"It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" 2021

Shortly after Thanksgiving Allison decided to "put on makeup," something she's seen from playing makeup games on her tablet. She chose to color her eyes and face with paint. It was washable paint, but Oscar gave her a bath afterwards and still couldn't quite get it all.

On the first weekend of December the kids received their 2nd vaccine shots and didn't have any concerning reactions. Tyler came into our room at 5:00am the next morning to tell us his arm hurt, but that might just be because he was sleeping on it. A few hours later he said it felt fine and was easily moving it around.

I took the selfie on the left after Allison asked me why I never wear makeup. I told her I was wearing makeup right then, but she didn't believe me. After dropping her off at primary and going back to the chapel for Sunday school, I turned my selfie camera on to see if my makeup had worn off. The makeup looked fine, and it was a decent shot, so I snapped a selfie. 

Tyler is old enough now that he can work out with us at the gym. He usually runs with daddy for about 20 minutes before getting tired and letting us check him into the kids' club. 

For veteran's day Allison's school encouraged the kids to wear red, white, and blue. After dressing her I randomly pulled out a mask for her that also happened to be red, white, and blue. It was a total coincidence I meant to commemorate by getting a photo, but I forgot. Fortunately she brought home the pumpkin picture above with a picture of her glued onto it from that very same day.

Here are our cute kids in their Cousin Crew 2021 jammies.  

Oscar and Tyler came up with funny alternative spellings for all of our names, and I met up with Lia and Alex for cookies and gift exchange after they'd visited their favorite spa in Lynnwood.

A lot of work went into setting up this impressive winter wonderland for our ward Christmas party. Oscar spent several hours working on it with other ward members that morning. It looked great!

The ward party started off with several musical numbers before we went around to the different activities. One of the musical numbers dropped out last minute, and we were asked if our family could do one in their place. Tyler had been working hard on several Christmas piano duets with me, so we performed "Must Be Santa," "Jingle Bells," "Deck the Halls," and "Away in a Manger." We convinced Allison to sing while we played, and she totally stole the show. That girl loves being the center of attention! She announced each number then pointed at us and enthusiastically said "hit it guys!" Oscar sang quietly next to her to keep her on key and help her remember the words while she was at the microphone loving every minute of it. I felt kind of bad for Tyler since she got more attention while his performance required much more skill and practice, but fortunately he didn't seem to mind. Santa told him what a great job he did, and that really made him happy.

 After meeting Santa, Allison sang "Must Be Santa" directly to him. We only got video of part of the song, but when she really puts the effort in you can hear that she already has a strong, clear voice. Seeing her sing her heart out and watching Tyler thrive on the piano really makes my musical mama heart proud.

Cute silly cats!

I sang for the Arlington Nativity Festival again this year. My performance was on Saturday the 18th, and I drove up for one final rehearsal on Thursday. They were already mostly set up, so I took advantage of my time there to enjoy the nativities without needing to worry about keeping an eye on the kids. These were some of my favorites. I loved this one on the right that was an entire village of Bethlehem along with the nativity. The video is a Facebook live I made to preview the festival.

I'm with Mary on this one - laying down. I roll my eyes a bit at nativities that show Mary sitting or kneeling. I wouldn't be sitting or kneeling right after giving birth, especially giving birth naturally in a barn!

That Friday we had fun at our friend Warren's 50th birthday party. 

Here are our performances at the nativity festival. Tyler did duets with me while Allison and Oscar sang, then at 6:00pm I started my concert. The videos were recorded live, so their sound quality isn't stellar, but you could watch the whole thing if you really wanted to.

Oscar had to wrangle Allison during their performance since staying still is not her biggest strength, but otherwise the kids were really well behaved. They both had a lot of fun doing the provided scavenger hunt and other children's activities while I was singing. 

In the children's room Allison dressed up as an adorable angel and posed with another family.

After my concert we went in for a family picture. This time she wanted to be a "queen sheep."

I spent the week of Christmas doing my delivery job, and Oscar and the kids helped out on the busiest days. When they weren't delivering they picked up presents for the cats and Oscar wrapped both kids up in the unicorn cats in space wrapping paper. Leela could smell the catnip toys in her present and opened it herself with her claws. By the next morning those toys were completely soaked from her sucking on them.

A couple days before Christmas we took the kids out to do a scavenger hunt at Fir Grove and to see Irwin Family Lights. Allison danced around in their driveway during the light show for several minutes.

One of my deliveries was this large arrangement on the left and a platter of cheesecakes and cookies. When I dropped it off she asked if I had kids. I told her I did, and she gifted me the arrangement! She was a caregiver for Barbara telling me that Barbara didn't have any teeth right now, so she wouldn't be able to eat the fruit but could eat the goodies on the platter. She said we could tell the kids it was a gift from Barbara and Jazzy. So sweet! I knew we'd never eat the whole thing, so I divvied it up and gave some to the ladies I minister to. 

On Christmas Eve we made cookies for Santa and the cats come out just after Santa came. I always love how the tree looks on Christmas Eve surrounded by presents. I turned the lights off and just sat and admired it for about 10 minutes while watching our cool tree (it's a Twinkly tree with programmable lights).

Allison woke me up repeatedly through the night. She was just so excited for Christmas. It came to a point that I had to tell her I would get rid of all the presents if she woke me up again. When the kids were up for the morning Oscar went down with them and let me sleep a little longer. The kids admired their presents while patiently waiting for me. 

And here are the kids opening their stockings and presents.

Allison got several new beanie boos and a make up kit. We figured we'd rather she put on actual makeup that's made for faces rather than painting herself with craft paint.

That evening it snowed all night long. ♬ "I'm dreaming of a white Boxing Day" ♬ The amount of snow wasn't as bad as previous snowmaggedon years, but it stayed below freezing for 7 days! That's practically unheard of for us. The last time the Seattle area stayed below freezing for more than 3 days in a row was 1998.

Oscar braved the slippery roads to go shopping. He wasn't willing to live without milk, meat, and produce for a week. Barely anyone was there, but the lines were enormous since there also wasn't much staff. 

We spent most of the week inside since the roads were bad, and it was too cold to really play with the snow.  We did lots of piano lessons, had fun getting our exercise in with Kinect Adventures, played board games, and kept busy with new Christmas stuff. It was way better than previous snow days we've been stuck indoors now that we've all had much more experience staying home thanks to Covid. I was just glad we could do whatever we felt like doing and didn't have to manage virtual school too. On Thursday it was 30 degrees and sunny, so I went for a short walk around the neighborhood. I saw that the main roads weren't nearly as bad as I expected them to be, so on Friday (New Years Eve), we took the kids to Arena Sports to play on the inflatables and do mini bowling. We went out to eat at the nearby Boston's restaurant then went home to let the kids have some well earned screen time.

We made 2022 cookies (which looked much better as dough than as cookies), the kids played with their new Sandisfactory kit they got for Christmas, and we rang in the New Year at 9:00pm with the east coast. Allison couldn't even wait that long so we pulled up a YouTube video and rang in the new year at 8:00pm for her. For some reason she wanted to celebrate by pretending to be some sort of sea creature (we never figured out what exactly she was going for in the video).

For New Years Day we took the kids back to Arena Sports for mini-golf, more mini bowling, and to do the ropes course and climbing wall. I was a little concerned about how the kids would do after our last ropes course experience for Tyler's 7th birthday. He'd done the ropes but hadn't wanted to do the zipline, and Allison only did a couple ropes before becoming too terrified to go on and needing to be rescued by an employee. This time both kids did all but one of the ropes course obstacles and rode the zip line repeatedly. I even managed the cylindrical obstacle, which was by far the most difficult. I fell on it the first time. Standing up from that hurt my knee like crazy. Oscar, who had no problem with it, advised me until I was able to do it all the way across from both directions. 

Tyler tried the fun climbing walls too, which he totally rocked!

"Up on the Housetop"

Tyler started showing an interest in learning the piano in August of 2020, so I ordered a few books and gave him a couple lessons before heading out on our big cross country 6 Flags vacation. The 2020-2021 school year began the day after we arrived home, and I quickly realized piano lessons were out of the question. Our school district was all remote learning, but the state had intervened to require the curriculum be much more robust than it'd been in the spring. It was far more work than any 7 year old can motivate himself to do at home, so the burden of making sure 5.5 hours of schoolwork got done each day fell entirely on me. We were both completely wiped out by the end of each school day. With daily tears and power struggles over his school work, I just didn't have the heart to add piano lessons to his already very full schedule.

 
This past summer Tyler started wanting to learn the piano again, but I didn't know if I could teach him. He went back to in person school in mid-March, but the rest of the school year through late June was still more remote learning than not, and we still had power struggles, just less of them now that some of his work was being done at school. By the summer I was so relieved we weren't fighting anymore that I wasn't going to risk it again by attempting to give him piano lessons. My piano teacher friend Rebecca came to visit in late July, so I asked her to give Tyler a few lessons while she was here. He did incredibly well with her. It was clear he was ready for some serious study. After she flew home I started teaching him again. Unfortunately, it went badly. Our power struggles were back in full force. I told him I couldn't teach him because he didn't treat me like a teacher. He treated me like mom, and he didn't like mom showing him how to play and correcting his mistakes.

 
Tyler, however, kept playing. His natural engineering brain wanted to figure out how the piano worked, so he started reading through the books and teaching himself the first couple of lessons. When I'd hear him making mistakes I knew could be easily fixed with just a little bit of instruction, I started jumping in to help him. Within a week we'd figured out how to work together with limited power struggles. Basically I show him what to do, then give him time on his own to figure things out for himself, then come back in to make small corrections. In just a few months he's flown through his level A and B books and is progressing well into level C. The best part of it all, though, is how much he's taken to playing duets with me. We get to make music together! His Christmas song books come with melodies he can play at his level and harmonies I can play at mine. He quickly learned all 8 songs in the first book, but playing in time with someone else comes with its own set of challenges that have been really good for him. He's been learning really good lessons about how to keep playing when he makes mistakes and how to catch up when he falls behind. I don't pay as much attention to his playing when I'm playing too, which allows him to relax a bit and play with me while still feeling like he's doing his own thing. I also LOVE that piano has replaced quite a bit of the time he was spending on video games.

"I Love to Lick My Candy Cane." It would have been cuter with Allison singing it solo, but she couldn't quite memorize it, so I sang along too.

"Little Snowman"

"O Christmas Tree"

"Rudolph's Little Brother." This is the only Christmas song Allison had an interest in playing. In the video on the bottom right she sings and dances around to it. This girl can't stay still!

"Good King Wenceslaus." I recruited Oscar to sing for one of the videos. This song really needs a male voice.

"Away in a Manger." This was a huge victory for me and Tyler since he struggled with feeling 3/4 time after doing nothing but 4/4, and I struggled to figure out how to teach it to him. There was a lot of head-butting before he accepted that he couldn't count it in 4. 

Here's "Jingle Bells" in two different books - one with notes on the staff. We managed to recruit Allison to sing while we played (this was actually her very first time doing so). Not only did this result in much cuteness, but it was also a good learning experience for Tyler. He had to accompany someone who wasn't always singing accurately, and he had to keep the song going after making a mistake. About halfway through he hit a few wrong notes and stopped playing, but I'm proud of him for figuring out where we were and coming back in a few seconds later. With Allison we really only get one run through. She doesn't have the patience to do multiple takes. Tyler even sang along with "Jingle Bells," which is rare for him. Usually he finds it too distracting to sing and play at the same time. When we're doing duets I typically sing along quietly because it helps him keep time.

The 2nd video is also "Jingle Bells," but a different, more difficult version for Tyler (level B ). He breezed through all his Level A songs (pre-reading) and started quickly working his way through level B (reading on the staff).

 
If you watch some of the other duets, you'll notice we were on a different keyboard than this one. Allison spilled yogurt all over my old digital piano in October, so Meledie, the lovely lady who usually accompanies me in my solos, loaned us the keyboard she used to use back when she'd play songs at baseball games. I then purchased this digital piano for a great price during the week of black Friday. It has fully weighted keys so it feels like a real, acoustic piano. Tyler did not like it at first. He wasn't used to needing to put that much pressure on the keys. The day after we got it he told me "mom, I can't do any more duets with you. I don't like the new piano." I encouraged him to play some older songs on it, ones that he knew so well they were practically memorized. Within an hour he'd gotten used to it and was willing to do duets again.

"Deck the Halls" with Allison attempting to sing the words. This was the first song in the level B book. Tyler actually learned this song really well, memorized it, and plays it all the time long past Christmas. I'm surprised this is the only recording we've ever made of it.

Here's "Go Tell it on the Mountain" with Oscar on vocals. This song either needs a gospel sound or a man singing it. Since I can't do gospel, I recruited him.

Here's Allison singing along to "Must Be Santa." She couldn't stay still, so we encouraged her to pretend the toothbrush was a microphone since she'd done so well singing it at the ward party.

"He is Born the Heavenly Child"

"Infant Holy, Infant Lowly"

"What did the Angel Say?" (honestly we needed a little more work on this one, but we really wanted to get a recording made before Christmas had passed)

"The 24th of December"

Half of the songs in Tyler's books are well known and half are originals composed by the book authors. Since I didn't think Tyler would be able to learn all 10 songs of the level B book in only the 3 weeks since passing off all the level A songs, I encouraged him to focus on the traditional Christmas songs with melodies he'd recognize. But Tyler rocked his way through all of those in the first 2 weeks and started working on the original songs with only a week before Christmas. I liked that he learned it just in time for us to post it to social media on Christmas Eve.

He also learned an Icicle Song and "We Wish Wish You a Merry Christmas," but we totally forgot to make recordings of those.