Christmas Simplicity

Since we're on the opposite side of the country from most of our family members, this was our first year spending Christmas as just the three of us. For a couple of weeks I racked my brains trying to think of things we could do to make it special and memorable because I was worried that it would be kind of lonely. Finally a few days before Christmas I told Quinn that I'm lame and couldn't think of any really amazing things to do. All my ideas conflicted with the limits (attention span and other) of a family with a one-year-old. Quinn asked me why I thought I needed to have some amazing and elaborate plan. And...I really didn't know why, I just did! He said, "Well I think we're going to have a great Christmas just because we're together. We don't have to do anything spectacular." So I decided to relax. And you know what? We had a great Christmas just being together! We didn't do anything spectacular, but there was something to say for the peaceful simplicity of it all.

On Christmas Eve day we made chocolate chip cookies (and ate half of them, but we don't need to talk about that). That evening we drove around and delivered them to people in our ward who were alone or had other hardships to bear this Christmas. The last place we went was an older single lady in our ward who has been taking care of her very elderly and very ill mother. When she opened the door she was on the phone and when she got off the phone she told me her mother was dying and she had called the hospital for some morphine to ease her mother's pain as she passed. I asked her if she would like Quinn to come in and give her or her mother a blessing (he was out in the car because Caitlyn had fallen asleep). She gratefully accepted, so Quinn went in and helped her son give priesthood blessings of comfort. We felt like the Lord had been mindful of this family's need on Christmas Eve and had sent us there at that specific time that evening to provide any comfort we could. We were so happy to have been there.

When we got home we made my mom's Clam Chowder and ate it with homemade Lion House rolls I'd made earlier that day. Then we dimmed the lights and told Caitlyn the story of the Savior's birth using the PlaySkool Nativity set Grandma Disparte gave her. She was more interested in chucking the characters around the room, but hey, it's always been a tradition in my family to act out the nativity on Christmas Eve, so it was a start, right? Then we sat on the couch with Caitlyn snuggled up between us and watched some of the church's YouTube Christmas messages on lds.org, which really invited the Spirit. We put Cait to bed, wrapped and assembled her presents, and then crashed. (It was a too many chocolate chip cookies kind of crash.)

Christmas morning we got up and made breakfast burritos and had sparkling apple cider (yeah, I wasn't really sure if you're supposed to drink it for breakfast, but we figured it was Christmas so we could do whatever we wanted!).


Then we turned on our Christmas with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir DVD that Caitlyn loves to dance along with and clap for after every song. It set such a nice Christmas atmosphere. After a few minutes, we unveiled the rocking horse Grandma Disparte had sent and sat her on it. At first she wasn't sure what to think and kept shaking her head when I tried to help her bounce or rock. But after about 45 seconds it was love.


Now she does the sign for horse about once every half hour and runs over to play on it or pet it for a while. She also unwrapped an adorable outfit and gingerbread house from Nana and Papa and the Baby Signing Time DVDs from Grandpa and Grandma Sitthichai that I had wrapped up (even though we've had them for several weeks as an early Christmas present). After reading the last chapter of our Christmas book, we took a family nap. Aaah, that was nice.

A family in our ward had invited us and a couple of other families to join them for Christmas dinner, which I thought was a GREAT idea and was totally excited about. Unfortunately, their kids got sick so they had to cancel so that everyone else didn't get sick. So we decided to drive around downtown D.C. which I always love doing, and then drove to the Washington, D.C. Temple to see the lights and walk around the visitors center. It was beautiful!



They had displays of nativities and tree ornaments gifted from dozens of countries, including Thailand, which was cool:


On the way home we stopped for Chinese food which, while not the most traditional Christmas dinner, was delicious!

So Quinn's philosophy proved to be a good one. Detailed and well-executed plans are very good. But sometimes, it's also good to just relax and enjoy simple, spontaneous things with the people you love. And along the way, we ended up doing things that will probably become Christmas traditions for our family.

If any one has any ideas for other simple (or even not-so-simple) Christmas activities/traditions that work with small children, I would LOVE to hear them!

I am glad for many things

I love holidays. I love Thanksgiving. I feel like I have a lot to be thankful for. An endless list, really. I could write that list here, but I won't since it wouldn't end and I would never be able to publish the post. Instead I'll just name a few.

I'm thankful for the little person named Caitlyn who brings a kind of joy into my life that is different than any joy I have ever felt before. I can't even describe it. I'm thankful for her big tight hugs and the funny things she does, like copying me one day when I had my chin resting in my hand, or putting on my headbands and running hats.




I'm thankful for her bright, inquisitive little mind, how she loves to find any place to sit down with a book.


I'm thankful for this guy.

The most golden-hearted guy I know, and still the man of my dreams. I love him so, so, so much.

I'm also thankful for this guy, the best daddy any little girl ever adored.

Oh yeah, that's the same guy! Wow, I really lucked out!

And I'm thankful for my family and beloved friends. (If you're not on here it's because I don't have a picture of you on my computer.)








Hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving! We miss those of you we're far away from.

Bummer

No winner here, people! And no toyota jump. I would have just deleted the last post, but I love my friend Jane and didn't want to delete her comment. So, I decided to just do a new post and say, "Waaaaaa! I didn't win!" The end.

Our Best Bites

To Sara and Kate,

The odds of me winning anything in your AWESOME giveaway are pretty slim. BUT...I forgot to put my email address on my comment in entering the giveaway. So in the very, very slight chance that I do win, I wanted to put this post here to let you know that if you were to leave a comment on my blog letting me know I won, I would see it! And then I would do a toyota jump!
Congrats on winning the BHG cookoff, and thanks for all your great recipes!

Suzanne

H-A-double L-O-W-double E-N spells Halloween!

This has been a fun Halloween for our family -- the first year we've actually dressed up, and the first year Caitlyn is old enough to enjoy it.
Last week Caitllyn and I went with a friend and her little boy to the Burke Nursery Fall Festival and Pumpkin Playground. I wasn't sure how much of it she would be able to enjoy, but thought it would be fun to take her anyway. To my surprise, she had a total blast! She would not let me hold her hand because she just wanted to run from the slides to the merri-go-rounds and on to the tunnel through the ghost's mouth and then to the hay ride and from there to the animal petting zoo. I knew she'd like to see the animals but I didn't realize she was already grown up enough to go down the slides and other playground things. It was really eye-opening for me to realize that maybe I underestimate what Caitlyn is capable of doing because I think of her as my little baby still and I just want to protect her and help her all the time. I thought about that a lot afterward because I think that's going to be an important lesson for me to remember her whole life.
Anyway, I wish I had gotten more pictures of her on the playground, but I was too busy trying to keep up with her! I was seriously exhausted by the time we got home! I did get these pictures though -- she thought it was really fun to stick her head through the hole. Doesn't she look so super happy? She was beaming like that the whole time we were there!






Then last night was our ward Trunk-or-Treat. I found a practically-brand-new little butterfly costume for Caitlyn at a children's consignment sale for $2 (wahoo!), so I went as a flower garden and Quinn as a butterfly catcher.




Ok, so my flower garden turned out a little lame, but hey, at least we dressed up! The net I made for Quinn didn't turn out TOO bad! And anyway, we were just supporting cast to Caitlyn and she was adorable so it was all good.

Caitlyn's favorite part was definitely the trunk-or-treating at the end. She loves walking around with my purses on her arm, so she felt right at home with her little jack-o-lantern bucket, walking from car to car, picking out some candy, and putting it in her bucket.




The only tricky part was that she seemed to understand that this was candy and candy is yummy. So after she started putting it in her mouth, wrapper and all, we finally gave her some little pieces of some Trader Joe's chocolate someone had handed out and then I hid the rest after we put her to bed. I think she'll forget about it as long as it stays out of sight, but I'm not sure it will be that easy next year.... I know some of you are probably thinking what an uptight meanie I am, but I know what it's like to be addicted to sugar and I'm just trying to save Caitlyn from a similar fate by holding off on it for as long as possible while her taste preferences are developing. After that I won't make a big deal of it, and hopefully she will just enjoy it in moderation. Unless sugar addiction is genetic, in which case we may have a problem. For now I'll just enjoy the fact that her favorite foods are kale and broccoli. And I'm actually not kidding.

Trippin'

This has been an AWESOME summer in the family trips category! The trip to Thailand would have been enough to justify the previous sentence all by itself. But there's more! The first week of August we drove from Utah to Virginia where we'll be living for this school year while Quinn does a Tax LLM at Georgetown. If you've never driven from Utah to the East coast, it's a pretty cool drive! We stopped in Nauvoo on the way, and even though we only had a couple of hours it was SO neat to be there!



Once we got settled in a bit, we did some sight seeing around this AMAZING place they call our nation's capital. I LOVE it out here. We walked around (some of) the monuments, like the Lincoln Memorial.

And the World War II Memorial, which we'd never been to and was really neat.


We also went to the National Zoo, which is free! How cool is that? And we had really good luck too! It seemed like everywhere we walked they just happened to be bringing those animals out to feed them, etc. So we got to see a ton of beautiful animals instead of how it is sometimes when you go to the zoo and the animals seem to all be sleeping or hiding and you don't see hardly anything. I couldn't get over how beautiful all the animals seemed to me -- so majestic and graceful. I dressed Caitlyn in her zebra outfit that our friends the Lais gave her, so we got a picture of her with the zebras in the background. (Only you can't actually see the zebras in the background very well. Oh well.)


Then, the week before Quinn's orientation for school started, he packed us up for a spontaneous three-day trip to Palmyra. Um, it was A-MAZING! Which is funny to say because get this: the first night we arrived at our campground right on Seneca Lake (one of the Finger Lakes) and got our campsite all set up and went to bed...only to be awakened at midnight by a thunder and lightning storm! So after an hour or so of trying to sleep through that, Quinn and I both suddenly noticed that our sleeping bags were starting to feel a little wet. Upon some investigation we found that, sure enough, it was raining so hard that water had seeped through the part of our tent not covered by the rain cover and all our bedding was soaked! So when the rain let up for a minute we made a total break for it, threw everything in the car, and drove the remaining hour to Palmyra. By the time we got there it was almost 4am and to our surprise there were only two motels or hotels or anything like unto that anywhere near the city of Palmyra. When we had no luck getting someone to come to the door at either place, we finally drove around til we found the Palmyra Temple (beautiful!), found there was a Stake Center across the street from it, and slept in our car in the parking lot for three hours until we woke up at 7am (so uncomfortable wedged in our seats between all the camping gear that we couldn't sleep any longer than our utter exhaustion had allowed us to).
"So...why was your trip A-MAZING again?" you may be thinking. I will tell you. Instead of turning around and driving home when we woke up at 7am with no feeling in our legs, we decided we were going to stick this out and make it a good trip, dang it! So we called the two motels and one of them was so nice he took pity on us and said we could come right then, at 7am, and he wouldn't even charge us an early arrival fee! Bless his soul! So we went to the motel, showered (hallelujah!) and took a nap for an hour until Caitlyn (who had slept peacefully and comfortably in her car seat) decided she was ready to go. :) And off we went! (p.s. patronize the Scottish Inns if you ever go to Palmyra.)
We went to the Sacred Grove first. I don't remember there being a little white visitors center, but there's one there now. A sweet sister missionary took us on a tour of the Smith family log cabin.

And the frame home they built and moved into just down the road.


Different things stood out to me this time then when I went when I was 18. Afterward, Caitlyn and Quinn and I went into Sacred Grove. Something about being there with my husband and precious little girl made my feelings stronger and more tender. It has never meant more to me then it did right then to know that we were standing in the very grove where our loving Heavenly Father and His Son came to begin the process of putting back on this earth the power and authority that will allow me to be with Quinn and Caitlyn forever and ever, no matter what happens to us in this life.

We walked around the Sacred Grove for quite a while. Then we went just down the street to the Palmyra Temple, which is beautiful.


Next we went to the Peter Whitmer farm, about a half hour away in Fayette. The wife of a senior missionary couple took us around the visitors center and then on a tour of the Peter Whitmer home. She was so sweet! That was a neat visit too. After the tour we asked her if she knew of any Amish restaurants or bakeries. We'd been keeping our eyes out but hadn't seen anything. She told us where to find one nearby and off we went. It was so cool! It was a Mennonite grocery store and at the deli you could get 8 inch long sandwiches with homemade bread for like $3.50. I also left with a sack full of homemade mennonite treats, like chocolates, caramel apple fudge (though I'll never know how that tasted because we decided to give it to the motel manager for being so nice to us), and pastries. Yummmmmm! (Why yes, I did gain several pounds! Thank you for asking!)

After lunch we went to the Hill Cumorah. Again, the sister missionary who took us around the visitors center was so sweet.

Then we walked up to the angel Moroni monument at the top of the hill.


(Apparently, Caitlyn is raising a triumphant fist in the air for making it to the top.)
There were two men up there with an unmistakable Australian accent so I asked where they were from. It turned out they were from Australia but had lived in New Zealand so we had fun talking about all the places I'd served on my mission. AND, it turned out Quinn knew one of the brothers from BYU-Hawaii! Small world, huh?

Last we went to the Grandin Press, the building where the Book of Mormon was first printed. I guess I didn't get any pictures here, but trust me, it was SO neat! We'd saved that for last in case we ran out of time because we didn't think it would be that cool, but it was AWESOME. I can't really explain why it was so neat. You'll just have to go I guess.

The next morning we loaded up and headed out. But on the way home we decided to take a small detour into Amish Country Pennsylvania. We made reservations at a family style Amish restaurant called Plain and Fancy. It was pricey and turned out to be basically like any other restaurant, nothing like the authentic Amish experience we had imagined. We were disappointed but decided to take a drive through the town. We happened to turn down a road just to turn around, but saw a huge gathering of Amish people at a park at the end of the road and decided to check it out!
It turned out to be a gathering they have just once a year and we happened to be there! We bought some shoo-fly pie (ok now my mouth is watering) and icecream and watched the hundreds of youth play volleyball on nets around the field. It was pretty darn cool. We didn't take pictures because we thought that would be rude, but we did get a couple of pictures while we were driving.




Ok, so this has turned into the longest post known to man. But anyway, we had a GREAT summer. When I was growing up, my family went on a big family vacation every summer (in addition to lots of smaller camping trips and other excursions) and I still remember how much I loved our family planning sessions where we would all sit down together in the dining room and decide where we wanted to go that summer and what we wanted to do. It made me feel so special and important that my parents involved us and valued our input. I want to continue that tradition with my family and I'm so glad Quinn loves family trips just as much as I do if not more!

Teeth at Last! (and other toddler tales)

We're going to begin this post with a disclaimer. My original purpose for starting this blog was so my family could see Caitlyn as she grows up even though we're living far away from them now. SO...if anyone reading at the moment happens to be non-family and therefore maybe not quite as interested in all the happenings of Caitlyn's life...um, sorry! :) That's probably been about 99% of the content of 99% of the posts on this blog...and will probably continue to be!
Ok, now we've got that out of the way I will proceed with every detail of every milestone Caitlyn has reached lately.

Caitlyn's first birthday seems to have been a magical milestone for her. Soon after that she started developing in warp speed. (ok, not really.)

She finally got her first tooth on August 23rd. Yippee! (Maybe that was her baby-style birthday present to Grandma Sitthichai and Uncle Colin?) Her second tooth followed close on its heels on the 29th. So she now has both her top front teeth and is our little chipmunk.:)

The same week she was getting her teeth she started to stand by herself (Incidentally, she's started loving a binky again now that I've started to wean her from nursing -- since she was about 6 months old she wouldn't even accept the binky.)


Then, just this past weekend, she started walking! Woohoo! (I think.) Her first few steps were toward some baby clothes I was holding while shopping Labor Day sales at Sears (a true girl). Then on Sunday Quinn, who just got called to the senior nursery, had her in nursery with him and she seems to have figured that if all those three year olds could do it, she could too -- she's been taking lots of short distance walks ever since then! We took this video on Monday, so her third day taking steps.


Here are some other things she's been up to that delight me every day:

She can now say dada, mama, baby, yay! (while clapping her hands), and uh-oh (but she says "uh-uh")

She can do patty cake and itsy bitsy spider (well, you know, the baby version of the hand actions, but still! it's so cute!) I'll have to get a video of it with Quinn's camera (so there's sound) and post it later.

She blows on her food. ANY food. Even cold watermelon. :)

She hugs her stuffed animals and says "Ooooh" with a little round mouth and then holds them out for us to hug and says "Ooooh" again while we hug them.

The day before her birthday she suddenly folded her arms and bowed her head when we were getting ready to pray over dinner. Ever since then she's been folding her arms during family, mealtime, and bedtime prayers. Not the whole time of course, but the fact that she even does it has been really quite amazing to me.

She now likes to copy us a lot. Like she'll push on the top of any bottle and then rub her hands together (to copy me pushing the pump of the lotion bottle and rubbing it on my hands). Or the other day I went "Ugh!" in frustration about something and then heard the same little "Ugh!" come from over where Caitlyn was playing with her toys. Hmmm...a good reminder to be very careful about the things I say and do...

Something I love about Caitlyn is that she LOVES books. Ever since she could crawl, several times a day she crawls in to her room, pulls all the books off her bookshelf (ok, so we only actually own about 10 that we read over and over. And over.), and sits in the pile of them, "reading" them one by one.





She's also developed quite the little independent personality. The day after her birthday Quinn had his hands on top of hers to help her steer her new "alphabet train" push toy we got her for her birthday. She stopped, gave him a little scowl, removed his hands one at a time, and then continued pushing without his help. We got a video of her doing this to me a couple days later (so this video is about a month old -- now she's whippin' and steerin' that baby around like it's NASCAR).


Alright folks, well, if you're not family you may not have even made it to this point in the post, but anyway... That's the latest in the (to me, VERY exciting) life and times of Caitlyn Disparte.

Caitlyn is 1!

Ok, so this is also a little late, but ... Caitlyn is 1 year old! I don't know how it happened! I'm pretty sure we just brought her home from the hospital yesterday, right?
We had her birthday cake at the Sitthichai family reunion at the Temple Hill campground in Manti the last weekend in July. It was a week before her birthday but we decided to do it then since my whole family was together. I couldn't bring myself to set a big, hardcore sugary cake in front of her when she's still such a little baby (I know, I know, people have been doing it for years). I even considered not having a cake, but then I realized I shouldn't let my fanatacism suck ALL the fun out of Caitlyn's life. My ultimate solution was to bake a homemade carrot cake with wholesome ingredients and then use plain whipping cream with no sugar added for the frosting (her first intro to cows milk). I did add pink sprinkles though, so that's kind of fun, right?

I made a doll cake and it turned out pretty good! Growing up, my mom used to make us whatever kind, shape, theme, etc. we wanted for our birthday cake and we loved it, so I want to continue that tradition.
Caitlyn played the part of birthday girl very well. I had to encourage her at first when we put the cake in front of her, but once she realized that we WANTED her to dig in and were not going to stop her at all, she had a total feast! I actually had to stop her a couple of times from shoving a bite bigger than her fist into her mouth. She was pretty much in cake-heaven. (Incidentally, see that little finger-swipe mark in the front of the cake? Apparently that is Kayla's signature for the cakes in our life -- it just occurred to me that she put an identical swipe mark in our wedding cake before anyone could stop her!)

On Caitlyn's actual birthday we were here in Virginia and in the middle of moving into our apartment. We decided to buy her a push toy (having suddenly realized that her two grandmas have done such an excellent job of supplying her with great toys that we've never actually bought her a toy!) to help her gain confidence walking without holding our hands. It's a pretty sweet toy -- an "Alphabet Train."

Happy Birthday Caitlyn! You are the light of your mommy and daddy's lives!