An actual, honest to goodness, Christmas

We actually had a good Christmas!  I can't believe it!  So here's the obligatory run down of the day so far.

K had to work yesterday until evening so the girls and I went over to my parents house for a simple dinner.  I dressed them up for the heck of it and the big balls my parents got for the girls were a hit.

He got home at bedtime so he got the girls into their Christmas Eve jammies and much to our surprise, they went to sleep almost immediately.  The rest of the evening was spent blowing up inflatable toys and rearranging the living room in prep for Christmas morning.  Everything the girls already owned was taken out of the room and replaced with the Christmas tree and new toys.  

K and I opened our presents for each other and had a quiet Christmas Eve.  I got a waffle maker that I'll never have to use!  You see, whenever K makes a nice breakfast, he includes pancakes.  I don't much like pancakes, but I like waffles.  So he got me a waffle maker so that HE could make me waffles!  I got him a Doctor Who tardis lunch box because he's been brown bagging his lunch a lot.

K had to go into work for an hour this morning because the animals in a pet store still need to eat on holidays.  He left around 6:30am, and as he was pulling out of the driveway, Teeny Tiny woke up crying.  She's been waking up often the last couple of weeks because of a hacking cough and getting stuffed up.  So I got her diaper changed and rocked her back to sleep.  Then I went back to bed and the next thing I know, K is waking me up because my parents have arrived.  Mom and Dad were kind enough to do our laundry last night so we now have clean clothes again.  Yay!  The washer and dryer will theoretically be installed tomorrow but I've given up on actually counting on things this time of year so I appreciate my parents helping out with things like this.  That's how it is with them, they help out where they can without being all intrusive in our lives.  They're pretty swell.  

I told my parents that the girls will probably finish breakfast and be set loose on the gifts around 9:30-10am because that's their usual schedule.  But it was 10am and the girls were still asleep!  K made us all a wonderful breakfast (including waffles and eggs benedict for me, I'm totally spoiled) and we were pretty much able to eat our entire meal before the girls woke up around 10:45am.  They NEVER sleep in that late!  It's just too bad that K had to get up so early for work, it would have been nice to let him sleep in like that.  Oh well.  

So the girls had their breakfast and we set them free in the living room to watch what would happen.  They scrambled over to the present pile and each took one of their new puppy pals and got down to playing.  I had my video camera set up just running in the corner of the room so sometime in the future I'll be able to check out the video and save whatever pieces I want.  I like that I captured it all.

After doing some playing with the unwrapped toys, I went to sit on the floor and encouraged them to rip the paper on the wrapped things.  We never sat and focused on unwrapping any presents, just when they would come over to me, I'd help them rip a little more paper.

My folks left to visit my brothers family about 12:30 and very shortly thereafter the girls started showing tired signs and seemed to need a nap.  They had only been awake for about 2 hours, but they went straight to sleep.  They've now been asleep for about 2 hours and should be awake any time.  My brothers family will probably come over this evening for pizza and no, I'm not getting dressed!  Christmas is a day for jammies.

The only bad thing is that it appears that the cold that was clearing up is swinging back around, possibly starting all over again.  It was a bit snottier this morning than I would have liked, but it certainly wasn't a Christmas killer so I'm happy!  The rest of the day will be spent with Doctor Who and more playing with new toys.  My first enjoyable Christmas!

THIS is why I hate Christmas

Yeah, I'm a Scrooge.  Everyone knows it and dislikes this trait about me.  Every year I try to pin down exactly why I hate it so much.  So here's this years explanation.

Everything fucking breaks and you can't get it fixed!  Everything is just 10x harder the week of Christmas. Even just going to the store for some milk is a pain in the ass because everyone is in every store everywhere.
So this year, here's what my week has looked like:

The baby monitor broke a couple of weeks ago.  The video portion works but the sound doesn't.  Motorola is sending us a new one (thanks!) and it probably should have arrived by now.  But of course not because everything takes longer to deliver in December.  Yesterday I said fuck it, and bought a cheap sound monitor to keep next to the video monitor.  Why was this so important to me?

Because the girls have been sick and have possibly been exposed to RSV.  That means if breathing becomes labored, they would need to go to the ER.  We can hear them cry through their bedroom wall, but labored breathing isn't something that would be loud enough to wake us up without a monitor.

Then about a week ago, the laundry room started to stink.  I wondered if it was gas, but it didn't have that classic rotten egg smell and I moved the carbon monoxide monitor into that room that never went off.  So I thought ok, maybe it's not gas, maybe it's mold under the linoleum due to water leak issues we had a while back.  But we'll come back to this.

A few days ago, our dryer died.  It still appeared to function, but it generated no heat so nothing was getting dry so we can't really do laundry.  Just fucking perfect.  Ok, not a major disaster, I can deal with this.  We've been looking at washers and dryers for a while now because we knew the washing machine would die on us at some point.  This isn't a major shocking big purchase.  We turned off the gas valve thinking maybe the smell is indeed gas and maybe it's because the ignition thingy on the dryer doesn't work so the dryer is filling up with gas.

Yesterday, my parents came over to watch the girls for a couple of hours so I could get a break.  With everyone being sick, my ankle hurts, K can't take any days off right now because he works retail, I'm just a bit overwhelmed.  I needed to get diapers and on my way to the store, I realized that a Sears appliance store was right next door.  Okey dokey, let's just throw some money at my current problem and get on the list to see when we can get my new machines installed.  Tomorrow?  Before Christmas?  Really?  SOLD!

Today they come to deliver and install the machines.  OF COURSE it's not on their paperwork that I paid for haulaway service so that's all confused.  Then they come in and freak out because they can smell gas and they sure as hell aren't going to do any installations with gas in the air.  They tell me to call the power company emergency line and they'll leave the washer and dryer in my living room so that hopefully we can get a quicker installation tomorrow since the products will already be here.

Emergency power guy comes over.  Takes a while to find the leak, there's a hole in the line going from the furnace to the house.  So for god knows how long, we've been venting methane throughout our house, and since the primary vent is in the laundry room, that's where most of it has collected.  It's basically a wonder that my house hasn't become a fireball at any point in the last week.

But we now have the gas leak fixed and the house has been aired out (and chilled down obviously).  So I get on the phone to reschedule installation of the washer and dryer and OF COURSE they can't do it until after Christmas.  So now I have two washers and two dryers in my house that currently serve zero function and piles of laundry that can't be done until after Christmas.

So that's it.  Every year, the week of Christmas it's just fucking something.  Some big problem that Christmas prevents it from getting fixed.  Ok, so it's not always Christmas fault, I mean Christmas didn't kill my girls three years ago, but whatever.  The week of Christmas is always a major problem that I can't just handle like I would be able to handle it any other week of the year.

I tried this year.  I really did.  I got a Christmas tree, it's decorated, shit, I even made most of the ornaments on it!  We came up with a plan for Christmas day, K got the girls special Christmas Eve jammies to sleep in, I seriously tried to unScrooge this year.  And yet, it nearly killed us all.  I'm off to google what kind of damage breathing in methane for a week or so has done to us.

Humbug!

No comment

Today is the third anniversary.  There are no comments to make about it, but I can't let it be forgotten.

Language associations

We've spent the last 10 days watching baby TV and cleaning up snot.  I was going to try to make it the full 2 years recommended before allowing your children any screen time, but I don't have the energy to keep them occupied and they feel like crud and don't want to be occupied by fun stuff so TV has been our saving grace.  It's going to be rough turning it off again once I'm feeling better and up to entertaining them.

However, the girls have been demonstrating some major learning leaps.  Middie Biddie's language is exploding.  A few things they've learned this week -

• Teeny Tiny will follow the directions from the TV.  When the squirrels hide the acorn, she knows to clap her hands when the one searching gets close to it, even without being reminded by the TV character to do so.
• Middie Biddie now calls any plate of food "eggies".  Mostly because that's almost always what they eat when they get up from their nap and I when I get them up, I'll say something like "it's time to have eggies and then we'll play".  
• For diaper changes, we've been using a spare phone to keep them occupied so they won't fight us.  Believe me, they usually win the fight, so anything to keep them happy and lying still!  On the spare phone, we've downloaded My Singing Monsters and the most prominent sound is the white monster singing "bum, bu bum....buuuuum bu bummmm".  Middie Biddie now says "bom bom" when we head for the diaper changing station.
• Middie Biddie has also learned to say "down" when we're playing physical games where I lift her up and then drop her down.  She'll climb into the couch, stand up, and then drop to her butt saying "down".  She's quite pleased with herself when she does this.
• Teeny Tiny now taps on counting books because we will tap and count things when reading them.
• Middie Biddie gives kisses!  She used to just kind of bow her head if you were looking at her and asked for a kiss (we're more of a cheek or forehead kissing household), but now she's participating in the kiss exchange!
• Teeny Tiny is fully waving bye bye and understands that it means goodbye.
• Middie Biddie is saying "ah da!", also known as "all done", but usually she's only repeating after me rather than communicating her own thought.
• Today, Middie Biddie said a sentence!  Watching the peekaboo show, she kept telling the character "I see you!"  This is the first time she's said something in context without it being repeating what someone else prompted her to say.  I captured a minute of this on video.

So there we have it.  "Bom bom" means diaper change, "eggies" means plate of food, and "down" or sometimes "upda" as in "up/down" means she wants to be lifted and manhandled around.