Laine and Eve's magical imaginations

As most of you know, Laine and Eve are incredibly imaginative and make life magical. Lately, they've been really getting carried away. The vast majority of their playing time this week has been spent playing pretending games. Some times they play really cute pretending games like this:

Laine: Hey Eve, let's play with our pretend-girl-cousin-friends Laine Hendricks and Eve Hendricks.

Eve: Okay! Let's all play crazy dance dance.

And they'll wiggle around and sing and dance with their pretend cousins for a while.

Other pretending games are really dumb.

Eve: Laine, let's pretend I'm a witch and I'm going to cast a spell on you to put you to sleep and I need to touch your eyeball to do it.

Laine: Okay!

Eve: Hocus pocus...

Laine: OW! My eye!!!

Other times they turn chairs into motorcycles and footstools into steering wheels for their Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang-esque cars. Other times they play grocery store with their new Christmas toys for a long time. The other day, Eve burst out laughing all of a sudden and when I asked what was so funny, she told me that he pretend frend Grandma had just told her a really funny joke.

This weekend, we drove to Baltimore, which is about an hour away in good traffic, to visit the aquarium. They have a huge aquarium there with dolphin shows, rays and sharks, an australia exhibit, and tons of other fun things. We had a fun time even though Eve got pretty tired toward the end.

More pictures of our house

We've sort of gotten the bedrooms organized. We call this room James's room, but he really doesn't use it. He still sleeps in our bed, so it's more of a kid's reading room and diaper changing room. We let them keep a couple of toys up here too, but most of them are in the basement.


Here's the girls' room. It's really tiny, so when Eve grows into a twin size bed, I think we're gonna have to do bunk beds because there's no way we can fit two twins in here. The girls really like their room. All of the bedrooms get a lot of natural sunlight and they're very bright and cheery.

Here's our bedroom. That little lump on our bed is James taking a blessed nap. Chris and I finally got all of our clothes into drawers and closets, so it doesn't look like a wardrobe tornado blew through it. The blinds are arriving in a week and a half which will be very nice.

We really need someone to visit us so that I can get motivated to make the guest bedroom cute. Right now, we're putting the boxes in there that we aren't sure what to do with. We're going to IKEA tonight to get some shelves, so I think we can finally unpack some books soon.

Several hours later... So we're back from the IKEA run and I just need to blog about how great IKEA is. IKEA is the coolest place ever. For like $380 we got 3 big bookcases, 1 coffee table, 2 side tables, 2 decorative baskets, a shower curtain, and a pack of batteries. And they're all cool pieces of furniture. I mean, they're nothing fancy, but they're sleek, simple, well-designed pieces of furniture that we will use for a very long time. Everything from IKEA is so well thought out and efficient. Chris was saying how weird it is that good-products-low-prices is not like some amazing concept, but somehow when the Swedes do it, you get IKEA and when Americans do it, you get Walmart. How come Swedes do stuff way cooler than us? Maybe some day when I'm a rich novelist and order stuff out of the Horchow catalog, I'll look back and cringe with distaste at my poor college days when I thought $13 end tables made out of particle board from IKEA were the greatest thing ever. But for now, I'll sing praises to IKEA.

Happy New Year!!!!

Yay! Our first New Year's Eve celebration in our new home! We celebrated with a fondue party. We love living near a Trader Joe's. They have fantastic prices on all sorts of delicious cheeses. We started off with a cheese course featuring the tradition Emmenthaler and Gruyere. The kids weren't such big fans of it and mostly just wanted to eat the dippers by themselves. That was fine with me and Chris because it meant more for us. The kids did enjoy the bubble juice though, and the chocolate dessert fondue went over pretty well, but Eve mostly wanted the fruit and marshmallows plain. The dessert course did end in tears after chocolate was repeatedly dribbled all over the place and we decided the kids had had enough. Laine insisted she wasn't finished and yelled a lot, but they're in bed now (after only two fights tonight). We're pushing their bed time back by an hour starting tomorrow in an effort to stop them from invading our bed at 4 in the morning every day.

Little James is standing tall pretty regularly these days. He's taken some stuttery little steps already while trying to chase after Momma's legs when he stands up holding them and she walks away. We figure he's due to start running marathons any day now.

My (Christine) New Year's resolution is to be greener. I'm a pretty terrible polluter but this year I'm going to try to recycle, reduce, and reuse. For example, I'm only going to allow the kids one bath a day instead of three (barring extreme soiling, of course). We're going to try to reduce meat consumption (Chris hates this idea even though he's the only one in the family that's ever been a strict vegetarian), turn off lights when we're not using them, etc. If your resolution is along these same lines, see treehugger.com for ideas. We wish you a wonderful new year!

And now it's time for Silly Songs with Lainey

Some times, Laine likes to invent completely absurd songs. For example...

It's Christmas, It's Christmas!!!!

We had a fun Christmas this year. The greatest present we got this year was being able to be together next year in our new home while I finish school in Virginia. We spent Christmas Eve singing songs, acting out the nativity, and drinking cocoa around a fire that Chris built in our awesome wood burning fireplace. Chris definitely has the Bradley pyromaniac genes. We sat by the fire for hours thinking about what an upgrade this was from our orange cellophane wrapped light bulb that we had in the "fireplace" at Carriage Lane.

Here's where the kids were acting out the nativity. Eve was Mary, James was Jesus, and Laine played various other roles including angels, shepherds, and Joseph.

Here are two lovely renditions of Jingle Bells

Eve had James giggling like crazy with this pillow fight. Sorry it's sideways. I thought I could just rotate the image after I downloaded it to my computer like I can with still images, but it couldn't.

The kids had a ball opening presents on Christmas morning. Thank you everyone for the wonderful gifts!

Laine the Runny-Nosed Reindeer and a Man-Bath!

This weekend, Chris helped James overcome his deathly fear of baths. Our girls always LOVED baths and still ask to take more than one bath a day some times swimming around for an hour or more singing and playing Mermaids. James, however, has always screamed at the top of his lungs the minute he enters water (he also screams like a banshee when I perform booger extractions or dab his face with a Kleenex). Yesterday, Chris got all the kids in the bath with him and had Laine and Eve show James how fun a bath could be. Slowly, he got James into the water without screaming and by the end of it, James was even having fun.

We keep hoping Laine will finally get over Christopher from her old pre-school. She's been telling us every day how much she loves Christopher and how she wants to take his last name when they get married and have his babies. She even said "It's so easy to think about Christopher that I don't even have to use my thinking cap!" I tried to explain to her that she's marrying James VanDam, darn it! But to no avail. Then Chris had to go burst her little love bubble by telling her that Christopher might meet someone else and ask her to marry him first, and Laine was really distraught about it, but we'll keep distracting her so that maybe she'll forget him soon. Laine held hands with one of the sunbeam boys on the first day we went to our new ward, so maybe she'll find a new boy here to want to marry.

The girls seem to like the new ward pretty well. Laine has her hand-holding buddy and Eve is enjoying her last couple of weeks of nursery before moving up to big-girl primary at the start of the new year. James is as popular as always, getting "Oh how cute!" and "What a beautiful baby!" everywhere he goes. We think he's cute too, especially in his little man clothes.

Chris and Laine went exploring the woods in the backyard yesterday and found an antler! Laine was so excited. We're going to have lots of fun tromping through the forest exploring and having adventures here.

The adventure never ends

Here's one last picture of our new home before the mountain of boxes and furniture arrived. What a day! So I woke up this morning and let the painter in so that he could hurry and finish the kids bedrooms before our furniture arrived. He was totally amazing. He didn't use so much as an inch of tape and he painted 2 bedrooms quickly and perfectly in about 8 hours between yesterday and this morning and finished just as the moving van drove in. Meanwhile, fate decided that this would be a perfect day for Eve to have a massive ear infection and pink eye. My poor baby girl spent the morning crying her pink and green sticky eyes out while writhing on the floor with a finger in her ear while Chris tried as hard as he could to get her in to see a ped. Everyone had taken an early holiday break, so he ended up taking her to the urgent care facility where he waited 2 and a half hours for the only doc available to write him a prescription for amoxicillin and eye drops. Of course, our insurance cards aren't here yet, so all this is paid for out of pocket for right now including $70 eye drops. SEVENTY bucks for like 4 mls!! That means every time Eve wiggles and I miss, I've wasted like $12. Ironically though, yesterday I got a check in the mail from Jordan Valley Hospital partially refunding me for this ER visit that I had over a year and a half ago when the jerk doc on call wouldn't just phone in a Macrobid prescription for me when I woke up in the middle of a Sunday night with a bloody (I mean that literally, not as a British curse word) UTI and the hospital overcharged me. The amount for the check almost covered the cost of Eve's visit. Kind of funny how some times things all work out in their weird way. Maybe in 2 years from now when we get reimbursed from our insurance for this visit, it'll be enough to cover the current crisis at that time.

Anyway, our house is filled with boxes. I tell ya, professional movers are like the most underpaid people ever. I know they make like $50/hr but for the work they do, that's nothing. This one guy today just hoisted our massive toy chest that Chris made down a flight of stairs like it was a backpack. Amazing! We're trying to figure out how to arrange furniture that used to be in a wide house into a skinny house with limited storage space. Oh, and in the middle of all this, we discovered our dishwasher won't start. It's brand new. We know it works, but we just can't get to turn on. Luckily, our new next door neighbors brought us over dinner which was soooooo nice of them. After dinner, Laine, Eve, and James had a ton of fun playing with all the stuff in their toy box. I don't know why I bothered getting them anything for Christmas. When you haven't seen your old toys for 2 months, they're practically brand new.

Tomorrow: Let the unpacking begin!!!