Merry Christmas letter from the Pagets as told by the MATRIARCH

My parents put out a notoriously epic Christmas card every year.  I've never felt the need because 1) I'm in my parent's card anyway and they send it EVERYWHERE, I mean every single continent.  Probably.  Also, 2) sending Christmas cards would involve my nemesis, the US postal service, 3) I already make an anniversary video, so the nostalgia is taken care of, and 4) ugh.

But now that I'm a grown-up technically, and my parents are busy slaving away in China hence no card this year, I figure I'll take up a teeny part of the slack and write something.  Except I really hate those Christmas letters, so I challenged Jared to a card-off in the hopes that we'll end up with something representative of our family.  And since I'm using the computer with access to our photos, mine will be shinier.  So I'm already ahead!

Life in the Paget family has been super awesome this year.  There has been a minimal amount of vomit, almost all the family members now regularly eliminate in the toilet, and the kids are still willing to eat the same breakfast every.single.day.  

Reason 1 the year was awesome:  There was like, no winter.  It was FABULOUS.  This was taken in March, but it could have been January.  

 Do you notice the absence of snow pants?  I DO.

  Reason 2:  You see all these people?  All these people are awesome, and more importantly - fit into our house at the same time.  I've only been married 7 years (8 next month!) but to me it is astounding I had enough towels to accommodate this many guests.  And this many people spent the majority of time in our house because it was a kajillion degrees all summer long and being outside was a terrible idea. 

 And then when we did venture outside, this face happened.  So that was awesome.

 Reason 3: We got a slip n' slide.

 Reason 4: Solei got to go to kindergarten FINALLY.

 Reason 5: I got Forster to sit still long enough to get a picture of him next to a sign that said Knuckle Head.

 Reason 6: We survived yet another birthday party for Solei where I lost my head and invited every female in town.  The screaming.  OH THE SCREAMING.

Reason 7: I have a decent reason for getting to eat an entire meal of condiments and call it a "craving."

 Reason 8: Jared got me a remote for the camera so this picture could happen:

 And these kids continue to astound us with their massive brains and ability to embarrass us in public.

Just you wait until you are teenagers.  JUST YOU WAIT.

And the final reason is that we got to survive this crazy year together.  Jared changed jobs, sold his motorcycle and jeep and then bought another jeep and ensured the Paget name will live on in at least two male heirs.  I recorded and produced an entire album with my band in 24 hours and I now own enough yoga pants to not have to wear any jeans at all.  But the yoga pants are all the same brand so it looks like I'm wearing the same pants every day and this does not bother me in the slightest.  I am now of the age where this matters little.  In fact, some mornings I drop Solei off at school and have to check to make sure I'm wearing a shirt.  So far so good!

All in all, we feel very blessed, tired, and sometimes gassy.  We hope you have a marvelous Christmas!!

Okay Jared, whatCHUgot???

added: Okay, he officially wins.

Merry Christmas from the Pagets

(The ones that are in rural Wisconsin, remember us?)

As the year comes to a close and letters and cards come from all over the world in various shades of Christmas red and green, our thoughts have turned to how we also have done things that we feel are marginally better than everyone else.  Therefore I have chosen to conquer the annual Christmas letter (adding this conquest to homemade bread, homemade pizza, large messes, spreadsheets, snarky facebooks comments, and drinking milk.)  Strap on your “I care” cape and hold on for the ride:

When Reva and I were married, we both wanted to have four kids.  After our first was born, we both thought that maybe that was a little aggressive and we should maybe only have 3.  After our second was born, that number dropped to two.  We were happy and loved our kids (for the record both children are still loved.)  After some powerful amnesia and celestial prodding we made the decision to try for a third.  We were wildly successful and are expecting numero 3 sometime in late February.  It’s a BOY!!!  I’d love to name him Guy Incognito Paget - but Reva’s not on board... yet.  I’m pretty sure that all the internal kidney kicking he’s doing is a result of her refusal to accept the name.

Now for the post-utero offspring: Child #1 - aka Solei - had a spectacular year.  After some small effort, Solei finished 4-K with a bang!  For a girl who learned her alphabet and numbers at 16 months, 4-K was not so challenging.  She has a great love of science and reading.  Kindergarten has been a lot of fun for Solei, who loves nothing more than to go to school.  Solei loves to fight with the neighbors bears and even beat a pack of wolves with her bare hands.  She’s a beautiful little girl who is a great joy to our family.

Child #2 - aka  Forster - has made leaps and bounds this year.  He went from being a loud, energetic toddler to being a loud, energetic little boy.  He is all boy - he loves trucks, tractors, and trying to seriously injure his father.  His favorite greeting is ramming his whole body, full force, into the crotch of the person he is greeting.  Not so bad for the lady folk, but for us guys he needs an education - “That’s My Purse!”  Forster is nearly potty trained.  He loves wearing underpants, but not actually going potty in the potty.  Those are mutually exclusive in our home.  Reva’s been working on using the hours upon hours she has him sitting on the potty to teach him to read.  He’s getting pretty good with sight words, but phonetic pronunciation is as awkward and infrequent as emotion coming from Kristen Stewart.  Forster is not the bear wrestler his sister is, they are too easy an opponent for him.  He’s enjoyed wrestling dump trucks.

Reva’s had a great year.  She spent the majority of the year as a Pinterest missionary.  Her conversions have been many.  She’s also taken on a challenge in which she takes a photo every day for a year - the only trick is that she has to be in said picture.  It’s been an interesting challenge for her - that has produced literally thousands of photos of her appendages.  She spent the year as the President of the Young Womens organization in our congregation.  Reva and her trio, The Blarney Girls, played the N. GA Scottish Games in June.  They, of course, were awesome and were invited back for an unprecedented 7th year next year.  Reva was also impregnated by an attractive gentleman with whom she shares a marriage.  

Jared’s year has been spectacular and disappointing at the same time.  Our hearts were broken on election night when Jared only garnered 6 votes for president.  In other news, Jared received 6 votes for president of the USA!  How impressive is that?  We have 4 years to perfect the message before the next election.  While waiting to move into the oval office, Jared took a new position with a Dairy Equipment Company in Madison - not stereotypical at all, is it?  We lost two members of our family this year when Jared had to sell is CJ7 and Motorcycle.  It was a sad parting on both parts.  They’ve been replaced (just yesterday) with a Jeep Grand Cherokee.  You can’t ever really replace a family member, but it’s nice to not have something with 4x4 to drive in the winter.  

Our pet monkey still has not arrived, so we can imagine what he did this year:  Furious George was quite the handful this year.  His penchant for excrement diffusion would be useful on a farm, but not in a home.  The carpets are not enjoying our friendly little pet either.  When he got loose this summer he bit the mailman, so our mail is not delivered to our home anymore.  This winter he got out and stole Reva’s brown jacket before a trip which apparently ended at an Ikea in Toronto.  Maybe it’s not so bad that our pet monkey hasn’t shown up yet.

We hope that all your lives are wonderful and you have a wonderful 2013.

Love,

The Pagets:

Jared, Reva, Solei, Forster, Guy, and Spaghetti Cat.

These kids are too smart for me

I've been worrying about Forster lately.  Maybe because I don't have anything better to do.  But mostly, it's because he's a boy and my only previous mothering-of-a-3-year-old experience has been with a very different girl.

I've gotten out my Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons book because that's how I taught Solei to read - of course, I don't think I used it the first time until just before she turned 4 and Forster is just barely 3, but I'm anxious.  Is it even possible with him??  So far he's done well.  His attention span isn't as long as hers, we muddle through, just slower than the first time.  I love that book because I'm a big fan of phonics.  Who isn't? 

But I've started to realize one of the reasons why Solei was so fast was because she's a visual learner - she sees something and knows it immediately -  and Forster is kinesthetic.  And while the book involves him touching the page a lot, I realized I need to supplement it with some movement activities.  I've been slightly obsessed with it since I know nothing about it.  So this morning I looked up some activities found this great blog post on what sight words to teach and why.  We've been blessed with some great homeschool friends that donated their old materials and I have a TON of flash cards for all subjects.  I got out some beginning words and put them around the floor and had him find me whatever word I told him.

I thought we'd work up to five, but he already knew five.  In fact, we were up to 30 before I decided we should take a break.  I have no idea where he learned all these words.  I go in two mornings a week to help out in Solei's kindergarten class and Forster is already ahead of most of the kids there.  Good golly, Jared's smart genes are strong with these two.

So now, he's starting violin lessons, is well on his way to reading like a champ, and I have yet to get him fully potty trained.  My priorities are so messed up :)

Now if we could just get Forster to stop hugging the tree...

Family Fotos

I must admit I'm pretty proud of these pictures.  last Sunday as I was on an errand with Solei I drove past Circus World and realized at that time of day, the lighting was fabulous and those newly-painted doors would look fabulous for some pictures.  So I screeched the car into a parking lot and took a few with my camera phone.

I came home and told Jared I'd really like to try taking some family pictures there before the weather turned. And in true Jared fashion, he looked at the forecast and found out exactly when it would turn and came home early the day before Thanksgiving, declared this would be our last chance for family pictures and we threw on some finery and headed down the street to Circus World with the camera, tripod and remote.  And, very luckily, with a recently arrived Nana and Papa to dance behind the camera and and get Forster to possibly behave a little bit.

Not bad for taking them all ourselves!  If you look closely, you can see one of us holding the remote in some of the pictures.  Now we have some documentation of our little family of four.  Next up, five! (next Feb/March, btw)

Orange Blossom Christmas

Here's a little preview of the Christmas album that's forthcoming!  We got lucky and our good friend Brad came over to jam with us on sushi night!

Busy being thankful.

More tomorrow!

Holy adorable, Batman!

We made an attempt at a family photo shoot today.  More to come after the holiday - but aren't these two just precious??

Yo

Almost Thanksgiving ... so tired... and yet Forster begged for his violin lesson again. This time we did rhythms and he is GOOD! I know I've said it before, but this kid is going to be a fabulous drummer someday!

Tomorrow the family descends on the house! I hope it'll be ready!

Borster's biolin lesson

I'm a whirlwind of crazy busy over here, trying to get everything ready for the families to descend for Thanksgiving this week.  But I could never skimp on Solei's violin lesson - so after school today, we took our usual few minutes and worked on her new song.

Side note - her new song is MINUET 3!!  That's the third to last song in the Suzuki book 1!!  I have taken my sweet time with her progress and I'm still all pins and needles about her technique, but every now and then I stop and look at what she CAN do and I'm baffled we've managed to make it this far.  The Suzuki method ROCKS!

So when I asked her to put her violin away, Forster ran up to me yelling hopefully "Borster's turn??  Borster's turn biolin and mouse house*??"  How could I refuse?  I had Solei run to get the red circle rug I used to give her lessons on (a portable learning space) and tried giving him a wee lesson on bowhold and sang some bowhold songs while he tried to not poke my eye out.  Or unsuccessfully tried to poke my eye out.

It was so sweet and precious!  I am more and more aware every day how how vastly different the two of them are and how skewed my ideas on education are from having a visual/aural learner/genius first.  Whatever successes I may have had with Solei are NOT a given with Forster and I have had to let go of the expectation of him reading at age three or playing the violin and piano - we're taking it one day at a time and seeing what he is capable of and interested in.

But I can't say I wasn't THRILLED to give him a wee violin lesson, just the same :)

*I'd shown him how to make a bowhold last week and had called the inside of his hand a mouse house  - just to keep the space open so that a mouse could run in and out.  Apparently he'd remembered!

the Dude's got rhythm

You have probably seen quite a few videos of your friend's kids dancing on youtube lately.  And here's another one!  But right at 19 seconds, you can see his seriously keen ear for timing.  And sweet moves.  We love Forster!

To do

Shopping, decluttering the pantry so I can fit more food in there for Thanksgiving, recording for the annual Christmas album, going to a baptism, and fast food on the way to the Holly Jolly Light Parade. Saturday, you tire me.

Bring it on, Thanksgiving week!

Sibling reunion 2012

It looks like we forgot to mention the monumental happening on early July - we hosted my entire side of the family for a reunion up here in Wisconsin.  It was over 100 degrees every day but we braved it to get some serious fun in.  Massive amounts of root beer (a KEG of it!), Pewitt's Nest, Circus World, Mom and Dad's 40th wedding anniversary - it was INSANE!  

So without further ado, here are a kajillion pictures, without order or explanation.  Enjoy!