Christmas Day

I think I forgot to mention that we had a Chinese student come live with us for 2 weeks right after we got back from the States. He is a non-Christian student in the high school who has been living with another family this year. That family was going to the States for almost a month and asked if we would keep him. It was very different having a high school male around. I'm even more thankful for Gary now. :-) Gary is very clean; he never leaves clothes on the floor, he cleans up any mess that he makes, he helps with cleaning. He even washes the shower down afterward. I'm so blessed to have such a wonderful husband and father to Ethan. Hopefully we can train Ethan to follow his Daddy's footsteps.

Our Chinese house guest left once school ended, so he wasn't here for Christmas. The Yaikos and Audrey came over for Christmas dinner. After we ate, we all went for a walk (except for Seth and Kevin, who stayed and took a nap). Sadly, the snow was gone, and it was raining. So, our walk was only a few blocks. After coming back we ate dessert. Gary and I enjoyed having Kevin, Kristen, and Audrey over. Even Seth and Ethan played together (which we weren't expecting with Seth being about 13 months older than Ethan).

Ethan getting ready to open his present. We waited until evening, after everyone left before he opened his gift. Gary and I have opened presents on Christmas evening/night since we've been married. Some of it out of time since I'm usually cooking all morning, and some of it in an attempt to try to not focus on physical gifts, but the gift that God gave us in sending His son to earth knowing that He would die. A lot of people know that I don't like all of the Santa Clause stuff because it seems to take away from the point of Christmas-- the celebration of the birth of Christ. I am enjoying thinking about and talking about traditions that Gary and I can do to have fun enjoying Christmas and at the same time focus on Jesus. One advantage of getting married and having a child at an 'older' age in life is that we can glean from what others around us have done.

As some of you have probably noticed, I seem to be posting stuff about once a month and trying to post stuff from the whole month at that time. Hopefully I can start doing it more regularly, but it's unlikely to happen before February.

Decorating for Christmas

So, here is a picture of God's decoration for Christmas-- snow. We actually didn't have any snow left for Christmas, but the same weekend that the East Coast got a lot of snow, so did we (though, we only got around 8 inches). The streets in the back part of Diosd hadn't been scraped, so the folks who go to our church and live in this part didn't go that Sunday. We did end up walking a block down the street and having church in someone's home.

On the way back, Ethan fell asleep. We don't have many opportunities to get a picture of the 3 of us, so we asked our neighbor, who was shoveling his walkway, to take this picture of us.
Ethan really enjoyed "helping out" with decorating the Christmas tree. He played with the box that the lights were in for a long time, and then he played with the lights.

My mom gave Ethan his first Christmas ornament, and Gary helped him hang it as the 2nd ornament on the tree (with our family ornament from my mom being first).

I was really amazed that Ethan didn't 'mess' with the Christmas tree or ornaments that much. We made sure to put nonbreakable ornaments without hooks near the bottom of the tree expecting him to mess with them a lot, but he only touched the tree and ornaments on it a few times while it was up.

Crawling up Stairs

Ethan has been pulling himself up more since we've been back in Hungary. Now, he's pulling himself up all the time and letting go with success for a few seconds. Below is a picture where he was very entertained by Gary playing the guitar and wanted to help Daddy play.
Ethan started crawling at the end of our time in the States, but he wasn't crawling around real fast or a lot. We have 3 stairs that go from the dining room into the living room. They go across the room, so they are too long to be gated off, plus, we want Ethan to learn how to get up and down stairs correctly. It would be nice if they were carpeted, but the houses in Hungary have the hard tile floors instead of carpet. Not too long after we returned from the US, Ethan made his way up the 3 stairs.And, of course, what does Mom do? She gets her camera out to take pictures of it. My first thought was actually that I wanted Gary to be able to see it.

He used the space of the whole stairs, but he finally made it up. I think it was the next day or the following that he continued and wanted to go up the "big stairs". Gary stayed behind him and let him do it. He climbed up all 15 stairs! We mostly wanted to see if he could do it, but decided not to let him do that again for awhile. Now, he is learning how to get down the 3 stairs. Once we get him started on the top one, he can get down the other 2 fine.