As we started decorating tonight Kulia found our Xmas hats:

Doing much better today.

Kevin took the day off – thankfully – and we bundled up the girls and headed to Sleighbells to cut down our Christmas Tree. It was nice and empty since it was a weekday and we wandered the fields a happy little family. Kevin’s outside stringing the last of the lights and I’m impatiently waiting for Leina to wake from her nap so we can start decorating the tree.

It hit me last night why I’m so down. This is the first Christmas that Leina understands. She’s so excited for Santa and his reindeer to visit. She keeps asking where her stockings are and why we don’t have a tree. At night we walk around ohhhhing and ahhhing at the crazy neighborhood lights. I so want to kick our family traditions into gear.

I want to make Kulia her own felt stocking. I want Kevin to lift Leina up to place our angel at the top of the tree. I want to show Leina all the cool ornaments that have been handed down to us for our parents and grandparents. I want to see her eyes glow when she sees all the twinkly lights on our tree. I want to lie under the branches with her and gaze up at all ornaments just like I used to with my sister.

See, all we needed was one day to catch our breath and rub our sore feet. Now, we’re back Jack!

S come on kid, wake up already! There’s a tree that needs trimming!

Haven’t had much time to blog. Kevin and I are in triage mode right now. He’s slammed at work and is working 12 hour days and weekends. I’m juggling both girls single handedly which is ok except Kulia is having a horrible time with her teeth. Too add fuel to the fire, she had her six month check up and received FIVE shots. Unbelievable. I thought she was grumpy before. Ha! She turned into a screaming ball of adorable chub tonight. Her screaming freaked Leina out and she begain yelling “mommy, what’s wrong with sister? Mommy, mommy, hold me! I’m scared!” At one point I had both of them 9in my arms crying and clinging to me. I must say that as a mom, I have developed incredable upper body strength!

Kevin stumbled home at 7pm to help get the kids to bed and then dragged himself back into work. He didn’t even eat dinner or shave today so he looks as ragged as he feels. I broke down in tears last night right in the middle of washing a huge pile of dishes just from feeling so overwhelmed. Yup, it’s definately Christmas time! Time to run around like crazy trying to cram everything into on measly month. Sigh.

I’m doing much better today. I had a beer with dinner and I must say, I’m feeling rather….floaty. It’s been 15 months since I’ve had a beer so I’m afraid the alcohol has gone, voosh, right to my head. Rather pleasent really.

The girls are great. Leina is loving her advent calendar. Every morning we check off another day and she gets a little present. Today, she found cocktail umbrellas in her Advent box. You know, those little paper umbrellas they put in tropical drinks? She adored opening, closing and twirling them. She tucked them behind her ear or held them over Kulia’s head to keep the pretend rain off. They were quite a hit.

Kulia? Well, she is scaring the pants off me. She’s clocking in at a whopping 18lb 10oz right now. Even more frightening, she’s getting up on all fours and rocking back and forth with the most manical gleem in her eye. And you know what that means.

Crawling.

Yup, I predict she’ll be tearing around the house by Christmas time and it keeps me up nights just thinking about it. I remember what a handful Leina was when she started crawling and Leina was 1 year old. She understood “no” and “don’t touch.” Kulia, at a mere six months old, is not even close to understanding that. I have horribly vivid dreams of me chasing after her as she speeds around the house stuffing everything that isn’t nailed down into her mouth.

Gonna need a lot mroe beer.

So excuse the lack of posts but Kevin and I are running a marathon right now and until we get out from under this horribly busy time, it’s going to be a long slog. It would help if they stopped moving the finish line on us but hey, such is life.

Kulia is sitting on the ground stuffing everything within reach into her mouth.

Typical.

Artie wanders up and begins to voraciously lick her face as if it is covered in peanut butter.

Typical.

Kevin witnesses this licking and says, “not the face, Artie! Not the face!”

Artie continues to lick.

Kevin, exasperated, blurts out “what part of ‘not the face’ do you not understand dog?”

I begin laughling. “Um, probably, ‘not’, ‘the’, and ‘face’?”

Kevin sends me stink eye and pulls the dog away from our youngest who seems a bit sad to see his big slobbery tongue leave.

Yes, another typical day at the McLaughlin home.

I have uncontroverted proof of alien life.

The small child sleeping upstairs right now is not baby sister. Oh no, it is definately a body snatching alien from the planet Cranky.

I must say that this replicated alien baby is very life-like. To the untrained eye, it looks and sounds just like sister. However, I am not just your ordinary person. I am a Mother. As such, I have super powers. One of which is that I know every square inch of my child. And while the aliens did a very good job replicating Kulia, they made one very small mistake. Now, a normal person would not notice this minor detail but to Mom, well, it’s a giant red-flag.

This alien baby has two white swollen spots on the front of her lower jaw.

Now, my real child, Kulia, has no swollen mouth bits and it the sweetest, happiest, creature to bless this planet. The thing sleeping fitfully upstairs is a cranky, screamy little thing with tooth buds. Clearly, not my child.

Having discovered this discrepancy, I am now at a loss. How, exactly, does one contact the ET’s and demand return of your child? ‘Cause I can tell you I want my sweet baby girl back. This fussy crying baby is definately not fun. No sir.

I’ve tried aluminum foil antenia and have placed large X’s made of masking tape in sister’s window in the hopes of contacting whatever Being stole my child. I’ve heard dosing the alien intruder with Infant Tylenol and/or Motrim has, in some instances, caused the real child to be returned. Something about the alien’s metabolism being unable to synthesize the cherry flavoring in the medicine. I’ve tried both methods and so far, no help. I’m moving on to placing extremely cold objects in the alien baby’s mouth in hopes that this will trigger the return of my sweet child but if this fails, I’m out of ideas.

The good news is that, according to my sources, your child will always be returned sometime after a lunar even know as the Two Year Molars. However, this planetary alignment seems depressingly far away so if there are any short-cuts you know of, I’m all ears.

The Thanksgiving feast was still warm when Kevin ran into the garage to unearth the Christmas decorations. He loaded up our CD player with Christmas tunes and started unwinding our Christmas lights. All I could think of was, “who is this man?”

Kevin hated Christmas. He used to complain about how early is started. He bemoaned listening to my John Denver and the Muppets CD. He poo-poo’d Christmas trees and was often caught stomping around using the phrase “humbug”.

And now? Well, lets just say, just like old Ebenezer, Kevin has come to embrace the Christmas spirit with as much joy and enthusiasum as old Scrooge himself. He gleeful ran to Target to select another moving reindeer for our lawn display and I swear last night he had visions of air blown lawn polar bears dancing through his head. But by far, my favorite part of Christmas is watching Kevin hang the christmas house lights.

The people who lived here before us kindly placed hooks all long our house eaves so hanging the lights is a simple matter of placing the cord into the hooks and plugging the strands in. We only have two strands of lights which outline the eave about our front door and over our garage. Nothing special. I would budget 30 minutes to untangle and test the blubs and 30 minutes to hang the lights. So imagine my surprise when Kevin went outside to hang the lights at 11am and returned defeated at 5pm. Yes, he spent approximately six hours trying to hang lights. The story goes something like this.

Kevin untangled and checked the lights no problem. He then hung them, no problem. At this point, Kevin noticed that our neighbors had outlined not only their garage but their second story roof line as well. Kevin’s little brain started thinking and before you could say “we wish you a merry christmas” he had popped the screen on the bonus room window and was walking around the roof. He decided to run the lights up to the roof top just like our neighbor. This he did. He then went to plug them in only to realize that he had strung the two strands plug to plug instead of plug to socket. So he started to take a strand down and they slipped from his hand. Smcrack! The lights hit the driveway and a bunch shattered. Undaunted, Kevin decided to go buy replacement bulbs. Yes, the fool actually went shopping on weekend after Thanksgiving. After driving around fruitlessly and finding the parking lots packed and the shelves empty, Kevin arrived home with the only strand of lights he could find. They were purple, yellow and green transparent bulbs. Realizing how bizarre it would look to have two conflicting strands of lights, Kevin set out to blend the bulbs together. This involved removing the other strand and interspacing the transparent bulbs with the ceramic bulbs. Once this was done, he was back out the window and up on the roof trying to hang the light. Unfortunately, he noticed it was getting a tad hard to see what with the sun having set, and so he had to call it a day. So imagine my surprise upon viewing 6 hours of work. We have two strands of oddly mixing lights snaking half way across our house.

And the best part? Kevin had to work yesterday and today so it looks like the lights will remain unhung for another week at least.

I shudder to think how long it will take him to put up our lawn reindeer. Fa la la la la baby!