We then had pizza at Grandma and Gichan’s house once we were all done, and then came home to get ready for Santa’s visit!  But we allowed them to open one present.  The Webmaster grew up in a Christmas Eve family, where everyone opened their presents on Christmas Eve.  I grew up in a Christmas Day family.  So, since we weren’t with the Webmaster’s family, I let them open their presents from the Webmaster’s cousin Lolo, who sent us a package early.  The kids were dying to open them, mostly because they were among the few presents I’d actually put out under the tree.

Rerun had a little difficulty remembering what to do, but then he caught on.  Each of the kids got a new thermos from cousin Lolo and her family!  Ane got a Clone Wars one, appropriate for a “warrior princess,” as her Dad has taken to calling her.  Rerun got a Cars 2 thermos, which he loved.

And Tad…

Obviously, someone remembered what he likes.

Rerun loved his thermos so much that we couldn’t pry it out of his hands for the traditional “Christmas Eve in pajamas in front of the tree” picture.

The Webmaster took Rerun off to his crib, while Ane and Tad prepared their offerings for Santa.

Ane decided that each of them should pick one cookie to leave for Santa.  She picked the Peppermint Bark cookie, Tad picked the Gingerbread Bear, and Ane decided that Rerun would have chosen the Butter Spritz, since that was his favorite.

And then, with a last check on NORAD’s Santa Tracker to make sure they would be asleep by the time he got to the Seattle area (he was flying around Colorado when they headed for bed), it was time for sugarplums to dance in their heads!

Last night was our first annual church Christmas lighting.  Basically, a whole group of us gathered together to watch the Christmas lights switch on for the first time on the church building and sing a couple of carols.

The lights themselves aren’t that fascinating – just plain clear lights outlining the building’s roof line – but there’s a projector attached to what used to be the Barn (and is now called the “East Building”) that can project pictures right onto the front of the church building.

When Tad saw the projector, he got excited and said, “Oooh, the Bat-Signal!”  And then he saw the picture that was being projected.  It was a pattern of question marks, with the words “Why Christmas?” underneath them, with the date and time of our Christmas Eve service listed.  It’s all right there on the front of the building, which is pretty cool.

When he saw all the question marks, Tad sucked in his breath.  “The Riddler!”  he exclaimed.  Then he read the words “Why Christmas?”

“A riddle in the form of a joke!”  he cried.  Which is a line he lifted directly from the 1966 Batman film.

The Webmaster and I were too busy giggling and shaking our heads to try and explain this to anyone else who had been listening.

My word, this boy!  Well, at least I know what he will be saying every time we drive past the church in the dark.

First things first: get pumpkins prepped.  This means cleaning them out of seeds and gunk.

Tad was good for exactly three scoops with the spoon before he turned to me and uttered the magic words: “Mama, you do it.”

Once the pumpkin was cleaned out, a design needed to be chosen.  Ane found a jack-o’-lantern cat face that she liked.  The Webmaster decided to make a more traditional jack-o’-lantern face for Rerun’s pumpkin.  And Tad had already requested his design well in advance – so much so that I had come prepared with our own pattern.  Guess what it was.

I had gotten a stencil pattern from Google Images, and the rest is history.  Tad loved it!

Ane’s cat face turned out pretty well, too!

The Webmaster had traced the line at the top with black Sharpie, which, of course, does not come off the pumpkin… so he improvised and made a spider web pattern on the pumpkin lid.  Clever, right?

Rerun was given a pretty wide berth to run around and play – so much so that the Webmaster and I were constantly saying to each other, “Where did he go?”  Usually, we could find him quickly, but other times, we had to go looking.  And once we found him behind a table, looking for the best stuff.

He loved examining the candy, but it apparently never occurred to him to try and eat it!

There were several prizes handed out in all the age groups, and Tad and I won for “best mother and child team!”  I laughed when his name was called – I think it was because we came with our own design and it was an instantly recognizable one.  He was thrilled with the attention, and the goody bag of prizes.

One of the prizes in Tad’s bag was a Playmobil play set of two swimmer/surfer figures, with a surfboard and a jet ski.  Somehow, I think they will be ending up in a shark attack reenactment in our bathtub very soon.

And once we got home, the pumpkins went on the table for display – the better to keep little baby fingers out.

I rubbed all the exposed pumpkin flesh with vinegar (to keep them from spoiling quickly), and took this picture to always remember this year’s pumpkins.

I hope you enjoyed seeing them, too!

Did he want to stop when it was over?  Nope.  Who can blame him?

While the older two gathered eggs with the older kids, Rerun – who hates shoes, so I just pulled off his socks and let him go barefoot in the grass – was in the “under 2″ area, being initiated into the wonders of an egg hunt.

This included picking up the eggs…

… and seeing if they were edible.  I had to tell him that the candy was on the inside.

He was kind of uncertain about being outside and not in my arms, not to mention the bare feet.  I don’t think he moved more than two steps during the egg hunt.  He still came away with seven eggs – plenty for someone whose Mom won’t let him eat much chocolate.

It was a novel experience for a one-year-old.

Ane came away with double the egg limit (I made her put half back), and Tad got a respectable amount.  Since I don’t allow the kids to bring their good Longaberger Easter baskets to the hunt, I brought out the paper bags that we use each year.  This year, though, Ane and Tad decorated theirs with stickers that Nana and Papa had sent.  Ane had Disney Princesses, Tad had Batman.  And I threw in some shark stickers for him, too.  Rerun will have to decorate his bag in the years to come.

As you can see, Rerun was fascinated with these eggs.

And I took advantage of the sunshine to get one good picture out of them.

Then Ane went to a birthday party, Tad went for a haircut, and Rerun went for a nap.  It was a fun, beautifully sunny day.

It began raining that night.  Naturally!

It was actually kind of a quiet day… until I packed up Rerun, dropped him off at Grandma’s, and went to Tad’s school for his class party.  They joined the class next door for a large party full of crafts and fun, and it was nice to see Tad interacting with the peer model class.

Since the party was right at the end of the day, I signed Tad out and drove him to Grandma’s house, picked up Rerun and Auntie, and headed for home, where Ane had gone home with Little Mo after school.  We stopped at the entrance to our cul-de-sac to pick her up, and then once the Webmaster was home, we headed out early for our weekly small group meeting.  All the wives knew is that the husbands were plotting something.

However, a great big wrench got thrown in that something when the Webmaster got a phone call from the hosting house, saying that the power had just gone out.  Emergency plans began to be created, and the wives were sent off to get a pedicure at a nearby nail salon.

Small problem – the nail salon had also lost power.  Uh-oh.

We found another nail place that was open and had power much closer to my home (we were at the nail place in Canyon Park next to the QFC, for those of you in the know), and very close to the new location for dinner.  While we were getting pedicures, the husbands packed up the food and the kids (Auntie was with them), and drove to another family’s house to create dinner.  A house with power on.

When we arrived, Auntie had the kids finishing up a Valentine’s Day craft and the husbands were hard at work cranking out dinner.  By 8:30 pm, dinner was ready.  And it was yummy.  We gave them an “A” for effort, especially since they’d had to pack up and move the whole thing to a new house, so we excused the late dinner.  It was a fun time with friends, and we all ignored each other’s yelling kids.  It was late when we headed for home, but fortunately for us, home was less than 5 minutes away.  The Webmaster drove Auntie home (who had been paid well for her services) and I hustled the kids off to bed.  It had been a long day.

But it was one of the most creative and fun Valentine’s Day celebrations that I’ve ever had.

The preschool Nativity scene was, as always, full of cute kids in costumes who sometimes remember to sing.  And then there was Tad.

Tad was originally supposed to be a shepherd this year.  When the kids did a dress rehearsal on Saturday, he refused to be a shepherd.  “I wanna be a COW,” he told me.

Thankfully, there was a cow costume still available.  Tad was pleased with this turn of events, and had behaved beautifully for the rehearsal, singing and standing still on the risers with the other preschoolers.

Grandma, Auntie and I all feared the worst.  After all, the saying goes, “Bad rehearsal, good performance.”  What happens when you have a perfect rehearsal?

Tad, dressed in his cow costume, stood up on the platform with the other kids with Auntie sitting beside him (and holding his hand, she told me later), and actually attempted to sing the songs properly.  He was distracted by the shadow that his cow ears and horns were making behind him, but fortunately, he didn’t start making shadow puppets like last year.

However, he was totally into his role as a cow.  During a break in one of the songs, he turned toward the audience. “MOOOO.”

The audience broke into laughter.  The Webmaster, who was filming this with our video camera, was laughing so hard I’m sure the video will be shaky.

I have a method actor for a son.  Why am I not surprised?

Here’s what mine ended up looking like:

The recipe uses a pound cake – probably to make the color separation a little easier to achieve.  The batter is split and tinted with food coloring, and it uses orange extract as a flavoring.  The frosting is a vanilla buttercream.

The cupcake needed the frosting, because the pound cake was kind of dry.  The buttercream was very rich and tasty, which helped.  I don’t think the orange extract really worked, because “orange” is not the flavor I associate with candy corn.  But it wasn’t bad tasting, it just wasn’t great.

The batter was layered – this made it very labor-intensive – and then turned upside down to frost and serve.  It’s supposed to invoke the look of a triangle of candy corn.  I think the cupcake would work better as a mini cupcake, because it would look smaller and be bite-sized, which is what the candy is supposed to be like… but the work involved to make this as a mini cupcake blows my mind.

Regardless, I baked them, frosted them, and took them with me to small group last night.  I had also made chocolate cupcakes and brought a dozen of those, since this recipe only made 16 cupcakes, and the Webmaster and I had to test one before it could even be frosted to make sure it was okay and check the colors inside.  All the kids at small group were clamoring to have a cupcake, but we held them off until the end of the evening.  Auntie is our group’s babysitter, so she was watching the kids (there were nine kids downstairs and three little ones upstairs) in the downstairs family room.  As I walked into the room at the end of our meeting, Tad and one of the other boys had just bonked their heads together while they were running around.  Tad, typically, just rubbed the sore spot and said, “Ow, my head,” and kept going.  That boy has a skull made of steel.  The other boy, P., who is in his age group, was in tears over the collision.  Auntie, who had witnessed the whole thing and knew it had just been an accident, was working on consoling him when I came in and announced, “Cupcake time!”

You’ve never seen a room empty so fast.  Auntie commented, “I’ve never seen P. dry his tears that fast.”  He had gone past me yelling, “CUPCAKES!!!”

All the kids picked their cupcakes and tore into them – except Tad.  I had a gluten-free chocolate cupcake for him, but I’d frosted it with the vanilla buttercream and stuck a candy corn on it (all the cupcakes had candy corn on them, even the chocolate ones.  I know what matters to kids).  Tad sits down, gets his cupcake unwrapped, and then takes his time to enjoy it.  While the other kids are gobbling their cupcakes up, he is positively savoring each bite.  I’ve never known a kid to do this, but Tad does.  It takes him at least twice as long as the other kids to eat his cupcake.  I love baking for him, even if it is gluten-free.

So, while it was a lot of work, the Candy Corn Cupcake was a hit with the kids and adults, even if it wasn’t the best tasting cupcake ever.  More experimenting is definitely called for, don’t you think?

Today will be all about Rerun.  He has a regular doctor’s appointment in the afternoon, once Tad has gone to school, and then we have a late visit to Children’s Hospital planned.  Rerun is taking part in a medical research study through the University of Washington, which includes an MRI.  So, I will be spending the evening/night at Children’s – there are three hours blocked out for this MRI.  The goal is to get Rerun to sleep through it, which is why it’s scheduled for late at night.

Tuesday is Tad’s school pictures, so I must try to dress him nicely (I gave him a haircut on Saturday) and hopefully he doesn’t look too banged up.  His black eye is pretty much gone, thankfully.  Immediately after school, Ane has piano lessons with Friend.  Yes, we’ve started piano lessons.  Ane had been begging to start for a while, and her first lesson last week didn’t dampen her enthusiasm.  And right after piano lessons, Ane has a haircut scheduled.  Because….

Wednesday is Ane’s picture day at school.  She’s had her outfit picked for weeks.  And Wednesday is also the beginning of the Awana programs at church – Tad will begin another year of Cubbies, and Ane will be in her second year of Sparks, the Webmaster resumes his duties as sound guy for the older kids, and I resume my crafting with the Cubbies.  Rerun is going to spend time in the nursery this year.  Tad finished his first Cubbie book over the summer, and he already has the first verse of the new book memorized and ready to recite.  I think this year will be a good one for him.

Thursday is my only “free” day.  And now something will probably pop up.

Friday is Tad’s therapy day – speech and behavior – so that eats up most of the day.  But I have book club that evening – finally, something for ME!

As I said, this week is crazed.  Anyone want to trade?

*deep breath* … Here we go!

This year, though, we managed to compensate for the fact that she wouldn’t be in school.  Her friends Gracie and L., who left two years ago, along with their mom and dad, to be missionaries in India, are back on furlough and in the area.  So we made plans for the dads and the kids to go and see Despicable Me at the movie theater while the lovely Mrs. K. and I took Rerun with us and went shopping and browsing.

From all accounts, the movie was a total hit with the kids and the dads.  Shopping, with a stop for coffee along the way, for me and Mrs. K. was a wonderful and leisurely way to spend the afternoon.  Rerun was the perfect shopping companion, and eventually fell asleep in his stroller with a blanket tucked around him.  Did I mention it was pouring rain?  But this is the Pacific Northwest!  Who needs an umbrella?  We had rain jackets!

After the movie, the whole group came back to our house, but Ane asked if Gracie could ride in our car.  L., not wanting to be left out, asked to come in our car, too.

This was the scene in the backseat of our minivan:

I caught Gracie mid-word when I shot this picture, so I took another one:

But the first shot was better of L.  You just can’t win!  But you can see the rain pelting down on the back window.

After some time spent playing at our house (the girls retreated to Ane’s room to play, while I brought out Tad’s Star Wars LEGO sets for him and L. to play with – L. was thrilled), they had to leave, with the promise to come back and play again soon.

This has been such a fun experience for Ane – it’s been two years since she’s seen these friends, and yet she hadn’t forgotten them.  And they hadn’t forgotten her or Tad, and now there’s our sweet little Rerun, who Gracie thinks is so much fun.  Mrs. K. is pretty smitten with him, too.

So, even though our Labor Day was very wet and rainy, it was a whole lot of fun.  And not once did Ane complain that she missed school.  She was having way too much fun to miss school this time.