Christmas Eve

I face a dilemma a lot of the time with these posts. Like, I can make them as long as I want (due to having approximately a zillion pictures) and describe absolutely everything or as short as I want and say Christmas was great, I had a break that was 2 weeks about a decade long, and here's a picture of our tree and stockings. The end.

But BAHAHA that's not my style. No, I like to bore everyone silly with the details so it might take me a few posts, but we'll get through it. My "regular" life resumed today in full force, and I have paid next to no attention to it for the past two weeks, so this first one will be short.

Christmas began for Jason and I on December 23. We left the boys and set out for some last minute toy shopping. I had ordered a lot of stuff from Amazon but surprisingly didn't have a lot for Ashton to open. We headed to Toys R Us when, what to my wondering eyes did appear?

Where were the Duplos? Certainly not here!

Luckily we picked out some other stuff and Ashton was none the wiser. But note to self: you get beat by parents everywhere if you wait until December 23rd for popular toys. Womp womp. There happened to be an employee when I turned around, and, seeing my look of disbelief, he said, "There's a truck unloading RIGHT NOW, I don't know what's on it, but I could find out!" Such a nice little elf, I laughed and said no thanks, that's not necessary, I would never be that desperate can I climb in it and see??

But the best part of our shopping day was going out to lunch. A seemingly simple thing but it rarely happens and when it does, our kids are there. We sat at the bar and ordered a couple of beers like normal people! We had so much fun together and that night, I started to wrap all the madness while Jason put together a "super duper track" as Ashton later called it.

See that green box in the foreground? That's one of Ashton's old toys that we pulled out of the basement and rewrapped for Alex. Good as new!

The next day was Christmas Eve. Alex woke up not feeling good at all. He would just crawl around and cry, and after his first nap he had a fever of 103.5. I called the pedi at 11:55 am, of course they were closing at 12 pm, and told me to go to the emergency room. Having ridden in this rodeo before, I took a deep breath and started to pack up (Jason was out doing a last minute errand). I called Papa for a second opinion (hi Papa!) and after a cool bath and a dose of Advil, Alex's temperature had come down 3 degrees. We stayed home (Alex continued to be miserable for days, I did finally take him to the pedi in Long Island on the 27th just to rule out flu, ear infection, etc. and it was all negative, but it was rough). So that's all I really remember about Christmas Eve, freaking out that Alex was sick. He went to bed early though and I set Ashton up to decorate cookies for Santa. I simply can't believe how big he is.

And then of course we left some "cawwots" for the reindeer. It was all very exciting and the entire set up process can be viewed here complete with prancing (on Ashton's part ;) )

After his bedtime, Jason and I put all the presents out, had a nightcap, and strategically crumbled the cookies and broke off bits of the carrots (you think I was going to put my mouth on those things?). When I was young, this extra proof that Santa had come sent us into a tizzy almost as much as the presents: "Look he drank the milk! Look he ate the cookies! He liked them!! AHHHHH!!!" And then we would rush to the window to see if we could see sleigh tracks and reindeer footprints.

We were off to a very good start. Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night ;)