Here are all of our pictures from last month (except the ones from Christmas – I’ll do a separate post for those).
I’m sure you will not be surprised to see that Henry chose to start the month out with a puzzle. I love this picture of him, with the morning sun shining through the window, making him look like a little puzzle angel.
Lizza was busy working on her headstands: 
And here is Cynthia playing with dinosaur magnets with Henry (we never use our fireplace for actual fires, so it’s a great magnet spot). Cynthia went through a bit of a leg-warmer phase – she always wanted to wear some, and she preferred them on her arms and her legs. 
All the better to keep her properly warmed up while she does her exercising:
Other cute things Cindy did in December:
Pushed various toys around in her stroller: 
Decided to help out more around the house:
She knows where the cloths are in the kitchen, and she loves to get them out and start scrubbing the floor or the barstools. I think it makes her feel like she’s a big kid.
When she wasn’t hard at work she just stood around being cute: 
Or cuddled up on the kitchen floor with her blankets and a bottle of warm wassail when she was feeling sick with a sore throat:
She also learned a new trick that is only a tiny bit cute, but mostly dangerous and a big hassle because now that she knows how to get up on the table she climbs up there maybe a hundred times a day:
I don’t take pictures of it anymore.
When she gets to be too much trouble I just put Lizza in charge of her, and then everyone’s happy:
I have realized I rely a lot on my older kids to help out with the younger ones. I am lucky to have such good helpers.
In other exciting December news, Henry managed to get a little toy hand stuck up his nose. This was a first for me in my 11 years of parenting. It was way too far up for me to get it out myself (even after trying all sorts of crazy methods found on Google), so I took him to his pediatrician. She couldn’t get it out either, and while she was trying he was screaming and he snorted it even further up his nose, so we couldn’t even see it anymore. We got an appointment with an ENT specialist down in Austin later that afternoon, but after he looked up there and saw where it was, he thought it was too far up to get it without causing damage, and he thought it would be too hard to keep Henry still enough. He suggested bringing Henry in to surgery the next morning and having him put under. I really did not want to do that, especially after I found out it would cost us around $1000. I said a prayer and called Daniel and he suggested bribing Henry with Legos. Turns out that was a brilliant idea – I told Henry that if he could stay completely still and not wiggle or cry at all while the doctor tried to get the hand out then he could pick out whatever Legos he wanted at Target. He was super excited about that plan – his eyes got really big and he said, “you mean my very own Legos, and I don’t even have to share them with the kids?” When he sat down on my lap to get ready for the doctor to try to get it out, he beamed up at me and said, “Mom, this is such a fun day!!” Ha. The nurses and I held him down and the doctor stuck a big clamp way up in his nose and Henry did not even flinch! I don’t think he’s ever sat that still in his life. The doctor yelled out “I got it!” and I was so relieved and glad that I had insisted he try instead of scheduling the surgery. Henry immediately hopped up and said, “Now can we go get my Legos?”
We stopped at Target on the way home and he picked out his very own Star Wars set:
The hand: 
After that we started getting ready for Christmas. Sometimes I think my favorite thing about Christmas is that it makes the whole month of December exciting.
Remember last years’ nativity picture with our cute little newborn Cynthia as baby Jesus?
I attempted it again this year, and quickly discovered that the difference between Cynthia being baby Jesus last year as a 1-month old and this year as a 13-month old is about 80 more picture attempts, most of them looking like this:
At one point she was replaced by a much more well-behaved baby doll, but I decided that wasn’t quite as fun.
We kept trying and finally came up with one that worked. 
Maybe next year I will have Cynthia be a donkey and then she can be as wild as she wants.
The cutest angel ever: 
A very patient Mary: 
And a runaway baby Jesus: 
She’s grown up so much! 
Other fun Christmasy moments:
When Henry wasn’t laying around looking at the Christmas tree lights or playing with nativities, he was singing Christmas songs. He took a particular liking to the Little Drummer boy song. Here he is dressed up in what he thinks is a superb cowboy/drummer boy outfit, complete with a set of tupperware drums and a sword (the only thing he’s missing is the pants!) 
I was lucky enough to catch a performance. Cutest thing ever.
These next two pictures have nothing to do with Christmas. This is called “The Ball Game”, and Daniel has played it with the kids since they were really young. It involves Daniel getting a huge bucket full of balls (he tries to only get the softer kinds) and then the kids stand by the door and he stands way down the hall and throws balls as hard as he can at the kids while they try to dodge them. I’m not sure how the point system works – it changes a little each time they play.
I love the looks on their faces as they try to dodge:
To make up for the lack of snow here in Texas, we made lots and lots of snowflakes and hung then up above our kitchen table. It almost felt like winter. 
Rachel really wanted to learn how to sew over Christmas break, but unfortunately she has the wrong mom for that (I have no sewing machine or sewing skills). My sister gave me the idea to cut out a little stocking shape and let her stitch it together, and she absolutely loved it: 
We also got out some Christmas puzzles to work on as a family over the break:
I love this picture of Henry. A puzzle challenge unlike any he had seen before! It was almost more than he could bear.
The kids love playing this Christmas game every year (and there are fewer casualties than with the ball game). I draw Christmas pictures and they dance around to music until it stops, and then we pick a little picture out of a bowl, and whoever is on the matching picture gets an m&m. (so I guess it’s like a cakewalk only with m&m’s for prizes).
I love how the dancing around in a circle gets wilder and goofier as they go along:
In this next clip Daniel decides to make things more interesting by offering $1 for the prize instead of one m&m, and then, just because he loves messing with the kids’ heads, he says the next person to win gets $100 which of course isn’t true, but Tristan perks up and says, “Are you serious?!”, and it’s just like in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation when Clark says something about Santa Claus coming and his brother Eddie (an adult) believes him and is like, “Are you serious, Clark?”
And the funny thing is that when I tactfully changed the grand prize to 5 m&m’s instead of $100, the kids seem just as happy with that idea.
Since all the kids were home from school and I had a huge mountain of laundry to fold, I decided to have a laundry-folding party, but it somehow turned into a “let’s take pictures while we jump over this huge pile of clothes” party.
The clothes did eventually get folded.
A few days before Christmas we bundled everyone up to go down to Austin to see the trail of lights at Zilker Park. We’ve gone before and the kids loved it – you can walk along a trail through the park and see thousands of Christmas lights in different fun arrangements. I had read on the internet that the lights would turn on at 6:00 pm, so we made sure to get there a few minutes before 6:00. We walked over to the big Christmas tree made out of lights where the trail usually starts, and then waited and waited. No other lights came on. I finally asked someone about it, and they said, “oh, they decided to not do the trail this year – it’s just the Christmas tree.” Whoops. We were pretty bummed, but we decided to pretend it was a big adventure, and of course all adventures end well if there is ice-cream involved, so we started driving around Austin looking for a good ice-cream place.
All’s well that ends well, and frozen custard at Freddy’s was a pretty good end to our adventure:
The next day was Tristan’s 11th birthday. Tristan loves Mexican food, and he decided that he wanted soft tacos for all three meals on his birthday. We settled on breakfast tacos in the morning, quesadillas for lunch, and dinner at Maudie’s (our favorite Mexican restaurant).
Here is the big 11-year old helping to make the breakfast tacos:
His birthday present this year was going to the BYU/UT football game, and he didn’t mind not having any presents to open on his birthday, but just for fun I let him open up some games that I had gotten for the family for Christmas: 
We also got two huge boxes later that day from Grandpa Darcy with all the kids’ Christmas presents and a birthday present for Tristan, and everyone was super excited about that: 
Everyone gathered around Tristan’s new Legos:
Tristan put together this little Lego movie that afternoon. I don’t know how he knows how to do stuff like this:
Henry showing his excitement about all the new presents:
He was so excited he felt like he should suddenly go dress up like a crazy army Batman sock monster:
All the kids at Maudie’s for Tristan’s birthday dinner:
Tristan always chooses pie on his birthday instead of cake (actually this year he said he was fine with just having some ice-cream cones instead of cake or pie, but I convinced him that it would be fun to be able to blow out some candles): 
The next day we let the kids bring down all of their Legos into the kitchen to set up a huge battle (they like to do this about once a year): 
More Christmas singing (and puzzling) from Henry. I guess at some point I should teach him the words:
By now the older kids were mostly puzzled out, but Henry, Lizza, and I worked faithfully on this one:
We finally finished it on Christmas Eve, and they were pretty happy:
The end.
