Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Have a Holly Jolly Christmas...

6thGrader has been listening to holiday music on the radio for over a week already. He says it is his favorite type of music, so when the local station started playing "all holiday music all the time" on Veteran's Day evening, he happily tuned in.

His favorite two songs are Have a Holly Jolly Christmas and Jingle Bell Rock.

What about you and the young'uns in your life?

Friday, November 16, 2007

Home Videos

A few nights ago we watched Christmas Vacation and there is this one scene where Chevy Chase is in the attic watching old home movies on a projector. It reminded us that we have our old videos from when the boys were little. I don't even know where our video camera is now but we do still have the tapes.

The first one I pulled out was October 1997 - September 2002 which covered 6thGrader's toddler and preschool years as well as kindergarten and the beginning of 1st grade. 4thGrader was an infant, and then toddler and preschooler during the course of the next 6 hours.

It has been so much fun looking back at the children and seeing how much they have (or haven't) changed over the years; watching their personalities emerging into who they are today.

Of course we have the yearly Christmas morning scenes; in fact, that has been the overwhelming majority of screen time. The kids have enjoyed seeing what they got for Christmas each year and what of those things they still have. They have even pulled some of those items out to play with again "for old time's sake."

But we also have a lot of every-day footage and I'm really glad we have that because it shows me that maybe I wasn't as uptight a mother as I thought I was. I let them climb on stuff and launch cookies across the dining room with their pop-up toys. I let them run and jump and play like boys (and girls) need to without hovering all the time. I have at least one lengthy segment for each of the boys when they were crying unconsolably so they now have an idea of what we had to put up with at times (hee hee).

And we have the reading and the singing and the adventures with grandparents. And what a wonderful surprise to me to see my grandfather in one holiday's footage - how awesome it was to see him and hear his voice again as he sat at the dining table with 4thGrader as a toddler in his lap.

I think that as the boys have aged and we've neglected the video camera that now is the time to get it out again, but instead of us using it as parents to let the boys use it to see the world through their eyes for a change.