While Connor and I were watching TV this morning, I sneezed and Connor said “Bless you, Mommy!”.  I sneezed again and he said “Bless you, Mommy” again while his eyes were still staring at the TV.  I had tried to encourage good manner by asking Logan to say that when someone sneezes, but so far Logan had never said it to me yet.  I however had never talked to Connor about that.  The fact that Connor said it so naturally and smoothly totally surprised me, but in a good way.

   Both boys were due for a hair cut, so we did that Saturday morning.  They both like the hair salon as it has a play area in the back.  After a few minutes of playing, they were called to the hot seats.  Connor did fine as long as I held his hand, but the picture however showed a drop of tear on his face.  Logan on the other hand was a bit whiny and fidgeting.  The lady was not able to spend too much time on his bang which turned out to be a bit long, so we had to take him back for a quick trim in the afternoon.  But overall, Stuart and I are very happy with their cuts this time.

      I finally did the gift wrapping.  After the kids went to sleep at 8:30pm on Saturday, I took out all the hidden presents from my closet and started wrapping.  After three straight hours and an achy back, we finally have our stockings stuffed and the bottom of our tree filled with presents.  Connor noticed the new additions this morning as he brought a present carefully over to me.  I immediately gave a talk to both boys, and now they understand that the presents are not allowed to be touched until Christmas.

   This was a photo of our living room.  I was playing with the panoramic feature of my phone camera.

  Stuart edited the boys’ videos.  Here is Logan’s Christmas Sing.  Sorry about the camera angle as this was where we were sitting.

    Here is Connor’s Winter Performance.  It was not too exciting as he only wanted to stay with me.

    Connor can talk just a bit more now and communicates what he needs to us better.  Like tonight after bath, he requested “Momma reads me, not daddy!”.  In the morning, he asked me for a specific TV show “Yardigan (his way of saying Backyardigans), the choo-choo one”.  Some words he just has troubles with, like “muf-gin” for muffins, “eppington” for elephants and we are not quite sure what sound he makes for his own name.  Another one is Christmas lights which he says “am-mee lights”.  Logan would ask us jokingly what “am-mee light” is or teases Connor that he is not saying it correctly.  Connor often gets offended and says “NO, not am-mee lights!  Am-mee lights!”.  He tries to correct Logan but they both still sound the same to us.  Poor guy!

    The past couple of nights, when Connor and I were reading a Dr. Seuss book and saw a page with lots of letters, he started pointing to the letters and called out some random letters.  So, I pointed each letter out and he repeated them beautifully with good pronunciation.  His counting is getting better too.  When I wash the kids’ hair, I often have Logan count each of the water bucket that I pour over his head.  This week, Connor starts to count along with us, and he can count all the way to 10 one night.  The other night he even mumbled all the way to 14.  Last week at school, his Spanish teacher was so excited to bring over a Number flip book for Connor to read, and he did it all to the way to 10 in Spanish with just one reminder at 7. 

     We have planted the orange dwarf tree along with the lemon tree 4-5 years ago, and this is the first year that it is finally growing oranges.  We went to harvest the bounty today.  Some were still greenish, but skipping those, we still managed to get a small bag full.  Connor once again helped me put each orange into the bag.  After dinner, we all tried our home grown oranges; they tasted fine but just a bit sour.  I am trying to persuade Logan to take one of the oranges to school tomorrow for show and tell to share our success.