Merry Hanakwanzmas!

The other night Sophie and I were reading her book-in-a-bag, the book that comes home from school every night.  It’s a different book each time, and we read it together, talk about it, and then write down what we talked about and she takes it back to school.  Well, this particular book was about the Underground Railroad, so when Sophie saw that the person in the book was black, this sparked a thought, because she interrupted me and said, “Mommy! The red candle in Kwanzaa is for struggle, and the black candle is for black” {um, not sure she got that right}, “and the green candle stands for HOPES and DREAMS!”  (She got really excited about the hopes and dreams!)

And so I learned that Sophie has been paying attention at school to her multicultural holiday education.  The next day she came home and excitedly said, “Mommy! Guess what?? Kamri celebrates Kwanzaa because she has BLACK SKIN!”  Kamri is one of Sophie’s good buddies, and she does, in fact have black skin.  So does one of Sophie’s teachers and another classmate (her class is very racially mixed, with Hispanic and Caucasians tied for majority). So I said, “Do Mr. G and Honest’I celebrate Kwanzaa too?”  and she said, “Nope, just Kamri.”  It kind of cracked me up, because it didn’t seem to bother her that those two didn’t celebrate Kwanzaa even though they also had “black skin”.  Then today, she told me rather longingly that she wished we could also celebrate Kwanzaa.  I think she’s just aiming for more presents, though.

Next, her class moved on to Christmas, however the extent of their education on Christmas was Santa coming to visit class and the making of a stocking.  This was kind of confusing to Sophie because we’ve never tried to pull the whole Santa thing over on our kids, and we just told them that he is pretend. Only now, she thinks he is real because CLEARLY he came to her school.  Hmm.  Good thing we have our nativity scene, Advent calendar, and you know, Bible at home. Not too mention the many books we read to try to explain about Jesus’ birth.

Next, her class moved on to Hannukah.   “Mom, Hannukah is another holiday. And it has candles TOO! But it’s not right now, but it’s in a few days.  And we played a Hanukkah game with pretzels!  And we made a dreidel!”  That’s all the info I got on Hannukah, though when she came home Wednesday with her dreidel, Kwanzaa mat, and stocking that she had made over the past few weeks, she was rather jazzed about them all.

Learning about others is awesome!

Truth be told, as funny as Sophie’s interpretations of what she is learning about at school are, I am really glad she IS learning about other families’ traditions, and that she thinks it’s all awesome.  Obviously, we celebrate Christmas and we believe in Christ, but it’s excellent for her to start to learn and understand about the different people in our very urban part of town.

And it sure is cute to hear her explain all about what she’s learning.

So whatever holiday you celebrate, I hope you have a very happy one!  And should you be short one Kwanzaa mat at your holiday table…well, Sophie might let you borrow hers!  If there’s a present in it for her.

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Apukealypse Now

Remember the other day when I wrote about trying to keep the fam healthy for the holidays? Yeah, well. For some reason I was thinking coughs, colds, strep throat, oh my! I was not thinking about vomit.  It hadn’t occurred to me that we might be swimming in it sometime during this cold & flu/holiday season.

So of course that’s what came to visit us, because I was not expecting it at all.  It started last Tuesday night when Joshua was complaining of a headache. I took his temperature and lo and behold, it was 101.4!  So I declared that he was not going to school the next day and put him to bed.  When he woke up still feverish the next morning and puked a couple times, I was pretty nervous.  But throughout the day, he actually improved.  His fever responded to ibuprofen, and he didn’t vomit anymore.  He was still peaked, but he ate a couple popsicles.  When Sophie got home from school, they played really nicely together.  She was rather happy to have her big brother home.  Then he started feeling bad again, as it got later, and I wasn’t sure whether he’d be well enough to go to school Thursday or not.  We put both big kids to bed in the hopes that he would wake up all better.

And THEN Sophie woke up and vomited alllll over her bedroom at about 11:15.  I got her undressed and threw her in the bathtub while Bobby went to work on her bedroom. Let me tell you that one of the pleasures of having a daughter with long, glorious hair is scrubbing puke out of it in the middle of the night. Oh, did I say pleasures? Because I meant HORRORS!!  Ick. Poor Soph had a rough night and also a rough early morning.  She was quite a bit sicker than Joshua had been.  He still had a fever in the morning, though, so I kept them both home.  At about 3:30 in the afternoon, an exhausted and sick Sophie girl fell asleep on the couch.  She slept for almost three hours!

Pathetic!

Joshua was doing ok, but he started feeling bad again as night fell and his fever went back up to 101.4.  So, I kept him home Friday too.  Friday – day 3 with two sick big kids!  But Friday wasn’t too bad – they were definitely recovering.  Less TV and more playing, and they both ate peanut butter toast instead of just popsicles.  By Saturday morning, they were both back to normal.  Joshua’s energy was through the ROOF! You could tell he hadn’t been out in a few days.

So, Saturday was good. Saturday we were all gloriously healthy.  All seemed right again.

Until I woke up at 3:30 Sunday morning to feed the baby, and had to throw, I mean, quickly place him back in his crib to avoid throwing up all over him.

Oh, I was sick. SO, SO sick.  I can’t remember the last time I was that sick!  I threw up a million more times that the kids did combined.  All day Sunday, I laid in bed because I couldn’t sit up with having to throw up. It. Was. Baaaad.  Bobby took care of the kids, took them to a birthday party, brought me whatever I needed – he was great.  I couldn’t even sit up to nurse Jonah, I had to nurse him lying down. I don’t know what I would have done had this occurred on a week day!

So – we’ve had our holiday sickness!  Please germs and cooties, stay away from us at least until after Christmas, we’ve paid our dues and sacrificed to the porcelain god.

________

P.S. I totally stole the term “Apukealypse” from my pal Dawn.

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Elf on the Shelf

Have you seen the latest craze?

Elf on the Shelf.

The premise is that (and I haven’t read the book so I’m just reporting what I’ve gleaned from the interwebz) an elf shows up at your house, checks out what’s going on there, and reports back to Santa whether the kids are being naughty or nice. But, the elf shows up in different places every day.

I know it’s been popular for a few years, but apparently my kids hadn’t heard of it before now. This year, though, they really wanted an elf!

I couldn’t bring myself to buy the $30 brand name version, though, so meet Fake Elf.

I bought him for $7.99 at a local gift shop and printed a letter I found online, explaining who he was.

The kids totally bought it, and I saved myself $22.

So, Fake Elf has been bouncing around our house, hanging from light fixtures, doing snow angels in powdered sugar, and sitting atop a pineapple, among other things. It takes 5 seconds to do and it’s so fun to hear the kids search for him and squeal in excitement when they find him. I love hearing them conjecture about how Fake Elf got from where he was last night to where he turned up this morning.

Of course, there are a million people more creative than their elves than I am, and I’ve seen some really cute elf hi-jinks! In fact, there’s a whole Flickr pool dedicated to the subject. Here are a few of my favorites:

Run like the wind Bullseye!!!

Friends

the adventures of feagle day 10

Elf Tagging.

My elf placement has been much less involved than those, but aren’t they cute?

Do you have an elf on a shelf?

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