Christmas!

We are having a really nice time this year trying to start some Christmas traditions for Joseph and his future siblings. As some of you know, I am a real stickler when it comes to Christmas traditions (and I am still a little sore at my niece Elena for ruining one of the big ones a few years back ... but she and I made amends today, as described below).

We started things off by decorating the house and watching "Joy to the World," which depicts the birth of Christ. Joseph loved it because it had a lot of animals in it. He'd "hee-haw" at the donkeys, "haha" at the sheep, and, of course, "kwok" at the hens.

Naturally, Joseph loves the tree and ornaments. At first I just put the non-fragile ones below, thinking he could play with them, but then he would nearly pull the tree over every time he'd try to get one (and he even broke some non-fragile ones). So our tree is now covered with ornaments on the top 1/3 and is empty below. Still, sometimes we let him, with supervision, remove and replace some of his favorites.

Joseph has learned to give kisses recently. Usually those kisses are reserved for toys, and now Christmas ornaments, instead of mom and dad.

I got a really cute advent calendar. You can't see it in the picture but it has a Nativity scene for background, and then a cubby-hole for each day with a magnetic piece of the Nativity (Mary, Joseph, animals, stars, you get the idea). So every night we read a scripture about Christ's birth and then Joseph gets to put one of the magnets on (and then mommy moves it to the right place -- Mary just didn't look that comfortable upside down in the sky).

Unfortunately, this tradition needs some fine-tuning because it usually ends in some tears when Joseph starts to get a little too rough with the calendar and we take him away from it.

We have a really cute Christmas book that we read every night. We need to get more Christmas books so that we can rotate, but Joseph doesn't mind the repetition.

After the advent-related tantrum, we get one of our non-fragile Nativities down for Joseph to play with. He likes putting baby Jesus in his manger and saying, "nigh nigh" and waving bye-bye. Then he tries to put the other figures in the manger, but they don't fit. Then he tries to stack the figures on top of each other, but they don't stack. Then he tries to put them on the roof of the stable, but they fall off. Usually eventually he starts throwing them, and that's when we put the Nativity back and prepare for some more tears. But he's very sweet (as usual) here.

Today we had the Braziers over to decorate gingerbread men. We didn't get many pictures, but the kids had a really fun time playing together. Joseph is finally old enough to really interact with Lena and Dojo, and he loved following them around. Elena was very good at decorating.