This is what the girls were doing while I was packing to visit my family for a few days before Christmas. I think Tansy would put everything in the dress-up drawer on if I would let her. She actually ended up with more than this before she was done.


We got a lot of snow while we were at Grandma Olsen's house. Sydney was ready to go build a snowman as soon as the storm hit. She hadn't been able to before because the snow was too powdery. This snow, however, was wet, dense, packing snow. Tansy was pretty upset when I put her snow stuff on because it was so big. Once she got out in the snow, she got really happy and had a great time waddling around and patting the snowman.

We also had the kids put on a nativity play, but because of illness and weather, we lost four of our cast quite suddenly. We had to draft some others in quickly. Ben go to be a wise man as you can see in this picture of his awesome turban.

Christmas was great. All Sydney had asked Santa for was dinosaurs. This is a picture of her counting her new dinosaurs, which temporarily distracted her from further present opening. There were twelve, by the way.

Tansy was our meticulous present opener. Each one took a long time, but when we would try to help her so she wouldn't get frustrated, she would say, "No." She wouldn't get upset or anything. She just wanted to do it her way. Her long, tedious way, one square inch of wrapping paper at a time.

Zack got these froggy rattle slippers from Aunt Kim. He was hooked. We ended up opening most of his presents while he was napping since Tansy's gift opening made the morning take FOREVER.

But the greatest presents of all: the elepant and lion from Santa that were big enough to sit on. Sydney named the lion Asland (I can't convince her that there is no D at the end of Aslan) and the elephant Tika (from Barbie as the Island Princess, for those of you who are not up on your Barbie culture). The girls spent a lot of time on these on Christmas and pull them out quite a bit.

Now for the reason that I did not post on Sunday. On Christmas Eve, Sydney's cough got really out of control. When she coughs really hard, she throws up. That night she threw up in bed and told me that she had tried to hold the throw up in her mouth so it wouldn't get on her Christmas jammies. We had to change her pants, but these pajamas also had a pair of shorts that matched. Fortunately, she missed her shirt.

On the 26th, Tansy started coughing. The next day, Zack joined the party. I was pulling out every home remedy I had, but when Sydney still hadn't improved by Monday, I called the doctor. They ordered a chest x-ray that came back clear, so Tuesday morning we went in to get her checked out. The doctor concluded that she has Reactive Airway Disorder like I do and would need a steroid to stop the cough. He gave us enough to keep on hand for colds in the future.

On Tuesday morning at 4:30 a.m., Zack cough got really bad. He was coughing up a lot of stuff and working really hard to breathe. We took him in to the doctor as well and learned that both of his ears were badly infected. The doctor also said his wheezing sounded really bad. He decided to forgo the chest x-ray, because he felt fairly confident that it was pneumonia and he was putting Zack on an antibiotic anyway for his ears so he prescribed one that would treat both.

The longest stretch of sleep I have gotten in the last week is four hours, which felt amazing. This morning I was so tired, my hands and feet were tingly and I felt like I was going to throw up. I'm so glad Ben is out of school right now. I don't know what I would do without him.