In Which We Raise A Pair Of Lilliputians

As requested, here's a photo of the kids with The Best Santa The World Has Ever Known.  Note Eden's awesome flame-covered AFOs and Connor's festive tweed cap and cowboy boots-- all important fashion accessories for any holiday photo shoot.  

Also I believe that Connor is wearing the same train vest he wore for this same Santa not one, but two years ago (and also like two years ago, Santa once again wouldn't let us pay for our photos, because this guy is amazing).  My kid is tiny.  I swear we feed him and everything; we're not sure if this is related to his genetic condition or if it's just because he takes after his daddy.  Who knows?  Maybe he'll shoot up at some point.  Somehow I doubt it, though.

At five feet tall, Eden is also on the teensy side and we think she's done growing, but Thai women tend to be shorter than the average American woman as a general rule, so that isn't really surprising.  Also we're not sure what kind of nutrition she got as a little kid, so that might have had something to do with it as well.  At any rate, I'm kind of resigned to being the tallest person in our family, unless we adopt another boy in a few years (which is entirely possible).

Anyway, today I ran by the store for a few odds and ends after picking up Connor from school, and I noticed they had Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World on sale.  Eden read the first book of the series out loud to me a few weeks ago, and I thought that maybe she'd be more interested in reading books if she could see the movie that's based on them afterwards.  So we watched it together this evening as a special (late) reward for finishing the book, and she enjoyed it tremendously.  I think after we're done with Awkward, we'll try something else that has a movie tie-in and that other teens will probably have read, like Harry Potter or the dreaded Twilight.  While the Harry Potter series is, in my opinion, much better written than anything Stephanie Meyer has come up with, there is one thing to be said for Twilight-- at least the language is simple enough that Eden shouldn't need too much help with it.  

Thus far she hasn't been interested in reading any series past the first novel and it takes her a month or two to get through a book (reading in twenty minute intervals), so I don't know that we'd get to some of the more mature things that happen later in both series, and if we do we'll have plenty of time to discuss them.  While there are a few other more recent YA novels the kids are all reading that have been made into movies, most of them have pretty dark plot lines fairly early on.  While she's definitely become way more mature in the past year, I don't think Eden's quite ready for stuff like The Hunger Games just yet.

~Jess