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Friday, January 08, 2010
I had another enjoyable Christmas this year. We further refined our approaches to reduce the stress and hassle, and I feel it worked well.
We had picked up some of the kid's gifts months in advance during the sales, and while we did go out four weekends in a row, after that effort if we had not found a suitable gift for a person we simply got a voucher for them instead. We had finished our gift shopping at least 10 days before Christmas.
Instead of travelling to visit my parents this year, they came and stayed a couple days with us. They are easy guests, and with Mum being able to help with the kids, it made it easier for us to prepare.
We picked tasty but quick food to prepare for Christmas lunch, and staggered the meal across several hours. I think our only fault was putting out too much food. Next time we will just do hot foods at lunch, and put out the cold foods for Tea. Desserts were eaten hours after each meal, which worked well.
On Boxing Day we went to Al's step-sisters place, which I also found relatively relaxed.
Grace mostly took everything in her stride, while Jack was a bit up and down. All told though I think he enjoyed it, and having less running around meant he wasn't stretched so far. Both kids got a huge haul of presents, although Jack's seemed to be mostly wrapping and packaging in the end.
I don't think Al enjoyed it as much. Grace's sleeping hasn't been the best, and Al has really been suffering from sleep deprivation. Add a late onset of hayfever and a surprising amount of stressing about Christmas and juggling Jack's demands (while his childcare is on holidays), and things haven't gone as smoothly for her as she would have liked.
Grace has been teething. She has been a touch more antsy and wanting to chew on things more, but otherwise is handling the process much better than Jack used to. Her arm strength is impressive - I've noticed her swinging from side to side or dancing in her portacot, holding on with just one hand.
Posted by Doug at 11:46 AMTuesday, January 19, 2010
Jack is attending a summer swimming program this week. It was offered to us free; to try and help Jack get over a couple hurdles he has been stuck at for a while. These basically come down to him panicking any time he is out of his depth.
One very obvious example of this is his refusal to jump into the pool without reaching out to hold the hand of an instructor. Today, heading towards his third jump, he told us he would jump in by himself this time. He got to the edge of the pool, crouched down low, refused the offered hand, and launched himself into the water all by himself. He came out beaming and very happy with himself.
We were very impressed – but also rather amused. In his effort to ensure he hit the water very close to the instructor, he actually ended up landing right on her head. The startled instructor was only a trainee, and hadn’t braced her leg against the wall to push away with.
Posted by Doug at 12:35 PM