Holidays

One of the things I love most about Jadon is his genuine, heart-felt happiness and joy. He is always so excited when his dad or I come home and always greats us with an exuberant "hi" and hugs. This year for the first time that joy and excitement has started to carry over into holidays and other time of celebration. It's really the first year that Jadon has taken notice of special days and knowing that something exciting is going to happen. All year he has really been into birthdays. I put up a monthly calendar for him with the basic event of the day that is later replaced with the date when that day arrives. He can point to the birthday PEC on the calendar and tell you who's birthday it is (we have a large family so most months have several birthdays in them). I was surprised when October rolled around and he kept talking about Halloween. He wasn't really into the trick-or-treat thing, but he loves getting dressed up. We took him to a local mall and let him ride on the carousel (another favorite activity and I'm not sure what I'm going to do when he is too big and old to ride it). This is another thing that I love about Jadon. He is so excited about things that seem very trivial to most people. He reminds me of how the best things in life are those simple things.

Now I can hardly wait for Christmas. He has been the driving force to get the Christmas tree up and we are not doing it fast enough for him. We have an artificial tree due to allergies int he family. We got the tree out Sunday night only to find out that we needed new lights. No big deal, you say. Just go out to the nearest variety store a pick up a set. Except that we had a big snow storm followed by below freezing temperatures move in the same day. Here in the Northwest, a snow storm brings everything to a grinding halt. Our neighborhood streets are sheets of ice and we have been pretty home bound since Saturday except for trips of necessity. I convinced my husband last night to take a trek to our favorite neighborhood store to look for lights only to find out that they were sold out of the type we needed. I further persuaded him to try one more store where, luckily, we found success. The only problem was by the time we got home, it was time for Jadon to go to bed and my husband had some work to catch up on at home so the light didn't get put on the tree. School has been delayed two hours the past two mornings so Jadon doesn't leave until almost 11:00. He has busied himself during this time by slowly putting the ornaments on the tree. I think he is doing it slowly to test my reaction to what he is doing. He puts a couple on and then comes to me all excited saying, "look mom!" so proud of himself. I haven't the heart to tell him that we are going to have to take them off in order to put the lights on.

Santa is another new discovery for him this year. I work at a children's therapy center and we had our annual family Christmas party last week. They always have a Mr. and Mrs. Clause come and someone to take pictures of the traditional "sitting on Santa's lap" scene. Jadon has wanted very little to do with Santa in the past, but this year as we walked into the room, Jadon spied Santa in the far corner and made a beeline to where he was sitting. Luckily I caught up to him before he was able to barge his way to the front of the line. He was very content to skip the whole waiting in line bit and go straight for the lap. When it was his turn, he walked right up, said "hi", climbed onto Santa's lap, turned and smiled at the camera, and said "cheese" and very pleased with himself.