Christmas 2014

The Christmas holidays were a lot of fun. Santa was so good to the children this year. Santa's gifts were in special blue paper, with special tags, and had a jingle bell on them. Santa's gifts were awesome! Christmas was a group effort. With the presents John and I got along with money from my in-laws, my parents, a friend who brought over gifts, and the help of MOST (a group of high order multiple moms) the children had the best Christmas they have had in YEARS! Santa was very good and on target with the gifts he brought. One of the best gifts was an iPad mini. I am excited to get apps to help with therapy stuff for the children.

James was happy to get some great gifts including Snap Circuits and a furby. He is having fun with those. He is also enjoying the games he got from Santa like Life and Clue Jr. Margaret got several gifts that she loves including a furby, new bedspread, a pop-up playhouse, balance board and clothes. Joseph got several gifts he loves too. He got a piano that he is having a blast playing! He got a bubble timer. Visually Joseph is having a blast with it! He also loves his new backpack. It fits his little frame just right.



John and I did not get anything for ourselves. We figured we could get something later with tax refund money.  ALL money went to buying new toys and toys to be used for
therapy for the children. The poor kids were so starved for new toys and more age/developmental appropriate toys that the children kept forgetting to open their Christmas presents to open Christmas morning. It took us TWO hours for them to open all their gifts! They would open a gift and then they would get excited about the toy and would ask for us to open it. We would open the present and then they would start playing with it. I would have to remind them to come back to open another present. James and Margaret would literally say, "Oh yea, I forgot!" LOL It was VERY cute!




Christmas day and the next few days after that was nice because no one asked me for my phone. They were too busy to playing with their new toys. :)

Happy 7th Birthday My Babies!

On Saturday my pumpkin s celebrated their 7th birthday.  I wanted to celebrate their birthday in a big way this year.  At least that was my intent.  Life has another way of working things out though.

I ordered a bouncy house for the children this year as a  surprise.  I had ordered the bouncy house right before Joseph broke his clavicle.  I thought I would be okay because his shoulder should heal right before their birthday.  Then, of course, poor Joseph falls again and hurts his should more on Thanksgiving Day but I was still holding out hope he would be okay for his birthday.

Two weeks before their birthday I placed an open invitation to people to attend the children;s birthday party.  This is a HUGE deal for me since I am always worried about Joseph catching some sort of respiratory illness and getting extremely ill.  I wanted the children to have a birthday they would remember this year.

I had several people tell me that they would come over.  The day before there was talk of a lot of rain.  I cancelled the bouncy house.  I reminded people online about the party the next day.  I was planning to make homemade play dough and we made two cakes to make sure we would have enough.  We made a chocolate cake for the children.  It was what they requested.  We also make a spice cake to make sure plenty of cake was on hand.

I started to get people saying they would not be able to come.  They had plans that changed, their kids were sick (which I did appreciate they did not come over!), and some never got back to me.  On the day of their birthday no one showed up.  We had the respite worker come over.  She brought her son.  They has a nice time playing with her son.  John and I decided to leave and head to a Goodwill across town where they are suppose to have nice clothes.

We took off and one of the moms asked about coming over but we had left the house all ready.  We ran into a HUGE storm heading to the Goodwill.  While there we found clothes to be on sale.  They did have nice clothes.  Not much in the way of pants but I found shirts for James, shirts, leggings and dresses for Margaret and Joseph did not really need anything since he wears James's hand-me-downs.  We also got some board games and books.  We used the clothes, books, and games as a new tradition this year.  Normally they get stuff for wither their birthday or Christmas since they are so close together.  This year we decided to give them each a small present every night between their birthday to Christmas.  They either got some clothes, a book or a game.  The kids are loving the new tradition of our version of the 12 days of Christmas!

Kids Today...I'm Confused

So my children always fascinate me.  I never really know what they are thinking.  I believe having older children before I had the surviving quadruplets gave me lots of insight into raising children and what I was doing wrong (sorry older kids, I truly mean it!).  I think my oldest children, even though I mostly only let them watch educational programming, still saw a LOT of commercials.

The little kids do not really see any commercials.  We got rid of cable before they were a year old and got a ROKU to stream TV. We got an antenna to pick up local stations and the only channel they watched was PBS. Since PBS has no real commercials I was fine with them watching TV.


Over the years I LOVED I could take the children to McDonalds and the children were not begging to go all the time and they weren't even asking to eat the food.  They called McDonalds the "place where the kids play" or "Old McDonalds".  It was SO cute!  Most important is that there was no begging for the toys, food, or anything associated with the fast food giant except the play place.  LOL

Now fast forward to present day.  Since the children do not watch commercials they have no idea what's popular or trendy.  There is not a drive in them to buy toys or stuff.  I have been trying to figure out what to get James for Christmas that is NOT electronic and can hopefully be played by himself.  Joseph and Margaret are fairly easy to shop for but James is difficult.  So last night I sat down with James and the Chromebook and we went looking on Amazon for toys.  We were scrolling through pages of toys on the internet.  After about five minutes James asked me if we were done.  I said we had only been looking for five minutes. Do you like anything you see?  James hesitated and said he only wanted a Nerf Gun and a Kindle.  That was ALL he wanted!  I was proud that he does not want a lot of stuff, but dang, it makes it SO hard to buy things for him!

I remember when I was a kid and I couldn't wait until the Sears Toy Catalog came out!  I would scour that thing and mark all sorts of stuff that I wanted. Even my older children, Jerrin and Caitlin, would love to look over the ads from the newspaper on Thanksgiving and find stuff they would love to have. Now, I can't get the kids to tell me much of anything they want.  Margaret wants a Fuby and by default so do the boys.  Joseph wants musical things and so do the others. James wants a NERF gun along with a Kindle.  I know Margaret and Joseph would enjoy those too.  So I think that will be our Christmas.  I am going to see about getting an iPad Mini instead of a Kindle so we can take advantage of the educational and therapy apps available in the Apple store.