Family Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I hope everyone enjoyed lovely holidays.

Our holidays were wonderful. We hosted Christmas Eve at our house for my family. Christmas morning was quiet and relaxed; probably one of our last Christmas mornings when we don't have to worry about assembling various toys, keeping Santa's gifts separate from our own, etc.

It felt like a real family Christmas. Eleanor wasn't that bothered about the whole thing, although she did enjoy getting new toys to play with (eat). Gomez is like the young child—she's up before anyone else, racing around the house. But again, that's her usual modus operandi.

Beckett is the teenager. He stayed under the covers as long as possible. After Eleanor's first feeding and once everyone else was up, we called for Beckett to join us downstairs. No response. I finally had to go into the bedroom and pull the covers off him before he would stretch and wander downstairs. I gave him a huge bone, said "Merry Christmas," and that was the last we saw of him all morning. The rest of the family gathered around the Christmas tree to open presents. Beckett disappeared to the other side of the living room to lay under the coffee table. We could hear sounds of gnawing and licking, but that was about it.

Christmas afternoon we went out to my parents' house. By this point we were learning what Eleanor's favorite part of present-opening was: the wrapping paper. She kept trying to eat it. Well, and every present we opened .... including a globe from my sister, which seemed fitting. What can I say? She knows what she wants and goes after it!

We had Christmas with Keith's family in Cincinnati over the following weekend, and New Year's Eve was a quiet night in, watching a movie and drinking a glass of wine.

The hardest part of the post-holiday letdown was Keith going back to work. He was off from the 24th through the week of New Year's, so Eleanor and I had gotten used to having him around all the time. I went through a mini-version of my first traumatic realization that I would be home alone with the baby all day long when she was about a month old and all of our wonderful helpers had to return to their usual lives.

But we made it through. And now the weather is frigid, inches of snow cover the ground, and there's a winter storm advisory for several more inches tonight/tomorrow. Ahhh, winter! I think I'll take a cue from Beckett and hide under the covers all weekend.