The Verhaarens: O Christmas Stick

LOOK OUT! IT’S THE NEW YEAR! Well, not yet. But just you wait; it’ll be here before you know it. So, in the spirit of most other forms of media we’re going to recap the year with a lot of stuff you’ve already seen before.

Actually, blogs are set up for recaps already. I guess if you want that you can just pick your favorite posts from the side bar. That being the case, instead of a recap we’ll put in a conglomeration of pictures that we took while saying, “We have to blog about that,” and then never blogged about.

In short, get ready for a choppy post. It’ll be worst at the beginning where you’ll see stuff from everywhen. It might actually be good by the end, but you’ll have to read (or in my case write) the whole thing to find out.

We begin with Jack’s weight problem. He doesn’t have one. Which is just as well because all we did to deal with his pretend weight problem was to create a WiiFit character for him and have him do a body test. It turns out that the WiiFit doesn’t recognize ages under two years, so we lied about Jack’s age. Funnily enough it did let us put in his exact height, though you can’t tell from the main screen line up, where he appears to reach my shoulder.

In creating his Mii we tried to replicate his face and body exactly. So, he has a huge bald head with wide blue eyes. We hoped this would be cute, but it mostly looks like a short, big headed, sleep deprived, creep.

His body test took a team effort,

but it paid off. Just look at the smug expression he had when his BMI came back in the normal range.

It wasn’t all good news though. His WiiFit age was around thirty due to his terrible balance.

While we’re on the topic of weight we really should talk about eating. I don’t know if we ever told the internet in general that Jack’s been eating solids for a while, but he has. One of the ways we started was by grinding some broccoli. Well, Jack really wasn’t a fan of home ground broccoli and he told us by crying. But we, mean parents that we are, would take advantage of the open crying mouth to shovel in some more broccoli. Jack came up with a creative evasion to our feeding tactic. He would cry normally while the spoon was far away, but when the broccoli came near enough he would close his mouth and while continuing a sort of humming cry through his closed lips. We were, of course, proud of Jack for his problem solving skills and we quite prefer closed mouth crying to open mouth, so everybody wins.

Another everybody wins scenario is due to an excellent impulse buy of Hilary’s. She was at a second hand store for baby things and came upon this little number.

Since Jack decided he’d rather be on his feet trying to walk than almost anything else this jumper lets him run back and forth in a way which is not only safe, but doesn't require anyone strain their back by holding his hands a the optimum height.

You may think that Jack doesn’t look all that happy to be in the jumper, but he’s not actually frowning. He has discovered that he has two teeth in his mouth, and he loves to suck on them while making that face. As you can see,

he typically has a blast running around.

He has also rediscovered the pacifier’s in a big way. This is all Levi’s fault. Levi is the three month old that Hilary watches during the day. Well, Levi responds well to a pacifier in the mouth. So well, in fact that Jack decided he wanted to try it. So, he has learned to take the pacifier from Levi’s mouth and put it in his own. For instance,

we don’t own a green pacifier, but Levi does.

Well, that about does it for the day to day updates. Time to jump into the holidays. As you can see,

Jack is a big fan of holiday accessorizing. So, we let him help us get the house ready for Christmas. He used his excellent taste to pick out the right lights for the outside.

He may have been inspired by the festival of lights put on at the DC Temple. Of all the crèches, trees, and lights that were there his favorite things were those we let him put in his mouth.

(We actually even made it inside the temple for stake temple night thanks to Hilary’s awesome cousin for babysitting for us. We even got to go to the seventh floor meeting room. Very cool temple indeed.)

Now, it just wouldn’t be Christmas without a tree. Well, to be precise part of a tree. I mean, few people (if any) actually have an entire tree with roots and all inside the house. So, you just take part of a tree and put ornaments on it. This year we took that idea to it’s illogical conclusion, which makes our festive plan part just a little shy of Charlie Brown’s tiny tree. We lovingly refer to ours as the Christmas stick.