Christmas, New Years, and In Between!

Eliana singing during her Playschool Christmas Program. She knew the words and motions and performed earnestly. She was so animated and proud of herself and not at all shy or sad (wailing crying) like she sometimes is when there's attention on her, which we worried she might be. So great!

The Christmas Pageant, Eliana's first acting job, where she debuted as a "Wise Girl".

Gingerbread house decoration with Jayden and Elijah.

The Lewis Family on the Holiday Lights train. This was very fun for the girls and made for some fabulous photos.

Despite lots of preparation and warnings, Eliana was still initially scared of Santa's walk-by on the train.

Eliana, after receiving a candy cane, decides Santa might not be that bad.

Mom, Annea, and Santa. (She looks downright underwhelmed!)

Daddy with the girls in front of the Holiday Lights train, glowing after a successful ride.

Our special Christmas (Eve) breakfast.

Christmas Eve Morning, opening presents with our little family. Calvin worked on Christmas Day, so we celebrated ourselves as though it were Christmas on the Eve.

Christmas Day Morning at Abba's house, Eliana sports her new wings.

Baby girl cousins, propped together and indifferent about it, Christmas morning.

Auntie Lolo on Christmas morning

Abba Christmas morning, not feeling great but hosting nonetheless.

Annea turned eight months old, December 29th!

New Years celebration, Santiago, Chile style (7pm), and Julie's 3rd birthday, at the Stewarts.

My beloved, posing with me on New Years. I thought we were both smiling, but later discovered this...moment in time.

Cute Annea at New Years, before the PJ part of the evening.

Annea and Emma, future friends, celebrating their first New Years Eve together.

Alex and Cassiel came to visit, and we got to see lots of them. I love that distance is not keeping the kids of the dear-but-far-away-VIP's in my life from being friends with my girls.

The girls and I visited the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose with my cousin Misha. So fun! We ran into Nathan and Jessica and Lillie and Isaac, too, and had a blast. I forgot my camera, but did get this shot back at home before washing up for nap time. The girls got to paint their own faces. Adessa assured me that the sunny-side-up egg looking thing on her forehead was a flower and stem, not bird poop.

Festivities

At the beach, on Thanksgiving morning.

...with Auntie Lolo!

Eliana helping Daddy cut down our tree, a douglas fir named "The Hulk".

Adessa helping Daddy cut down the tree.

The big girls monkeying around at the Johnson's Farm. I should have taken pictures of the abundance of marshmallows that the girls put into their hot chocolate, which is now irrevocably part of the christmas-tree-hunting tradition.

Annea, so happy that we got our tree.

At St. Nicholas night with our most faithful attendees, Kim, Gwen, and Julie!

Annea and Adessa weren't fazed by St. Nicholas, but Eliana was terrified, whether it was of St. Nicholas or of having people looking at her, I'm not sure. Needless to say, I started to feel cruel as I kept shoving her toward him and into the picture, and finally gave up as her wailing got ever more persistent. She is out of frame but off to the side crying loudly.

Christmas headwear, as we put the tree together.

There are more pictures that may end up here if I don't put them in the Christmas photo/card thingy. Stay tuned!

Halloween, '12

Halloween was pretty great. Girls had low maintenance, albeit funky costumes that they were delighted with. We got in all the important things, carving pumpkins, Adessa's school parade, and trick or treating. Love them holidays!

Morning of Halloween.

Eliana, the sweet pea, keeling over Halloween morning.

Adessa at school, watching the parade go by.

Adessa and Eliana on parade with Adessa's kindergarten class.

Annea Halloween night.

Grandpa giving Annea her first Trick or Treats.

Trick or Treats with Auntie Lolo. Yay!

Getting ready for some trick-or-treating with the Mom's group.

All the kids (almost, or can it be...all of them?) pre-trick-or-treat.

Our spooky pumpkins.

Me playing dress up, though not on Halloween. A high alpine climber! I'm ready for K2 or Everest! I'm wearing a sleeping bag, really.

Sky Park

Sky Park!! Skypark? SkypArk.

Annea's first time in the swing. She could have taken-or-left it, not too excited.

Eliana's hair in the tube slide. This is me trying to get a prize-winning picture of it.

Fall Photos

Eliana and Eliana posed for a photo.

Annea and Eliana leaned on each other.

My girls!

Annea's smile: beautific but hard to photograph. (Not that you will tell from today's post, full of her sweet grin, but believe me we have mannnnny pictures that miss her smile.)

Tired girls taking a nap.

She's part of our fall decorating, lacquer box lid as hat.

Pumpkin patch! Officially the start of the holidays for us.

How amazing is this picture? It's our best one of all three girls to date. Amazing!

We are doing well. Adessa is loving kindergarten. She seems totally herself, eager and bright and she absolutely couldn't care less what the other kids think of her, which I love. I wish it could stay forever, that strong sense of herself. Calvin worked in the classroom and overheard her telling another student: "Well, that's the way you do it in your family, but that's not how we do it in our family." Matter-of-factly explaining herself.

Eliana is loving Playschool, too, and I love my mornings off with her and the baby. The other morning as we were getting ready to get everyone out the door to their respective places of care or learning or work, Eliana marched into the kitchen. "Mom," she said, "so, listen to my plan: the sound machine is still on."* Good plan, Eliana!

*I've been lying and telling the story that she said: "So, Listen to my plan: the alarm clock is going off." because who has a sound machine? We do, none of us can sleep now without blasting white noise of some kind. It seemed easier to falsify the story to make it more easily understood, but then, here for posterity, I had to come clean.

Annea is a human package of slobbery softness. She is talking, mostly very high pitched, and also into making a gargling sound(?). She is rolling around, has found her feet and loves those fun things I put on them, so tasty--we've had some seriously soggy socks. She enjoys grabbing and scratching at things, most disturbingly my food, now. Yes, that time has come, I'm washing her hands if I don't get my plate away in time. She loves watching her sisters entertain her. She is sooooo tremendously easy. When she does squawk, it entirely derails my plans, because I have now figured-in her calm, quick-to-sleep, no complaining/no fussiness, to my expectations of life. As long as I keep on top of feeding her and giving her frequent naps, she is a dream. And even her version of crabbiness is pretty dreamy, too. Thank you, God. I am thanking God for her mellow nature all the time.

We have had colds, pretty significant ones, and by the time Calvin gets home from work after his long day, I am wiped out. I see the difference having three kids makes as I'm a little more tired, and there are a few more interruptions of sleep when kids are sick. It makes me glad we're having three, glad to be done and just raising these girls. (Every time I write something like that I feel a little bit wary, like I am tempting fate, and like I had better do something quick! and permanent to make sure that I don't eat these words later. We are planning to do something permanent, but it just isn't happening quick.)

I am in a different kind of funny space about my mom. I wasn't planning to write about her, but am inspired to write about her just now because I had a pang of sadness that she won't be reading this blog anymore. She was my loyal follower, and after every post she would get excited about what I wrote and the pictures and the funny things my girls were doing.

My different funny space is that I feel like her sick self supplanted her regular self in my mind, and I don't miss her sick self. It was five months of sad, weird, traumatic, or all three. It was stressful. It was hard to watch her deteriorate before our eyes. I'm not sure how long I'm going to allow relief to be my dominant feeling, but for now I'm keeping sad at bay. There are glimpses of how much I am going to miss her healthy self, but I can't handle much more than a glimpse right now. I don't know how good that's going to be for me in the long-run of grief over all, but I'm trying to maintain space for whatever my strange process decides to do. Sometime, soon probably, the missing of her is going to seep its way in. And that will be okay, too.

No More Grandmas

So in the end, she did it. My Mom did die. It took her body a long time to let go, and I got to be there for most of it. It was hard to watch. It was hard to loose her in small bits. Five months of cancer, that was it. Five months of super-fast, unbelievably fast deterioration. New bad things kept happening, week by week, until by the end it was as though our mom vanished day by day and hour by hour, disappeared into her laboring body. And we washed her and dressed her. We took her to church. And then we had her funeral, and buried her. Which is still unbelievable to me. I'm attributing that to having kids, being distracted by them made it somewhat difficult to process. My girls were right up in front during the funeral being distracting, to me. I wanted them to be a part of everything, with me there gently to guide them through it, but instead I was over-the-top mad when they needed something, didn't they understand what was going on!? (No. Of course not.)I fed Annea during the graveside service, which we were late getting to. I stopped feeding Annea mid-meal because they were lowering the casket into the ground, and I felt I better see that part. That is an important part, and I wanted to be right there, and I wasn't. I sort of stopped registering things around then. I kept thinking: "How am I supposed to get through this with meaning, if I'm worrying about my hungry kid?" Life goes on, I guess? Overall, I felt discombobulated, which is probably quite normal, but I was in the wrong spot many times, or felt like I was missing things, or that I wasn't going to do justice to mom somehow in my bumbling way of grieving her, in my distracted way of parenting while trying to be present at the funeral. I don't know. What are you gonna do, anyhow? It was what it was. A hard day. A day full of so many kindnesses and generosities and love and tears. So many wonderful, life affirming hugs. So much shared grief, as my mom was loved by many. My chest cavity is heavy and my lower back feels weak, like I prefer the fetal position right now over any others. Because I miss her, already, and I know that I am going to have to get used to missing her, and I don't want to.

The girls are doing okay. They often talk about not having any more grandmas, and that makes them sad. They list the people that they do have, Grandpa and Abba, aunts and uncles and god-parents, and that makes them feel better. Eliana cried, appropriately, during the shutting of the coffin, and when we started putting earth on Eema's coffin, and lowered her into the ground. She is a sensitive soul. Adessa's much repeated comment was: "When can we go home so we don't have to be sad anymore? This is sad!" It was sad. I now want to be with my family like never before. I want to be with my siblings and my dad and just be sad with them. We're going to make sure and do that.

Eliana's First Day of Playschool!

Okay, admittedly it was two weeks ago, but it was noteworthy nonetheless and I want to get it up here on the blog ASAP before other news overshadows it. Eliana started Playschool and loves it. She already knew many of the kids, and the teachers, and the format from tagging along with Adessa. It was painful for her to watch Adessa start school at the end of August, and have to wait until the middle of September for her school. She loves it! She loves having stories to tell us about her day when we get home, all kinds of things she did on her very own at her very own school. For which she proudly wields a backpack. And to which Amanda and Gracie and Charlotte kindly pick her up from the babysitters house and take her, and from which Grandpa generously picks her up and walks her home to the babysitters house for nap time. Thanks, Team!

Walking to school with Gracie! First day!

Daddy took the day off from work to drop her off and pick her up on the first day. So sweet!

Happy to be painting.