Nov 23-29: Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  I hope that you all had a wonderful and pleasant holiday with family and friends.  Since I'm writing this blog a bit late (today is Dec 7 - oops!) and since we've had a bit of a traumatic experience recently (see the blog entry for Nov 30-Dec 6), I am, once again, going to use pictures as the main part of this blog entry.

We had a lovely, quiet Thanksgiving holiday at the Johnson household.  We spent the first part of the day relaxing and playing at home and then went to a friends' house for the big meal in the evening.  It was wonderful of William & Heather Cochran to include us in their holiday celebration with their parents.  Sadly, we took no pictures of that event.

Erik's daycare had a Thanksgiving party for his class on Friday, November 21.  Elin & I were able to attend the party.  It was a beautiful day, so having the party as an outdoor picnic was genius.  The kids were able to play outside and run off some energy from all the treats!

The kids & I at the picnic.  I couldn't get Erik to close his mouth for any of the pictures!

Pilgrim Erik wearing a hat he made at daycare

Elin, testing out Erik's pilgrim hat

Some random photos:

Elin, testing out Kent's knit hat.  This picture makes her look like a smurf!

Erik's bed head hair after his nap!

Elin's sad face - sorry, baby girl, this one makes me laugh!

Elin's pouty face - yeah, I still have to laugh at this one, too!

We went to SeaWorld on Friday with the Cochran and Zbaraschuk families.  Yes, it was cold that day!

Family photo - Elin is blocked by Erik and we inadvertently put Erik's face in a sun spot.  Oops

All the kids

We had a burst of Christmas spirit on Wednesday, November 19, and decided to be crazy and put up our brand new, never used, prelit Christmas tree super early this year.  We got 2 sections connected and then discovered that a strand of lights wouldn't work.  After Kent went through all the trouble-shooting steps, we had to call the company and get a replacement light strand. Then poor tree sat all forlorn for a week until we got the replacement part on Wednesday, November 26.  I decorated the top part of the tree with all the fragile, breakable ornaments while the kids slept and then let the kids help me put the soft or more kid-friendly ornaments on the bottom part.

The completed tree

Erik hanging an ornament - he was very particular about the placement of his ornaments!

Elin inspecting some of the kid-friendly ornaments

The look I got when I told her to be gentle!

On Thursday of this week, we decided that it was time to finally move Erik to a toddler bed.  What?  You're surprised?!  Erik has only, in the past 2-3 weeks, tried to climb out of his crib!  Since he had never tried before, we decided to let "sleeping bears lie", if you will!!  We certainly didn't want to mess with his sleep routine!  We were very worried that Erik would play "jack-in-the-box" once we moved him to a toddler bed.  We could not have been more wrong - at least so far!  He stays in his bed once we put him in it until we come to get him up after naps or in the morning!  I'm still shocked when I think about it!  He'll sit up in bed and play with his blankets or stuffed animals, but he won't climb out.  We'll see how long that lasts!

Erik & his crib

Erik & his toddler bed

Erik showing us how he would sleep (I gave him a pillow to his great excitement!)

Some funny stories:

1. A very little known fact is that I love musicals and sometimes, I sing my conversations to the kids. (And NO, I do not dance in my real-life musicals!!) They generally get a kick out of it, but one day Erik stopped me mid-song and said "Stop singing, it hurts my ears"!!!

2. We have been germ conscious in our household since our long bout of colds in September.  One day, Kent was playing with Erik and pretending to sniff his neck.  Erik responded by telling Kent "Don't 'niff me!  You have boogers in there and I don't want to get sick"!!

3. Elin can't talk to us much yet, but she is certainly an expressive little girl.  When eating, she tends to stockpile your food in her cheeks while asking for more bites.  We finally caught on to her tricks after a few puking incidents and we now will prompt her several times to "Chew" during meals.  When we say "Chew" now, she will tilt her face up to you, open her lips and show you her teeth as she takes some giant, exaggerated bites of food!!  Too funny.  Of course, now we sometimes say "Chew" just to get her to perform her little trick!!

4. This last story is more a trick that I played on Nana (my mother) than a cute story about the kids.  Back in October, I had included the "Love you Forever" children's book in our library rentals and we had it when my parents came down for a quick weekend trip (the weekend of the stomach bug).  I had never read the book and since it had a picture of a little boy playing with toilet paper on the cover, I thought it would be a story about potty training - which I definitely wanted Erik to hear about!  Well, the first time I opened the book to read it, I had to quickly paraphrase the story and put it down.  It made me burst into tears with the "I love you forever, I like you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby you'll be" chorus.  I showed it to Kent that evening and he told me that he had tried to read it to Erik a few days earlier and it made him cry!  A little devil got ahold of me and I carefully set the book aside for my parents' visit (my Mom cries really easily).  Then, once they arrived and had settled in, I waited until we were all in the living room and then, oh so casually, suggested that Nana might like to read Erik some stories.  Of course, Erik jumped at the opportunity.  I handed Mom a stack of books and she cheerfully read through a few books about race cars, trains, etc.  I then handed her the "I love you forever" story.  She opens it and reads through the first few pages.  We all laugh at how crazy the Mommy in the story was to drive across town to climb through the window into her grown son's house so she could rock him while he slept & while she sang him her little sweet song.  Well, then Mom got to the page where the Mommy in the books is old & sick and calls her son to come see her and the son, in turn, rocks his Mommy while singing the song.  Mom is almost sobbing but she kept on reading the story to Erik; even as I'm laughing to myself at this trick I've played on Mom, I'm crying and then I look over at Pops and HE is crying.  Mom gets through the end of the book and looks at me: "Why would you read this to your kids?"  Excellent question.  I've seen that book on lots of popular book lists or searches.  How did it get there?  It is a tearjerker story!  Anyone know?

Oct 26-Nov 22: Major Catch-up

Yikes, I guess I've gotten very behind in my blog posts!  November was very busy with various illnesses, potty training, appointments, etc & so on.  As I sit here trying to think back on the month, I really cannot remember everything that we did and why I got so far behind on this blog.  I hope that my faithful readers haven't suffered too severe a withdrawal this past month!!  I'm going to catch up by using lots of pictures!

At the beginning of the month, I told Erik that we had run out of day-time diapers (I gave him a few days advance notice) and that he would have to start using the potty like Mommy & Daddy now.  This approach worked pretty well and we only had a few accidents during the first 4-5 days.  After that, Erik has no problem with going pee.  We are still struggling with going poo-poo in the potty, but I hope that he will soon stop holding that until nap or bed time.  Potty training has also provided me the opportunity to talk to Erik about anatomy, much to my chagrin.  He saw me getting into the shower one day and looked at me with surprise and said "How do you go pee?!"  That was an interesting conversation, to say the least!

Erik has fully embraced the concept of being sick and getting medicine since his recent bouts of the flu and a head cold.  He insists on having a puke bucket in his room at all times and will often ask to have it in bed with him (he doesn't get it).  He also makes sure that I never forget to give him his vitamins/medicine every morning.  Erik has also started drinking Xango (mangosteen juice) and was so upset when one of Kent's shipments went missing and there wasn't any "juice medicine" in the house for him!!

Elin is getting more vocal in the past few weeks.  She is mimicking a lot of sounds and intonations.  She will say "dow" for "Down" when she wants out of her highchair.  She also tries to say "thank you", "Amen", and "Erik".  She can say "Noooo" really well and is learning "Yes" though it sounds more like "Yeth".  She is starting to display some temper - however, rather than throw herself on the floor, she will start to cry, walk over to a wall, throw her hands on it and bury her face in her hands.  This lasts only for about 10 seconds or less before she turns around to see what I think of her performance.  She loves all of our ride-on toys and is super good at steering, especially the plasma car.  Elin did get her first boo-boo while riding on the trike - a little road rash on her elbow, knee and tiny bit on her cheek.  She is a super tough little girl, though, and didn't even whimper about it.

Pictures from our month:

We finished up our session of fall swimming lessons (when you live in Florida, you can swim into November!):

A neighbor was getting their yard landscaped and Erik got to drive a tractor/front-loader!!

A local fire station visited Erik's daycare and he & Elin have been playing with his fire hats since:

Various photos of Elin from the past few weeks:

Elin on Erik's trike - she loves all our riding toys and is really good at steering:

Elin showing off her owie from riding the trike:

Elin at Sabbath School - she looks like she knows what she's doing!

Erik demonstrating the classic Johnson stance:

We have 1 tree in our yard that drops its leaves; Erik helped Kent rake them up one Sunday.  It was a bit nippy for Florida!

Elin lounging:

Kent was reading a book to Erik at bedtime about tools, so he decided to show him the real, live versions!

We took some family pictures at JCPenney (look for them on our annual Christmas letter!) and this is how Kent entertained the kids while I reviewed the photos and placed our order.

Erik & Elin had a dentist visit this month.  This was the first time that Erik was supposed to go back on his own.  That didn't work out at all.  Due to his uneasiness of the whole experience, I wasn't able to get any pictures of Elin's first visit.  Oops.  Doesn't he look so small & pitiful sitting in the x-ray chair?!