Chirstmas Chirstmas Christmas

So we were walking through ASDA (the U.K. version of Walmart) the other night and Veronica sees a nicely dressed woman walk by in high heels and she remarks “Look, Momma that woman is walking so sensibly” I laugh a little because the word sensibly wasn’t part of Veronica’s vocabulary so far as I knew so I ask her to repeat herself just to hear her cute little British voice say it again. She says “That woman is walking so sens….” At this point she trails off and says “Momma she’s walking nice and straight” It’s then that I realized that my daughter just “dumbed it down” for me. She came up with a word substitute because she didn’t think I would understand. I laugh some more because this isn’t the first time. I have noticed that she uses very British words when speaking to Brits but switches to more American speech at home. She calls the stroller a pushchair when she’s with her friends but always refers to it as a stroller when with our family. It’s like she’s keeping two different languages straight in her head, although everything is coming out with a British accent. Troy, the die hard patriot, teases that he won’t respond to her requests until she sounds like an American, at which point she laughs and asks again with a British accent because she can’t help it. So cute.

One other quick story. So I’m and idiot and lost my military I.D. while Troy was gone. What a pain. I think the Air Force personnel cut me some slack because I didn’t have Troy here to vouch for me and they agreed to give me a new one anyway. After about an hour of driving all over the base and waiting in offices, I am finally getting my new I.D. laminated. I’m minutes away from being done with this big production. Ben and William did great so far with all this, and I’m just thinking to myself “self this is really boring stuff for a 2 year old and 11m old, I’m lucky that they haven’t lost their cool yet”. As the thought scrolled through my brain I hear a crash in the very quiet office, and what I see next mortifies me. Ben is sprawled out on the floor half buried and half on top of about 1 million uniform patches and the containers that they once lived in. As I didn’t see what happened I can only guess that he had tried to climb up a stack of stackable open faced bins. The bins held literally hundreds and hundreds of patches; unit patches, rank etc of every shape color and size. It wasn’t the mess that had me so humiliated as the realization that all these patches would take hours to sort through and reorganize. I got down with my face the color and temperature of a lava flow and shoved what I could back in the bins as both Ben and William both cried. The office was so totally quiet, did it really need to be that quiet while my kids were screaming and crying? I was already feeling dumb that I had lost my I.D. and they had done me a big favor so I could have access to the American base, but now I as I walked out of there I was kinda thinking I wouldn’t need the new I.D. because I probably shouldn’t show my face around there again anyway



I love how tiny they look by this huge Santa.


Ahhhh, isn't it just precious! William just asked to get the hell out of that room for his Christmas present from Santa.


Ben asked for a bad guy for Christmas.


Veronica asked for a Princess Belle Doll.


I love to see this, it's like capturing an endangered species on film.


My sweet little William.


How pretty!


What a cutie!


William was stuck in this bucket.


We have a little pond by our house, we take our old bread down there for the ducks. The kids won't touch the stale bread if I try to feed it to them in the house, but as soon as it's by the duck pond it tastes great and I have to fight them to share it with the ducks.


When William wakes up from his nap, I'll often send V and B up there to play with him while I wrap up what I'm doing down stairs. This works out pretty nice because V and B can both climb in and out of William's crib and they play and bring him toys. It's not unusual to get and extra 20 minutes of work done before I have to go get all of them. When I went up there on this day, Veronica had stripped William of his clothes and put them on herself. Ben had gotten one of Veronica's swimsuits on and tried to get one on poor little William. Goof balls.