December

This month is flying by. We were only just able to get our Christmas tree on Friday night. The advent calendar is entering the home stretch. Menus are being planned and travel times calculated. We'll be hosting Christmas eve festivities at our house with my family and then heading north to celebrate the 25th with Jeff's family. We are mostly finished with shopping and are just awaiting all the deliveries from online purchases. Work is busy for Jeff and picking back up for me and the kittens are totally bananas. Jeff's new evening look is to sport an Old Fashioned in one hand and a spray bottle in the other; just waiting to pop the kitties when they try to slap the Christmas tree/drink water from my glass/climb the leather chair. Edie's annual Christmas cold is pending, but I'm confident that she'll wake up sick any day now.

We spent some time with Santa on Friday and Edie was A-dorable. She hugged Santa right away, and when prompted, quickly blurted out that she wanted, "Bunny slippers, a Russian Bunny, and ballet slippers." Since I'm sure Santa was a little wtf about what a "russian bunny" was, he decided to focus his energy on the request he understood - ballet slippers. Here he is demonstrating dancing on your toes while Edie excitedly clutches her Santa Pez dispenser - which incidentally was very important because she was extremely confident that Santa would think it was amazing that she had a tiny Santa that spit candy out when you pulled his head back. I love so much that I gave birth to the kind of kid who bum rushes Santa.

 We came home from that visit to read the news about Connecticut. I really have no words. And so much has already been said by others. Rather than explore all the feelings of gratitude for my own life and terror for my child's future that it invoked, I'm opting to let others perform the post-mortem. The internet just feels too informal a place to talk about something so real.