Christmas in April

About a month ago, Andrew found a bin of holiday books that I keep in his closet. There are books for every holiday, but he has been particularly drawn to the Christmas books in there. He found his Rudolph book with the buttons that make noises, and we have been listening to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer a million times a day. It has died down over the past week, but for a while there, everybody that came over had Rudolph stuck in their head all day.

He has also been playing with his Christmas train and the Santa that goes with it. Last week, he took out one of the Christmas books and pointed to Santa. He ran over and picked up his Santa from the train and has been carrying them around together.

I told him Santa would wait for him while he ate breakfast.

Now two mornings ago, they played a little a little 60 second piece of seasons on the Disney channel after a show, and the part at the end is a Christmas segment with Pluto. He thinks it is just hilarious, and we have watched it at least 50 times since then (literally). He whines until you rewind it and watch the Christmas part over and over again. I did some research on what show it was from, and it looks like it is an old Mickey special called Pluto's Christmas Tree. It looks a bit violent, so I may hold out on buying it (very Tom and Jerry style b/w Pluto and Chip and Dale).

As you can see above, he got a new table and chairs. At first he just wanted to stand on the chair and play in the box, but now that I moved it to his room, he has been enjoying his puzzles on the table.

Inside the Box

The New Location

Working on his Puzzle

Before we got the table, we went to Noodles and Company, which Andrew loves! He eats like a grown man there. It's scary.  He does such a wonderful job of sitting still and eating his mac and cheese like a good boy.

Everything else has been going pretty well. Dad got back from China on Saturday, and I was just relieved to have him back. He went for work, and I always get nervous when he leaves the country.  This new nerve medication that I am on for my neck seems to be doing wonders, but I am hesitant to say too much until I wait a few more weeks. It has some side effects I'm not wild about (including trouble concentrating), but things seem to be improving the longer I am on it. I forgot to do all sorts of things this past week, which really worried me, including forgetting to feed the dog, leaving the dog outside at night and almost falling asleep, forgetting to post final grades in one of my classes, and driving right by Andrew's music class. Speaking of the music class, he has been doing really great. He becomes more interactive each week and even showed us his dance moves this past week. He has been very shy, but opens up more and more each week. He has also added "mooing" and "baaing" to his animal noises. His favorite is lion, but if you ask him what a cow or sheep say, he will tell you. It's also a little scary how you can ask him any Mickey Mouse Clubhouse character, and he will point them out in his books. A little too much TV....

Here a pic of him yesterday afternoon when he was supposed to be napping ( I would just like to say that I just had a typo on the word "napping" and the spell-check replaced it with "bar-hopping", which is definitely not what he was supposed to be doing). Lauren called me in to show me that he had thrown all of his blankets out:

Here is another pic of him playing in the corner:

Today I met Tammy and Emily for a birthday lunch, and this weekend I will have a mini celebration with Mike and another one with my dad. Not really looking forward to getting any older. I have also been getting ready for a garage sale that is coming up in a few weeks for the neighborhood, and I actually have a good amount of kid stuff to sell. Hopefully all the planning will be worth it!