Anders Extended Family Christmas

This year we went to Andrea's Aunt Karen's house for the Anders family Christmas celebration the week before Christmas. The kids had fun playing with the other children and we watched the Chiefs upset the Green Bay Packers, who were undefeated until that point in the season.

It was a fun day and it was great to see everyone.

Plaza fun with the Gobles

On Saturday, the 17th of December, we went to dinner with the Gobles while Andrea's cousin Teresa watched the kids. It was a fun adult night out on the town and we went to eat Hibachi Japanese cuisine on the Plaza. The weather was beautiful, not too cold, and it was the perfect night to go to the Plaza. We weren't the only ones who had that idea unfortunately and we should have known that the Plaza the weekend before Christmas would be packed. It was almost impossible to find a parking spot and we almost gave up on the whole plan, but we're glad we didn't.

Dinner was great, it was fun to see the lights and the city at night, and we had a lot of fun! Just what we needed to get into the Christmas spirit.

The Elf on the Shelf and Jingle

While we were in Florida, Mommy picked up "The Elf on the Shelf" and "Jingle".  The Elf is a little guy that watches over Connor and Paige to see if they've been good or bad throughout the day. At night, he flies to the North Pole to tell Santa if the kids have been good, then he comes back to the house (sometimes with a gift) and ends up somewhere new every morning. There is a cute book that explains it all to the kids and they love searching for him every morning. Connor decided the elf's name would be "Gin". (See him hanging from the lamp?) Gin's brought a few Backyardigans stuffed animals for Connor and some PJ's too, so far.

Andrea also got Paige a neat puppy dog book. Jingle (sitting on the end table) is a stuffed puppy that likes to listen while we read some special Jingle books to Paige. Whenever we get to certain parts, Jingle will bark or sing or whine depending on what's happening in the story. Paige thinks it's great fun. Every time Jingle makes a sound she will burst out with a loud silly over the top laugh. It's infectious and even Connor will do the same silly laugh whenever Jingle barks along to the story. She loves to read the books and will carry the books and Jingle to us every night after dinner.

I had to throw in this picture too. Connor kept sticking his hand in his mouth while we were trying to get a picture and I asked him to put his hands down. Well, what does Paige do? She raises her stinking hands over her head! Connor did too and it turned out to be a cute pic.

Paige has really been enjoying books lately. One of her favorites is "Hippos Go Berserk". She always does a silly dance at the midpoint of the book when you say "All the hippos go berserk!".

SICK

We all got sick this last week.

It all started on Monday when Rachel, the kids' babysitter called and told me that Paige had vomited. I went to pick her up and we didn't really think she was all that sick. I was hoping she had just gagged on some drainage from her runny nose or something. She just seemed normal, happy, and didn't have a temperature or any other symptoms. We fed her a normal lunch... and it came right back up. It was kind of bizarre since she seemed so normal otherwise. After vomiting, she'd be upset for a couple seconds, but then she'd be her regular old sassy self. We gave her some water to drink to wash out the vomit from her throat and a little while later it all came up. At that point, we held off before giving her anything more and during her nap she vomited again in her bed.

Thankfully (although we didn't know it at the time) that was it for Paige. Unfortunately, it was just the beginning for everyone else.

Connor had been to school and had lived a pretty normal day. When I got him off the bus, I saw that he'd fallen asleep, and was a little quieter than normal, but nothing too out of the ordinary. He sat on the couch for a few minutes as we got his dinner together and suddenly he coughed and made a gagging sound. Mommy and I both froze, staring at him in disbelief. It was one of those long moments where you know what's about to happen, but you're somehow hoping that your senses are lying to you and it won't turn out like you know it will.

Then, vomit. Everywhere. All over him, all over the couch. We tried to get him to the wood floor, but it got on the carpet first. Andrea took him to the sink to clean up and I started along the tedious process of stripping the covers off the couch cushions, washing everything, and cleaning the carpet. Thankfully not much got on the floor.

We got done cleaning and Connor sat on the clean side of the couch with a bucket nearby in case he needed to throw up again. Paige kept wanting to play with it, so I suggested he wear it as a hat to keep it away from her. Surprisingly he did, and surprisingly it worked! I took a quick picture of the kids on the couch, hoping that would be the end of our adventure.

The kids stayed home Tuesday and Connor felt nauseous while eating. He was pretty miserable and complaining about tummy aches. At one point, we got him a bucket to barf into and sat him down on the wood floor. Paige decided she wanted to join in the fun and got a white bucket-like object and sat down with him. We took him to the doctor on Tuesday to get swabbed for strep and to double-check that we were treating everything correctly. Everything came back normal and it was confirmed that it was just a stomach bug that had been going around lately.

 

By Tuesday night, things had gotten mostly back to normal. The kids were feeling much better and we were hoping for a relaxing Wednesday for everyone. The kids are usually home on Wednesdays anyways, and it was a nice extra day for them to recuperate. We were hopeful that they'd be back to their normal selves on Wednesday.

Andrea and I both had been vigilant about hand washing and being careful not to catch whatever it was that got the kids sick. Unfortunately, Tuesday night (actually very early Wednesday morning), it was Mommy and Daddy's turn. I would put it somewhere in my top 10 list of worst pains I'd experienced. We were both up most of the night, completely drained of energy, dehydrated and exhausted. When morning came, we faced one of the longest days ever. Both kids were good as new and ready to play. We both felt awful.

Thankfully, Mommy handles this kind of thing better than Daddy. We both shared in the tasks of taking care of the children throughout the day and both had an opportunity to take a nap, but it was a LONG day and Mommy took care of everyone. 

Today is Friday, and we are all pretty much back to normal. This is when we really remember to appreciate the days when we feel normal and healthy.

Florida Design Center Appointment

 

When we signed our contract to build our house, we put off the design center appointment in the hopes that we'd sell the house and would be moved down when the time came to do it. We wanted to be there in person for it, and didn't want to have to pay for another trip just for the 4 hour appointment. Well, the house hasn't sold yet, so we had to squeeze in another trip. The weather is getting chilly in the Midwest, so it wasn't a bad time to visit sunny Florida, but it was a busy time of year to squeeze in a trip.

Last weekend, Andrea and I flew to Florida to make the big decisions. We spent a while before the trip looking at model homes and thinking of design and we thought we were going in to the design appointment prepared. We also brought our secret weapon, Wendy Chandler of Chandler Designs (her website is under construction http://wchandlerdesigns.com/). We aren't great about picking things out from a pile of choices, but we had a hazy idea of what we were looking for although we couldn't put it in to words. Wendy asked me at one point how I'd describe my style and I said I thought I liked "Modern", until she showed me exactly what that meant and it wasn't at all what I thought. I told her I knew I didn't like "Ye Olde Englishe" antique styling and that's what I meant, it wasn't a good enough excuse though, so for the rest of our time with her she teased me mercilessly. Thankfully Andrea was a little better at describing our tastes.

When we got to the design center, it was about as overwhelming as we'd expected. It's nice to have so many choices, but they add up quickly. We picked out the kitchen stuff first and went with a darker wood stain on the cabinets than we've got in our current home. We picked a rich brown wood color that went pretty well with one of the granite options. At first, we were going to go with the standard tile in the entryway, dining room and kitchen which is pretty typical for Florida. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to take a look at wood flooring. Maybe it's just the Midwestern guy in me and I'm used to it, but I really wanted wood floors over tile. We went with some wide flooring boards with a nice brown color to it. It's hard to know exactly how it will look when you have it stretched from the front of the house to the back, but it looked nice on the tiny 5" by 3" sample they had. It was one of the bigger upgrades, so hopefully it's worth it.

The first picture shows the granite for the kitchen, with the backsplash, wood floor choice and wall color. Bad picture from our dinky camera with bad lighting, but it gives a general idea of some of the stuff we picked.

Next, we chose all kinds of tiles, carpet and design elements for our bathrooms. The master bath has granite countertops and we were surprised and happy to hear that the smaller bathrooms will too. We picked some tile and some neat decorative tiling that should look nice together. Again, hard to imagine it all together, but hopefully the girls all had a good eye for this.

The last picture shows the granite for the bathroom with the floor tile and cabinet color.

There were lots of other things like carpet, crown molding, etc that we didn't snap pictures of, but those pictures would be pretty boring and the pictures weren't coming out great in the design center.

Finally, we finished with it and were done. We didn't manage to pick out the exterior color while we were in town, which was disappointing. We did drive around with Wendy for a bit to look at colors we liked. Wendy was nice enough to drive around the neighborhood after we got home and helped us over the phone.

The trip was short and all business. We also talked to pool people while we were in town and still have to make that decision. Pools are a lot more expensive than we expected, but we'd like to just get one in and over with while we're in construction mode anyways.

Once our business was done, we drove back to Orlando to fly out. We planned to stay the night and take an early flight on Sunday. We got in town late Saturday night and ate at the Cheesecake Factory. Our Garmin happened to take us to one that was in a mall, and we were very happy it did. The mall was one of the top 5 malls in the country and it was amazing. We ate outside on the patio (remember, this is in December and it's in the 20's at this same time in KC) and watched the valets park some amazing cars (there was a particularly nice Ferrari). We went to the Rolex store (didn't know those existed) and the Louis Vuitton store before the mall closed. It would have been fun to stop in at the Chanel and Gucci stores, but it was too late. It was a nice relaxing way to wind down and appreciate all the neat stuff the area has to offer. Up until that point, the trip was mostly stressful and exhausting.

We flew back to KC the next morning and are looking forwards to the day we can go back and see our new house!

Great Wolf Lodge 2011

This weekend we went to Great Wolf Lodge for Snowland. Aunt Amanda and Uncle Ryan watched Paigie Pie for us, so we were able to just with Connor and spend some special time with just our little man.

We put together a video showing most of the highlights.

Everything was decorated with a neat Christmas theme, and the weather was terrible, wet, and rainy so it was a nice time to be indoors and swimming.

We took a few pictures of Connor in the Lobby while we waited (forever) to check in.

We took a little video of our room when we first went in.

After we checked in, we all swam together for a long time. Connor was a little slow to get in to it at first, but he warmed up pretty fast and eventually rode everything he was big enough to ride.

For dinner, we ate at Applebees and then we played for a while in the arcade. Connor enjoyed a number of the games, but his favorite was definitely the air hockey. He was pretty darn good at it, although he could only reach about 6-8 inches in to the play area. He was definitely good at defending his goal and if you wanted to score, you'd really have to work at it.

After dinner was the story time and the visit with Rowdy Reindeer. 

Mommy got a great spot with Connor for story time. After the story they were second in line to see Rowdy, although it didn't matter much since so many kids were cutting in line and none of the parents had enough class to stop them. Unfortunately, this was also the case with many of the rides. Mommy and Daddy had to scold a lot of kids that had no supervision and no concept of how a line works.

 We didn't have to wait long though for the picture with Rowdy.

Overall, we had a great time. We were exhausted after all our fun. Poor Daddy bashed his elbow on a slide when he was trying to jump in for a fast start. I could barely feel my fingers on my left hand for a few minutes. I also managed to do something to throw my back out. It hasn't bothered me much since I hurt it on our Alaska trip back in 2006, but I can tell it's close to spasming after all our fun this weekend. I'll have to take it easy this next week!

Connor doing his letters

Each night, after Paige is in bed and we have a little peace and quiet, Mommy works with Connor on his letters and writing. For a while now, he's been able to identify all the letters and their sounds, but he wasn't really able to write them all until recently. We have also been working on sounding out and spelling words. He's doing great!

Mommy took a video of Connor doing all his letters this past week.

Great work Buster and Mommy!!