Catching up

December disappeared quickly.  And January is about to do the same thing.  Life has been so crazy between home, kids, church and the dental office, that I have not sat down at all to write a post in a month!

So, here's a bit of what has happened this month.

The two boys recovered miraculously from their surgeries.  They couldn't move their arms for a couple of weeks without intense pain, which meant that I had to feed them and help them do lots of other things I didn't ever really think I would help teenage boys do...  But they dealt with the pain quite well.  The surgery is excruciating to recover from, so at first I was waking myself up every 4 hours to make sure they kept the pain under control with their oxycodone.  But after about a week they were down to just a few a day, and then after 2 weeks I took the hard stuff away and left them with Tylenol and Advil.  They did really, really well with their recoveries.  When I told them we were done with the oxycodone, they kept teasing me about giving them arthritis medicine when they are teenagers, but they did great.  One funny thing is that during their recovery time we moved Joel's bed upstairs into Jacob's room to make it easier on them and on me.  Now that they are totally fine, they don't want to move!  Joel's stuff is still all downstairs in his room, but they like sharing a room.  Odd for teenage boys, but I'm not complaining.

Everything was pretty much back to normal by Christmas Eve when we had Mark's family all here for dinner and a party.  I started a tradition last year of feeding the kids and teenagers pizza for dinner, and then banishing them all to the basement while the adults sit down to a nice quiet meal.  This year I made London Broil, which is one of my very favorite meals.  Not quite traditional for Christmas Eve, but I was in charge, so that's what we had.  And every last bit of beef was gone, so it was a hit.

 The cousins did their traditional nativity play.

 Noah and Savanna played some pieces on the piano.

 And we all sat around our big tree and enjoyed the evening together with lots of noise and lots of cousins.

Christmas day in a house full of 9 people is always exciting, but when Christmas is on a Sunday and you need to get to church it makes things even more hectic.  Typically we get Christmas morning started at 7AM, but this year we moved it up to 6:00 to make it possible for us to get to church--especially because Mark was conducting the meeting!

Aubrey got a guitar for Christmas.  Secretly, this was my present to myself....I play it while she is at school.

 Three kids got big bean bag chairs.  Mark and I were a little worried when they arrived in these little boxes, but after prying the cardboard off of the vacuum-packed bags, which was not an easy job, the bags expanded to their full 4-foot size within minutes.

 Jacob got a video camera, and he and Joel are working on a production called "Teens in the Wild."  It's  a documentary about teens in their natural habitat....  In true "Jill" style, the first camera we bought Jacob was broken--something inside was loose and loud.  So we had to replace the camera after Christmas with a functional one.

 Joel was excited to get EPIC Perplexus to challenge his big brain.

Noah got the disco light of his dreams.

 Savanna learned what a Cricut was.  I found a deal on Black Friday I could not pass up.  I had a hunch that this would be the best present we could possibly give Savanna, so we threw her Christmas list in the trash and went with the Cricut.  Turns out I was exactly right.  She told me later that night that even though she didn't get any toys for Christmas, the Cricut was the best thing she could have ever imagined.  She has made lots of things for a lot of people, and pretty much every day comes up with some reason to cut something with the Cricut.

For the record, she did get a toy for Christmas--Fozzy Bear that she cannot sleep without.

Abram joined the Pillow Pet club with his new Wally the Big Green Monster Red Sox mascot.

 Zachary loved The Muppets so much that he has made us call him Walter ever since we saw the movie at Thanksgiving time.  I knew he would love to get this little Walter stuffed animal for Christmas.  He takes it everywhere.

Last, but not least, on Christmas day was the opening of the big mystery family present.  What kind of crazy idea did we have?

A marimba!  When you have a house full of piano playing kids, who also love to play music on anything they can get their hands on, why not add a marimba to the house?  Sure, it's huge, but the sound is really quite pretty.  I have been amazed to see the kids take songs they know from the piano and just walk right up to the marimba and play it on there.  Savanna made things easier by using her Cricut to cut out some vinyl letters for the names of the bars.  Mostly for me...I was getting lost and messing up the songs.

 We had a fun Christmas break, and had a lot of fun when my sister and her family came, and also the cousins from Connecticut came, for the week after Christmas.  We topped off the break by having a quick stomach flu run through every person in our house....Luckily it left as fast as it came and we were all back to full health again within 24 hours of falling ill.

And then school started again, and now the high schoolers are in the middle of finals week!  I have been busy fixing computers and training a new person at the dental office while the kids are at school, along with trying to get my groove back for running.  I sort of slacked off for November and December--I didn't stop altogether, I just didn't make it out as often as I should have.  Now it's time to kick it into gear because my race is 18 weeks away.  I can run about 5 miles easily now, but I've got to work my way back up to be able to run 13.1, and to do it in under 2 hours, so I have my work cut out for me.