christmas randoms

• I have a thing for Christmas mugs. 

• Pita and I decorated a gingerbread house last week. She directed most of the decorating and it came out pretty well, considering.

• I found an easy and healthy recipe for cinnamon buns in my Happy Herbivore cookbook. Fat free, whole wheat cinnamon buns that don't have a lot of sugar. I made them, sprinkled them with Christmas-y sprinkles because I'm a big dork, and froze them so they can be easily heated up on Christmas morning. 

• Henry blows milk bubbles in his sleep sometimes. Oops, that's not Christmas-y is it? Unless, by "Christmas-y", I actually meant super cute :D

• Henry has been rocking his Christmas outfits this week. Gotta get some good use out of them! 

I wanted to take this picture and Henry was all "No way Mom, no more pictures", but then I got him milk drunk and he was willing to do pretty much anything after that. Good story, huh?

• Celia's little daycare is closed for most of the week, and will be closed for Christmas vacation all of next week. We had been planning on having a normal schedule this week, so when I found out on Sunday night that I'd be on my own with both kids, without help for the first time? I may have panicked a little. Okay, actually I cried. Ha!  

• No, really. I did... But I'm okay now. 

• The other day I had an ingenius idea. Evenings are tricky times because they're when Celia needs to eat dinner, be played with and read to, and put to bed all while Henry is having his fussy screaming time. Around this time, Celia also starts crying, constantly misbehaving, and having constant meltdowns. Evenings have gotten real fun around here. Anyway, I was thinking if I could find something fun to do in the late afternoon/early evening it would be perfect for us. Henry sleeps in the car, and Celia would have something fun and special to do. And what better thing to do this week than look at Christmas lights? Genius, I tell you! Turns out there's a pretty famous Christmas display not far from us. I pictured our happy little family snuggled up in the car in our pajamas, happily going for a drive and happily looking at the amazing lights while listening to jolly Christmas music. I thought this could become a yearly family tradition. Yeahhhhh.....

          I'll bet ya wanna know what happened. In one word: Disaster. In two words: Utter disaster. In forty-four words: I wanted to jump out of the moving car while on the highway, scutter away into the underbrush, and disappear from the face of the earth because I could not be more of a failure as a mother and planner of fun family activities. But the baby was hungry so I had to stick around until we got home. Darn breastfeeding. 

What happened was that the fun and delicious dinner (pizza) I made for Celia never got touched because she started acting up as soon a it was time to eat. Then she proceeded to earn herself several timeouts in quick succession, all while I was trying to feed Henry so we could get out of the house and have fun. Chris arrived home from work amid the chaos. Celia was in full meltdown and nothing I could do was going to bring her back. I can hug her all day long, and that's what she wants, but Henry's mere presence seems to ruin it. Chris took her to her room and finally calmed her down. I calmed Henry down (because when Celia's screaming and crying it makes him cry too). Finally we got in the car. We drove for a long time. The line of cars waiting to go through the crazy fancy Christmas light display place was over a mile long. We staying in the line for a while. Henry was crying and hungry again, because it had taken us so long to get out of the house. Celia was yelling at Henry because he was crying, which made him cry more. I was crying because I obviously completely suck in general, and specifically because I have clearly psychologically damaged my daughter by introducing a new sibling and my son by exposing him to a household where someone is constantly yelling and crying. We turned around and went home. 

I thought the pizza would be fun. It wasn't. I thought wearing those blasted reindeer pajamas in the car would be fun. It wasn't. I thought the car would be quiet and peaceful as the baby slept and we had a nice time talking with our toddler. It wasn't and we didn't. I thought the Christmas lights would be lots of fun to see. They probably would have been... 

Nothing I do, no matter what I try, seems to make Celia happy for longer than a few minutes. Sigh and humbug. 

I still have to try. She's happy when it's just me and her, no Henry in sight. So this morning I went to her room, climbed in bed with her, and we talked and snuggled and were silly together for a while. I just wish she was herself all the time. I only see little glimpses of her between meltdowns.

• Despite this latest debacle, I am still super duper excited for Christmas eve and Christmas morning with Celia this year. And if things don't go well, you can find me cowering in the underbrush next to the highway.