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Neighborhood Naughty List

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December 25th, 2021 – just in the ‘nick’ of time. 😉

Anonymous neighbor reporting about life next to the Spadys. They were caught up in the craziness of 2021 that they lost sight of writing a holiday letter, so I am going to report on their happenings from next door. They may want you to think they are a nice, normal family. From one neighbor to another, between moving into the neighborhood, remodeling a house, Creed starting Kindergarten, potty-training Truett and sending him to pre-school part time, toss in their day jobs, and take my word for it, they are on the jolly, but crazy side of the nut house.

Earlier this year, they pulled up with a roll-off dumpster and their boxed-up belongings. Demo debris was getting tossed out of the windows and boxes were getting moved in. With doors wide open, they welcomed me in for a tour and if I do say so myself – they found the key to no more free time. Inside the under-construction house was a furniture-free living room currently being used as a basketball court, a half-finished bathroom with the tub being used to wash dishes because of course, no kitchen yet. Another neighbor said they are ALWAYS coming over for food, but because they have a temporary and nomadic kitchen that changes locations almost weekly, we will give them the benefit of the doubt (inside joke – the “other” neighbor is a grocery store).

They did manage to take a break and leave town a few times, which was an amazing power tool pause for the neighborhood. We were able to trade the noise for some peace and quiet while they were away up in the mountains, then again as they went road tripping to Yellowstone, and later visiting Chicago.

Word on the street is that they are expecting to finish the house renovation sometime in twenty-twenty-never. We also heard another neighbor say that they might put a fence up next year. Is there such a thing as a noise cancelling fence?

In a more recent tour, it looks like they hammered their way through 2021, while painting, sanding, and staining their way to insanity, but the progress looks worth it. I hope they continue to nail it in 2022.

Previous neighbors say they are filled with friendliness, so we hope they will grow on us.

Merry Christmas from the anonymous neighbor!

Cookie Crumb Thumbs

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cookie

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Creed and Truett here! Last night at bedtime after rocking out to Rudolph and Jingle Bell jamming, mom decided to silent the night by reading last year’s Christmas letter. It worked, put us right to sleep. To save you from falling asleep like we did, we are taking over the Christmas letter this year. We just need to find a way to break the news to mom and dad…last one to the cookie jar has to tell! Santa, if you are reading this don’t worry we’ll save you some cookies. We tried to tell our parents, well, Truett tried but they didn’t understand a word he was saying. You’d think by now they would have him figured out – like me!

Truett, lets show everyone how this works. Hold my cookie, tell me about your year and watch this! What I heard Truett say was, “a-daba daba doo!” What he meant by that was, “I am the best big brother ever!” Just kidding, he didn’t say that but here is what he was trying to say:

“This year I got really good at walking and am starting to get the hang of temper tantrums. I turned one in May and had my first birthday party which was a little fishy. Literally, my family danced around pretending to be sharks and sang doo doo doo doo doo doo over and over and OVER again. This isn’t the only crazy thing that happened. I went on my first airplane ride and things got crappy. I know I’m not supposed to say naughty words but I am also not supposed to lie. After an accidental blow-out in the rental car, people’s patience were running a little thin and unfortunately I had unfinished business to take care of. Before we even had time to settle in with some pretzels I pooped on the plane in my back-up pants! Mom had to carry me to the bathroom at the back of the plane and we turned heads if you know what I mean. She talked to herself almost the whole time, which sounds crazy but is actually pretty normal. I can remember her mumbling something about there not being a changing table, the sink not draining and being full of water, and there not being any room for her to set anything down. She was holding onto a clean diaper with her teeth and had my third outfit of the day hanging over her shoulder, which was actually your back-up clothes, Creed. It’s a good thing she didn’t set anything down on the floor because while she was taking so long to change me, I couldn’t hold it anymore and pee started going everywhere. I panicked and accidentally knocked all the puke bags on the floor. While all of this was happening a stranger opened the unlocked door and then quickly closed it again so we could finish the diaper change disaster. Your turn Creed, I need to take a cookie break.”

And that is how you translate Truett talk, the cookie doesn’t crumble far from the milk! Did I just make that up? Nah! Wait, maybe the saying is about apples and not cookies. Either way, as Truett’s big brother I understand him because my days are jam packed with him. Jam packed teaching him how to climb up on the counter to get a cookie, poor milk into a cup without hardly spilling, and most important of all – transforming robots. Transformer robots are a big part of my life and they do as much with me as I do with Truett. They go with me to pre-school, day care, and had a front row seat at my fourth birthday party. For the second year in a row Transformers are on the top of my Christmas list. My transformer toy collection has grown almost as much as me since last Christmas. My dad says if I want to be big, strong and smart like them I need to eat a few more apples and a few less cookies. Apples and cookies again, no wonder I’m confused. What I do know for sure, if Santa doesn’t eat all the cookies we made him, I will.

As far as mom and dad, well their lives pretty much revolve around us and they LOVE it! They did leave us behind and took a trip to Seattle because well, something about them being married for five years. We weren’t invited because well you just heard about what happened the last time they took us on a plane.

Busted boys! Mom-voice stepping in. In all seriousness, Creed really is the best big brother and Truett is his copy cat. Alec and I are hard at work trying to raise kind-hearted cookie monsters. This year has been jam packed with dirty diapers, loads of laundry, messy faces, and we can’t wait to see what craziness follows us into 2020.

Wrote with cookie crumb thumbs,

The Spady boys!

cookie 4

North Pole Parenting

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Dear sleep, I mean Santa,

We know we’ve had our problems the last year but we’d love to explain. We’re assuming we have secured a spot on the naughty list after overusing your name as a new found parenting tactic. We’ve found that parenting is a constant battle between balancing teaching moments and bribery. Your naughty/nice reward system is a good addition to our current Love and Logic technique that is occasionally accompanied with the Whisper Scream method. To put this in real life perspective, you are rocking a tired baby to sleep while trying to calmly and quietly talk a toddler through a meltdown about cereal. Why wouldn’t the Cheerios need milk the very second the baby finally closes his eyes? To a toddler with no perspective of time, no matter how nicely you explain that you will get the milk in just a minute, to them it means they will never ever get cereal. The stress of these dramatic moments can quickly turn calm and quiet into whisper screams and when that doesn’t work our new ‘Santa tactic’ could normally stop the tantrum.

Your name has become an excuse to put off buying every dinosaur or robot seen and encouraging good behavior in times of desperation. We found this method very effective long before Christmas which has understandably made it difficult for Creed to believe if we were telling the truth about Santa. In these moments of doubt, it seemed fitting to make a fake phone call to the North Pole to turn up Creed’s claus-o-meter. I mean really, if you haven’t had a pretend phone call with Santa in front of your kids, you should! The fake phone calls quickly needed a voice, so please forgive Papa Greg for being an imposter. During a ‘Santa Claus’ conversation, over hearing about how good Creed had been all year made us wonder what version of Creed Santa had seen. No milk in his cereal bowl, naughty list! A milky bowl of cereal, nice list! When you arrive at our house, whether it is with a bag full of toys or lumps of coal we’ll have your cookies ready and yes, if we haven’t used all the milk for the cereal we will leave a glass of milk out too.

Before you come in, remember that we have another milk drinker in the house, Truett! As much as I believe in you, I equally believe that he could drink you under the table, or should I say down a chimney. You may have officially met your match, possibly your replacement. He seems to meet all the qualifications, good at pulling all-nighters, milk guzzler, and can make his belly bounce when he giggles.

To ‘wrap up’ our defense, whether or not our family name made it on the nice list or not, we have plans in place to help secure our spot next year. We will continue to learn more about love, patience, and kindness. While we work to relearn the words that have lost their meaning this year: sleep, hurry, clean and quiet. We will try to use our most frequently used words less: no, more coffee, and our newfound cussword replacements!

Our year has been hectic but happy! We feel incredibly blessed and are looking forward to more sleep as well as whatever life has in store for us in 2019!

P.S. – Creed wanted you to know that if you need to take a bathroom break you can use his big boy potty. You can’t make this stuff up, Santa!

All our love,

Truett, Creed, Alec & Nichole

naughty 3

 

The carnival ride of a pregnancy I was on hit a jolting moment, where we were thrown into a quick motion of spinning. The type of spinning where you try to scream, but find yourself completely breathless.  At this point of my pregnancy, you would think that no news could be quite as big as my cankles, but the announcement we were about to hear gave my cankles a run for their money.

It was our final ultrasound before our first baby was to make her appearance into the world. A gender reveal and two gender-specific baby showers later, I was prepared to be the mom of a girl. But as fate would have it, on this ultrasound day Baby Spady looked like a boy, showing what were clearly identifying ‘boy’ parts. We left the appointment making the 30-mile car ride home where I can remember repetitively telling myself this is nothing a funnel cake can’t help fix!

Once a year, in my small 2,000 person town, the county fair fun comes to town bringing in the carnival, concerts, cows, campers and of course funnel cakes. My husband and I made the half-block walk from our house to the county fairgrounds for a ‘fix it’ funnel cake. With a funnel cake in hand walking to the campers I came to the sugar-coated realization that boy or girl the world will continue to spin, and the love of my baby is what will make the ride worthwhile.

As we buckle up for another ride, I now have a 2-year old son that thinks he is getting a baby sister at his house and a husband that is confident we are having another boy because he “saw” something on the ultrasound.  So, while we each have our ideas this time we are taking it slow and steady, ferris wheel style, and will wait and see once we get to the top of the ride.

Sugar Coated

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