Arwen/Elizabeth

Why Do I Live in Michigan Again?

Our trip to DC this past weekend was great.  I know you were worried, so I'll reassure you: there were no diaper-leakage incidents on the plane.  Or anywhere else, for that matter.  We even got wicked-lucky and had three seats to ourselves on both flights, even though we'd only paid for two.*

We were in the capital-town for about forty-eight hours, and it was exactly long enough: we left while we were still having fun, but we didn't feel shorted on time.  Our friends were completely taken with Camilla, natch, and spent two days doting on her.  She was pretty fond of them too, especially our host.   Here's a picture of him - or his hand, anyway - about to tickle her.

They offered outings like museums or the zoo, but we declined on the grounds that we'd rather spend the time playing Dance Dance Revolution on their XBox.

Ha, not really, although we did play a lot of it, and we are really bad.  We declined on the grounds that Camilla is fifteen months old and cannot tell the difference between a coyote at the zoo and the neighbors' dog pooping in our front yard.  And guess which one of those things is easier and less expensive to see?  Also, I hate the zoo.

To assuage our feelings of guilt about flying five hundred miles just to sit around playing video games, we did take Milla on a walk, and visited the playground of the elementary school down the street.  This, as you can imagine, was absolutely thrilling for the toddler.  She found a stick on the ground!  AND we let her push the empty stroller around the basketball court!  It was the best day ever!

Cute, right?  But like so many first-time parents, we committed Outerwear Overkill.  I don't blame myself because I'm used to Michigan winter temperatures, but still: Milla was wearing overalls and a long-sleeved shirt, a fleece hoodie, a hat and mittens, and her coat, and it was FORTY degrees outside.  When we got back she was all sweaty underneath.  Poor girl.

The highlight of the trip for me was the chance to meet a fellow blogger with whom I've corresponded for a while, but whom I'd never met in person.  SoCo is awesome - we went to brunch and didn't stop talking for three hours, and I felt like we could have kept going for three more without the slightest bit of trouble.  I'm her biggest fan now, and I'm not taking a single DC trip again without seeing her.

I realized after I met SoCo (and talked Bryan's ear off for the next three days about how great she is) that I've now had eight in-person meetings with friends from the Internet, and every single meeting has been a positive experience.  I'm not the type of person who is friends with *everyone*.  I have a lot of friendly acquaintances but just a handful of good friends, and there's not once been a time when I met eight people in a row and thought I could be good friends with all of them.  Now, I know they're self-selected in advance because we've already discovered common ground online, but still: with every single person I've met from the Internet, I felt I could be really good friends with her if we just lived close enough.  Especially SoCo, who is lucky she doesn't live within five miles of me, because she would never get rid of me.  Seriously.  I would put up a tent on her front lawn.

Since I can't do that, I'm thinking about packing myself in Bryan's suitcase when he goes back to DC next week.  Or maybe I'll pack myself in a box.

Yeah, that would work too.

*Someone recommended this to us years ago and it's paid off a number of times: when traveling as a pair, choose the window and the aisle seat in any given row to decrease the chance of someone else taking the final seat in your row.  If someone does get assigned the middle seat, he or she will be happy to switch so you can sit together, and if no one gets assigned the seat, you're in luck!

Hodge-Podge, Beyond Saving

January has been surprisingly good this year.  Maybe it's just because last year was so tough with the infant Miss Fussbudget and toddler times are better in comparison, but the gloomy post-new-year days have passed quickly and painlessly, and now I find there's only a week left before February.  Woot!

One thing I'm doing to pass the time (besides studiously avoiding laundry) is expanding my horizons cooking-wise.  For instance, tonight's dinner of chicken Caesar salad included homemade croutons, which turned out to be very easy* and unbelievably tasty.  And last night I actually made marshmallows from scratch.  Who knew you could even do that?  You can, though, and fairly easily.  I did about half an hour of work to get the marshmallows into the pan, then when they were set I spent another half hour cutting them up and sugaring them.  It was a little tedious, but easy as pie.  Easy as eating pie.  Anyone with a stand mixer and a sharp pair of kitchen shears could do it.  And they taste like marshmallows you buy at the store, except they're the freshest tenderest marshmallows you've ever had.  Stick them on top of a cup of hot chocolate and you'll wonder if you're still on earth.  Next time I'm going to try making the peppermint ones.

And to top off January, tomorrow we're leaving for forty-eight hours in our nation's capital.  Or in Maryland, actually, where we'll stay with family friends.  They're not technically relatives but they're like an aunt and uncle to Bryan, and they've never met Camilla, and we've got an open invitation to visit them whenever we'd like, and the plane tickets were cheap, and DC is south of here and it's currently 9 degrees where we live.  Need I continue listing reasons this is awesome?

I have to say, it's a really cool thing to have friends who live near DC and are happy to put you up whenever you feel like going.  Bryan and I have both been to the capital enough times to have seen most of the monuments and museums and whatnot, but the stuff we haven't seen... well, there's no imperative to see it on any particular trip.  It'll still be there next time.  Instead, we can have another cup of tea!  Play another game of dominoes!  Take a nice walk!  And when we do go down to Monument Strip, we don't have to wear our heavy-duty walking shoes and fanny-packs (heh) because we'll just sightsee for a couple hours at a time anyway.  Like I said, it'll be there next time!  And the time after that!

Man, now I'm kind of feeling like I should send our friends a thank-you just for living where they live. 

Speaking of fanny packs, I've just ordered myself a new handbag and I'm unduly delighted about this.  I've decided it's time to move on from carrying the diaper bag everywhere.  Milla's not an infant anymore.  I can just throw a diaper and a baggie full of Cheerios in my purse and leave the diaper bag in the car.  It's so freeing.  I feel... free.  But anyway, I'll take pictures of the purse when it gets here.  Which unfortunately, according to the tracking on UPS, will not be before our trip this weekend.  Boo.

Okay, this is the most boring entry every.  I'm aware.  But it's January, kids!   The month of endless cold gloomy days!  Not a lot of inspirational material available!  I do nothing most days.  Nothing except:
"Yes, I'll read you that book.  Hey! - don't get off my lap - I've just started - okay..."
"No, sweetie, put that down!"
"Don't touch!"
"I'll pick you up in a minute."
"Please don't scream.  Would you like to ask nicely?"
"Where's your hair?  Where's your mouth?  Where's your belly button?"
"Don't eat that!"
"Are you hungry?"
"Do you need a new diaper?"
"Are you tired?"
"Are you ready for your nap?"
"Please be ready for your nap?"
"Please please please please be ready for your nap?"
Ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

Oh, the doing-nothing thing has reminded me of something.  Are you all reading Maggie?  I know that I've mentioned before that I love her, and I've got a link to her over there on the right and everything, but seriously.  I am LOVING Maggie these days, so I just had to bring it up again so that in case you're not reading her, you will start immediately.  Otherwise I will send my daughter to your house so that she can ask you to read her books and then refuse to allow you to read her books until you feel like the top of your head is going to fly off with the insanity of it all.  And THEN you should go read Maggie's blog, and also her other writing gig, and the top of your head will start to feel better again, and all will be right with the world.

The Maggie topic has reminded me of another topic, so we can have yet another paragraph in this endless wasteland of an entry.  (My segues!  They're so... crisp and clean, aren't they?  There's a reason I am a *self*-published writer, people.)

Phhhhbbbtp.  Anyway, Maggie writes sometimes about how her eight-month-old baby will not sleep.  I feel great sympathy for her, but sometimes I also want to throw something at her (in a nice way.  Have I mentioned that I love her?) because my child is fifteen months old, which is almost twice as old as eight months, and she will not sleep either.  No way, no how.  I never fretted over the sleep during her first year of life because I'd counted on her not sleeping through the night before a year.  I congratulated myself on how level-headed I was about it all.  I take things as they come!  I deal!  I am Level-Headed Dealing Mom!  But it turns out I had just created some sort of mental block that dissolved when Camilla turned one, and now I am deeply unhappy with the fact that she won't sleep.

However, we are working with it and she will eventually sleep, so I'm not looking for advice or sympathy.  Nay.  I brought this up because when I was reading Maggie's blog and cursing her under my breath for thinking that a non-sleeping eight-month-old was a trial (which it is!  I am just turned into an irrational hag by sleep deprivation) I realized that this whole thing is relative and there are people out there who probably curse me for thinking a non-sleeping fifteen-month-old is a trial.  People whose babies didn't sleep through the night until they were two or three or seven years old!  People to whom I look like a whiny little wimp. 

People, are you out there?  Normally it's a big no-no to one-up others' stories of suffering, but I am asking for it!  Tell me how your kid slept so much more horribly than mine!  It will make me feel better about my life!  It will brighten up January.  We all have a civic responsibility to Brighten Up January.  Get to it!

Here's my contribution to Operation BUJ:

*Because I know someone will ask, here's the recipe I used: Toss cubes of bread with olive oil, approximately 1 Tbsp. oil per cup of bread cubes, and herbs of choice.  Bake on a baking sheet at 325 degrees for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the cubes are toasted.  If you want to get fancy you can heat up the oil first and cook the herbs a little to infuse the flavor.  Try not to eat all the croutons before you get a chance to put them on your salad, unless you make them just for the sake of snacking, in which case you are my hero.

Me = Sitter

Milla got better!  Blessedly fast, actually.  Like I mentioned, Baby Darth Vader disappeared a couple hours after they gave her a steroid shot at the doctor's office, and never reappeared.  On Tuesday Milla was still clearly feeling sick, and she fussed and clung to me most of the day, but by Wednesday morning she was doing much better.  Now she's basically back to normal, with just a tiny bit of leftover congestion and the occasional cough to keep the congestion moving on out.  (Gross.)

I know it's been said ad infinitum by every woman in my position with a sick baby, but MAY-UN am I glad Milla is nursing.  The poor sore-throated girl would not eat or drink anything for four days, and if she hadn't been willing to nurse I don't know what I would have done.  I mean, besides tried harder to get her to eat and drink, duh.  But it was so much simpler this way.

My mom didn't end up coming to visit because she caught the flu from my dad.  I was bummed to miss her, but obviously it was better for her not to come and give us the flu.  Milla was pretty much recovered by the time Bryan left Wednesday morning anyway, and 36 hours was not so bad.  It wasn't so great, either, but we made it.

Right now I'm resisting the call of Farm Frenzy in order to blog (because I have, uh, so many important things to say) and Bryan is downstairs purging the basement.  We've got these awesome shelves down there that he and my brother-in-law built a couple years ago, but we never organized them, just kind of shoved stuff on them haphazardly, and then more stuff collected and started spilling over onto the floor and before we knew it we had an enormous Pile of Stuff, practically unnavigable.  We've talked for months about organizing it, the same way you talk about doing anything that's beneficial but not especially fun.  "We should do more volunteer work."  "We should read the classics."  "We should clean underneath the fridge."

Maybe YOU think about doing those kinds of things and then immediately go do them (In which case why are you wasting time reading blogs instead of being productive?  Don't you feel bad about this?) but I do not.  I am such a practiced underachiever/procrastinator that I no longer even feel guilt about not doing those things.  This is who I am.  I am a non-doer.  I do the things that are actually important and essential to my family's well-being but the rest of it, eh.  Who needs the stress of self-created imperatives, you know?

We've never explicitly discussed it, but I've observed that my husband has seemed to be on the same page with me in this area.  I don't do things; he doesn't do things.  It works.  Until the other night when he suddenly decided that he was going to make it his Own Personal Project to purge and organize the Stuff in our basement.  And he has since preceded to actually do it.

I'm not complaining about this.  I do want the basement organized and I'm glad it's getting done.  But I feel the way I did back in 1999 when he graduated from high school and I had another year of the old grind.  I'm left behind now.  He's moved on.  He is now a Doer.  And I'm sitting here with my computer on my lap, surfing the Internet for a new handbag.  Perhaps I should get off my butt and go help him.

Perhaps I should do it tomorrow.

Survival Mode

On Saturday evening we noticed that Milla had some chest congestion, and she slept horribly (up every 45 minutes) for two nights and then yesterday morning she woke up sounding like Baby Darth Vader ("Uuuuh-wheeee, uuuuh-wheeee") with a bonus barking-seal cough.  When I called our pediatrician's office the nurse said it was probably croup, and that we should bring her in, so we did and sure enough, it's croup.  Way to go, nurse, with the diagnosing over the phone!  Although now that I think of it, my mom could have diagnosed it too, I bet.  My mom's a walking Merck manual because for years she was a constant consult-er of the Merck manual until she had to give it up because of her hypochondriac tendencies.

I'm getting off topic.  Anyway, at the doctor's office they tested Milla's oxygen levels, which were 99, so she didn't need any breathing treatments, and they gave her a shot of steroids to help bring down the swelling in her throat and sent us home.  Actually, first they gave her oral steroids, which I oh-so-skillfully managed to get her to swallow, but then she threw them up all over the floor.  By the way, the doctor's office is a good place to have your child throw up if she has to throw up in public, because it doesn't phase the staff one bit.  The receptionist didn't even blink when our girl started hornking on the carpet, just told us she'd have a nurse clean up the mess and sent us back to the exam room where they gave Milla a shot to replace the vomited medicine.

I have to say the steroids worked pretty well, since within a couple of hours there was no sign of Baby Darth, thank heavens.  However, for the next couple of days we've got to continue giving Camilla the prescription orally at home.  KILL ME NOW.  Last night through a combination of baby-throwing-up and baby-fit-throwing we managed to waste two entire doses before finally getting about two-thirds of a dose, mixed with milk, to stay inside the child.  Today I did pretty well by splitting her doses into smaller parts and giving her six one-quarter-teaspoon instead of two three-quarter-teaspoon portions.  But we've still got two days to go, so eh.  Like I said, KMN.

By the way, did you all know that vomiting is one of the symptoms of croup?  Me neither, until I had to change my outfit three times yesterday.  But hey, it's survival mode.  We're just getting through this, and through the sleepless nights, and when it's all over we can breathe a big sigh of relief and get back to normal.

What else is new?  Let's see.

This past weekend I went shopping with my sister and got $280 worth of clothes for $40 at Coldwater Creek, because Rosie has this awesome power to make sales happen.  If you're with her, you will find great clearance stuff, guaranteed.  One of the items I bought at CC was a sweater for my mom, which I am going to give to her tomorrow when she comes down to stay with Billa and me while Bryan is out of town for two days.  I had not been excited about his trip but I had been going to cope just fine until my baby got sick, upon which occurrence I called my mommy, and like the good mommy that she is she agreed to come and stay for a little while.  I promised her that she didn't have to do anything except play with her granddaughter, and that we would get take-out for meals, but I think she would have agreed to come even if she had to cook and clean the whole time.  That is the kind of wonderful mother that she is.

My dad has the flu, though, and my punk-nose littlest sister and brother better take good care of him while Mom is with me.  Otherwise I will have to go up there and rap their little sleep-deprived heads together.

Which reminds me, I've discovered that since being blessed (ahem) with a Child Who Does Not Sleep, I've got an incredibly low tolerance for the sleep deprivation woes of people who COULD SLEEP IF THEY DARN WELL CHOSE.  People who stay up late of their own accord do not deserve to complain about being tired the next day.  Only if you are kept from sleeping by outside demands do you have the right to whine about it.  Seriously.

Now that we've got that cleared up, guess what I learned to do?  Solve a Rubik's cube!  I know it's kind of geeky but I've always wanted to learn, and this year Bryan got me a cube for Christmas.  I took a couple days to learn the algorithms, and now I can do it in about three-and-a-half minutes.  Next I think I'm going to try speedcubing, because I like a challenge.

Farm Frenzy is calling.  Kisses.

The Tie Belongs to Her Cousin

Bring on the doldrums, because Christmas is officially over.  Epiphany happened this past weekend and now it is just plain old dull boring January.

I've always thought January is the most depressing month.  November (Thanksgiving, which I love) and December (Christmas, ditto) are over, but spring is still months away (here in Michigan, anyway).  Nothing happens in January except taking down the Christmas decorations and moping about the fact that it's either (a) gray and ugly outside, or (b) snowing yet again, can we not get a BREAK?

Yes, I am impossible to please, why do you ask?

My sister Rosie pointed out that January is depressing to me because I let it be depressing to me, and she is probably right.  With that in mind I told Bryan that we should try to brighten the month with activities, so we planned a weekend trip to DC two weeks from now.  This weekend I'm going shopping with my sister, sans toddler-clingsters, and next weekend we've got Bryan's work holiday party (they do it in January instead of December, how inspired is that?) which means a night to ourselves, praise heaven, and then it's our DC trip and then it will be February.  So hey!  Maybe January won't be as bad this year.

Today, though, I have to take down the tree and the other Christmas decorations, and I don't want to.  Why is it that a Christmas tree on December 9th is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but a Christmas tree on January 9th looks sad and glaringly wrong?  It's as if an enormous bedraggled pink cat were suddenly sitting in my living room.

Either I'm charmingly indulgent or just lazy and foolish, but this morning I've been letting Milla take the shatterproof ornaments off the tree and deposit them in a small plastic bin.  After more than a month of "No, Camilla, don't touch the tree!" this delights her as much as you'd imagine.  I think it might be a bad idea, undermining my discipline and all that, but heck.  I've already started letting her do it and if I renege now I'll be even more inconsistent than I already am. 

If I look hard enough, I can usually find an excuse for taking the path of least resistance.  Not that I'm proud of it.

Speaking of the path of least resistance (but not in a deriding way this time - the good old POLR is not always bad), I'm sort of intrigued to find that I've become an "extended" breastfeeder by default.  I planned before Milla was born to try my hardest to nurse her, and when it turned out to be amazingly easy for us, I set a goal of nursing for at least a year and didn't give it much more thought than that.  I've always been open to the idea of nursing a toddler, and the idea of child-led weaning makes sense to me. But I'd heard from some people that their children self-weaned before or around a year old, and I had no idea how I myself would feel about the way nursing was going at twelve months, so I figured there was no point in crossing the bridge before I came to it.

What I couldn't have predicted was that my child would not even come close to self-weaning (although I've since learned that the whole "self-weaning before a year" concept is sketchy anyway), and in fact would be a slow starter on solids and still be getting most of her nutrition from breast milk at a year, and that there would be no question of weaning her at that age unless we started giving her formula, which would be silly for us since it's more expensive and less convenient.  Fortunately, I found that at twelve months I was still loving nursing her.  I loved it even more after we night-weaned her (because loving nursing is not the same as loving waking up multiple times per night) and I didn't feel so stretched and could enjoy our nursing time.

Anyway, to make a long story short (ha!) I have a nursing toddler, and I have no idea when she will stop nursing.  Perhaps one of these days I'll start to get tired of it and will gradually encourage Milla to taper off the nursing.  Maybe she'll begin to eschew it of her own accord.   I don't know, and I'm not really concerned about it.  She's certainly not going to go off to college still nursing, and between now and then we'll find the right solution for us.

However, I am curious about something, and maybe those of you who have also done "extended" nursing can weigh in.  (Sorry about the quotation marks on "extended" - nursing a fourteen-month-old who only has six teeth doesn't seem to me that it should be out of the ordinary, and I have trouble accepting the fact that it is.)  When people started asking if you were "still" nursing - however politely or impolitely they did it - what did you say?  I can't decide whether to simply answer, "Yes," because it's none of their business, or to try to educate by talking about the WHO recommendation and the benefits of nursing a toddler.  Currently I alternate between the two options depending on the person I'm talking to; I like the idea of sharing information but I'm not sure how fruitful it would be in some cases.  If you nursed a toddler, how did you respond to the questions?  And how did people respond to your responses?

Also, since we're in information-collecting mode anyway, I'm curious about something else: teething and willingness to eat solids.  I've got this hypothesis that kids who teethe late (and Milla wasn't really late since she got her first tooth at seven months, but she's now almost fifteen months and only has six teeth) tend to be less willing to eat solids early and often than their many-teethed peers.  What think you?  What has your experience been?

As I've been writing this, Milla's been playing with a set of cards that we've designated "kid cards."  They're from a casino and have a hole punched through the deck, and she keeps taking a card and sticking her finger through the hold in the middle, then yelling for me to come rescue her from the evil card that is eating her hand.  Kids.  They're so darn helpless.

Good thing they are cute to make up for it.

Christmas Recap

(tap tap tap)  Is this thing on?

Merry Christmas!

It's only the ninth day, so I'm not late in wishing you a happy Christmas.  I am... sort of... late in the posting, since it's been an enormous amount of time since I was around here in blogland.  Ahem.  Let's just pretend otherwise, shall we?

I'm doing my best to keep the Christmas spirit alive all through the twelve days, right up to Epiphany.  I've got iTunes blasting Christmas carols and I'm sitting in the soft light of the fragrant Christmas tree and I'm thinking about what to put in Camilla's shoe for Epiphany.  I'll probably even bake one more batch of Christmas cookies (why not?) and I am diligently holding the post-Christmas letdown at bay until after January 6th.

I may not be able to avoid doldrums, but at least they will be liturgically correct doldrums, darn it.

Christmas is not over but Christmas break - ten days of visiting our parents - definitely is.  This is not a good thing, as we love the time with our families and were sad to leave, but the silver lining is that we are home in our own beds.  There's no place like home, did you know?

We had a lovely celebration this year.  As always, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day were a non-stop twenty-four hours; the only thing different was that this year they were a non-stop twenty-four hours *with a toddler.*  Which, as usual with a toddler, made the whole thing both far more delightful and far more exhausting.

When Bryan and I got married we worked out a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day schedule that involved the two of us bouncing back and forth from my parents' house to his like festive but increasingly exhausted ping-pong balls: Christmas Eve dinner, stories, and stockings with my family, Christmas Eve nightcap and presents with his parents and grandparents, approximately six hours of sleep, up at zero-dark-thirty for stockings and prayers on Christmas morning at my parents' house, then breakfast and Mass and the endless one-by-one present-opening that is my family's tradition, then back to Bryan's parent's for more stockings and more presents and Christmas dinner, then getting both families together at one house or the other for games and dessert.  By eight o'clock Christmas evening I've always been ready to fall into bed for at least twelve or fourteen hours.

Since Camilla's arrival we've toned down the Christmas celebrating a wee bit.  We've cut out the Christmas Eve nightcap and the Christmas evening games and dessert, and this year we spent the night at my parents' on Christmas Eve so Milla could sleep in Christmas morning if she wanted.  (Not that she did, but at least we didn't have to cart a baby across town in a freezing car before the sun was up.)  It worked pretty well.

The coolest thing about this year as opposed to last year - besides the lack of baby-fussiness and the fact that this year I'm eating dairy again, woot - is that Milla is so much more independent.  Not that last year set much of a bar, since there's little that's LESS independent than a 2.5-month-old.  But this year, we'd pull up to my parents house and she'd start agitating for "Gan-pa! Gan-pa!" and we'd walk in the door and she'd launch herself at my dad or one of my siblings would whisk her off and I'd sit down and have a cup of tea and not have to tend to any baby-needs for an hour or more.  I don't think I could overemphasize how much this rocked. 

We are big kids.  Our parents are alarmed, but appreciative.

This Christmas all three of us were pretty well spoiled, present-wise.  I'm now the thrilled owner of an LLBean toiletry bag (family size), a Pandora charm bracelet, a bunch of great kitchen stuff including two new saucepans and an awesome paring knife, and C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy in hardcover.  My amazing husband also got us tickets to see a ballet in March, just to prove how much he loves me.  I definitely believe him now.

Among other things, Bryan now possesses a table saw and a planer.  I'm not sure exactly what these things do, but he's pretty happy about them.  Camilla scored some pretty cute clothes, plus two trucks, a tractor, a doll, a little musical cube that is surprisingly un-annoying, and a sled.

Okay, that stuff is not so exciting.  We all got stuff for Christmas, yadda yadda.  But I ask you this: did anyone else get *peed on* on Christmas Day?

I thought not.

I'm beginning to develop a theory that I have a special baby-urine magnetism that manifests itself on special occasions or in special circumstances.  For instance, the one-year-old son of the hairdresser peed on *on my wedding day.*  (Hours before I donned my dress, fortunately.)  My daughter peed on me on an airplane back in May.  And on Christmas morning, halfway through the marathon present-opening, she did me exactly the same favor.  It was so fun.  I was sitting there, hugging Camilla on my lap, enjoying the festive atmosphere, and suddenly I noticed that my legs were warm.  And wet.  And did I mention warm?  Before I had a baby I always thought that warm wetness was preferable to cold wetness, but unless a tub is involved, this is untrue.  Cold wet things - water or juice or melted snow - are relatively harmless.  Hot wet things - coffee or tea or soup - are okay too. 

Warm wet things are bodily fluids.  They are not okay.  Especially when you're trying to enjoy a happy holiday celebration.  Especially when your daughter is wearing an adorable Christmas outfit that half her grandparents haven't seen yet, and now she has soaked key parts of it, and instead of a well-matched turtleneck and leggings she must wear print tights and a be-hearted sweater, for heaven's sake, and look like she was dressed by a half-blind hobo.

Did you notice my weird clothes?

Honestly, I don't think anyone but me cared at all.  Motherhood makes you neurotic.

Another notable thing about this Christmas was that Bryan and I got addicted to a computer game called Farm Frenzy, which looks ridiculous but is actually loads of fun.  It being vacation, we had plenty of time to sit around and rot our brains and hurry the onset of arthritis in our right-hand index (mouse-clicking) fingers.  Back in the day a happy couple would sit by the fire and while away the hours with their reading and their knitting; we sat just as happily by the Christmas tree with our laptops and whiled away the hours buying and selling virtual livestock.  This is twenty-first century living, folks.

Speaking of whiling away the hours, good heavens.  It's bedtime.  Kisses.

No, I didn't sleep at all on vacation.  Why would I want to do something crazy like that?