Relief

Our high school is overcrowded. Student enrollment this year is 3300 and 1800 of those are sophomores. On the first day of school, Nathan was completely overwhelmed by the teeming mass of humanity. And he can see over the crowd. I can’t imagine how rough it was for the shorter kids. This problem is known, however, and there is a brand-new high school opening next year. The new school is one mile from our house which means that we are definitely in the boundary for the new school. School changes can have pros and cons and Nathan has been weighing them for months. The social pressure to stay at the current high school has been enormous, but Nathan has been very unhappy with both the choir program and the theater program (which encompasses stage crew). After much deliberation, Nathan has decided to attend the new school rather than submitting a permit to stay where he is now. He let people know about his decision today and the response from many other students and even the choir teacher (very unprofessional, in my opinion) has been very negative. He knows he has made the right choice (and Kevin and I both support his decision) but the social backlash has been considerable.

This evening there was an open house where parents and students could meet the faculty and staff for the new high school. Not all the hiring is done, but a considerable amount has been completed. Among those already hired are the choir teacher (who grew up down the street from me and is extraordinarily talented and a fantastic teacher besides) and the theater teacher (who is a good friend of the choir teacher and therefore comes highly recommended). Nathan and I attended the open house this evening and he was able to meet many of the teachers, ask a bunch of questions about academics as well as extra curriculars, get some answers, and generally get a feel for what he can look forward to in choir, theater and stage crew. He came away very excited.

I am more relieved than I can express. This decision has been extremely difficult for him in spite of the fact that he has been unhappy all year. He had such high expectations for choir, stage crew, and high school in general and he has experienced nothing but disappointment and discouragement. He has been involved and all that, but the emotional environment has been extremely toxic and he is suffocating under the weight of it. I can hardly wait to get him out of his current situation and into one where he can actually find joy again. Seeing excitement from him was a huge relief. Now the countdown to the end of the school year begins.

Looking Forward

Sometimes I feel nostalgic as we reach the end of yet another year. I think back on the events of the past year and feel a touch of sadness for the growing up my family has done and how those days will never come again. I remember with fondness our many happy moments and think about the challenges we have faced and how we've grown through them. I see how much my children have grown and think back on how far we have all come. I can be a bit introspective as I think about moments I handled well and those where I fell short.

This year, however, I find myself looking forward rather than back. There are bold new changes coming in the church. I'm super excited about those. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to implement those changes in my family and I hope that we will be able to take advantage of the new opportunities to strengthen our faith and our family. In the next year, Daniel will graduate from high school and head out into the real world. As a mother, I honestly have no idea how I'm going to respond to that. He is my first, after all. Both Nathan and Matthew will start at new schools in the next year and there is excitement and trepidation about both those situations. Malia will be the only one of my kidlets still on year round school so her off-track time will be mother-daughter time. There will be a lot of changes for our family in the next year and I'm sure that those changes will bring challenges as well as blessings. So I feel like I'm squaring my shoulders, taking a big breath, and facing the new year head on. Ready or not, here it comes.

The Aftermath

It took Matthew two days to build his ginormous truck. He didn’t do much else yesterday. He’s quite pleased with himself.

Malia has been riding her scooter all over the house since Christmas. Even Jolly got in on the fun.

It would appear their gifts were wisely chosen this year. Good job, Santa and Grandma!

Holiday at Home

Christmas morning always seems like a whirlwind of paper, presents, laughter, excitement. The afternoon generally feels like things slow way down, get lazy and kick back. This year was no exception.

Malia presented Santa with a rather interesting wish list this year. She requested a drone, a phone, chapter books, a ticket to Legoland, a very specific Lego set, a kiddie sewing kit and a horse. Santa definitely knows us and thankfully he did not bring her a phone or a horse. He did manage to track down the Lego set she had her eye on even though it was no longer being produced and Mrs. Santa helped him fill a sewing box with sewing supplies. The sewing kit was accompanied by a basic sewing skills book and a beginners’ cross stitch kit. Although Malia rushed through the unwrapping in her traditional whirlwind of excitement, she was happy about them all and is excited to start learning to use her sewing accoutrements.  Her experience gift for this year will be a ticket to see “The Nutcracker” at the ballet next Christmas. She’s pretty excited!

Matthew has grown up a lot this year so even though he was excited, he was trying hard to be manly about it. His wish list was a lot shorter. There was one certain Lego set he had a hankering for. But it was “big boy Lego,” one of the sets meant for adults, which also means it has many more pieces and a much bigger price tag. As such, he assumed it would not make an appearance beneath our tree because it was too expensive, but he lucked out because Santa decided he was worth the expenditure. And in my opinion (and hopefully Santa’s), his reaction to the gift made it completely worth the cost. Matthew also gets to go to Autorama in the spring. He has developed an intense interest in cars over the past year so a car show will be a perfect fit for him.

Santa brought Nathan a board game that he played with his cousins many times over the summer. I know he doesn’t look excited at all, but he really likes the game, I promise. Kevin and I have started focusing on the experience gifts for our older boys since the experiences they want are much more expensive, so from us he received the money to fund Summersong, a summer music workshop for teens that one of his cousins really enjoyed a few years back. It is an audition only weeklong event so if he auditions and isn’t accepted, we’ll come up with something else.

Once the early flurry of activity was over, Nathan’s new game was the first one we played. He really does like it. See what I mean? (Matthew photobombed this one like a total spaz. I just couldn’t crop him out. It makes me laugh!)

Daniel got a small Lego set from Santa. From us, he gets a trip to New Orleans. The high school band will be traveling to the home of jazz in April. It is a pricey trip so we figured funding it would be a great Christmas gift. He’s totally excited about the trip and doesn’t feel at all shafted by way of Christmas gifts. He’s just looking forward to a brand-new adventure!

This year there were several family experience gifts as well. We will be going on vacation with my folks, my siblings and their families in June and part of our trip will be taking everyone horseback riding. So I guess, in a tiny way, Malia did get a horse for Christmas. 😉 Kevin, the boys and I also got tickets to see “Wicked.” We are all excited about that one!

Grandpa and Grandma joined us for the afternoon and dinner. Grandma has jumped on the experience gift bandwagon and gave Daniel and Nathan money to spend on their adventures this year. Matthew gets to shoot arrows with Grandpa and Grandma at some point. Since Malia isn’t really going on any adventures of her own this year, she got a scooter that lights up. She absolutely loves it and has been riding it around the house all afternoon!

I love these days when everyone is home all day, talking and playing together, enjoying each other’s company. In years to come, I may only get a few days a year to gather my crew around, so for now, I want to take advantage of as many of them as I can.

Merry Christmas to all! Hope your day was as full of family and joy as ours!

Seasonal Eats-Repeat (and a Family Gathering)

We started off our month of activities with Christmas tree pancake stacks and they were so fun that we decided to do a Christmas Eve repeat so the older boys could partake. For some reason I just can’t get a picture of all of them looking normal at the same time. On the flip side, getting universal crazy faces presents no challenge. No matter what they look like, the kids enjoyed the pancakes. They are fun to eat, being bite-sized and all!

Christmas Eve generally means dinner at my folks’ house followed by a dramatic reading of the nativity story. As all the cousins have grown up, there have been fewer and fewer kids who want to participate in the dressing up and acting it out portion of the nativity. We are at the point where it is really just Malia and Rachael’s two girls. With some talking, we did convince Matthew and Drew to be the wise men, but our cast was small this year. Sabrina was Mary with Sam as a very inquisitive baby Jesus.

Kate and Malia were the angels. Malia was a pretty wacky angel, all hyped up with Christmas anticipation, but was reformed just in time for her big moment.

The wise men were a bit more sedate than usual (we were really trying to keep everything appropriately reverent this year) and brought presents of gold, frankincense, myrrh and Fisher-Price (to prevent the baby from taste testing their other offerings).

The Christmas Eve excitement has toned down for the boys as they’ve gotten older, but it’s still running high with Malia. She’s wide awake and trying to convince herself that she can slumber so Santa can work his magic. She has been so high energy all day that I think that once she stops and closes her eyes, sleep will come…

Santa Goes to the Symphony

For the past several years, we have had season tickets to the symphony family series. It has been fun for the younger set, the ones not quite ready for the opera or the regular symphony. Although Matthew is at the point where he is losing interest in the stuff themed for little kids, Malia still enjoys it. There is always a Christmas presentation and today was the day. Malia is a lucky girl because she got to chat with Santa again today. For this event, Mrs. Claus got to tag along as well. She and Santa must be music lovers!

Seasonal Eats-Part III

Today held two separate holiday foods. I spent a good portion of the day making Chinese pretzels with my mom and my sister Rachael. Pretzels only happen once, maybe twice, a year. They are a bit labor intensive, but they are a treat looked forward to all year by many of my parents’ friends and neighbors. And the family, of course.

I actually haven’t made pretzels for years because they are too much work for a treat that Matthew can’t eat. But my mom has become a food allergy Rockstar and last year she figured out how to make egg free pretzels that are Matthew friendly. I’m so grateful! And Matthew loves them! He gets his own separate bucket of pretzels, something no one else gets. The rest of us have to share. 😉 Matthew needs to label his so that no one else dips in and he is deadly serious about the whole thing.

Our second festive food today was garlic bread made into a fancy Christmas star. I’m totally proud of myself. It looks amazing and is tasty too! It shouldn’t necessarily taste better because it looks amazing, but I kind of think it does!

So merry eating to all, and to all a good meal!

All is Bright!

While most of our pre-Christmas activities are during the day for the kids who don’t have school, every year I try to toss in a few for the whole family. This year I saw an ad for a holiday event that I’d never heard of. It looked fun so I added it to the list. It was called “Christmas in Color” and is basically a bit lot covered in Christmas lights that flash in time to music creating a giant light show that you drive your car through. It took about half an hour to drive through the course and was quite entertaining. I’m don’t know that it is something we will do every year, but we enjoyed ourselves!