleep without it.  When you pick him up, he will often pat your shoulder and explain, "Blanket!" reminding you to put in on your shoulder so he can lay on it and nestle his little forehead up against your neck.

 How he is always watching Creed, just like the the photo below, where he's watching Creed while snacking on a half eaten apple he picked up off the ground (Creed's friend Lydia had just dropped it, and I failed to snatch it from Ollie before the damage was already done. Yuck)

 The way he giggles with glee when you put him in a swing and begs to swing the rest of the day away.

 The way he grabs my phone at every chance and has filled it with funny self-portraits. It's pretty amazing how well he can use it.

 The way he adores Mickey Mouse and Elmo, and points to the computer, begging to watch Youtube clips of them, and he's so happy, how can you not loves those annoying squeaky voices?

 The way his seizures exhaust all of us, but most especially him.

The way he didn't wake up today.

Which sent us on yet another excruciating ER journey with him.  It has happened once before, but it was no less terrifying today, in fact, it was worse because it lasted longer.  To see him laying with his eyes open, not responding to anything, not moving, not speaking strikes a terror in me that I cannot begin to explain.  I spent hours wondering what I could have done wrong and feeling like I failed him some way.

The test results came back slowly one by one, each normal result leaving us a little more baffled and feeling a little more helpless until, finally, we got an answer, or at least a symptom; extremely low blood sugar.  Easy to temporarily fix, but very scary as we are now left to consider the possible causes.  The nightmares are cycling in my mind: hormone and pituitary gland problems, maybe.  A tumor secreting extra insulin, possibly.  Something in his brain . . . I try to remind myself, that it could all be nothing, right?

The ER doctor has probably been practicing longer than I have been alive and he has never seen a patient with provoked seizures like Ollie.  He said it makes him a zebra among horses.  This new problem seems to be unrelated so he said it makes him something like a rare subspecies of zebra.  The whole conversation I kept losing focus and thinking about how zebras are Ollie's favorite animal and how we just got him a new Christmas book about Ollie the Zebra.

So now we will head in for more testing and we will play the waiting game, and I stop trying to imagine the what ifs, and focus on how grateful I am to have Ollie the zebra in my life, walking and talking again. And I feel grateful to look around me to see Christmas everywhere, a reminder of another baby who lived at another time and provides much needed hope and peace.

Creed Finds a Place to Call His Own

Someone mentioned to me the other day that I've never shown Creed's room on my blog (so much for the home tour, I have yet to show you about half of our house).  Creed has one of the coolest rooms in the house architecturally, and we have big plans for it, but they'll have to wait until next year while we take care of more immediate needs.  I'm a little embarrassed that I've put so little effort into, but why bother for something temporary (and I must admit Ollie's room is much worse off at the moment).

Another reason that I haven't posted pictures is that with so many windows, it's really hard to take pictures in Creed's room so I hope you'll excuse the messy photos.

Welcome to Creed's room for now.

 For the past few years I've been picking up letters here and there with the hopes of someday spelling "abracadabra" on Creed's wall.  I know I could have easily gone on a site like Etsy and picked them all up, but the fun was in the hunt.  Most of them are vintage sign letters picked up from neighborhood consignment shops when we lived in Salt Lake.  The last letter that I picked to complete the collection was the letter A with wings, and it actually is a new letter from Etsy, but it was too amazing to pass up (You can custom order any letter in several colors at Edie's Lab. They were remarkably fast, and they happen to be having a holiday sale right now).

I'm not even sure how we ended up with The Cat in the Hat wall stickers, but Creed found them in a donation pile when we moved and begged to put them up in his room, which is fine for now.

 The original plan was to spray paint the letters in different gold finishes, but I ended up loving them just the way that they are.

In the corner we have the bookcase that my dad built to hold bedtime stories, which we are always rotating from our bigger library, and a rocking chair to sit in during the bedtime stories.  The map of the US is from a printer from our old hometown, Columbus, Ohio, These are Things and it looks like they just got in back in stock.  We've had this printing sitting around for a year and I'm glad we finally found it a home.  I'm pining away for a few of their other maps because they are all so cool.

 In the opposite corner is a shelf to hold Creed's toys plus a couple of odds and ends that I have yet to find a home for.

 And next to that is a whole wall of sliding glass doors with a balcony (did I mention that every bedroom in our house has a balcony and they all have big gaps at the that my children could easily fit under?  Yes, we keep those locked)

 The view is pretty amazing.  It's the best place to watch thunderstorms when they cross the valley.

 The wall next to that is basically covered in doors so it's not terribly exciting, but you can see our one splurge on this room, that David Trubridge pendant.  Luckily, we got it for an amazing deal and had out electrician install it when we were remodeling.

 My fingers sure hurt after putting it together, but I think it was totally worth it.

And that's Creed's room.  What do you think?