Christmas Chaos

Christmas with a 3 year old...well what can I say....total chaos, excitement and overall fun.  We started out Christmas eve with dinner at our house with some of Jen's family.  Grace has a great time exchanging gifts with Me Me, Pa Pa and her cousins.  On Christmas morning Grace came into our room nice and early letting us know it was time to get up.  She was very excited to go downstairs to see what Santa had brought her.  Later in the day we headed out to my mom's for dinner.  By the end of Christmas day we were all wiped out but it was a great day.

Happy Holidays

Our holiday cards are going out a little late this year.  For our blog readers not on our holiday cards list the list the 2010 edition below.  Hope everyone has a great holiday season.

This kid needs to be in theater

No idea where she came up with this or what she is singing but it is pretty damn cute

Getting ready for the holidays

We are about a week late getting started with our holiday activities this year as we had some home improvement stuff going on and are just getting our house back together.  We ventured out to the mall this weekend for a visit was Santa.  We weren' t sure how it was going to go as last year Grace wouldn't sit will Santa unless mommy was with her.  Grace seemed excited but we thought she may freeze up when her big moment came.  But she surprised us and marched right up and plopped herself down next to Santa and rattled off the list of presents that she has in mind this year.

After our trip to Santa we headed home to finish decorating our tree with a little help from Grace.  Perfect photo oppurtunity.....

Really!?!?!

Last Friday after Jen picked Grace up from school they were having  a conversation about Grace's day.  During this conversation Jen referred to herself as mommy, after which Grace stopped her and said "but not the real one".  Jen's first reaction was a bit of shock and sadness but she quickly composed herself and asked Grace who had told her this.  I think Grace knew from Jen's reaction that something wasn''t right so she tried to get change the subject.  Jen eventually got it out of her that one of the little girls in class had told her this.  Jen handled the situation pretty well explaining to Grace that she did not grow in her belly but she was still her real mommy.  Luckily Grace didn't seem to be upset by the whole situation, but I am not sure she fully understood either.

Now we knew we would be dealing with this type of thing eventually but not so soon.  The kids in Grace's preschool are three and four years old.  We have to assume that this child was just repeating something she heard at at home.  We don't blame the kid, it is obviously the parents that need a little education.

The teachers at Grace's school are really good but we realize that not everybody is as familiar with Positive Adoption Language as we are so we printed out a couple adoption language documents to bring in to school on Monday.    Jen had a conversation with one of the teachers on Monday and to say the teacher was surprised would be an understatement.  She totally got why this was an issue and was very supportive.  She told us she would keep an eye out for future conversations of this type between the kids and would be sure to correct any of them if it comes up again.  Unfortunately you can't teach the parents proper adoption language but hopefully if a kid is corrected at school this will find its way back home and make the parents think twice about the conversations that have with or in front of their children.

We were really happy with the way the school handled our concerns but still were a bit shocked that this has come up so soon..... Since this was kind of a downer post I will sign off with a cute pic of Grace...