The 10 Best Photos from Christmas

1. Sunday service the day before Christmas Eve was beautiful.  Besides the meditation on the true meaning of Christmas and the gorgeous Christmas music, the best part of the morning was dressing both of my kiddos up in festive, Christmas-y clothes!

2. While I cooked all morning for the big meal Chistmas Eve night, Shepherd played with play-doh and Christmas cookie cutters while Lydia observed closely.  They do a pretty good job entertaining themselves.

3. I'm a sucker for generational pictures.  Here's three generations of Pierce women in the kitchen!

4. A two-fer.  Everybody contributed something to the meal.  Here are a few of us working, and then to the right, the fruits of our labor.  It was tasty fruit.

5. This was my first year being Santa Claus.  I had a blast stuffing Shepherd and Lydia's stockings!

6. This was Shepherd's face at the precise moment that I told him Santa Claus had come the night before to fill his stocking.  He'd watched Santa Claus is Coming to Town enough times to know what that meant.

7. Shepherd got a tent from Mamm and Pap.  In this picture, he had managed to talk his dad into joining him in the tent.  He was obviously pretty proud of himself.

8. Nana made Lydia this hat.  Lydia + fluffy pink hat = cuteness overload.

9. This is the grandparents on Christmas morning.  I wish we could have all four of them every year for Christmas.  It was truly a wonderful holiday, and it was made special by each of them.

10. One last two-fer.  Ardmore had their first white Christmas since 1914 this year.  Here are some pictures of my guys taking advantage of it.  Shepherd really liked eating the snowflakes and ice cicles. 

I hope everyone had as wonderful of a holiday as we did.  Thank you to Nana, Papa, Mamm, and Pap for making it so much fun!

Sweet Lydia

Don't be fooled by her size or by the fact that most of her clothes are still 0-3 month sized.  This little girl is 5 months old today! 

After thinking about the passage of time and how she is rapidly approaching half a year old...

...she decided that it is all pretty awesome.

In fact, she rocks 5 months.

And for the record, those happy pictures aren't a fluke.  This kid is happy all of the time.  She probably got that from BJ (cue the laughter.)

To Potty Train or Not to Potty Train (yet)

Shepherd is getting to a phase where he doesn't want to lay still long enough to get his diaper changed, and I'm getting to a phase where I'm tired of wrestling him while simultaneously cleaning him and putting on a new diaper.  I've been hesitating to start potty training simply because a) the parenting books say to wait until a child is bothered by dirty diapers and can recognize the urge (the latter, yes, the former, not so much), and b) the average potty training age for boys in America is 39 months, so I'm not sure if trying it at 26 months would be premature and frustratingly futile.

With all of this information running through my head, I've basically been putting off the issue week after week.  However, something happened last week that has me seriously considering the issue.  It was early in the morning, and Shepherd was watching Dora the Explorer in the living room while I was nursing Lydia in mine and BJ's room.  Since BJ had gotten Shepherd out of bed that morning, Shepherd was in his diaper and nothing else (BJ does not understand the point in dressing our children, so he never does it. Ever. If our children have clothes, you can bet it was my doing.) 

So I'm nursing Lydia, and Shepherd runs quickly into the bedroom naked carrying his diaper.  He says, "Dipe-a, poopy," sits the diaper on the floor, and then starts running back down the hall with every intention to sit on the couch and resume watching Dora.  I quickly deposited a not-too-happy-to-be-interupted Lydia into her bed, and started chasing my dirty-bottomed little boy.  Thankfully, I caught him before our couch was defiled.  I carried him back to his room at arms lenth, cleaned him up, and put a new diaper and clothes on him.  When I laid him on the table, he looked up at me and said, "Thank oo, Mommy."  I'm not sure what I was being thanked for, but I'm glad the kid is polite.

With this memory all too vivid in my mind this week, I'm left to wonder if it is time to bite the bullet and potty train this kid.  To my dear readers, do you have any advice on how to potty train an ornery, 2-year-old little boy?  If so, please, I'm desperate.

Interacting with a 2-year-old

Shepherd: (in a loud whine) P-ease, p-ease, p-ease, p-ease!!!

Me: Can you say please nicely?

Shepherd (suddenly cool, calm, and collected): P-ease nicely.

The One Picture

With a baby, getting a good picture is a matter of random luck.  But every once in a while, you get a picture that perfectly captures the little personality you've been watching develop for the past few months.  For Shepherd, it was the below picture that I snapped during some family cuddling time on the couch.  Even today, this picture is still a perfect capture of Shepherd's joyfully and wildly mischievous nature.

Today, I got one of those pictures of Lydia.  Lydia is sweet and funny and she always leaves me suspecting that she knows something I'm not in on.  To me, this picture says it all:

How the Grinch Lost His Wife in an Outdoor Shopping Mall (and nearly his mind)

Before I begin this Christmas tale, here are a few things you need to know:

-Unless he is sitting in his desk chair buying computer parts, BJ hates all forms of shopping. 
-BJ hates moseying, meandering, or browsing in stores. 
-For BJ, Christmas shopping is simply a necessary evil.
-BJ does not know the difference between a Payless Shoes and a Nordstroms.  He is oblivious.

With that said, let me begin.  This evening, BJ and I had two errands to run: we needed to exchange a bad box of Christmas lights at Lowe's, and we needed to pick up a couple of presents at Stages, a clothing store in an outdoor shopping center near Lowe's.  We decided that BJ would drop me and Lydia off at Stages while he and Shepherd ran to Lowe's.  Unfortunately, we both forgot our cell phones, but we figured it would be easy enough for BJ and Shepherd to find us in Stages, a fairly small store.

So BJ dropped off me and Lydia in front of Stages.  We went into the store and started looking around.  Soon after arriving, Lydia started showing signs that she may not be up for shopping, but being the determined shopper I am, I started picking up items here and there.  Over an approximately 30 minute span of time, the little fusses started getting more violent.  It was getting harder for me to hold her and the couple of items I had, and I was starting to get looks, the looks that say, "Why are you subjecting civilized society to that child of yours."  All I could think was, "Where is BJ?!?"  Lowe's is literally right across the street, and he was doing a quick exchange.  And surely I couldn't be that hard to find in Stages considering it isn't a large store and I was carrying around my very own foghorn.  Eventually, I started apologizing to the people around me and explaining that I would have left already if only my ride had arrived.  Finally, I decided to check out the items I thought would work well enough (I could hardly think over the screaming) and stand outside.

Back up thirty minutes...
BJ and Shepherd dropped us off and headed straight to Lowe's where they quickly exchanged the lights.  They returned to the shopping center and went into the store to find us.  Soon after coming in, Shepherd, who BJ was holding, had a diaper leak causing his pants and, thus, BJ's arm to get soaked.  Between having urine on his arm and just generally hating being in any store whatsoever, BJ was very anxious to find me and Lydia as soon as possible, but he couldn't spot us anywhere.  After about twenty minutes of futile searching, BJ started asking store clerks if they had seen a woman with a baby.  No one had.  With his levels of anger, frustration, and anxiety about to shoot through the roof, he decided that he wasn't waiting for me in some stupid clothing store any longer, and he headed toward the Petco two stores down. 

Back to where we left off with me and Lydia...
So I checked out and walked out of Stages' doors.  As soon as I exited, I saw BJ walking down the sidewalk toward me.  It took about half a second of examination for me to see that steam was emitting from his ears.  When we got close enough to talk, BJ immediately dug in: "Where have you been?" I replied that I had been walking all over Stages with a crying baby and asked where he had been.  He angrily said, "I've been looking for you all over in there while carrying Shepherd who peed all over my arm."  This whole time he was pointing to a Ross Dress for Less.  "Why were you in Ross's?" I asked.  Suddenly, the anger drained out of BJ.  "What?"

After our tempers and frustrations cooled down and I had the time to say, yes, it would be horrible to be peed on while stuck in a store, and BJ had the time to say, yes, it would be horrible to have a screaming baby while stuck in a store, I asked BJ if he ever wondered if he was in fact in Stages, our agreed upon meeting place.  BJ replied, "Well, it was a clothing store."

So the moral of our Christmas story is this: While all Stages are clothing stores, not all clothing stores are Stages.  Ah haa.

Five Things Shepherd Did Today (just an ordinary Saturday)

1. Sang the alphabet all the way through for the first time, and then proceeded to do it multiple times throughout the day.

2. Rubbed apple sauce into his hair.

3. After having bacon at breakfast, begged for bacon every time he walked into the kitchen.  Like a dog.

4. While in Walmart, picked his nose multiple times while yelling, "Booger!"

5.  Stared at his own reflection in the mirror, and then spit at it so he could watch the slobber run down the mirror.