Another Merry Christmas In the Books

This year we had 5 Christmas gatherings in just 9 days. Yes, FIVE! The Christmas madness included the following: 1) Lageschulte's in Storm Lake 2) Mark, Angie and Elliott's in Kansas City 3) Currie's in Odebolt 4) Lorenzen's in Ida Grove and 5) Scheonherr's in Ida Grove.  We had an amazing time seeing all the family and we can now successfully mark another great Christmas in the books!

 

Lageschulte Christmas 

Sharing apples...kind of

Coloring with Pops

Family Picture

Someone loved their book

Bedtime reading

 

Family Christmas

We decided to start our own family Christmas tradition this year.  We went to our church's Christmas Eve service for the first time since we have lived in Kansas City.  It was amazing and surprisingly Elliott sat relatively quiet through the service.  We picked up Chinese on our way home, of which Elliott ate only two bites so we ended up giving him cereal.  So much for our idea of creating a family tradition of Chinese food on Christmas Eve.  We made cookies for Santa, Elliott opened his Christmas jammies, and then he was off to bed.  Apparently Elliott knew Santa was coming and just couldn't wait to open gifts, so down the stairs we went at 5:30am!  After opening presents we were of to Iowa again.

 

Peanut butter cookies, because that's the only recipe Mom had all the ingredients for

Someone was pretty excited for his Christmas jammies

Cookies and milk for Santa

Taking inventory of all his loot

 

Currie Christmas

 

Reading his new "Harvest Book" that Grandma made for him

Playing guitar with Uncle David

The boys got out their old farm set and Elliott was in heaven 

I sure hope he gets the Currie music gene

 

Reading with Great Grandma Olympia....Priceless!

Schoenherr Christmas

Classic...Addison mad because Elliott won't sit still

Monkey See Monkey Do

Someone got a lot of trucks and tractors for Christmas

 

Friends' Christmas

The girls all came over for a little Christmas gathering and brought their families this year.  It was a fun, crazy time with two toddlers running around the house all night.  No longer can we sit down, sip our wine, and talk about what's going on in our lives at that time.  It's interrupted with diaper changes, food throwing, and crying because someone took their toy.  Holy cow...our lives have changed so much!  But I love my girlfriends so much.  They keep me sane and give me an outlet when I need some time away from busy life of being a working mom. 

 

Umm excuse me...you have your own veggie sticks

Loved having everyone together...the only one we were missing was Megan's boyfriend, Zach

Angie, Leigh, Laura (and baby Bentsen due to arrive in April), Jamie, Megan

The boys spent most of the night in the toy room

19 and 20 months

I realize that I forgot to do a 19 month post so I'm going to cheat and do 19 and 20 months together.  Mark and I went from saying "I could take this age forever" to "Holy Crap, I want to pull my hair out." Elliott started to comprehend more things which was really fun for a while.  But as his comprehension grew so did his frustrations when he didn't get his way.  Maybe this is just the terrible two's early?  On top of that we went through an almost 8 week sleep regression which brought about 2 hour stints of being wide awake in the middle of the night.  YIKES!  But, the light is at the end of the tunnel.  Elliott is now over the sleep regression and now that he's getting more sleep the whining has subsided, at least a little. :) 

Aside from all that, Elliott continues to amaze us every day.  His list of words continues to grow.  He now says mom, dad, ball, up, hot, bottle, baby, duh-ah (tractor, or really just any vehicle), more, hat, apple, doh (go), no, wow, duck, and bat. We also found out this week that Elliott can point out most of the objects in his color book when asked.  This really amazed us because just last week he wouldn't even point to the basketball on the page.   

Love to read!

Eating a whole 6 inch sub. Yes, the whole 6 inches!

One of many wrestling matches with cousin Addison

Story time with some of my coworker's kids

 

Thanksgiving

I had to work on Friday this year so we stayed in Kansas City to celebrate Thanksgiving.  Grandpa John and Grandma Laurie came down for a couple of days.  We really didn't do much but eat, watch football, and do some Gray Thursday and Black Friday shopping.  Elliott was just getting over a 4 day stomach bug so he didn't even get to partake in the wonderful food.  Darn!  

Playing tractors with Grandpa.  I promised I wouldn't share this pictures because Grandpa is driving a green tractor, but the pictures is so adorable!

I wonder where Elliott gets that sitting position from?

Morning playtime with Grandma

Elliott's very first gingerbread house

So hard to get a good picture with Elliott

Sleeping Positions

I'm always amazed at the sleeping positions of some kids, but this one really made me laugh.  Elliott is still going through his sleep regression, but I've been letting him cry for 15 minutes before I go back in the room.  Last night he got really quiet and I was so excited that he had fallen asleep. I was rejoicing that we had finally gotten over this yucky 4 weeks of needing Mom and Dad in the room in order to fall asleep!  I looked at the monitor and this is what I saw.

It's hard to see, but the little blob in the left hand corner by the battery sign is Elliott holding onto the crib rails.  He had fallen asleep standing up!  He has actually done this before, but he fell over about 30 seconds later and woke back up and started crying again.  This time he was actually sleeping like this for over 10 minutes.  I decided I couldn't resist and snapped a picture!

Fall

 

We took advantage of the 65 degree weather in the middle of November and raked the leaves this weekend... in our t-shirts.  We found leaves everywhere when we came inside, even inside Elliott's diapers!

 

18 Month Sleep Regression

I'm going to add sleep regressions to the list of "things experienced moms should tell new moms about."  Elliott has usually been a pretty good sleeper.  He started sleeping through the night around 9-10 weeks and has been a pretty good napper in general.  Yes, we've had our fair share of early mornings and short naps, but he's always been very easy to put down. 

Enter the "18 month sleep regression."  It hit us like a freight train.  Our baby went from falling asleep without a peep and within 10 minutes of laying down in his crib to absolutely refusing to let us leave his room.  We first tried the "cry it out" method since we were successful with getting him to sleep through the night with this method.  But we quickly realized that this wouldn't work after two days of crying through his whole naptime at daycare.  So, we've resorted to laying down on the floor next to him until he falls asleep.  I sure hope that all the blogs about 18 month sleep regressions are right and this only last 2-6 weeks.  We are entering week number 3 so cross your fingers!

Here's to hoping for some more of this....