The Streetpoet

Our morning was delightfully yummy with Scott’s fresh cinnamon rolls delivered right from his oven, and the rain was falling in a cold, gray Christmas morning when the boys woke up. Jerome was up first, of course, full of anticipation and excitement! When his brothers woke up an hour later Peter read Luke 2 before opening presents.

It was a wonderful morning that lead to a precious day at Papa’s house. We finished Advent together and shared some Christmas hymns before exchanging gifts, then came a wonderful Christmas dinner with extended family and friends!

Tomorrow we fly to GA to see my family!

I will post again next year. Merry Christmas!

This past weekend Jerome announced the long awaited LOOSE two front teeth!

And last night he came to tell me he’d had a bad dream. He didn’t look at all upset to me, but it must have been exciting enough to wake him up. He told me he had dreamed that he was swinging on our rope swing but he was going too high and he flew off the swing all the way around the world! He came back and landed by the swing tree and ran home and woke up.Isaid that sounded exciting and not scary, he said no, it was scary to him. 🙂

This is the earliest we’ve ever gotten a tree as we usually wait for Peter to finish his semester, but he graciously gave us his Sunday evening before finals. I wanted to get a tree earlier because we’re planning on being in GA for the week after Christmas and will probably take it down when we get home.

Following a wonderful tradition,  we had Darrell and Eric with us to pick out our tree, eat pizza and decorate! The boys had fun gathering branches to take home, playing with the strings discarded from unwrapped trees, and hiding in the “forest” of chopped down Christmas trees. Although Peter liked the first tree we looked at, Darrell decided that we should consider at least three trees before hauling one home…for the experience of the-perfect-tree-hunting! 🙂  I’m glad we did! A helpful and spunky employee unwrapped our perfect tree, trimmed the trunk, and netted it for us, then Peter tied it to the car while we ordered pizza! At home after a delicious meal around a table with loved ones we unpacked the decorations from our Christmas tote with much excitement and rediscovered our Christmas memories from years past. Most of them are from my childhood, and we found that Jerome has three ornaments of his own while Seth and Ian don’t have any, so I aim to change that. Not that they care now, but someday they might. Jerome had claimed a cast off pine tree branch as his own little Christmas tree and hung his own three ornaments on it with some borrowed ones and carried it around most of the evening replacing fallen ornaments over and over until we found a vase to “plant” it, wherein it could stand upright and not keep tipping over. He adores his own little tree, and I think it’s pretty clever. 🙂

So here are pictures of our Christmas tree this year:

My mind is still back in September somewhere. School beginning. Taekwondo lessons. AWANA. It’s taken me a while to get the hang of the routine of homeschooling with Peter in college plus little ones to care for. But here we are at the end of the year with Christmas approaching fast! We’ve made plans (but have not bought tickets yet)  to go to GA the week after Christmas because my twin sister and her family are flying back from Peru for a timely break! I’m shocked that I’m not actually jumping off the walls with excitement…it still seems too good to be true! Our whole family together again for a blissful week? I cannot think of a better gift!

Here are some pictures of the boys this past week: