Whirlwind

The pre-Christmas insanity continues this week. On Sunday we had our Roberts family get-together, where these photos were all taken. The kids both received board games and they have gone over well. The later photos show some fierce rounds of Pictureka going on. On Monday night we were invited to "Festival at the Creek" which is an open house that the Home and School group puts on at Liam's school each year. There was not a ton to it; there were some choir performances, a cheerleading routine, a Gingerbread Walk (musical chairs where the winners came away with gingerbread houses), a book sale, cookies and cider, and a dance. When we got the invitation in Liam's school bag, we kind of scoffed at it. A family dance... riiiiiiiight. Well, as it turned out, we couldn't drag the kids away from it, and that's where we spent most of the night. It didn't help that when we first went in the DJ was playing "I Like to Move It" which is Mallory's all time favourite song (though if you say anything to her about it now, she will tell you that Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is her favourite song, and indeed she knows most of the words and was up past 10 p.m. last night, warbling from her bedroom. But I digress.) When we first went into the gym for the dance it was mostly empty, and the kids amused themselves by running laps through the flashing strobe lights. Then one of Liam's classmates spotted him and started chasing him, and for the next half hour at least, the two of them ran. We couldn't figure out whether Liam was enjoying the chase or whether he was trying to shake the other guy off his trail. Whatever the case, it kept him busy. Mallory saw Liam and assumed that the proper thing to do was to run around the gym in the dark, and there were a few times when we lost her, particularly when the DJ started to play Miley Cyrus and all the older kids started flooding in. She was not fazed by them in the least and in fact seemed to have a sense of entitlement being there.I'm pretty sure that none of the grade eight kids threw a kicking, screaming fit when they had to leave, or that they arched their back every time their mom tried to get their coat on so that they wound up being hustled out the door, still coatless and still screaming, in an effort to minimize the amount of disturbance they were causing.
Today is Liam's last day of school for the year, and although his class party followed the concert on Tuesday, they are having some sort of special day to wrap up the Polar Express unit they just finished. The kids were invited to come to school in their pajamas or 'comfy clothes' (track suits etc.) and I am sad to report that despite having a killer pair of Christmas pajamas... Liam chose the comfy clothes. But hey... he's old enough to make these decisions on his own. The Polar Express was on TV last weekend and we DVR'd it, and he took great pride in being able to tell us what was going to happen next, having already read the book in class.His after-school program is having a party today and tonight is Chad's departmental Christmas dinner, and then tomorrow the kids have their party at Cindy's. Two parties on Saturday and then we take a much-deserved break for a bit. Good thing because as Mallory proves in the picture above... she needs her rest.