Thanksgiving is o'er

Now tis Christmas time. Christy is out shopping with Carter today and left me home to clean and be with Bryce. To set the record straight, we have two sweet little boys. They both have good hearts and Carter has quite a lot of manners for a 3 year old. Maybe it's because I expect so much of him and when he does fall short that I tend to feel frustrated. But he is only a kid. I already know that I am much milder with Bryce now that I know what to expect (or not to expect) out of infants his age.

I will start a new job on Monday. By a new job I also mean a new career. I am leaving the accounting world as I have known it and am going to work with a financial planning company! I am excited for the change as I haven't really felt a passion for accounting necessarily and hope that I feel more passion for this new career.

Christy loves the holidays. It's great to be married to a person who loves the holidays as much as she does. I remember feeling as a kid the excitement in the fall air during Halloween, or the peaceful spirit of Christmas. She definitely brings holiday spirit into our house and I am grateful for that.

Christy bought the Christmas classics that we knew as kids. We watched Frosty the snowman last night with Carter. I can't believe how cheesy these films are and how much I used to love watching them at Christmas time. It was these films that helped bring in the holiday spirit into my life as a kid.

So I found a mouse in our basement a few days ago, and the day after Christy found two baby mice in our washing machine! How did they get in our washing machine?! After I removed them from the washing machine I thought I'd better put it on spin cycle to see if it filled the washer full of more mice. It didn't. Then I went out and bought a tomcat mousetrap kit. Two glue traps, two snap traps, and an animal lover friendly catch and release mouse trap.

So I put a glue trap under our stove a few days ago. I was checking it yesterday to see if we had caught anything and I didn't really want to get down on my belly to look under the stove. So as I was bending down with my hands on the floor, I realized that I could be squatting and put my elbows just inside each kneecap, and lower my head close to the floor without touching anything but my hands to the floor. But to do so I had to lift my feet off the floor and stick my legs out a bit to keep a perfect balance. "This is pretty cool" I thought. I'm like Ethan Hunt from mission impossible using his strength to balance without letting anything touch the floor (my hands didn't count). As I leaned forward just a bit more I lost my balance and my head was about to hit the floor. I couldn't stick out my hands to prevent myself from hitting my head because they were what was holding my body up braced into my knees. Needless to say, I crashed in a heap onto the floor. Christy came running into the room to see what had happened and I was rubbing my knee.

Then we decided to have a quick little contest to see who could balance the longest in that position, I won. And she says she knows Pilate's and has a good sense of balance. Actually she does as witnessed from our indoor skydiving video below. Our instructor told us that people with good balance can fly well. And I thought that it was just falling through the air... Christy goes first in the video below and I follow.

I'm going to cut your butt off

This is the newest thing said around our dinner table by our 3 year old. Christy tells him it's "potty talk" and that if he wants to talk like that he can go into the bathroom. He knows it's something that he shouldn't say yet he continues to ask almost every night at the dinner table, " Cut your butt off is potty talk huh mommy?" After which she politely says "yes, that's potty talk" and he'll ask one more time.

I let little things like this get to me more than I should. I feel like he knows not to say it but likes to see that he can get away saying it by posing a question. Christy washed his mouth out with soap the other day for saying he wanted to kill his little brother. Kids shouldn't be saying these things. They are sweet and innocent! And should always be that way.

Carter used to go around singing "dangit" because Christy told me to not make a big deal out of it after I already had a time or two. He used to sing it to get a rise out of me. For those of you unfamiliar with this song, it's really easy to learn. It goes something like this, "dangit dangit dangit, dangit dangit dangit, dangit dangit dangit, (then the chorus, which is the same. Sometimes there is variation with a dramatic pause and a look at me to see how he is performing, then the smug smile as he continues his singing) " The kid sure knows how to push my buttons, or better said, I sure know how to let him push my buttons.

I go into his room at the end of the day when he is in a deep sleep and I stroke his hair and tell him I love him. I am too hard on him too often. I haven't quite learned what battles to surrender or which ones to wage. It's a hard balance to know when to react and dish out punishment or when to let things go.

I guess as Christy has pointed out, there will be far worse things he could say and will learn someday, and to let him know we don't approve of it but not to come down hard on him. I guess in high school if he is still only saying "I'm going to cut your butt off!", then he's doing pretty well dangit!