Christmas and The Things Julia Says

Before we get to the titular topics... Julia had a holiday-sing-a-long during one of her last days of her semester of preschool. All the kids got to wear their pajamas and bring a pillow. Parents were invited and everyone participated together to sing songs and have snacks. It was a lot of fun and very cool to see some of what Julia does everyday at school. Here's a picture of Julia and me from that morning.

Our first Christmas in our house was pretty exciting. For starters, we actually had a good place to put the tree without feeling like it was in the way or without having to rearrange furniture. We also had a little tree that we had used a few times while still renting and we found a good place for that in the kitchen. This was Finn's first time getting to really help with decorating and he seemed to like it, as did Julia.


People always say that Julia looks a lot like Mandy. One of the ornaments was a picture of Mandy when she was little. I think this is definitive proof that the people are correct.

The end products of the decorating:

We decided to have our gift opening with just our family the weekend before Christmas. We traveled to Wisconsin Rapids for Christmas, so we wanted to have a little holiday fun at our house before things got too hectic.

As expected, the traveling aspect of Christmas this year was busy, stressful, and fun. We had a lot of places to go while in Wisconsin Rapids and so every day we went somewhere to celebrate Christmas or visit relatives and friends.

One gift that Julia got was tickets to go see Stars on Ice in February. She loves dancing and she's talked about how ice skating is like dancing on ice. I'm sure she'll love it. This is a picture of her after someone explained to her what it was inside of the box.

Sometimes Finn would think that Julia's presents looked fun too. That doesn't usually turn out very well for either child or the people in the vicinity who have to hear the yelling. Julia decided to get some bodyguards to help out. Here she is with Mandy's cousins Curt and Zach at her side to help protect her interests - in this case, a new keyboard.

I thought this picture of Julia and her Grandpa Dayton was especially cute.


Beware: Clever segue ahead! (Ok, so using a Christmas present to lead into The Things Julia Says might not be THAT clever...)
You never know which new toys will be a hit and which ones won't be. This year Julia got Honeybee Hop and it was a hit. It's a stick attached to a base and the stick spins around and you jump over it. Julia was having fun jumping over the stick and running away from it when I decided to join her. I must have been getting in her way, but she didn't want to be mean about it so she said, "Dad, you watch me for a little while so you can get better at it." And then later, when I was sitting on floor close to the game doing something with Finn, she turned it back on. It banged against my back as it was trying to spin around. Julia said, "Daddy move! Your butt's too big!" For the record, by butt is adequately sized.

Frequently Julia will inform us of things out of the blue. One such example of this is when she announced that, "Circles are the only shapes without corners."

While driving to one of the our many stops this Christmas Julia piped up from the backseat. "Seven plus seven is..." She was quiet for perhaps 10-15 seconds before revealing the answer to be fourteen. She counted on her fingers (which I thought was impressive enough for a not-yet four and half year old), but since she doesn't have fourteen fingers, she had counted out the first seven and when she maxed out at ten while counting the second seven, she had to start back over with the first hand. We've got a smart one on our hands!