Christmas 2011-Reader's Digest Edition

Ah, Christmas. The most wonderful time of the year. (For who, I am sure I don't know.) Traditionally, I pull out my camera and take some photos. Not sure why I forgot that particular tradition this year, but I did. Right from the get go. Our first Christmas-like activity was decorating sugar cookies with the Johnsons. We love this tradition. One that gets easier and cleaner the older our kiddos get. I made some sad-and-sorry-straight-from-the-Pilsbury-tube-cookies this year. I just couldn't bring myself to make the yummy thick sugar cookies I normally do, knowing I would not be eating a single one. I figured the kids wouldn't mind. I was right, they didn't. However, I did not account for Bill's friend, Alan, who was so worried he might have to eat a "vegan" sugar cookie he baked a huge batch of his own. He even brought his own frosting. Granted, the sad-and-sorry cookies were no match for the perfect-from-scratch goodies Alan showed up with. Lucky for Alan, I am used to being shown up in the kitchen department and never take "food-mishaps" personally. Plus, this tradition has very little to do with cookies and everything to do with seeing our friends and their munchkins.
From friends to family, our next Christmas activity involved inviting all of Bill's family over for a brisk walk down the hill to enjoy the lights at Temple Square. We picked a cold, crowded night, but everyone (and their phalanges) survived. Even super-trooper 9th months pregnant April, who walked both ways (slowly) without a peep of complaint. Hot cocoa and ginger cookies were everyone's reward for surviving the 20 degree weather. Good conversation and laughs about growing up "Barber" kept the evening light-hearted.


April hosted the family Christmas Eve dinner. (Did I mention she is VERY pregnant with her 5th child? This will be the 5th with every other child 7 or under!) With a family full of strict and strange diets of vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, and kosher- no one wanted to tackle preparing a meal for a bunch of picky-poo eaters. Hence the "bring your favorite dish" theme of the evening (which turned into, bring what you and your family can eat). Anne and I killed the time making silly pictures of ourselves. Well, silly pictures of Anne anyway.

After eating all the vegan chili we could handle, we drove to Salt Lake where we participated in another Romney-Barber tradition of opening one present on Christmas Eve. Without a trace of creativity, it is always PJ's. But before they could adorn our young sons, we decided this year to revive an old Romney family tradition- a late night Christmas Eve movie. This year's choice. The Adventures of Tin-Tin. (It was a major hit with my boys, for the record.)

Exhausted, we all crawled into bed around 2 am with parental instructions not to wake us up before 8:30. Being the fabulous listeners our boys are, they slept in until 9:30, making me think we should make that late night movie an annual thing from here on out! Once conscious to the world, we started our morning opening our stockings and working our way from there.

The boys are growing up. No where has that been more apparent than when it came time to make their Christmas wish lists. Cash and Legos. End of list. Really. That was all they could come up with. So that is just what we did. We opened new savings accounts for them that come with their own debit/cash cards. They are now the proud/responsible managers of their own money. A gift for all of us, as no longer will Bill need to be the keeper of their money. Their allowance is set up to automatically be deposited into their own accounts. They get to manage how much they have online. I think we are all singing the "hallelujah chorus" about this new family development.

The second part of their wish list-Legos. We made sure they had sufficient to play with Christmas morning. William also was able to download a game with a Nintendo gift card. Debit cards are cool and all, but not so much fun to hang out with in your pajamas on Christmas morning with. Bill's childhood fantasy was fulfilled this year with a gift certificate to go hang gliding or paragliding (his call) and Bill brought me closer to my dreams by grabbing me a stack of school supplies and a very cool tape deck shaped purse (in case the other students couldn't tell how much older than them I really am.)

After we celebrated by ourselves opening our gifts, we headed up to Amy's house for family presents and Christmas dinner. This is where the old adage of "the best laid plans" came to fruition. April decided as we were in the middle of opening presents to go into "false" labor. The trick is, at the time, no one knew it was false, because it was looking pretty "real" with her contractions lasting for a minute and being only just over a minute apart. If that is really what was happening for her for the length of time she was saying it had been going on that kid should have been born in Amy's living room. She was rushed off to the hospital for several hours, along with her parents and the most medically inclined of all the Barbers, Anne (in case she had to deliver the baby in the van- bwhahaha. Maybe next time, Anne.) That left our family, Dave and Amy and her kids to enjoy the half cooked turkey dinner. The turkey had been put into the oven frozen and cooked for 6 hours to no avail. This combined with the blocked kitchen sink that Bill worked on for several hours and you have all the makings of a comedy of errors type Christmas night. With April in the hospital, Amy's house was full of 4 little kiddos with no parents to take them home. We took pity on Amy's boys who would be displaced from their beds that night and decided to have a cousin sleep over with Sam and David Ray at our house. Video game madness ensued and cousin fun was had by all. Christmas wrapped up with a girl's shopping trip with all the Barber women, Bill and Anne having a ski day at Brighton, and Anne and I having a fun girl's night out at the Tavernacle requesting songs and enjoying each other's company. As soon as our last Barber relative left us with a quiet and kind of empty-feeling home, our Tyrrell friends stopped in for a visit. It took the edge of the whole "empty house" syndrome.

New Year's Eve finds us at home together watching movies and playing games. Some unknown neighbors kindly invested at least $1,000 dollars on illegal fireworks and are currently treating us to a magnificent display right out our front window. Thank you unknown neighbors. Thank you unknown photo takers for supplying photos from the internet for this blog. And many thanks to our family and friends who made this a memorable and delightful Christmas season.

Eunuch Bunnies

Well one of those bunnies feels our bunnies' pain. The one with the sore end half. Being the responsible pet owners we now find ourselves to be, we had our bunnies neutered. This was not an event I would have guessed when we made the appointment with the Vet to be "blog-worthy". Easy in, easy out. They are both male bunnies after all. From what I had read it was going to be pretty easy. Bring your rabbits in early with food and water and then come back several hours later to pick them up. That part went according to plan. The curve ball came when we picked them up only to find out (for the first time) that we would need to keep them indoors for ten days to keep them warm, as their little bunny bodies may not be able to regulate their body temperature with the anesthesia used for the surgery. Um, excuse me! We picked these animals because they are one of the few that we think it is more cruel to keep in a small cage indoors than a large protected area outdoors where they are allowed to run happy and free. Indoors was never part of the plan. But we love our buns and so the hutch came indoors. Into the back hallway. We lasted about 12 hours, following a sleepless night worrying about them, cleaning up the urine they sprayed on our walls, with our runny eyes, noses and tickley throats before we decided (after some careful internet research) that they would be just fine outdoors at least during the days. They spent the night outdoors the next night, but on the third night, Romney's bunny was acting unusually slow. He wouldn't eat or poop and for a bunny this is a big deal. We brought him in and spent an hour nursing him and coercing him to eat and drink. The next day he couldn't wait to get out of his carrier and be outside again, all back to normal. And, finally, after the 5 day mark that is where the bunnies were again- back to normal. Enjoying our unseasonably warm weather and each other more and more each day as the testosterone subsides.

Appliances Belong In A House, Not A Mouth

When you think of the word appliance, what comes to mind? A refrig-
erator? A stove? A dish-
washer? Yeah before the middle of December, me too. Now, it conjures up graphic images of torturous levels of mouth pain. Poor Romney inherited the worst of both Bill and I's teeth, both crowded and crooked. Romney has taken crooked teeth to a whole new level with a permanent tooth coming in several millimeters behind it's baby tooth counterpart. This oral development, combined with an overcrowding problem, prompted the pulling of 3 teeth and an appliance being fitted to his mouth in an effort to try and get his new tooth to line up with it's other "tooth-y friends". Sitting in a dentist in never fun, but lucky for us all, Romney loves his dentist, Dr. Romney. Probably because they both understand their odd Romney humor and "get" each other.

Romney had been hoping to have the tooth moved in time for Christmas and to be appliance free for all the yummy, gooey Christmas treats. But I guess on Romney even his teeth can be stubborn and the darn thing would not move as quickly as everyone thought it should. We granted Romney a reprieve and let him remove his appliance for 24 hours during Christmas eve/day. As promised he remembered without a reminder to put the appliance back in. Not only did he remember, he put it in himself, as well as getting the tricky spring behind his tooth. Well done, motivated little man.

Dr. Romney had mentioned that as soon as his tooth had made it over the "hump" the appliance would be removed because he believed the tooth would slide the rest of the way into place. After several weeks of suffering you can imagine Romney's joy when Dr. Romney proclaimed it had moved past the dreaded "hump", and then you can imagine Romney's anguish as he learned that Dr. Romney no longer felt confident it would move anywhere on it's own volition and had Romney wear the appliance for yet another week. He was stoic as he left the office, but as soon as we got home, there were major tears of frustration as he settles for yet another (at least) week of dental hell.

Charlie Brown, the Flipside

You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Ado-
lescence is enough suffering for anyone. ~John Ciardi, Simmons Review, Fall 1962

I am still young enough to remember the good old days. Days spent reading comics from the Sunday paper while lying on the flower patterned carpet next to the slippered feet of my Mimi, who would read the more "substantial pages", and then ask me for the "funnies". My favorites: Garfield, Family Circus, and Cathy (don't judge!"). My grandmother was partial to Peanuts. Those days my be behind me now, but I am still having my very own Peanuts moments. Bill and I have become the voice of the "grown-up". No longer do we speak normally, but have been relegated to making unintelligible quacking noises that seem to make no sense to our now teenage son. A single case in point (one of many): Last night Bill took the boys shopping. William asked if he could set something down in the store randomly. Bill said no. William walked away. A minute later William comes back and says "Dad, I know I asked you a question. I know you gave me an answer, but I can't remember it. It just sounded like "ERRRRRCKKKKKK." Yup. To quote Pink Floyd: "[Y]our lips move, but [he} can't hear what [we're] sayin'." So the flip has begun. No longer do I relate to Charlie Brown and his buddies, I now relate to the voice in the background, the one that makes no sense and has no relevancy to the children it speaks to. To quote Charlie " AARGGHH!!!"