The pandas are key to a good holiday sweater.
Christmas was... exhausting. Good, but exhausting. Thanks to The Child.
She Does Not Appreciate going places. She is a homebody. She'll take a bottle from me with almost no fuss now. For this reason, I thought, "Yes! I can get out of the house for a few hours! James can watch the baby! It will be awesome!" So I skipped off to Madison to visit with Hebrew Friend. We watched the new Batman movie. We started a puzzle. It was fun to just get out. On the way there, I kept whipping my head around in a panic to see the empty car seat base before remembering I hadn't left her in a parking lot somewhere.
James called me a couple hours later. She wouldn't take a bottle, no matter what he tried. She'd scream and scream and scream and then fall asleep. I told him to swaddle her, give her the pacifier, and then pull the old switcharoo. He called me not long after. No such luck. Sound asleep, and she'd purse her lips together tightly every time he tried to feed her. Who says toddlers are the strong-willed ones? I really hope this isn't foreshadowing.
So I came home and fed her. I still got out for a while. It was nice.
We spent Christmas Eve at my mother-in-law's. Grace slept like a rock all night, but I, of course, kept dreaming that she wasn't sleeping or that it was ten in the morning, and I'd let her go fourteen hours without eating or that she'd stopped breathing, and then I'd be just getting back to sleep, and James would twitch. I hope there comes a day when I can sleep in the same room with my daughter. She doesn't even make noise--at least not any that I can hear over the fan. But if she's in the room, I don't sleep.
Anyway, Christmas Day was fun. My mother-in-law (who just had her second knee replacement surgery a month ago) cooked a huge breakfast with muffins and eggs and bacon and coffee. I ate almost all of it, and everybody else had to forage in the snow. Grace screamed a lot, but after a while we all went deaf, so it was okay.
James and I got some sweet loot. Of note: two sets of king-sized flannel sheets from mother- and grandmother-in-law. Also some very, very generous gifts from both of them. And then a bunch of gadgets and knick-knacks and other things ranging from useful to silly to tasty.
I gained forty-eight pounds. Grandma-in-law makes amazing mints and cookies. I challenge any of you to resist.
But the real Christmas winner was The Child. She was buried in loot.
I'm thinking there will be A Talk with the relatives once she's old enough to get the Wrong Message about Christmas from all those presents. Until then, we'll enjoy torturing her and taking ridiculous pictures.
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