Boy! It’s a boy! We had the big ultrasound and everything looks good. Ari is not terribly interested in talking about having a little brother or a baby, but he does think my “biiiig tummy” is “funny” and he asks to “open it” and take the baby out.

We were expecting a boy based on A.’s family being all boys on his dad’s side, so we would have been very surprised if it was a girl. So far I love having a boy, so another sounds good, and we’re excited for Ari to have a brother!

But anyway, time for a recap of December and Christmas.

This picture is from the end of November – A. got a waffle maker and sent me this photo when I was at work:

At the grocery store one day I decided to try this car cart out. It was really cute and worked great for about a minute, then he decided he didn’t want to be in there anymore and kept letting himself out and running around the store. But he got back in for pictures afterward.

We had a cold but fun evening with a friend and her son at The Grotto’s Festival of Lights. We saw choral singing, a puppet show, lots of lights, and animals. Ari and his little friend ran around shrieking and giggling like maniacs!

Lying down under the lights:

We also went to Alpenrose Dairy’s Christmas in Dairyville for a visit with Santa!

We also set up our Christmas tree and for several days Ari went out every morning and said, “Chris-uh-mas-uh tree!” over and over.

Photos for the pregnancy series:

Ari looks really excited, doesn’t he? 😛

Poor Andrew just has no idea what’s coming.

For a while, Ari was making drawings that all looked pretty much like this, with lines and spirals. I really liked them.

One rainy day, we didn’t know what to do so we drove out to Multnomah Falls. It was very rainy and we hadn’t dressed well so we didn’t hike up, but the waterfall was big and the restaurant there was very cozy!

I love when it gets “too quiet” and I find a scene like this:

Another week along…

And another age milestone for Ari!

The weekend before Christmas, my parents, aunt, and grandma came to visit. Ari was very excited about this barn gift from his great grandma:

He also got more little animals and some clothes from his grandparents and, from his great aunt (!), the book The Polar Express, with bell ornaments, and a book, video, and doll of The Snowman.

He loves his little collections! His bedtime routine usually involves putting all his “Christmas animals” in a bag and saying goodnight to them as they go in, one by one. And one day he wanted to sit on the couch with his snowman doll, book, and video, with the case opened and the disc laid next to it, and he just sat there with a grin and said something like, “These are my snowman things!” It took me forever, with lots of annoying whining and fussing on his part, to figure out why he wanted the video out but kept saying he didn’t want to watch it.

With my parents, we did a fun Kidical Mass bike ride to Peacock Lane, a street where all the houses do Christmas lights.

And…

On Christmas Eve, we saw a cool bubble show:

He put two kids inside that bubble!

I was recovering from food poisoning or a 24-hr bug or something and had been in bed with a fever the whole day before, so I was feeling pretty tired, but I got all the presents wrapped and under the tree.

On Christmas morning, when we told Ari he could open his presents, he got all excited and ran over and grabbed the two smallest ones, because he’d seen me put them out the night before. He brought them to the couch and we helped him open them, and he actually squealed when he saw that one was the little book Hug that he liked to read at Café au Play (which had just closed, nooo!). It was so sweet! I think he thought that and the other one, which had a little card game, I think, were his only presents and he was more excited than he was for the rest of the day. Every time he opened something, he played with it until we told him there were more presents for him. Then he would go touch one and say, “Is this a present for me? Can I open it?” The process took until like 3 in the afternoon!

He got dinosaurs!

I mostly took videos all day so there aren’t a lot of photos. But here he is playing with a new toy and making cookies with Daddy, after all the gift opening:

Later in the evening, we remembered another gift and brought it out! It’s a huge bin of train stuff we got from someone on craigslist. Ari lined all the trains up, of course.

Okay, so I have more photos and more to say about January so far, plus a vision board post, a sleep update, and book review coming up, but I’m out of time! So I’m stopping here at Christmas, plus the baby news at the beginning. 🙂