Andrea’s Weblog

We survived the holidays and I’ve run out of excuses for not devoting some time to my blog. I really shouldn’t put it that way. It’s more like I can finally put off laundry and other things that I should be doing because out last visitor left yesterday and we aren’t expecting anyone any time soon.

This holiday season was more hectic than usual. I can’t really figure out why. Elizabeth can entertain herself for quite awhile by herself now. I don’t have to keep both eyes on her all the time–my well-trained ears are usually sufficient. I got heavily involved in making calendars for the family. Since I couldn’t find any macintosh-friendly clipart or calendar programs I decided I could do better making them by myself. It was hard work picking out all the pictures and designing the backgrounds. I discovered that I my Photoshop and InDesign skills needed some brushing up.

I’m so thankful that I could do most of my shopping on-line. It took a lot out of me to get all my errands done between naps. Elizabeth is down to one nap a day, which is usually an hour and a half –that is unless she falls asleep for 5 minutes in the car. In that case, there’s no way to convince her that she’s only slept for 5 minutes and she refuses to take a real nap no matter how tired she gets. That makes for what we call a “grump-tastic” day.

Christmas with Elizabeth was so great. We had my family – Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Kirsty and Uncle Foof down from Maryland. Since grandpa “couldn’t get a flight in” the following day, he arrived the day before. The rest of the family thinks he just wanted to ensure that he got his “playdate with Elizabeth” the only thing on his Christmas list. Frank’s mom arrived a few days after Christmas and stayed through New Years. Elizabeth had plenty of presents to open and really caught on to the whole unwrapping thing. She wanted to unwrap each gift and play with it right away. She kept getting frustrated when we couldn’t get the toy out of the packaging fast enough. When did they start using millions of twist ties and plastic packaging that you have to hack your way through? Elizabeth wanted to play with each gift as she opened it. She couldn’t just look at it and move on. We had a hard time convincing her to open more gifts.

Amazingly, our live Christmas tree was barely touched. There were a few incidents with a cinnamon-scented ornament and one that wasn’t cinnamon, but looked the same. Finley has some treats that are cinnamon flavored, so we couldn’t really be mad at his mistake.

I should say to all the people out there who received a Christmas card from us. No, Finley is not a stuffed dog. We spent way too much time trying to get the perfect photo. This photo of our fine teenage puppy should put all questions as to whether or not he is real to rest. (Yes, that is a boner.)

I’ll be posting more stories from the last month in the coming week.