Christmas at the farm

It's been a few days since we got back from the farm and I am just now getting back into the swing of things. I have not recouped yet from the holidays nor do I expect to anytime soon. Since we didn't put our tree up until the 15th of December, I refuse to take it down before the 15th of January, so I won't even have the decorations cleared out until almost February. Then I can start to recoup from the holidays.

I'm pretty sure that we are waiting for everyone to get in the living room so we can open presents. Naps are done and excitement is high. I should have fixed the girls' post nap hair, but didn't. Next to Levi is my sister-in-law, Shelley. Did you all know that there are 2 Shelley/Shelly Svobodas?!? In one family...how DO we do it?!? (Dolly, you like the deer head in the background?)

Eden and her friend Abby LOVE to play princess dress up. She isn't quite old enough to be responsible to care for these, but she got Sleeping Beauty with her prince and a horse and carriage. She can't wait to get back home to play with Abby.

Levi's a funny guy. Now you moms can't say that you never thought of REALLY using duct tape to get some piece of quiet...it crossed my mind when I saw Levi do this, but I've actually wrapped duct tape around my head before...when I was little. I don' t know what I was thinking. It is very strong and took a long time to get off of my hair. I won't do that to my kids. They haven't made me that nuts yet.

This is Micah's little baby boy. I thought he was absolutely adorable and had to get him. We call him Charlie because at the time I couldn't think of a cute baby boy name. Any suggestions? She hasn't really taken to him yet. She still loves her "Dolly" that my mom got her when she was born. Charlie may make his way into her arms one day.

The 'boda boys and their new Bears jerseys. Elijah and Titus got Brian Urlacher and Levi got Greg Olsen. I got John Paul and Sarah Olsen jerseys too. It was fun! Now Levi is excited to have the same as uncle John Paul. Aren't they a handsome bunch?!?

Our cutie Nadia Renee...couldn't you just eat her up?

Saturday night the boys got involved in a little nerf dart gun fight. Uncle Phil is hiding behind the chair and caught the boys off guard. It was funny. The darts stuck very nicely to the pj's they were wearing. It was fun to watch Titus run around and around trying to be like his big brothers. Some day little man.

Merry Christmas!!!

I should be taking a nap right now. Last night I went to do one of my transcripts and got a bit drowsy, so Tim got me a Starbucks to jolt me awake for the 3 hours needed to do my transcript. It was supposed to be done today, not started today. At 10pm I had a Triple Grande Vanilla Latte and 8 hours later I went to bed. Tim was going to have me sleep in today anyways, but little did he know. The "Triple" did it's job, but down at 6am and up by 9:30 makes for a very tired mama, ya think? But the post must go on!

Here goes...Christmas Eve is always spent at Grandpa's house. This year aunt Barbara, uncle Jim and Jimmy came up from Florida to visit.
***TANGENT***The night before Christmas Eve (I think) we were all at my parents house and we ended up playing a dice game called Farkle. If you find it on the shelves, you might not be too impressed, and I don't think it thrilled poor aunt Barbara who couldn't score to save her life, but it's a pretty fun game. If you can believe it, we even got grandpa to play. You tell your grandpa that you have never played a game with him and he tends to get a little soft. I'll bet none of you Rebers knew that your papa had hot hands for throwing dice. At the set out of the game, he was having unbelievable beginner's luck. He even started snapping his fingers and pointing at the dice and then calling his numbers. It was fun and funny! Thank you again, grandpa.
Back to grandpa's house. I am not sure how I missed it, but I didn't get a picture of grandpa at his post on the piano bench, but rest assured that he was there handing out presents in true grandpa fashion. "To the gift giver!!!"
Here we are in the back room waiting for Santa to come. I think there are try-outs for the role of Santa. John Paul tried it last year and I think Joel got roped into doing it this year. Eventually someone will fill the belt.
Titus isn't sure whether he is to be scared or bold enough to march right into the living room to see what all the commotion was, which he about did.

Just before we began the Christmas story, we all sang "Happy Birthday" to Levi who turned 6 this day. He air guitarred the whole song. Yep, he's 6 alright. (That's Suzanna's boyfriend, Jeff, on the left.)

These are my precious pumpkins during the Scripture reading. Are they il-mannered or what? Eden has half stripped off her clothes making her look like a raggamuffin and Titus is stealing Eden's dolly and making her fly into the presents. Would someone please take control of these kids?!! Wait! That's my job. (That's Joanna's boyfriend, Nathan, on the right.)

***

On Christmas morning we got up, got ready to go to Tim's parent's house for the day and then sat under our one-presented tree to see what we got. The boys were shocked and quite thrilled to see a Wii under the wrapping paper. I wonder where my camera was for all that? Oops.

We got to grandma and grandpa's house for a wonderful brunch cooked up by Shelley and assisted by Phil. Regardless of what Shelley might say or think, it was delicious and great of her to do it all for us. Thank you!

When present time came, the kids all planted themselves one of the couches while I managed the cameras from the other end of the living room.

Micah thinks she is so big now that she can climb into this chair all by herself. Now, can she get down? I think she is asking grandpa for help.

Nadia Renee's first Christmas. I can't speak for everyone, but I am thrilled to have her in our family and am glad that we get to see them a bit more regularly for a while before they head out to Indonesia. She is learning to sit up by herself and I got a kick out of the head-to-head she had with this dog of hers, so I started snapping pictures.

Her dress was so cute. After the second kid, I don't think I remembered to get "First Christmas" outfits. Certainly nothing cute like this doll is wearing!

That night we played games and ended up staying the night because I didn't want to load everyone up in the cold to go home, plus I was tired. The next morning we got out the door fairly quickly (the kids insisted on eating breakfast...what's up with that?!?) and found that all surfaces in NW Indiana were covered in at least 1/4" of ice, if not more. It took us almost 1 hour and 20 minutes to go what normally takes around 20 minutes to drive. It was insane how often we ourselves almost crashed into other cars. The highways were closed and we were plain nuts for being out in that weather, but we needed to get home.

***
Mema's house is where we went Friday night.

Friday night we all spent the night at mom and dad's so we could have our Christmas breakfast nice and early to get a start on opening the mound of gifts under the tree downstairs. This was the best shot of the kids we could muster. Levi and Eden had me cracking up with their sibling pose. Elijah was all about anything Chicago Bears. He was thrilled to get this football because besides it being the right colors, it was just his size so he could actually hold it and throw it right.

Levi was all about his buddy Toby, or as Titus calls him, "Toby tobe." Levi wants a dog so badly, but mommy's not ready for another kid right now, let alone one that poops and pees on the floor. Do they think functions like that take care of themselves??? I don't think so.

Eden got a Madame Alexander doll (much like the American Girl Dolls) and she named her Rebekah. You wouldn't tell it to look at her, but she is our girly girl princess. So NOT me in that respect.

Titus was just about tearing stuff up. Everything. Everywhere. Tear, tear, tear. At least this time he is tearing open his own present. His "bestest" toy was his planet hero figures. He loves them!
Micah was oblivious to what was going on, naturally. She did manage to find Eden's necklaces and bracelets and rings and put them on herself so elegantly. She was a natural. Uh-oh, 2 princesses in the house? Can we handle that?

After yesterday's freeze, you can imagine what our weather was like today. Or can you?



It was a high of 67, I think, so these crazy guys took advantage and played outside. Aren't they hot? No, literally!



The boys thought this was so fun, and yes, that's dad on a lawn chair.



Even the dogs got out on the ice for a little romp. All the girls were too chicken.
That evening the worst wind storm passed through bringing on old man winter again. There was a wind advisory and you'd have though the house was not going to make it, it was so bad. When we got home, this is what we found.



I couldn't believe it. I think we managed to salvage most of it, but that could have done some damage to people's property and boy are we lucky it didn't!!!

I don't know about you but I think that's about all the crazy weather I can handle for one holiday, but there's more to come, I'm sure! Stay tuned.

Elijah's Christmas Program

I love my kids' school. It's a private school and I love pretty much everything about it...except for these goofy Christmas programs. You remember how Levi's was just way too late at night? Well, this one was supposed to start at 7pm on a Tuesday night. Despite the blizzard we had to drive through to get to the program, we had school the next day and 7pm is too late, on a school night, to start an elementary Christmas program. It was a disaster waiting to happen. I think a lack of planning and strong directing was part of the problem. Here we are packed like sardines in the hallway of the local public High School, an apparent last minute change of venue, waiting to go into the auditorium as the kids inside are practicing a couple of the numbers. Titus just wanted daddy and he was fine.

The program itself could have been cute, but as is the case with most private schools that aren't rolling in the dough, it wasn't equipped with all the proper tools. The music was played from a boom box through the auditorium speakers. Tim, being a sound professional, was going nuts! The kids with speaking parts spoke too fast and not into the mics, so we couldn't hear anything they were saying. The songs were great. That was the best part of it all, but the speaking parts, the parts that contained the bulk of the message, was just background noise. Oh well, the kids looked rather cute and were singing their hearts out!

The kids were all asked to make their own shirts. Of course, I waited until the last minute and 4 hours before the program I made Elijah's, but it was fun and he really liked it! It almost made me want to make all the kids a shirt of some kind, but I didn't want to waste all the white shirts.

Getting the tree up...finally

Ok, first of all, I know it is December 29th and I'm just now posting about our Christmas tree...but sometimes I can tend to be a bit anal about things that don't matter; Having my blog show ALL photographed events in chronological order is one of them. I am going to spend the next few posts catching up on my blog. Fun, I know. So, the tree. Well due to who knows what, we didn't get a tree up until the 15th, but fear not, I will have it up until at least January 15th to make up for lost time. We managed to get the tree up, but that was just about it. Once it's the middle of December, it seems to be too late to drag it all out. Maybe it was just me, but I didn't desire to do it all. Here, the kids are all helping to fluff those lovely branches on the artificial tree. (I only went back to re-fluff a few)

In the Svoboda house, whatever night is chosen to put up the Christmas tree is also a night that we will get Dairy Queen. It's a bit of an odd tradition, but it's our tradition you could say. The kid's loved it and I will have to say that my Georgia Mud Fudge Blizzard didn't disappoint!

Once I finally drudged through the lights, and the ones that all of a sudden don't work and the half lit strands and all that rigmarole, we put the ornaments on. I am lucky that none of the ornaments got broken the way these sugar infused maniacs were going through my box and in the end, it was a very cozy looking tree! I love a dressed Christmas tree!

There are no presents yet, but that's mostly because we only got one thing for the kids and us and that was a Wii. Everything else that we got for everyone else I am taking to mom's for a wrapping party as it will all be opened there. Besides, with Titus around, do you think it wise to wrap a bunch of presents and leave them enticingly under the tree??? No, I didn't think so either.

Levi front and center

Last night was the Kindergarten Christmas program at school. For some reason the evening started at 7pm, but the program didn't actually start until 7:45; 15 minutes after my kids go to bed. That could have turned out worse for us. This is Levi's favorite [boy] friend, Josiah. They met this year and it turns out that Josiah's parents went to Moody with Tim. Small world. They have really clicked well together and it's probably because both of them like to fool around...a lot!

Here is a very handsome and somewhat nervous Levi getting ready to do the opening lines of the program. Every kid was given 2 lines to memorize, but Levi's part was 8 lines long. I'm beginning to see that Levi is, perhaps, the teacher's pet. He had a rough start to the year with getting in trouble a lot, but has really turned his behavior around and is excelling at all his work above most all the other kids and has become the teacher's little helper. She even has him "teach" some concepts when he gets them before the others. It's k5, how tough can it be? They are learning to read, so who knows.

Not only did he have the opening paragraph, but his favorite girl friend, Grace, went home sick, so his teacher asked him to do her lines as well since he basically knew everyone's part anyways.
He did a great job. He has the Olsen tendency to talk really fast, but he did his best to slow down tonight.

I don't remember what song this was, but it obviously involved bells. Levi and the other boy, Peter, got a little carried away with the shaking of these bells...it could have stolen the show if it went on much longer; they were having too much fun.

Ok, remember the whole bit about this part of the night starting 15 minutes after bedtime? Well, that wasn't talking about Micah's bedtime. She goes to bed closer to 7:00 and now here it is after 8:00 and she is not thrilled. She was hopping back and forth between grandma and grandpa and me and my mom, but not my dad. He is growing a beard for the time being, and she was just plain scared of him. She is beyond wasted and we haven't even had cookies and punch yet.

Titus began feeling better today. I looked at Tim and said, "Of all times for him to be feeling better, it would have to be tonight." He was all over the place, true to Titus' nature. We did manage to bring in a few things to keep him occupied, but it was almost like he was putting on a program of his own back there he was so loud and animated with his guys. Fortunately most of Titus' program was during the music portion of Levi's program. We were in the very front so the poor people behind us didn't know whether to watch the kindergartners or the crazy family with the rowdy kids that can't be still or quiet or respectful of other people's desire to see and hear their own kids. Sorry people! (It wasn't that bad, but as the parent, I sure felt like it was!)

These pictures are just for fun. There's always gotta be a kid who's making faces and having fun.

Josiah's mom and dad didn't seem to think it all that funny, though.

We got done with the program, HAD to have cookies and punch and then went home to make it to bed by 9pm. Ugh. It's always rougher in the morning when I have to wake them all up because they are zonked. Wowzers what a morning I had...I'll tell you about that tomorrow. Goodnight!