holidays rock

Two years ago, I was immersed in my own living hell. I normally enjoy the holidays, but instead of getting to celebrate them with my new baby, I was deep in mourning - angry, bitter, depressed, and perhaps a bit overly self-medicated. During last year's holidays, I was heavily pregnant and practically paralyzed with anxiety. I hated leaving the house because every well-meaning comment about my pregnancy made me feel jinxed, twitchy, tortured.

This year's holidays are effing awesome. I had the best Thanksgiving of my life, cooking for a day and a half while Ellie crawled around on the kitchen floor, pulling herself up on the kitchen stool and the baby gates and anything else she could get her hands on, playing with a wooden spoon, grinning her snaggle-toothed grin.

During the weekend, we put up the Christmas decorations together, while listening to John Denver & the Muppets sing Christmas carols. My cup runneth over, truly. It is beyond wonderful to share these experiences with her.

Later this month, we're going to my favorite beach with our mothers, and then my dad and stepmom will come out to celebrate Christmas with us. The only damper is that we won't get to see my brother & SIL during the holidays this year. It always feels weird when I don't see my brother at the holidays; we grew up with divorced parents, so we alternated locations for the holidays, but we were always together. I'm sure we'll get to skype at least, though - technology is a very good thing in cases like these.

Ellie's doing all kinds of cute stuff these days. Her favorite thing is standing, and sometimes she'll cruise just for a few steps along the furniture. She likes to do "So big!" and, while she's been waving for more than a month, she's now starting to wave at culturally expected times (ie "Hello" and "Bye-bye"). She's eating a ton of different foods, and we can give her table food now, either ground up or cut into really small pieces. She freaking loved the green bean casserole at Thanksgiving; she was a little more skeptical of the turkey, but at least she ate it - her first meat. She loves being read to, and her favorite book is still "Barnyard Dance", possibly with "The Going to Bed Book" as her second favorite.

To say that I'm looking forward to next month is quite the understatement. I can't wait to show Ellie the ocean, for one thing. And regardless of what presents she gets for Christmas, I know she's going to have a blast playing with all the wrapping paper.

In other news, since my last post, we've gone on a couple of hikes with this awesome baby pack a coworker gave me, and swung on the swings in our neighborhood park for the first time. Other various fun activities included playing with cool toys, attempting to pet our dogs & cats, and, well, more standing and waving (while being extremely pleased with ourselves about this accomplishment). The party never stops around here!