Dear Family,
Did everyone have a nice Thanksgiving? We (the Keller’s) did. We went to Boise to spend the weekend with Tammy and her family. Tammy and I even made the whole Thanksgiving dinner by ourselves. : ) I thought it tasted good, and none of the kids (or husbands) complained. So I’m counting it a success (even though we were a day or two late making the pies). The highlight for me was watching Jared learn what it’s like to be surrounded by other kids all the time. He loves his cousins, but he was so surprised to find out they could get on his nerves! And he didn’t know that it was ok to have those kinds of feelings about your cousins. One day he told me and Ryan, “I don’t know why, but last time I saw Eli he didn’t bug me at all. But this time he’s totally bugging me!” Eli’s 4. Jared just kept stuffing his frustration until one day he’d had enough. The kids were all playing outside when suddenly Eli came running inside, crying inconsolably and muttering unintelligibly. Jared was hot on his heels and he was furious! All we could find out for sure was that they were playing tag, Eli wouldn’t stay in jail, Jared got mad, he chased Eli, and Eli fell.
Ryan and I told Jared he needed to apologize to Eli, but he refused. He was so caught up in the fact that Eli hasn’t played by the rules and his own build up of frustration that he couldn’t focus on anything but the injustice of Eli not staying in jail after he’d been tagged. Ryan and I took him to our room and I told him that we would give him 10 minutes to vent. I’d even time it and he could tell us everything that had been bothering him since we’d been there. Anything at all, no matter how trivial. But then, I said, when you’re done you have to apologize to Eli. Jared ranted for a good 4 ½ minutes and then he was done. We told him he still had more time if he wanted to vent more, but that seemed to be it. So after that we talked about being the older cousin and how it’s scary to be chased by someone bigger than you when they’re mad, etc. We also told him to come to us whenever he needed a break from his cousins.
He apologized to Eli and then Tammy told him/us about the most wonderful rule they have in their family: if someone’s bothering you and you say, “I need some space”, they have to leave you alone. (Elora was especially surprised to find out Jared needed a break. “But he didn’t say he needed a break,” she told Tammy.) If they don’t, then you can go and get a grownup to intervene. Well, that was just the absolute coolest thing Jared had ever heard! And he made good use of it after that, mostly when Eve would bug him (she’s only 2). The rest of our visit sometimes it seemed like all we heard from Jared was, “Mom! Eve hit me!” or “Aunt Tammy! Eve took my toy!” The last night Jared says to Tammy, sounding very grownup to grownup, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but Eli’s been really annoying me today.” Otherwise, the kids got along great and Jared thought Tammy and Jeremy’s climbing trees were well worth the 6 hour drive to get there.
Now we’re back home and back to our usual routine. We got a lot of snow last week and Jared has been out there every spare second he can. He even woke up at 6 one morning and announced he’d be outside playing in the snow until 6:30 (when we usually get up). He was really disappointed when we told him he couldn’t.
Ryan and I have been meeting with a realtor. We want to move this summer and have been torn between building a house and buying. We looked at a bunch of houses online with our realtor and have driven around a few areas, and in the end we decided that we don’t want to build simply because nobody’s building anything anywhere we want to live. We’d like to go to Draper or Sandy, a little closer to Ryan’s work but not super far away from our friends here. We want a house with more room, a bigger yard, and I want mature trees. We won’t get serious about looking or listing our own house until March though so it’s all just talking about what we’d like to find at this point.
Otherwise I’m sure we’ve been busy doing a lot of the same things everyone else: school, work, housework, shopping for Christmas, and going to Christmas parties. This weekend we have our ward Christmas party and next week is Leslie’s family’s party and Ryan’s family’s party is a couple days after that. His work party is somewhere in the between those and his department is having a movie party at Jordan Commons to see the new Hobbit movie this Friday (I really don’t want to go because I find the LOTR movies tedious, but Ryan loves them).
Oh! And I have to say I thought Amy had a great idea about the family history stuff. I would LOVE to know who has the sources and especially be interested in reading anything. Is there some way we could add any of that to the family blog? Or FB? If things need to be typed, I volunteer to do some of it. Ryan’s a huge genealogy nut and he says sources are super important. It won’t accept a date unless it has a source. Personally, I’m really only interested in the stories of our ancestors. Who has the lemon tart lady’s story? Or the guy who wrote Queer Little House???? I would love, love, love to add stories like those to my collection.
Hope everyone is enjoying the Christmas season. We’ve really been into at our house. We decorated before we left for Tammy’s and have been listening to Christmas music for a few weeks now. Even Jared has caught the spirit of the season. And we’re pretty sure he knows Santa isn’t really anymore and that we’re Santa, but that seems to have made us all the more impressive in his eyes.
Love,
Sherry, Ryan, Jared, and Kwigi
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