Christmas activities--are they really worth it?

Even though we haven't done hardly any decorating for Christmas or hardly anything around the house, I still wanted to do SOME fun things with Dane this year. He wouldn't care at all if we didn't do anything--he's happy just seeing the big blow-up Santa on the corner while we drive Tommy to work--but there are just so many cute things to do with kids this time of year, I didn't want to miss out on them just because we were moving. 

Of course, we go and do these fun things and then Dane is completely wild or uninterested and I remember that most things aren't very fun with a toddler. You have to lower your expectations of what they're going to get out of something--and what YOU'RE going to get out of it since you're chasing the wild child instead of enjoying yourself. So, the debate continues: is it really worth it to go to do fun things with your kid when you'd all probably be happier at home without disturbing the regular routine? 

My conclusion: Even with all the frustrating outings we've had lately (see below), I still am glad we have been doing them, because I want to go do things for myself. If Dane's only partly enjoying it, too bad for him. I want to go see Christmas lights and Nativities--and I want Dane to be excited about it too, but if I only enjoy it because he's enjoying it, usually none of us will be happy. 

Exhibit A: A nearby stake center (for the Allen stake) has a giant Nativity collection that they fill up their cultural hall with one weekend in December. They even have a live Nativity with people acting it out. I thought it would be a great way to talk to Dane about how Christmas is about Jesus being born. But this is what most of the half hour we spent there looked like:

The only time he sat still was when we were collapsed in chairs listening to the beautiful Christmas music played by the volunteers and Dane commandeered the row ahead of us and crawled around on all the chairs so no one else could sit there.

But really, the Nativities were beautiful. There was one that represented the entire little town of Bethlehem and took up an entire long wall of the cultural hall! I loved it.

I love, love, love this painting. I have seen it before, but it made me almost teary to look at this and think about Mary surrounded by the hosts of angels supporting her on that night. It's such a beautiful image.

This one reminded me of some of Grandma and Grandpa Murphy's Christmas decorations that I remember from Connecticut! 

Verdict: Totally worth it still, for me and Tommy, even if Dane didn't care at all.

Exhibit B: The Frisco Town Square has several fun Christmas-y events over the month of December. At the beginning of December, they have a tree-lighting and a huge fair with tons of vendors and Santa and musical performances, etc. I thought, Hey! That'll be fun to do! Dane will love seeing the lights! We'll walk around and maybe even buy some fudge! But this is what most of the evening looked like: Dane in time out (with Tommy holding him, for lack of a better option) in several different spots around the square.

 We didn't bring the stroller--I vetoed it because usually Dane will get out and then insist on pushing it around into everyone he sees. But maybe we should have because instead Dane just ran around, cackling like a madman, through the crowds of THOUSANDS of people, refusing to hold our hands or let us hold him in any way (we kept trying to hold his hood but he'd throw himself to the ground and scream). I was sure he was going to run away and get kidnapped or lost. We tried to enjoy ourselves and see all the vendors and people there.

There was a cute gingerbread house contest area, where people brought their own homemade ones--I LOVED this Star Wars-themed one.

 After about 45 minutes of wrestling with the crazy toddler, we finally saw them light the tree, snapped a few pictures, and then grumblingly headed home to put Dane to bed. 

 Verdict: Not worth it. We should know better than to try and do anything in the evenings with Dane.

Exhibit C: This was a surprise family date that I wanted to give Tommy as a present, at Ikea of all places! I've taken Dane to eat lunch at Ikea a few times, because kids eat free on Tuesdays there. One time when we were there, there were signs all over about their "Swedish Julbord Dinner"--a Christmas feast! I thought Tommy would love this, because Danish and Swedish food are very similar and it might be really fun for him to revisit his Christmases he spent in Denmark. The dinner was scheduled for one specific night (the night before our move, actually, which worked out great because our whole kitchen was packed up so we'd have to eat out anyway). Tommy's team all got off work early that day (because of their crazy week), so I picked him up early and acted like we'd spend an hour at Ikea checking out the furniture before our move the next day, and then we'd all go on to our date. So we wandered around for a while looking at stuff, and then, boom, we ended up right at the cafeteria right at the right time and I told him what we were really doing! He was definitely surprised and we were all thrilled about eating more Swedish meatballs and food. 

A lot of the food was herring and other fishy things, which none of us were really in the mood for. I have the excuse of being pregnant, at least. But there was some ham and meatballs and potatoes and lots of other really good foods that we stocked up on. Tommy was sad that they didn't have legit "flaeskesteg" ("fleskastie"), one of his favorite Danish Christmas foods, but they just had ham instead. 

Some delicious almond cake.

It was cute--partway through the meal, a chorus of girls singing Santa Lucia songs came in and serenaded us. Very fun!

Dane wanted to blow out the candles on top of the Santa Lucia girl's head.

The Ikea cafeteria was all decorated for Christmas, too.

Verdict: This night was actually fine. Dane didn't do anything terrible at this one, but that was mainly because I remembered what my good friend Libby told me about how they didn't want to hire a sitter one time, so they just brought their kids with them to a restaurant with their tablet and let them just watch shows while they enjoyed their dinner. I brought our Kindle just in case Dane lost it and pulled it out so that Tommy and I could finish our dinner without Dane getting down and running away from us. So, totally worth it!

Exhibit D: We heard about a neighborhood maybe 10 minutes away from us that is HUGE into Christmas lights. On Sunday in the evening we drove down there to see all the lights--and it was fantastic! The homes were huge and amazing and probably 3/4 of the houses had these fantastic light displays. We were driving around the neighborhood for 45 minutes and didn't even see it all. I took a lot more pictures of all the lights, but I don't have them on the computer yet. Dane loved the many Santas and reindeer and crazy blinking light displays we kept seeing. But it all paled in comparison when we drove past one house that had a Thomas the train blow-up in front of it. Dane almost had a CONNIPTION in the back of the car so we had to stop and get out so he could take a picture with Thomas. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?

Giving Thomas a hug. 

Verdict: Totally worth it. We were contained in our car, we popped some popcorn to bring with us, and we saw some awesome fun Christmas lights and houses. Perfect!

Exhibit E: Today I took Dane down to a mall in Dallas that has this big, huge Christmas train exhibit for kids to come look at. I knew it would be a stretch for Dane to be all that interested in it, but I know how much he loves trains and I wanted to see if it was really worth going again (next year). Plus, the money all goes to the Ronald McDonald House, which you can't argue with, right? We got there and I took a bunch of pictures of the back of Dane's head while he looked at the trains driving around.

He LOVED seeing the trains but was very disappointed that he couldn't actually play with them--he's used to the wooden train set at Barnes and Noble that he can move around himself. Seriously, he probably would have been happier there. And he HATED the other kids that were there (you can't tell from these pictures, but it was super crowded) and kept pushing and shoving any time another kid got in arm's reach. Stupid kids! How dare they try to look at the trains?

Verdict: Worth it, even with driving half-hour each way and the frustration of having Dane try to beat up every kid he saw. I am always so sad when he acts all aggressive with kids, because it really happens so rarely and when he does I don't know how to react or help him. But I decided I wasn't going to let my frustration ruin the outing (which happens a lot), and kept my cool and we stayed for a good hour watching the trains together.

Extra credit: Not really Christmas related, but the trains thing was at a mall only a few miles away from the temple, and we've been saying for months we wanted to take Dane to see the temple sometime. It just doesn't seem worth a half-hour drive to just take him and walk around the grounds and have him get tired of it after 12 minutes, though. Since I was close, we stopped by, and they had a cute little Nativity in front of it, which we looked at for about 25 seconds. Then we walked around the temple grounds until he fell and scraped his forehead on the sidewalk. And I tried to sing "I love to see the temple" to him while he yelled at me to stop. It was a super spiritual visit. 

I really love these two pictures of me and my boy. What a cutie!

Verdict: Totally worth it, but mostly because I was already down there and didn't drive the hour total to get there for just this.

All in all--looks like the "worth it"s win on this one. 5/6 mostly positive experiences isn't bad! If the other option is to always stay home and do nothing ever, I think it's worth suffering every once in a while to have the possibility of doing something fun.

Bonus: Even with all of these Christmas events, we went above and beyond did some Christmas decorating at our house after moving in! Look at us sentimentally decorating our beautiful tree! Hahaha. It looks so pathetic in its little corner by itself . . . Luckily Dane doesn't care and it only took about 15 minutes to set up and decorate with our 8 Christmas tree ornaments that we have. Win-win. 

But hey, we did pull out a Santa ornament and I said, "Dane, who's that?!" and he said, "Jesus!" And his second guess was, "Nephi!" I guess we're doing a good job of keeping him focused on what Christmas is really about if he thinks Santa is baby Jesus.

THE MOVE.

Let's talk about important things first: I just ate four brownies (actually, I'm going to get another one right now so let's just say five) and I'm feeling good. I could blame it on pregnancy, but let's be honest--I would eat that many brownies any time, pregnant or not. At least with being pregnant I'm supposed to be gaining weight, right? But I am justifying it as 1) it's the holidays! and 2) we just moved and had a very stressful last few weeks and I am celebrating by STUFFING MY FACE. Repeatedly. On Wednesday I ate almost an entire bag of peppermint bark Hershey's bells by myself and it was SO GOOD. No remorse.

Also, look at this cute picture of Dane and his daddy. He wanted Daddy to read to him, but then told him to lay on the floor next to the couch while he read to himself. A parent's dream come true--oh, you just want me to lay here with my eyes closed on the floor? Okay! Such great father-son bonding time!

A few cute things about Dane before we go any farther:

-I hope I never forget how he says "bulldozer" right now--he says "bullzodirt," which makes a ton of sense, actually, since it's pushing the dirt anyways. I also love how he calls the piano the "panio" ("I play the panio, mom") and is always talking about how the trucks are going "up the fridge!" instead of "up the bridge." 

-I LOVE how he says "fanks" or "fank you" five hundred times a day. He's very good at saying thank you for things. The last week or so, at every meal, he'll look over at me and say, "Fanks Mom for making the yummy dinner! Daddy, say that to Mommy." Even when Tommy's responsible for the meal, haha. I'm not going to complain about all of this gratitude!

-We started doing some scripture reading with him a few months ago, and he basically hates it. He liked it for about a week before he realized it was boring (Seriously? Already!?) and now writhes on the ground or escapes to push his cars around while we try to read like three verses to him. (I know, Mom and Dad, it's just payback for my many years of hating FHE.) But we read the story of the Good Samaritan a week or two ago, and he was TRANSFIXED and has asked to read the story about the "bad guys" every night since. And he wants us to tell him the story many times during the day. His version of the story is (without all the prompting and helping from us): "The bad guys jumped out and crashed! They took his money and clothes. He had owies. Then the guy helped him and gave him Band-Aids, he was all better."  We try to always emphasize the moral at the end--"And Jesus said that we should always help people, right?"--but he always ends by saying, "I got hurt when I fell on the sidewalk." I'm pretty sure he's just interested in how the guy got hurt. 

-Whenever we're in the car, he'll start randomly laughing to himself and say, "I'm funny, Mom. I'm so silly, Mom."

-Dane's always asking to go back to our "old new house," aka our apartment (which he called the "new house" ever since we moved in six months ago). I am very happy to crush all his dreams in this department and tell him we're not going back to the old new house. Sorry, bud!

Anyways, let's talk about the real point of this blog post now. Our move went great! It was sooo stressful getting everything ready, but of course it all went smoothly. We closed on the house on Monday last week. We did the walkthrough of the house in the morning, and then went and signed all the paperwork, and then Tommy went back to work until 11:30 that night. (It was a CRAZY week.)

Our realtor snapped some real-live, unstaged photos of us signing the paperwork. I guess that's part of her job description--documenting the really important moments of her clients' househunting process. Except that she DIDN'T remember to take a picture of us in front of our house (and I forgot as well) so we really need to get a real one sometime.

The move was on Saturday after the closing. The house didn't need any real work, and was totally clean, and we were ready to get out of our apartment, so we figured we'd just move in right away. We had a bunch of men from the ward kindly come over and help us load our stuff in the truck AND unload it into the house--so nice of them. I am seriously, seriously grateful for all the beautiful people who made this move possible without us completely losing our minds. A few final shots of what our apartment looked like as we got ready to pull away:

Guess what? Our stuff DIDN'T fit into the truck this time! Luckily, one of the men from the ward who came over had a pick-up truck, so they managed to fit the rest of it in his truck. And then after everyone left, we remembered that we'd left everything in our storage closet for the apartment there still! Haha! So Tommy went back over to the apartment with the truck by himself and got all those boxes himself. We've apparently accumulated a lot more stuff than we had when we first got to Texas.

And, we spent the next four or five days unpacking and trying to find a place for everything. We're basically done with that for now, because we've reached the point where all the essential, everyday things are unpacked. And look at how hilariously empty our house is. This is the family room. In it, we have--a couch. (And the folded laundry from last night that I haven't bothered to put away yet.)

This is the front living room. The ONLY thing we've done is to buy bookshelves and put them together so that we could unpack all of our books! I was so happy to get them out and put them on the shelves. Tommy was a little dismayed to find out that we have enough books to basically fill up four bookshelves--he thought we'd have more empty space and wouldn't have to buy new ones any time soon. Sorry, dear. (All those boxes by the window are our pictures and wall-hangings, which we'll eventually get around to doing.)

This is our fourth bedroom right now, aka our extra storage closet. This entire corner is all of the baby/infant clothes and items. SO MUCH STUFF! Good thing we're having another boy to use it all. Our third bedroom is now Dane's toy room. He is basically Dudley Dursley with two bedrooms to himself... so spoiled.

And, our equally empty bedroom. There is a lovely little nook/corner that could be really cute and amazingly decorated with some nice reading chairs or something... But pretty sure that will never be a very high priority on our "to-buy" list, considering all of the other EMPTY SPACES we have to fill.

On Sunday after church we tried to take some cute pictures outside of our house. Dane refused to leave his blankie inside.

And then insisted on walking backwards down the driveway instead of being in a picture.

 

A GREAT picture of all three of us in front of our new house! Can't you tell? Haha. We'll try to get a better one sometime, either with a neighbor or with our tripod.

And, we really are loving the house. I LOVE how quiet everything is--no loud neighbors upstairs or outside or driving around the parking lot blasting music--aaaahhhh. And although I'm joking about how big and empty the house is, I know we'll fill it up in no time. And Dane is loving, loving having so much room and a backyard! One morning this week, he kept crying about going in the backyard and I kept telling him he could go by himself, but I had to stay inside and unpack some more. He wouldn't go outside until I promised I would watch him through the window. And he went out there and just started wandering around in the back by himself, kicking his little ball and playing in the dirt. It was so cute I couldn't help but running outside to take pictures of him!

SO happy.

The last few weeks have been a huge rollercoaster for us. So much has been going on for all of us. We have been vacillating between feeling completely overwhelmed and completely blessed to be where we are. It has been stressful and scary, because I do not feel like I am old enough or capable of taking care of such a huge thing as this house and this (growing) family. I still am looking around and feeling completely blown away by how much there is to do still with the house and moving in. How does anyone do this? But we are also so happy to be here in this house and so excited about filling it up and making changes on our own too. It is going to be really OURS and I can't wait.