It has already begun

Note the bling bling.

This is the first time, but I'm sure it won't be the last. 

Dear Santa Letters

Eliza's note to Santa: [with translations]
Satu [Santa]
I love you beekus you giv us prezis [presents]
you are vare nis [very nice]
and uor elvz [your elves]
satu see you on christmas
marey christmas i love you plez bren me prezin

Sage’s note to Santa:
Dear Santa,
I HAVE BEEN GOOD but NOT PERFECT.  Will I still get presents and candy in my stocking?  I LIKE your "Ho Ho Ho!"  And there are some people who are giving us the twelve days of Christmas.  Do you know who they are?  Are they your elfs? (Ending of letter)  You don't have to give me any presents though.
Sincierly,
Sage Williams

Just so you know...

Taking a baby's handprint is harder than you'd think. 

  

And, for the record, I only applied paint to one tiny baby hand.  HE did the rest himself.  Our own little Jackson Pollock, in the flesh.  Or on the flesh.

 

 

Censorship

Remember that rhetorical question, "If you give a 2nd grader an email account?"  Well the answer is, she will probably begin reading your blog, and she might read the review you gave her review about the perfect chocolate chip cookie.  Then you might be in trouble.  Enough said. 

There were tears shed and a few insults hurled, which I probably deserved.  Then I sat at the computer (like a shamefaced teenager) with the aforementioned 2nd grader watching over my shoulder (like a disappointed mother), as I deleted the Offensive Post #1 from my oh-too-public blog.

My saving grace came through the many kind and complimentary comments about Sage's typing and Spanish, which I shared with her.  (Thank you, my friends!)

It made for a much less painful ending to my chastisement than the last time I was taken to task for my writing.  During my freshman year of high school, my physiology teacher gave us the assignment to write an anti-smoking pamphlet.  I decided to go the extra mile (I thought) and wrote a satirical pamphlet with such ridiculous things as "Everyone's going to die eventually, so who cares if you die when you're 20 (from smoking) as opposed to 75?" 

Okay, yeah, so it wasn't brilliant satire or logic.  But I certainly did not anticipate being invited to my teacher's office to be yelled at for ten straight minutes.  She repeatedly demanded, "What if this got into the wrong hands?!?", which led me to conclude that it certainly had.  I redid the assignment the "right way," which took 1/10th the time and creativity of my previous submission. 

Unfortunately, there were no kind blog comments back then to ease my teacher's pain or my own.  Which is why blogging is way better than going to high school.  (You can see I've been working on my logic.)  And also why I owe you all for saving my skin. 

One month old

Today my little baby boy, Christian, is one month old.  One month!?!  I'm not quite sure what I've been doing for the last month.  But it involves 1000ish tiny diapers, seeing all hours pass on the clock, and eating a lot of dark chocolate.

Being the math and number nerd that I am, I secretly hoped that I would go into labor on 11-11-11.  Which didn't happen.  I missed it by a few hours.  Next time (did I just say that?), I think I will try harder to conceive a few hours earlier.  But I’m not sore about it.  Really. Ahem.

It was two weeks before my due date, and I came home from a baby shower to take my standard try-not-to-get-a-migraine nap.  When I woke up, I had a few contractions.  Since I hadn't memorized "What to Expect When You're Expecting" (like I did with my first pregnancy), I felt a little rusty, so I appealed to Google.  I typed in "regular contractions," read a little bit, then stood up, and my water promptly broke. Which is why Google is the best invention on the planet.

I called Mark in a bit of a frenzy and said "My water broke.  Come home now."  And then I hung up on him.  Because there's nothing like a constant dripping of aminotic fluid down your legs to rattle your brain a little.

I made two important phone calls: one to dump the next day's Sunday School lesson off on someone else (how nice, because I had not started preparing yet), and the other to tell my mom to make haste, and then we were off, over the river and through the woods to the big H we go.  Labor was shockingly slow (compared to the last two)--only five total hours--which resulted in me actually being able to experience the "munch on ice chips" thing everyone talks about.  

Incidentally, they had blueberry ice chips, which I thought were super cool until I realized that our baby's scrapbook was going to be full of pictures of his blue-toothed mom.  I will be forever grateful to my friends who threw me the baby shower, because it caused me to actually have makeup on in my delivery pictures. (A first after four kids!)  The makeup was nice to offset the blue tint of my teeth.

Our little guy was little, just 6 pounds 3 ounces.

 

The girls were thrilled to meet him.  Lily showed up with Grandma in her witch costume, and apparently sang "I'm a Mean Old Witch" on her way up the elevator.  I wasn’t so concerned with the witch costume as with wondering when my [former] little baby turned into a giant.

 

Eliza wrote on her school paper: "I like my mom and I like my dad.  I love Criustin my babe bruthrr."  She loves to tell people about the time she saved his life by rescuing him from Lily, who picked him up without supporting his neck.

 

Sage will be a great big sister.  She's been the slowest to warm up to Christian, though.  Or, in other words, the only one to not smother him constantly, but she is pretty happy to have another family member with dark hair and possibly brown eyes.

All good things must end, and eventually it was time to leave the luxury of the hospital, with its full-time cleaning staff, menus, and room service that we will be paying for for a good long time, I'm sure.

I made sure we snapped enough pictures of ourselves from the perfect angle so I would have something to send out to announce our baby's birth that didn't show me in that glorious hospital gown with "Central Laundry" printed dead center.  Also my teeth were no longer blue.

We were met by a very adorable welcome home party. 

 

 My mom outdid herself with caring for our kids.  Eliza had made a cootie-catcher that she was thrilled to show off.  Sage had made a candy bar poster with leftover Halloween candy.  Lily had opened most of my baby showers gifts while I was gone.  The girls had all made Welcome Home signs and cards and even helped Grandma write a song about the new baby.

 

Here is (in the words of Eliza) the “little yellow man” himself (go away, jaundice).  Or, the “dorito baby” (burrito baby), if you listen to Lily.   But after one tiny trip to the name change office, we're now happy to call him Christian.

  Is that a smile or a grimace under that blanket?

 We love our baby boy, Christian.