Our trip this year was a little bit different, because we decided to travel a bit while we were there.  I joked that we were crossing the Great State of Tennessee, and we pretty much did.  We arrived in Nashville, spent a couple of days visiting with family, and then went to Gatlinburg with Papa and Oma.  After a few days in the Smokey Mountains with them we drove our way down to Chattanooga to visit with Donna, Brenda and Hannah.  Then it was back up to Nashville for a few days.  Yep, if you look at a map you’ll see that we criss-crossed the state.  I have a ton of pictures and a ton of stories, so I’ve broken up up the trip into a couple of different posts.

 

Sammy particularly loved Rosie the Pig.  At one point he took me to show me the pig and he just couldn’t stop staring at her.  He didn’t have the vocabulary to fully express himself so he said “It’s a pig!  Her name is Rosie!  She’s a pig!  She has… a face!”

I’ll wrap up with a few more pictures of traveling.  The kids did sooo well.  At home we keep a pretty tight ship with a fairly structured schedule and regular meals.  On the road it was much more relaxed – naps were caught as the kids sat still (usually in the car), meals were early/late or eaten in the car, bedtimes were late and wake ups were early.  The kids rolled with it.  Flight delays, no problem.  Head lice, no sweat.  Stomach flu, doesn’t slow us down.  

 

 

 

It’s that time again – where I give up all attempts to create a in-depth, humorous yet emotionally-resonant essay about the goings-on of the McPherson household.  And there are goings-on!  The goings-on go on with such frequency that I’m exhausted by the time the goings-on are in bed that I zone out rather than write.  So it’s the time when I throw a bunch of pictures from my iPhone on the blog, dig up some funny kid quotes from my Facebook feed and aggregate them all in the blog.  Family moments via technology.  Enjoy! 

An “instrument petting zoo” before a youth orchestra concert.

Me: That’s a really tall tower Sam. You’re a builder!
Sam: I am a master!

Sams’s current say of saying Good Night or Good Bye to anybody is “Bye-Bye! We’ll go to frozen yogurt tomorrow!”

Clare: “Mom, we are such good helpers!  What would you do without us?”

Clare: “I miss Sammy when I’m at school.  But he’s always in my heart.”

 While neither J nor I are particularly artistic or crafty but I can hold my own with preschool crafts.  The kids rarely go a day without coloring, painting, cutting and gluing or doing some sort of art project. 

Monday mornings have become the time when I let the kids get into the most complex, elaborate and messy projects.  They usually stay in their PJs and make a glorious mess creating art. 

Sam is still more interested in process than the production.  He wants to move the paint brush along the paper, see the paint mix with water in the cup, scribble crayons in big circles, and cut a hundred tiny cuts along the edge of the paper.  He doesn’t really care about the end result so much, but he loves the tactile experience of creating things with his hands. 

Clare is moving into phases of creating things and using them to tell stories.  It’s so fun to see what she creates.  Most of her pictures are of happy stick figures, holding hands in front of houses with lots of windows.  Every now and then she moves to a new subject and it’s always fun to see what she comes up with.  The picture above is an airplane (the big black lumpy thing) with colorful “attitudes” next to it.  On the back she drew a bunch of peace signs, to signify that the “attitudes” were happy ones. 

 

The artists, hard at work on new creations.

While I was gone J got a pretty bad cold.  On Thursday night he asked Clare to make sure to get herself dressed and ready for school in the morning.  On Friday morning he woke up a little later than usual and came out to the living room to find Clare completely dressed, Sam completely dressed (with a clean diaper), and both of them eating cereal.  Clare told J that she wanted him to sleep in so she got herself and Sam ready for school.  He told me later that he almost started crying right then and there he was so touched. 

I came home, of course, since even five-day business trips do end.  I came home to two children and a husband who were fine without me but were still happy to see me.  Oh, and a little girl with the stomach flu, which shortly turned into two kids with the flu.  OK, maybe they needed me after all.

Does this boy look like a baby to you?  Look close, maybe a little bit of chubby cheeks or wobbly posture?  No?  Yeah, I don’t see it either.  He’s 100% little boy with not an ounce of baby to him.  He’s all long limbs and talking back.  Of course it’s expected but let’s all pause a moment to mourn the loss of baby in the Mac House. 

…

OK, mourning complete.  Now we need to celebrate the little boy who has grown from that sweet, chubby little baby.  The boy runs through the house singing, he digs in the dirt, he sets up scenes with his animals and dinosaurs, he climbs to the top of jungle gym, he recites his favorite books to us, he describes his thoughts and emotions to us and thousands of other little things to show us his growth and development. 

It’s so fun to listen to his thoughts now that he has some vocabulary to share them with us.  Today in the car he looked a little sad.  When I asked him what the matter was, he said “I want to snuggle with my blanky.”  When we are out on a walk he often asks “what’s that sound?” or “what’s that I hear?”  I’ve started asking him what he thinks the sound is – on a hike he told me “it’s a dragon flying in the forest.” 

He doesn’t have his sister’s insistence on independence, but he is enjoying as he learns new skills.  He does know how to put on his coat via the good old “flip flop” method and his boots.  Sometimes he gets the details mixed up. 

We took the rail off his crib about a month ago, after witnessing some acrobatic escape moves.  He LOVES his “big boy bed.”  We don’t love it so much, since it means that bed time has become a muuuuuch more prolonged event.  We generally just leave him to his own devices following a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to what happens behind his door at bed time (until we hear things get really out of hand).  He gets creative with pulling out every toy in his room, climbing the furniture and sometimes staying up until 10 pm.  Eventually he’ll be done with this phase – right?

 One of the sweetest cousin moments that I’ve seen was at the community center a few weeks ago.  There is a train table that the kids all swarm around.  One little boy, who was about five, was intent on playing with the trains and pushed Maddy out of the way to get to them.  Maddy came up to Grandma and told her “the big boy pushed me.”  Grandma asked Clare to go and talk to him with Maddy.  Clare put her arm around Mads protectively and marched right up to the boy.  She tried for several minutes to catch his eye, intent on telling him that he had pushed her cousin.  The poor little boy wouldn’t make eye contact with our girls and eventually left the table and went back to his mom.  At that point we called off our very polite, but very insistent little crusaders. 

 We’re eagerly anticipating the arrival of the fourth musketeer, due to join the fun in June.  Clare has nick-named the lil’ guy Darget Ahhhh!  I’ve told her that JP and Debbie will probably name him something different when he’s born, but for now they’re very patient calling him Baby Darget for her. 

She has a great vocabulary but sometimes will make up words.  Often times the words make sense, they just aren’t typical grammar.  My favorite is when she describes a chilly day as “really brrr-ing cold!” 

 Over Thanksgiving we took Clare to see Frozen in the movie theater.  It was her first movie in the theater and she found it a little bit overwhelming and scary.  Honestly, I think we could have waited a bit but I thought that she would like it.  She talked about it for weeks afterwards, specifically the characters of Anna and Elsa and she regularly sang the songs.  I bought the soundtrack a few weeks back and we’ve probably listened to it 20 times since then.  She and I are a couple of musical theater peas in a pod.

So we went hiking, both in Bend and at Smith Rock State Park.  We went swimming at the Community Center.  We watched movies and read books.  We slept in, relaxed, and snuggled.  We cooked a little bit, ate out a little bit, and tried to recover from the whirlwind that was Christmas.  It was good.

Per Clare’s request, we did drive up the Mountain looking for snow.  At the very top we found a little bit of snow.  Just enough icy, crusty, old snow for the kids to stomp around on, leave footprints, throw snow (ice) balls and do a little bit of sledding. 

 Clare was especially happy.

We had a jam-packed Christmas around here, that apparently I didn’t feel much like putting up on the blog.  I’ll try to give the overview, but suffice to say it was a packed December full of Christmas preparation, plays and ballets, singing carols, presents, and family.  It was delightful, if tiring. 

We started the holidays with our usual tree-hunting at a local tree farm.  From the picture above it doesn’t look like Sammy enjoyed it very much.  I think he was just sad that we drug him into the trees when he wanted to pet the baby cows and pigs.  We had a great-grandmother, two grandmothers, a grandfather, and J and myself in attendance so someone was able to take him back to see the baby animals.  Ultimately, after choosing and cutting the tree, with Clare and Maddy’s assistance, we ended up with hot chocolate in front of a fire pit.  Of course the tree itself was quite a hit once we got it up in the house.  I dug through the ornaments to only put up the ones that I thought were unbreakable (I was wrong in the case of two ornaments).  The ornaments got moved around quite a bit, and I’m still finding them tucked under furniture and inside toy boxes. 

We started a new family tradition this year and Great-Grandma, Grandma, Clare and I all went to see The Nutcracker by the Oregon Ballet Theatre.  It’s a big production in the largest auditorium in town, with a full orchestra, and dramatic sets.  Clare was a bit overwhelmed by it, but settled in and loved it all the same.  She got a little wiggly towards the second act, but it kept her attention better than I thought it would.  She loved the dancing and still talks about the Sugar Plum fairy and “a girl like me but named Clara!” 

Of course Christmas means treats.  The kids and I made a gingerbread house (thanks Auntie Carrie!) and decorated Gingerbread house cakes made by Auntie Debbie.  Of course Grandma and Great-Grandma made plenty of cookies too.