THE GREEN(wald) HOUSE … (growing rosemary & raising a little wolf)

After celebrating some great holidays, Hannukah, Solstice, and Christmas - and now ringing in the new year with some friends at a kids party at 8pm, I am ready to welcome 2010. I can’t believe how fast this year has gone by - I was taking down my 2009 calendar, and looking at some dates and events written in from the beginning of the year, and they seem like they happened only a few weeks or months ago. We have been in this house almost a full year now, and we still don’t feel quite settled….
I am hoping 2010 brings us (and our families) much more financial stability and abundance, and we all continue to enjoy good health, love and happiness…

We decorated our Christmas tree on the weekend after Thanksgiving as is our new tradition. Aunt P and the kids came over and joined us for the fun and celebration and a family dinner afterwards. We also started a new tradition of having the kids take turns as Joe lifts them up and putting star on top after the tree is all decorated. This year was Rosie’s year, next year (even years) will be Sammy’s turn.

Rosie had her school holiday party, and was the epitome of cuteness as she sang the christmas songs she learned, and gave a curtsey after each song.

Then we had family dinner at Aunt P’s house for the first night of Hannukah - and Rosie lit the candles with cousin Marisa

and played dreidel with cousin Ari.

Rosie continued to be the designated candle lighter throughout Hannukah, and did a pretty great job (she liked to sing Rudolph or another Christmas song after lighting them)

until she almost lit her hair on fire on the 7th night (reaching for some ornaments she had painted that were just past the menorah). After that we were a lot more careful around the lit candles….

Gigi came and visited for 5 days- and helped us celebrate the end of Hannukah (her first time eating Latkes!) and we celebrated an early solstice and the kids were spoiled with lots of little gifts and lots of love from Gigi! And Gigi got to get her yearly dose of cold weather and snow to help her to really appreciate going home to sunny Florida…

The kids were really excited about the first few days of snow, we went outside and played, made snow angels, and pulled a sled around in the yard a bit…

but they seem to have lost the excitement for it now that we have had almost a month of snow on the ground…We haven’t really even built a proper snowman yet…

To celebrate solstice this year, I dried some orange slices that we tied ribbon to and hung in the windows, and the kids made some suns out of yellow and orange construction paper


then we ate dinner by candlelight that night and sang “mr. sun, sun, mr. golden sun, please shine down on me!”

On Christmas eve, we made lots of sugar cookies and decorated them for Santa,

then we sprinkled “reindeer food” that we got from our neighbors on the ground outside so Santa could find our house.

We went to a friend’s house after dinner for some visiting and dessert, then came home and opened our traditional christmas eve present - new jammies! Rosie added a skirt to her jammies and gave us all a beautiful ballet performance before bed.

Santa was generous this year, bringing the kids just what they asked for -

Rosie got her Barbie and The 3 Musketeers DVD and she also got the Barbie dolls to go along with it - and Sammy got a “BIG TRAIN” as requested, in the form of a Thomas pop up play tent. The presents were all opened by 9am, we had breakfast and just relaxed for a bit before Joe’s family came over for more presents and a big Christmas dinner.

Santa was nice enough to bring stockings full of goodies for Marisa, Noah, Cory and Ari and leave them at our house for them…

Sammy seemed a little grumpy that not ALL the presents under the tree were for him to open…

On to what the kids have been up to this past month….
Rosie has been on a big kick of renaming things. Pomegranates are now “christmas seeds - because they are red and look like christmas”
She also renames the games she plays on my iphone. She will ask me what a certain game is called, and then tell me “I am going to call it ‘this‘ instead” Speaking of iphone games, she has already beaten the high scores that Joe and I were once proud of on Doodle Jump. The girl has some serious gaming skills, but both her and Sammy have been too addicted the iphone games lately, wanting to play constantly. So Joe and I have been trying to limit it to when we are in the car, or in a restaurant or other place where they don’t have a lot of other means of entertainment.
One day this past month Rosie asked to go to the grocery store and buy bread and cheese and pickles to make a sandwich. I asked her “you want a pickle and cheese sandwich?” and she said “yeah, we can just try it and if we don’t like it we don’t have to eat it. You have to try things before you know if you like them or not”
She has been loving telling jokes, and has a staple of knock knocks she tells almost daily. Then she takes the jokes she knows and turns them into other jokes that make no sense. For example:
Q - what kind of apples grow on trees?
A - all apples silly!
turned into:
Q - how many apples grow on trees?
A - 100 apples, isnt that silly?

She also knows when Joe is trying to joke with her or tease her and says in a crazy voice “are you kiddin me?”
One of their favorite jokes ends with “I cant hear you - I have a banana in my ear!”

One other new Rosie thing is that she now kicks me out of the bathroom when she has to go, telling me “a girl needs her private-cy”…

Sammy has had a really hard time lately being 2 1/2. He is constantly whiny and grumpy, throwing tantrums, getting frustrated when he can’t do something (either he physically has trouble doing a task like putting his shoes on by himself, or because I tell him “no” to something). He still mumbles and whines mostly when he talks, and it drives me crazy. His big new thing he whines about is “That’s not fair!” and I know he doesn’t even really know the concept of “fair” - but he heard Rosie say it and now that is the big new complaint. Both he and Rosie also need to know the name of the episode of whatever TV program they are watching - yelling “what’s it called???” and complaining and whining until I rewind the show a few seconds and can read to them the name of the Peep or Curious George episode (or whatever they are watching).
I pulled out some hand me down underwear that cousin Ari had given to Sammy, to try to give him an incentive to go on the potty more. Telling him he could wear the big boy underwear with Diego and Elmo and Thomas on them when he went to the bathroom on the potty. He decided he wanted to wear the underwear OVER his diaper, and sometimes OVER his pants as well. It is a really ridiculous look, but I am not willing to fight his tantrum to have him take them off, so he frequently looks like this:

He is still crawling into bed with us 5-6 nights a week around midnight or so, but I don’t mind so much, he’s a pretty good cuddler…One night this past month I think I ended up dreaming same dream as Sammy. We were sharing my pillow, with his head right next to mine, and I heard a dog bark in my dream and it woke me up, as I thought for a second that it was our dog barking downstairs, I listened for a minute, and realized that our dog was not barking, and during the quiet, a few seconds later sammy called out in his sleep “no doggie no!” It was pretty cool knowing how closely we were connected…

Another thing that I noticed recently is that both Rosie and Sammy love surprises. Their favorite thing when being given something is closing their eyes and picking a hand. Even when I am giving them something that is not a surprise, they ask to close their eyes and make it a surprise. I hope they continue to keep this joy and excitement for life throughout the new year (though with less whining).
I wish everyone nothing but good in 2010.
Thanks for reading!
xo