Brian was tipped off by our neighbors about the Utah Symphony's Here Comes Santa program today. I had noticed it in the program from when Brian sang with the Utah Symphony two weeks ago but did not really think about it. (Brian sang the tenor solos in Haydn's Creation. It was lovely, such a great piece. We liked having a job at home, very novel.)
I brought the wrong lens for low light, but above are Colin and Jane before the symphony started, Jane in motion, of course. It was great to take the kids to somewhere Daddy has worked to try and put it in context for Colin. For awhile when I was pregnant with Jane and Brian had a few concert gigs that we stayed home for, Colin thought Daddy's work was to sing on airplanes. He knew his job was singing but since we were always taking him to the airport, singing on airplanes made sense to his then 2 year old brain.

Colin's face does a good job at summarizing our experience. He was very thirsty about half way into the concert. It got a little crazy. Thankfully I had some Mentos in my purse that got us through. Thanks Mentos, the Freshmaker.

Probably the best part, Santa! A really good Santa! Colin was so excited and told him he wants a light saber. We told Santa we would leave him some cookies. I am much happier to take our kids to see Santa at the Symphony than at a mall, seems appropriate for children of the arts. (Not that we don't go to malls, we go to malls way too much when we are traveling as a source of entertainment, just happy to support the Symphony.)

The little guy next in line is really great too.

We will have to try and make this an annual tradition, depending on our travel schedules.

Colin had his first school program this week. He was very cute and proud of himself. Above is a photo of Colin re-arranging the chairs upon arrival so he can have a blue one. Jane is on the far left. She went right to the front to sit with the kids. She probably would have stayed there but Brian brought her to sit with us when the program started. 18 month old Colin would not have stayed in one place like Jane does.

During the program, Colin needed his pants to become shorts. I am also amused by the 3 year old nose picking.

Colin and Mrs. Sarah. He was always very excited to talk in the microphone. He did a countdown from 10 for a blast off. He has easily been able to do this for months and months but when another kid yelled out 4 out of order, it got a little crazy. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 4, 5, 3, 5, 2, 1, blast off!

Colin got to show us his science project about the planets. Pluto was his favorite. His teacher told us he was quite interested in how planets rotate but stay in the same orbit. She said he asked LOTS of questions about this detail. We have been happy with his first preschool experience, and they have been very nice and flexible with us. Go Colin!

I found this hairless Playmobile guy paying his respects to baby Jesus. The nativity is by my very talented folk artist sister-in-law. Sorry to post this so late, I think she is doing a give-away on her blog and the end date was today. Her work is very great.

Colin saw me taking photos and re-posed the Playmobile guy so he could smile for the camera and brought some cars to the manger. Brian commented that it is a drive-in nativity. The whole scene reminded me of the Mr. Bean Christmas special, which I showed to Colin today (thank you you tube!). The Mr. Bean Special had Colin asking if there were dinosaurs when Jesus was born. I'm too tired to link to the video, but look it up when you get a chance. The first 5 minutes are all you need, then it is all about Mr. Bean getting a turkey on his head. Mr. Bean's Christmas has been one of my sister's family traditions. One year my young nephew, inspired by Mr. Bean's Christmas morning dance, knocked over the Christmas tree.

Colin is looking very rough these days, thanks to a very naughty child in the McDonalds Playland. Colin was very upset, and the grandparents of the child who did the scratching were horrified. (Naughty child did not want to share one of the cars that are part of the play structure.) We have been practicing with Colin to yell "no scratching!" and "no hitting!" to hopefully help him scare his attacker and get adult help in the future. Poor little guy! Hope he heals quickly.

Jane had some great bed head this morning. Here she is, in motion, attacking the tree.

Our talented friend Leah is teaching art classes for kids. Sadly, Colin missed last week due to his bout with bronchitis (Brian was out of town on a gig, my kids almost always get sick when Brian is gone). Here was the first week's class of snow flake mobiles. It was a very cute class. I proudly hung his work in the kitchen window.

We have a total parental rite of passage this week: the preschool Christmas Program! He keeps coming home with (washable) blue paint on his clothes in preparation for the program but he is not telling me much. Should be fun.

We were the recent lucky recipients of Brian's grandparent's high chair. They had offered it to us before and I tried to figure out how to take it apart to fit in our small car but to no avail. Brian's aunt and uncle traveled from Boise to SLC a few weeks back, had room for it and brought us this piece of family history. Brian's dad, the oldest of five kids was the first in this high chair, and I am sure countless grand kids and great grand kids have taken their meals here. I did not want it just given to good will, and it really is in great shape. We are happy to have it in our home.

Jane was eating Thanksgiving leftovers. A couple days after the big meal, Brian made turkey soup and I made sweet potato gnocchi to eat in the soup. It was very, very tasty. We almost liked our left overs more than the first meal.

Jane enjoys the noise the metal foot rest makes when she kicks her legs. Such a beautiful chair! How many high chairs bought today will look this good almost 60 years later?

Jane also slept in her Grandpa Hinckley's baby bassinet from 1935. She is growing up with a lot of her grandfathers' physical histories.

I need to do a better job at writing down the cute things Colin says. He has some pretty good ones these days. A while back while we were in Poland, I noticed he needed some help cleaning up his bum. He asked why (of course, everything is why and what does it mean) and I told him I did not want him to get an itchy bum. He told me "but I want an itchy bum! I want an itchy bum for my birthday!"

When he bonked his head the other day, he came running in to tell me and was so upset because he hit his head right where his brain is.

We were having a music time the other morning and he asked about the ABCD player.

When we served him some egg nog the other day, he came running into the kitchen from the dinning room to tell us egg nog is delicious. It was funnier at the time, looses something in the re-telling.

When we had enchiladas a while back, he was excited they were served with sour cream. He wanted a big serving. When he tasted it, he declared it disgusting cream, as I think he was expecting the sweet kind.

Colin wanted to make a snow man but I told him there might not be enough snow. His answer to me was that maybe we could just make one without a head.

Anyway, just so I remember.

Jane is also a chatter box little parrot. She loves songs. She has quite a few she sings, not totally with all the words but she has the tunes down. She has such a cute and funny personality.

My niece got a few quick shots of us the other day.

Jane's finger is not there yet, but her intentions are obvious.

Colin and I are preparing for "Mother Boy" with our green jackets.

Our last weekend in Warsaw was spent with good friends. We were able to meet up with one of Brian's co-workers and her family, we got to spend a lovely evening with the Lewis' (sadly, no photos of either of those events). We also met up with our friend Paola. I offered to take some photos of her and her boyfriend. Here are the kids while we waited outside of the theater for Paola and Tomek.

Thanks for being our kids' playground Warsaw. We really hope to make it back there sometime. Colin is still saying thank you to people in Polish, it is very cute. A lady at Costco who gave us string cheese samples asked me where we were from since Colin yelled "Dziękuję". We love our string cheese.

Wow, yet another slide show. I am overwhelmed with too many photos.

This was the hallway to our apartment in the Teatr Wielki. It was lined with offices full of people who are probably wondering where those noisy kids went. Poland almost seems like a dream from the recent extreme sleep deprivation from coming home and the blurry images of the hallway. The trip came up so fast (we only knew for sure we were going on Sept. 8th and we had to travel on Sept. 26th). I cannot believe we are home already and that we spent two months in Poland.

Jane needed more time to run around, but run around time was over.

Thanksgiving rolled around just two days after we were home from Poland. We had several kind invitations for dinner from family and friends but I declined since I had not idea how well our kids would be doing. It is much easier to manage toddler meltdown in one's own home. I am very glad we stayed home, our kids were extremely spent. My mom had ordered a lovely 17 pound fresh turkey before she made plans to visit my sister and brother's families in Chicago over the holiday. We had a lot of turkey for the four of us. Brian used a new Cook Illustrated method that turned out very delicious (super crispy skin, as you may note above). We also loved our Thanksgiving leftovers. On Sunday Brian made a turkey soup with Italian inspired herbs and I made sweet potato gnocchi. It was lovely lovely.

Just one traditional pumpkin pie, well not totally traditional since it was the Cooks recipe and not just the recipe on the can of pumpkin that I was going to make. My family has always made a pumpkin chiffon with a ginger snap crust but we forgot to buy the ginger snaps and Brian loves an excuse to make a pie crust. (He does have it down I must say. Serious crust.)

We enjoyed an excuse to get out a lot of our new pottery. Brian painstakingly carried all the pottery on the airplane and through the Paris airport and JFK for miles and miles. This was no small feat because we got eight place settings with square plates, small plates, bubble mugs, and bowls and a variety of serving pieces. We purchased two new carry on suitcases to meet our intense pottery needs. I am very grateful for a husband who understand my love of beautiful pottery and then carries it through multiple airports. Everything made it home in one piece!

The face of toddler jet lag, and in Jane's case, not having her face wiped after Thanksgiving. She seems to think face wiping is child abuse. The red eyes, the blank look, the 4am wake up, it was so sad! Thankfully we are basically back to normal now.

We do have many reasons to be thankful. Brian and I were asked to speak on gratitude at our Church's meeting before we left Warsaw. (We are very lucky to be able to find our Church everywhere we go as we travel. It is like having a piece of home with us as we travel, and an instant safety net. We have met some amazing people and made some great friends along the way.) It was a good experience for us to meditate on how we have been really amazingly blessed in so many ways. I had intended to type out the notes from our talks but am not sure if I can find them now. I was very tearful expressing my gratitude the day I spoke in Church. The teariness continued later that day when Brian had found Superman for Colin to watch on Netflix. When Superman saved Lois from the helicopter I cried.

Oh man I am behind on blogging. There are all these other things to do when we are home, so complicated. We have so many photos from our last week in Krakow and Warsaw that I would like to get up. (I blog mostly for our history, since some day I hope to catch up on making our annual family blurb books, that I make from the blog). I would have done more blogging from Poland but we had a 3 day Internet outage our last weekend. This was very bad for us because we did all our phoning on skype. We were trying to meet up with a lot of people that weekend, and we had to get very creative to communicate.

So the house is getting ready for Christmas. It is so fun to see the kids get excited. Colin was getting out some ornaments yesterday and just saying over and over that they are beauty. I am using Santa too much to my advantage. This morning Colin was having a tantrum about wanting to play with my jewelry box. I told him I was going to have to call Santa to report his naughtiness. We sang "Santa Claus is coming to town" and a few minutes later he told me he was ready to be a good boy. Not my best moment in mothering.

Colin does not really need help getting more excited about Christmas, but we are starting a new family tradition this year that we are excited about. I think we heard the idea from our friend Lindy. The ideas is to wrap up 24 Christmas books and open one every night leading up to Christmas. My mom has so many cute Christmas books that it is easy to find 24 in the house. It seems like a fun way to keep bringing Baby Jesus into the whole equation. Granted we have only done this one night so far, but we had a really fun story time last night and Colin is excited for more daily presents.

Jane trying to eat the apple ornament. We also have some lollipop ornaments that we have to hang up really high.