A long series of pictures, part 1

Okay, the promised pictures.

Starting us off is the Spider-man obsession. Somewhere in the house Elijah found rope. He decided it was his web and spent about a week putting the webs everywhere (I finally threw the rope away. It was trashed, and we'd had to cut it several times because it had been knotted so tightly and crazily around things).

These pictures don't show off his most impressive web, but I just like what's highlighted in one of the pictures: my wooden spoon from the kitchen. One of Elijah's other obsessions? Taking all my kitchen stuff out of the kitchen and playing with it. I just love the imagery of the wooden spoon helplessly dangling from the web. It makes me smile.

This brings up another good story about Elijah. I told you that he's been making messes and piles with everything. It cutely drives me nuts. It's not a big deal, but it's hard to keep the house clean when he does it to EVERYTHING IN THE HOUSE. He'll often trash one room, then, when it's trashed, move on to the next room. One day he was doing just this to my clean living room (why do we clean things again?). He looked right into my eyes and said, "Mom, I make mess." Not like a confessional, but like an announcement. And it dawned on me that he's been making messes just cause he likes to! I guess I should have known that.

It has prompted us to start making the kids clean the house with us. Up to this point, I've kind of done it myself, thinking it was more stressful to clean with the kids. Sometimes that's still true. But we'll get done with dinner and the next order of business is to clean the house. It works great! Should have thought of it forever ago. The kids clean the living room with Rob and I clean the kitchen and dining room. Then we'll use the clean room to do quiet bedtime things. Sometimes we'll watch a show (Avatar lately--good motivation), or read books. It's made bedtime go smoother, too.

On to the pictures! Notice Elijah's fingers webbing the camera. This features big in most of our other pictures, too. In fact, almost every picture of Elijah that I send out today has at least one version with the webbing fingers.

This is the picture of the Christmas tree with all the presents under it. Rob's sisters arranged all the presents all beautifully. I would have just tossed them under, but holy cow, how cool it turned out!

Also, because there was a no spending money rule for Thacker Christmas (genius idea), we made C a nativity. C collects nativities and lately she's been looking for some of the more unusual and unique ones. I thought, what's more unique than one done by family? I had the idea and the finished product turned out more beautiful than I had thought. I thought it was a good idea, but the finished product was GENIUS! Rob rigged a stable together, and Miciah did all the artwork. She practiced for days. She'd say, "Mom, I don't know how to draw an ox. I'll go look at your nativity." :) And then she'd study the ox. She also said, "Mom, I don't know how to draw Mary sitting. So I'll just draw a bench under her." :) The angel is a Gloria angel, just like in my nativity (and looks dang close to it, too). Anyways. It was all made out of paper and we then scanned in all the images (not going to lose that!), and it's a good thing we did. Because we borrowed someone's laminator to laminate all the pieces, and the laminator ate up 2 of the pieces!! So we were able to print them off the computer.

C loved the nativity and it's now being displayed in her home.

Pictures of Miciah and Elijah opening gifts. Check out Elijah holding his Thomas toy with one hand and webbing with the other.

And the picture with Elijah's hand in the camera cracks me up. The minute I get out the camera, Elijah starts getting up with his face in it or starts webbing and tilting his head (why the tilt?). So this one says a lot.

Tamra