christmas

Christmas Card 2009

| patmcg

This was a banner year for us… we had Molly, Claire is doing great, we moved to Austin for Kit’s great job, I made some positive adjustments to my job. It doesn’t get any better than that. This may be, on paper, our best year ever.

But in reality great news comes with challenges and keeps us busy, and we did not get around to writing a real Christmas card about our great 2009. So after some hand wringing, we ended up with something very simple.

Now this is nice and simple and sweet, but it’s too bad I did not get to write a real year in review like last year.

Christmas ’08

| patmcg

This year we ended up hosting Christmas at our house for the first time. It all had to do with Kit’s call schedule at the hospital. At first Kit was not supposed to be on call for Christmas, then the schedule got botched and she was supposed to be on call. Since we cannot travel or even go very far from our house when Kit is on call, we planned to spend Christmas at home in Dallas. All the grandparents agreed to come up. Sometime after that, it was determined that Kit did not need to be on call after all.

But the plans were already made, and so we still had Christmas at our house. This was a good development anyways because Claire gets so excited (read: messed up) over the holidays with all the grandparents and presents and being out of school and off her routine. She gets so worked up that she has trouble sleeping or even just settling down. Staying at home also saved us a potential 16 hour round trip in the car with the kid and the dog. I am sure the first 4 to 6 hours would have been fine; it was the other 10 to 12 hours I was worried about.

Well, I learned one thing from Claire’s recent birthday blog entry. I could go on and on about every little thing and try to tell a nice involved story about the holidays, but frankly that approach is going to wear me out and would probably do the same to you reading it. So I will keep it short and sweet (just like Claire?). How about a bullet list of highlights?
  • We had seven people and three dogs in the house, which was a little tight but not too bad.
  • Christmas dinner was a festive affair coordinated by my mom and Kit’s mom, served early (ie, normal lunch time) in hopes of accommodating Claire’s nap schedule. Claire still had trouble with her Christmas nap, as expected.
  • Claire charmed the socks off of everyone, singing songs, telling stories about trains and princes and the kids at school, or pretending to be a waiter taking our lunch order, or a Little Einstein.
  • Claire is learning the Christmas music, but she does not have it down perfectly. She is very insistent that on the first night of Christmas, my true love gave to me a pirate in a pear tree.
  • We were all determined to cut back on presents, but with me & Kit, the grandparents, an uncle and aunt, cousins, and oh yes — Santa! — it was a very good haul for Claire. For posterity, the list included a kid’s art easel set, a treasure chest full of princess stuff, a deluxe play-dough set, a giant teddy bear, something called “connectagons“, and a kid-sized shopping cart full of fake food goods to collect and distribute.
  • Claire gave everyone hand-made items, in one case quite literally. She gave Kit and me a framed handprint with decorative paper cutouts around it.
  • Many hours were spent, mostly by the ladies, working on a jigsaw puzzle. It was a tricky puzzle portraying a dog and cats made up in holiday cheer with no straight edges or corners at all. At the end of the holidays, part of a dog’s head could be recognized.
  • We took a driving tour to see the fine holiday lights on Armstrong Parkway, and also swung by George W. Bush’s future house, just out of curiosity. The “W” house was nice but not nearly as fancy as the houses on Armstrong Parkway. Some people in the neighborhood had street signs that read “Welcome home, George and Laura!”
  • Claire freaked out pretty bad when the last of the grandparents left, screaming that she wanted to go too. Kit’s theory is that Claire knew that was the end of the fun.
  • Three days after Christmas, with everyone gone, Claire is still having trouble getting to sleep. Her refusal to sleep has driven most of us to madness at one point during the holidays as we tried to lure her to rest.
  • After Christmas, we were getting together some things to donate. We wanted Claire to pick out an old toy to give away, but she resisted stubbornly. She was adamant that she would give away any brand new toys from Christmas, but no old toys!

Finally, here is a video montage showing Claire getting more and more excited as Christmas day goes on, and into the next day.

You wanna cumbo?

| patmcg

We have not really even acknowledged Christmas 2007 so far at home. We have no Christmas tree set up yet, no presents piled up on display in the living room, or even wrapped, or even purchased yet. We have not even been playing Christmas music. This lack of Christmas spirit is not intentional; Christmas has just sneaked up on us this year. So today, to get our Christmas spirit kicked off, Kit had the idea to go see the Festival of Trees at the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead.

We were hoping the Festival of Trees would be sort of like the Christmas Tree Forest that Kit used to go to in Corpus Christi. It turned out to be classier, smaller, and more subdued than the Corpus Christi version. It featured trees decorated up in the traditional style from several different countries, accompanied by a written explanation of Christmas traditions in that country. But it felt more like a display than a forest, and it did not exactly jump start our Christmas spirits.

So we moved on to explore the rest of the museum. Claire was especially excited to see the big, working toy train track. Along the track were little displays of things like ice skaters on a frozen pond, elves working at Santa’s toy factory, construction crews at work on the road beside the track, and countless other things to look at, each with a button to push to make them go. And best of all was the fact that Thomas the Train was running around and around the track. Things were definitely looking up.

After we saw every little thing on the train display, we went outside and came across an old kid-sized playhouse in the garden. Claire knew it was made just for her, and she went right in to explore. She explored each of the three rooms and then made herself comfortable on the little kid-sized wicker sofa. Kit and I mostly stayed outside, letting Claire explore as we chatted about little things like where the heck we will be living in two years, what jobs will we both have, who is going to be president, and other basic unknowns of the relatively near future.

Over our chatter, Claire was sticking her head out of the playhouse’s front window, looking especially cute in her little green Christmas dress, saying what we could best make out as, “You wanna cumbo?” or just “Cumbo!” We replied, “What’s a cumbo?”, but Claire just smiled and kept saying it.

Finally, when Claire said, “You want cheese?” Kit put it together. Claire was asking if we wanted a “combo”, and she was acting like she was a lady at the drive-through window at Wendy’s or McDonald’s, where they always say, “You want to make that a combo?” or “You want cheese with that?” when you place an order. Kit and I were cracking up, because Claire did this with such as big smile on her face but was also trying to act serious, like she really did want to know if we wanted the combo. At least she did not ask us to “biggie size” it for only 39 cents more.