Holiday snippets
{christmas traditions}
December ended up being crazier than we anticipated. D had been job hunting, knowing he needed a new job by January 1st. He landed a great one mid-December, and we're both super grateful, but they needed him immediately and the transition was hectic for us on the home front. Hence the desperate searching for dog walkers* and some frantic schedule juggling on our end, complicated a bit by some family illnesses that ended up meaning a lot of back and forth to OC. Luckily I get some time off around the holidays, so we had two weeks of full blown crazy and then a bit of a reprieve, which I used to crank out about a million Christmas cookies, probably because I was still running on adrenaline.
We had the annual gingerbread house party and it was good to get back into the tradition. It was smaller this year, which I think was a nice way to get us back in the swing of things.
I divided up all the cookies into platters for each festivity (we celebrate at three different houses between Christmas Eve and Christmas) plus boxes for our drop in visits at other places. This year I tried making an identification key for the cookie boxes. I just arranged all the cookies in the boxes and then wrote the names on a sheet of parchment paper.
The holiday itself was lovely. We don't exchange gifts anymore, so we just sit around and drink champagne and eat cookies most of the day.
Okay, we did get gifts for Circe, because we couldn't resist. D's grandmother bought her this crazy ball with little noise sliders inside and it's amazing - she has never loved anything so much in her entire life. She'll play with it until she's panting and about to drop from exhaustion and we finally take it away from her. Then she gets a drink of water and begs for it again. Of course, we can't let her play with it much in our apartment (we're upstairs, and we're not assholes) but we've started taking her out to an empty lot so she can get her time in.
January 1st kind of passed me by. I haven't done my budget. I haven't even sat down and had time for reflection. I threw a baby shower for my sister over the weekend (more on that tomorrow!) and I have one more baby shower to help with this weekend and then I think I'll sit down and reflect a bit. I'm not big on firm resolutions, but I have the feeling that this could be a transitional year with lots of changes and I'd like some time to get my head on straight.
Hope you all had a wonderful December!
*We did find a dog walker and I'm so glad, because the transition has been heart breaking enough as it is. Poor Circe is having a difficult time adjusting. Maybe I'll post later on everything we're doing to try to make it easier, although I'm afraid it will completely expose me as the most dog obsessed person ever. Seriously, I feel like the only way I could be weirder was if I actually quit my job just to stay home with her.
