Christmas retrospective

Wow, I can't believe how long it's been since I posted anything. I'm just soooo tiiiiiired. I had a total burst of energy for the past month, until about a week ago when my energy dissipated and just crashed. Anil and I did some major nesting around the house before that though. We're at the point now where if the baby decides that she's ready, we're ready enough. Since New Years though, I've felt exhausted, all of the time. That's only going to get worse though from here on out, so here's to trying to get back on the horse.

Here is our family portrait for Christmas 2009. We decorated our Charlie Brown tree, hung our three stockings (one for Anil, me, and Bailey... there'll be four next year) on the stairs, and draped snowflake lights below the windows. Those big boxes on the right were the baby's crib and changing table. I'm proud to report that only one of those boxes is still there, and it should be gone by this weekend (that's the crib--the final frontier).

Christmas was a wonderfully relaxing day for us, since it was still just us. Really all we've been doing since Christmas has been indulging in being able to stay up late watching movies, sleep in, make pancakes, and basically do whatever we want. Those days are definitely numbered. So Anil and I stayed in the house all day on Christmas--we ate pancakes and then made pizzas for dinner. We had grand plans to see "Sherlock Holmes," but we never made it out. (We did see it last Sunday though--highly recommended! I stayed awake and only had to pee twice, so it was worth the ticket price.) We watched the first season of "Mad Men" for a lot of the day. I'm saving the rest of the TV-on-DVD sets that I got on Thanksgiving sales for after the baby arrives and we're sequestered, rocking, and pacing day and night, but I thought, since "Mad Men" is supposed to be kind of slow and detail-oriented, that we should watch the first season when we could still devote some real attention to it and didn't have to pause it every fifteen minutes for one reason or another. But, of course, that meant that once we started it we were completely addicted and ran through the rest of the first season at an embarrassingly rapid pace.

For Christmas Eve, we went to our friends' house and made a festive feast of beef brisket roast, vegetables and gravy. I even made a spinach dip that my family in Richmond has always made for holidays, and I served it with the traditional bag of Fritos--it's the best. We're so lucky that one of my best friends from college and her boyfriend live right down the street from us, so we've shared lots of holidays and dinners up here. She's also an anesthesia resident, so I'm enlisting her this month to help me practice getting into position for an epidural. We watched some of the 24 hour loop of "A Christmas Story" that starts every Christmas Eve on TNT; I don't know how that movie never gets old. A friend from my work who joined us for dinner actually got a Red Rider BB Gun from his mom for Christmas last year (and for the record, so far, he still has both eyes).

Another tradition of Christmas is for me to make Anil and Bailey crazy by tying on Bailey's Santa hat and taking a picture. Bailey instantly gets this look in his eyes that is pure sulk, and Anil protests the whole time, but I love it.