Construction/Destruction

It was a constructive day, in the most literal sense.  It started with an animal hotel, made with the cool magnets from Gomma.

Chad camped out in the garage for a few hours and whipped up a bench and a bookshelf.

Meanwhile, back in the livingroom, Trevor created some kind of crushing device.  He methodically lined up things to be crushed, like, yeah, those same magnets from this morning. There's a fine line between construction and destruction around here.

His contraption worked perfectly.

After dinner, Clara got in on the action.  The contraption was dubbed, "The Crushinator" (no doubt a result of the fact that Chad and I have been letting them watch non-stop Phineas and Ferb every morning during vacation while we sleep in – totally, TOTALLY, love this show, BTW) and it crushed like a charm.

It's funny what vacation does to you.  I mean, I'm a person who loves my job.  I get a lot of satisfaction from teaching, and I love hanging out with my students.  Tonight, though, there is no part of me that wants to get up at 6:30, make myself presentable, and say goodbye to the two most fabulous kids in the universe (and their awesome dad) to go back to work.  But I will. And it will be fine.  I'll have a great day, even, and the kids will love being back at school, and we'll all have lots to talk about at dinner. Isn't vacation wonderful, though?  Sigh.  This sure was nice.  

(And I got all caught up on blog posts since Thanksgiving!)

Gratitude

I am the worst at getting around to sending Thank You notes. The worst.  I don't know why, exactly, since I feel heaps of gratitude for every type of kindness.  I should just sit down right away and express my thanks in writing, but I always put it off, and put it off, until sometimes it is embarrassingly late to thank somebody for something.  I know there's no statute of limitations on gratitude, but there's no excuse for lagging when it comes to telling someone how much you appreciate their thoughtfulness.  

Since I don't want the kids to turn into Thank You procrastinators, I thought I'd try to make an event of saying thanks, so we had a little "Thank You Celebration" today.  The "celebration" aspect was pretty basic – some popcorn and favorite music at the kitchen table – but it got us all gathered around and creating some cards to put in the mail. Clara never really needs any prodding to do this type of thing, because she loves anything to do with writing.  Trevor is another story.  The popcorn bribe was key.  Midway through, he declared, "All this writing is making me hot!", so he spent most of the celebration shirtless.

Clara got on such a roll that she even thanked the editors of American Girl Mini-Mysteries. Love that girl.

I have a little plan up my sleeve to make Thank You Celebrations a regular occurrence in our household.

2010. Whoa.

Even though we've packed a lot of activity into the past decade, it did blow by kind of quickly, didn't it?  To bring in the new year, Chad and I luxuriated at a resort last night (compliments of G&G! Thank you!!) and ate humongous sandwiches on the beach for lunch today.  We're ready to take on 2010!

P.S.  We'll spend most of the remaining 364 days this year with the kids.  :)

P.P.S.  Recognize my trusty sweatshirt?