Look who's TWO! Happy Birthday Joshua!

Overheard at our house on Joshua's birthday....

"Joshua how old are you?"
"......Green!"
"Joshua how old are you?"
"........Lellow!"
(Jennifer whispers into Joshua's ear)
"Okay, let's try this again....Joshua, how old are you?"
"I TWO!"

Joshua's birthday was almost a month ago already, but my blogging got hung up by trying to (unsuccessfully) fix my Christmas video....better late than never!  We had a lovely party with chocolate cake and presents and games and Aunt Calista and Aunt Becky in attendance....but those pictures were mostly blurry (sigh).  So here are the pictures from Joshua's 2 Year Birthday Photo Shoot.

What has happened to my little Ham?  For the longest time, Joshua would grin and yell cheese repeatedly at the sign of any small sized tech gadget, including the kitchen timer.  Now he is doing this....

Ah, but here is a smile for the camera!

Joshua is such a precious addition to our family.  I don't know what we'd do without him.... we're so thankful that God has given him to us.

 Josh got some new sand toys for this birthday ....here he is trying them out!

Merry Christmas! A few Christmas Carols for you!

Dear all!  Merry Christmas to you!

We hope you will enjoy this Christmas gift to you!

(Edit on January 24:  The video is fixed!  I have worked on this off and on for a month now...a long story you will not be interested in....but you will be interested in the video.  The boys don't perform in a Christmas program at school or church, so this is their program!)

Lastly, we want to share this Youtube video with you, which we have found surprizingly and thoroughly delightful this Season.  I do remember back in the day (1990s) when Fireplace video VHS tapes were on sale and I thought they were a pathetic idea.  Now that we live in the tropics for Christmas, a fireplace video with some traditional Christmas music helps a lot to bring that Christmas feeling to our home!

(I am going to go ahead and publish this post, because I want it up for Christmas morning in America (we are just finishing it up here on this side of the world).  However in the next 8 hours I hope to edit it with added videos, which are now slowly uploading!  Merry Christmas to all of you!  Celebrate the Birth of Christ and may Emmanuel find a welcome dwelling place in your hearts!)

Christmas Preparations!

It's the tropics, but we're still getting ready for Christmas!  Here's a few scenes from our preparations this year.....  Like our Santa Hats?  I bought them locally.  Our host country celebrates all of the major holidays for all of the major religions and cultures .....Idul Fitri, Christmas, Chinese New Year!  The local department stores are happy to provide merchandise and make a profit off of them all, too!

Our first Christmas photo for 2013 ....taken on the night of the school Christmas concert.  What I think is interesting about this photo is ....note how the mother's spine and hips are knocked out of alignment by holding the large toddler on one side!  She has to lean sideways just to stay upright!

Dave helped the boys get the tree ready.  The stand broke, so they filled this bucket with sand and rocks to anchor it upright.  Gotta love sand and rocks!

The last 2 years I have put our tree up on a table, far from little hands.  This year I decided to have a tactile tree and let the boys have full access to it.  It was a good decision.  They enjoyed decorating the tree.  Our  more special ornaments are at the top.  Joshua has really enjoyed deconstructing many of our cheap felt ornaments on the lower branches, picking off the glitter and beads and tinsel and making treasures of them.  

Our new garage sale angel tree topper.  Jonathan asked "Is this Bethany?"  We had a small discussion about our theology of angels and showed him the other ornaments we have in memory of Bethany.

Little boy ornament placement 

The finishing touch!

Josh is crazy about balls.  We started out with about 10 of these glittery balls on the our tree...but all of the bottom ones were gone and lost or broken after the 2nd day of the Christmas tree.  It's okay.  My main rule for the tree is they may not climb up on the table (actually our ottoman without the cushion!) that the tree is sitting on.   They've been keeping that rule so I'm content.

Heading to the school Christmas concert

 Baking Christmas cookies with our traditional family recipe!  Joshua's favorite tool is the egg beater.  He calls it "my Tool" and looks for it every day lately.

 The boys got their first Christmas presents (special crayons and drawing paper) of the season from our friends the Gearys.  Look how creatively she wrapped the packages!

 Now we are trying to make candy-cane ornaments out of beads.  

+I think this is one of those activities that might work better with girls?  The boys fizzled out on this project shortly after these photos were taken.....but we'll give it another go in a day or so!  My goal is to have at least one complete by each boy so in the future I can at least say "Jonathan/Joshua, you made this ornament when you were four/not yet two."  

So that's a bit of our Christmas cheer.  Hmmm, this will be our 4th Christmas away from our homes and families....but it doesn't feel so far away to us.  We have Skype so our families can join us for a few moments on Christmas morning (their Christmas Eve).  We can send Christmas cards home with a few people in our community who are going home for Christmas.  We can even order presents for our loved ones on the internet and have them sent to their homes!  The wrapping paper is not as nice, of course.   I can share a few of our moments with all of you reading our little blog.  I just realized all of these things I just mentioned are "cultural" things and have little to do with the real reason we celebrate....the birth of Christ.  We do celebrate Christ's birth and proclaim the truth of it, but all of these "trimmings" of the holiday do make us feel more at home and happy this time of year.  

As seen in our home lately -- Random shots

The boys are getting big enough now to have wresting matches with dad!

"Band-aid!"

Oh, we got this care package from Grandma Coral and one of the treats inside was a box of Lego candy. It tastes like Sweet Tarts.  We keep it in the freezer and I make last as long as I can.  Jonathan will ask for it and if he's earned it he can build something (although Mommy built this robot in the picture.)  He can't eat the whole thing at once though, just a piece or two. 

So Jonathan has started to learn how to dress himself.  We've been working on it for a while now.  Of course Joshua doesn't want to miss out on the fun.  He'll grab any old thing out of the cupboard and put it on somehow (pictured here with an upside-down tank top worn as a skirt!) and walk around the house for a good long time! 

Joshua wants to be like his big brother in every way, so the underwear are starting to be VERY interesting!  (This photo was the only presentable one of about a dozen, as he was playing roll away everytime I snapped the shutter)

 

Here is the first day Jonathan dressed himself with NO HELP, including choosing his outfit from the cupboard!

 

 Joshua, lately, has been loving to take naps in his swing!  He'll sleep there for an hour sometimes. He'll even ask for it sometimes -- "Go sleep swing, Mommy!"

 

He also is the one in our family who LOVES to help with chores.  Here he is using a yard broom to sweep leaves.  Yep, everyone here uses a broom (not a rake) to clean up the yard.

The baby doll was out this day, and I suggested to Joshua that he share his snack with the baby.....

....and here is baby with his mouth full of raisins and peanuts!

The times are changing.  I used to have to spend 30 minutes or more many days of the week building train tracks.  Now Jonathan can build train tracks by himself!  Here is the first long train track he did alone!

Ah, this photo is to highlight our new draperies, which I love!  Thank you Jesus!  I was so ready to move on from the old burgundy ones which just didn't seem to let in any light even if they were sheer and pulled all the way open!

Swinging

 

So this is another box from our pile we got from the new school fitness equipment.  (One became Joanthan's birthday firetruck, which is now in storage).  I'm not sure what was in it originally, but today it found new life as a ferry!

The box pictured above came with this large cardboard insert, which we also put to use as a city of tunnels and rooms for train tracks!

 

Joshua learning to use a screw driver on our take apart dump truck.

Well Jonathan's bicycle hasn't been getting much use lately, mostly because if we take it out Joshua just can't stop from climbing on to the back fender while the bike is in motion.   It's too much conflict for me, so the bike has been having a season in storage.  Still, at least a couple of times a week, I find Joshua quiet on the bike in the storage area pretending he's peddling and steering and going somewhere exciting. (If you wonder what he's wearing here, it's a Crayola paint smock that we use when washing the dishes.)

Then yesterday I even found him in the other storeroom up on the big bike!  He just goes in as quiet as can be, climbs his conquests and stays there happy with himself until I go looking for him!  "I ride daddy bike" is what he had to say about it!

Happy Thanksgiving 2013!

 Happy Thanksgiving from the Patrows!

For our Thanksgiving activity today, we dissected pumpkins!  You can see here what our local ones look like.  We can get big ones here, too ....but only these were available on our marketing day.  We scooped out the seeds to bake and eat later.  Or I should say Mommy scooped out the seeds.  Jonathan had a papercut on his finger so the pumpkin pulp was stinging it.  As for Joshua, he was more interested in using the egg beater method, as pictured below!  He persisted in using this ingenious pumpkin de-pulping tool for about 40 minutes!

 The Egg Beater Method

This is our first pumpkin, so we went ahead an made a face on Jonathan's pumpkin just for fun.  Jonathan says his name is "SACEY"  (rhymes with "Facey" you see).

We have so many Happy Thanksgiving memories with family in America.  We miss you!  We will be having a big meal tomorrow with about 50 expats.  All we have to take are 2 liters of ice cream and mashed potatoes for fifty!  

Joshua was singing this song tonight and reminded us to have this attitude during our Thanksgiving meal and every meal:

"Come Lord Jesus, be our guest and let these gifts to us be blessed.  Heavenly Father bless this food, to Thy glory and our good.  Amen."

Jonathan is FOUR! Happy Birthday!

Jonathan is FOUR!  We are so blessed to have him in our family.  We decided to have a "big" party this year and invited 10 young friends over to help celebrate!  The theme:  FIRETRUCKS!

It was lot of work but I think our 10 little friends had a lot of fun!  Thanks to some firetruck theme decorations given to us by a friend, a fire truck cake, and a giant box, this party was the most elaborate ever for our simple family.  Oh yes, we had fire fighter hats too!

Talk about perfect timing!  Around the beginning of November the school got new weight room equipment. They were kind enough to let us pick out a few boxes.  I got this giant box, which I think contained an elliptical machine.  It is bigger than even a refrigerator box and quite sturdy!  One thing I think is funny is that the machine and the box were made in Hungary of all places!  I tried to explain this to Jonathan and he kept asking "Why is that place named Hungry?"  So as you see the giant box was transformed into a firetruck. Whoops I forgot to put lights on the top, but it does have 3 steering wheels, 2 doors and 6 windows.  It was a big hit at the party.  At one point there were 10 kids inside, and shortly afterward they decided to start driving it and pushed/lifted it all the way to the end of the dining room!

Oh my, getting photos of the party action was a challenge!  There was so much movement that most of my pictures were just a collection of blurs!  Here are a few fire truck action shots, though.

We had a firetruck version of "Pin the Tail on the Donkey."  The kids had to put a missing balloon on the bunch of balloons in the picture.  First Dave demonstrated to the kids how to do it and made everyone laugh!

Here is Jonathan's turn.  Everyone who participated got a gummy fruit candy.

So, the cake. 

 I'm not the type of person to make elaborate cakes, but somehow I got inspired.  My first google search for firetruck cakes left me feeling defeated, but then my friend told me to search for "easy firetruck cakes" and I found this one!  My friend, who IS the type to make elaborate cakes, came over twice to help me out with the supply list and the decorating.  It was a 4 layer cake!  The funny part was the frosting.  The local red food coloring is just pink....the more you put in, the more pink.  I thought I had it made because I had a small bottle of American food coloring.  I guess it must have been from the dollar store because we put in the whole bottle and ended up with a bright pink cake!   None of the kids ever mentioned it though.  They all accepted it as a valid fire truck and there were no complaints!  

Frosting can really only be enjoyed if you eat it with your tongue!

The eating of the cake was the best part.  Somehow, all of the kids spontaneously wanted to go outside at cake time to play.  So as the cake was served, they all found places to sit outside and there were several spills but no mess to clean up inside the house!

We had the party on Saturday and Jonathan's birthday was Sunday.  I had to include the morning surprise, a big floppy pancake shaped like a FOUR!  I had a fiasco with the syrup, though.  It's a long story, but I accidently mixed our maple syrup with sweet soy sauce (which looks identical in a jar in the fridge!)

Jonathan received several nice gifts this year, but here is one of his favorites:  a box of "colored cheerios."  A few months ago we were at the store and Jonathan quietly stroked the Froot Loops box and wistfully (but not whining) said "Mommy, I really like these colored cheerios."  I couldn't justify buying them on a normal day ....so much sugar!  His birthday seemed like a good occasion!