Kyla and Blake managed to visit Santa twice in the run-up to Christmas, once at the Cougar Mountain Zoo where the kids met his reindeer, and then at the traditional Santa meeting venue, the mall. All of this Santa exposure did have an unforeseen side effect: Kyla began to have trouble sleeping because she was afraid that the weight of Santa and the reindeer would cause our roof to collapse. In order to protect us against the potential catastrophe, Kyla wrote a letter to Santa asking that he visit our house without his entourage. She also requested that he enter through the front door as she was pretty sure he wouldn't make it in via our gas fireplace.Kyla is as stubborn as she is clever. While Becky and the kids were out shopping, Kyla started misbehaving and making a scene so Becky told her that as a consequence she would not be able to watch her afternoon television show. This was of course very upsetting to Kyla so Becky offered a compromise where she would be able to watch her show if she said she was sorry for her behavior. Kyla continued to through a fit for over an hour even in light of this offer, and when she finally calmed down instead of finally apologizing she just kissed Becky and told her that she loved her believing that would be enough. Finally she gave in and said she was sorry.
Blake is now a crawler, though he isn't a big fan of it. Typically he'll crawl himself up to something he can pull himself up with and cruise around instead. He seems to want to just skip the whole crawling phase and move straight on to walking.
He's also eating a lot more these days. Blake isn't really interested in baby food anymore, preferring more solid food that he pick up himself. I'd forgotten just how messy babies got when they start feeding themselves and how easily that messiness finds its way to the parents' clothing no matter how much we try to avoid it.
I took the week off between Christmas and New Years but we didn't get much time to relax. If we weren't at some holiday event, we were usually preparing for the next one or cleaning up from the last one.One of these events was Becky's 30th birthday party. We invited a number of friends over and hired a couple of neighbor girls to babysit the kids upstairs (Linda was nice enough to come watch Blake). We had games for everyone to play, though everyone spent most of their time talking and drinking. Everyone seemed to have a great time especially the birthday girl... what she remembers of it.
By the end of the week all four of us were pretty cranky and under-slept. We do have fun during the holiday season but this year we are looking forward to a return to normalcy.
