Merry Christmas from the Wyckoff boys!
Every year, I dream of the perfect Christmas card photo of my two boys. I spend weeks, valiantly attempting to capture them on film (um, or the digital equivalent) with beaming smiles and perfectly spotless seasonally-appropriate clothing. Needless to say, these are my kids, and that is more than just a tall order; it's dreaming the impossible dream.
So, this is what I ended up with this year:
Yeah, so they're wearing old sweaters and jeans, and Andrew's got cookie icing all over his face, but you know, it's okay. This is what they really look like. This is what they're really like. They're wild and happy and messy. Unless they're asleep, they're almost always in motion. They're opinionated and exuberant and silly, and while they pick at each other, they also adore each other wildly. This picture shows my sons the way they really are. And you know what? I love that. I love this picture.
Also, it's very last photo of William with his top front teeth!
He lost one top tooth at a birthday party one Saturday evening about ten days before Christmas. The other one hung in there at a terrible, stomach-churning angle for several more days. We pleaded with him to pull it out already. I offered him bribes. I finally just dived in and tried to pull it out myself. Finally, on Friday morning, he woke up, and the tooth had given up the ghost and fallen out on its own. Hallelujah. It was a Christmas miracle!
As I can't resist a good photo opportunity, even if it's long past the deadline for the Christmas card, I took lots and lots of photos of William and his new smile, usually as I hummed "All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth" under my breath. He was mostly a good sport about it. Mostly.
"All I want for Christmas is NOT my two front teeth," he finally objected. "I already have two front teeth" and he pointed to his bottom two front teeth.
And what he really wanted for Christmas was Ninjago Legos. If the phrase "Ninjago Legos" means absolutely nothing to you, you must not have any contact with boys under the age of 10.
As you might expect, Andrew also wanted Legos for Christmas. He called them "Andrew's Wegos," and he wanted "Andrew's Wegos, and a train, and a truck and a car." He got all of the above. And he got a new "pack-pack"* and a Grover toy. One grandmother gave him a classic set of wooden vehicles, and the other gave him an "Andrew's Wego" car wash set.
(*That's Andrew-speak for "backpack." I can't bear to correct him. I also adore that he calls the cape on his Batman jammies a "caper." Jumping jacks are "jumper jacks." And the water fountain is a "water mountain." Oh, and on the first day of Christmas, my true love game to me "a partridge in the pantry." See, I have to cherish these things. William used to say cute little things like that, and we'd all sigh and giggle, and then three weeks later, he'd be saying the real, correct name for something, and I'd miss his little spoonerisms.)
So here's one of my favorite Christmas Eve photos of the boys. They're wearing their wild Hanna Andersson jammies that William picked out.
They were nearly bouncing off the walls by the time bedtime rolled around that night. (This was after nearly setting a world record in garnering time-outs that morning.) But they managed to set out cookies for Santa and get in bed before it got too late.
That left plenty of time for David and me to play Santa and Mrs. Claus while watching "A Christmas Story." Twice. It was a longer evening than we'd hoped to have. Poor David. I thought he remembered his vow to never put together anything on Christmas Eve ever again, after assembling the play kitchen a few years ago. But he was seduced by the Dark Side that is Costco and its colorful wooden train table. And so Christmas Eve found him surrounded by wooden pieces and screwdrivers and plastic bags and who knows what else. To his credit, he got it done. And Andrew was over the moon when he saw his train table from Santa the next morning.
More photos to come soon. In the meantime, Merry Christmas!
