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!

Big news in McLaughlin land.

First, baby sister has taken her first bite of real food. (So long as you don’t count those candy wrappers). She is an eating machine just like her sister. She loves her booby cereal and after each bite she licks her lips with her little tongue. It is so cute. I had forgotten that those first few meal most of the food ends up everywhere but their stomach and Leina got a real kick out of watching Kulia spit up almost every bite. Unfortunately, Leina’s amusement quickly turned to desire.

She wanted to feed Kulia.

So here I am, trying to feed Kulia with Leina literally hanging on my arm yelling, “my turn, my turn!” It was chaos so I finally relented and passed Leina the spoon. She carefully scooped up some rice cereal and held it in front of Kulia. Kulia opened wide and Leina jammed that spoon down her throat! Poor baby! She started gagging and I quickly pulled the spoon back out again. Leina, of course, was thrilled by this and immediately wanted to feed her another bite. As a compromise, I let Leina scoop up a bite and then we held the spoon together to feed Kulia. Leina was laughing and clapping and telling her sister, “good job!” after every slurp. I just wish I got it on camera ’cause it was too precious for words.

The fun doesn’t stop there. Oh no. Things are hopping here as our new bed has arrived! Yes, after years of sleeping on The Worse Mattress Ever, we have arrived. We had been saving up for a new bed all year but we totally drained our new bed funds to zero paying for our airline tickets to San Diego. We were resigned to waiting another year while we re-saved when my parents announced they were going to buy us our bed as our Christmas present! Kevin actually got a little teary-eyed when he learned our bed was once again a reality. So we loaded up the kids and hit the bed store. We waited until one hour before closing on a Sunday to strike. Kevin took the girls and chased Leina around the store while I bargained away. Our tactics paid off because we walked away with a great bed at a great price and it was delivered yesterday.

So last night, we Slept. Heavenly. No creaking or rolling into eachother. In fact, because we up-sized to a queen, we didn’t even touch eachother all night. It was strange. And today, Leina, Kulia and I all lay on it watching Sesame Street and I wasn’t afraid of Kulia toppling off the edge because suddenly there was more than enough room for all. Ahh, I can’t wait to hit the hay tonight. I just wish I didn’t have to wake up at 3am and get out of bed. Sigh. Well, hopefully the solid food will help sister sleep longer. Here’s hoping!

One of Kevin’s Christmas traditions is Satsuma Oranges. I had never really heard of these fruit before I met Kevin but his family tradition was a box of Satsumas under the tree at Christmas time. So every year for the last few Christmases we’ve gotten a box to keep his tradition alive.

Flash forward to Monday. I’m at Safeway with little one strapped to my chest and the big one in the front basket of the shopping cart. Little one is alternating between chewing the carrier and spitting up all over me. Big one is eating a donut and vibrating in the seat from the rust of sugar. We are almost done with the shopping and are powering through the produce aisle when Leina spots the Satsumas.

“Oh, mommy, can we get some oranges pwease?” she asks, tidbits of sugar glaze falling from her lips.

“Sure honey, daddy loves these oranges.” I reply and sling a box into our cart.

“Can I eat one now pwease?” Leina asks and rubs her sticky fingers on my shirt sleeve.

“No honey, we have to pay first, we can have one when we get home.” I reply and head toward the cashier.

When we get home and I manage to lug everyone and everything inside. Leina remembers my promise and demands a Satsuma. I pull one out of the box and begin to peel it but Leina snatches it away exclaiming she can do it herself. Happy she is occupied, I turn my back and begin unpacking the groceries.

A few minutes later, Leina approaches with a wedge of orange. Amazingly enough she has managed to peel the Satsuma, place the peel in the garbage and tear apart the wedges. I happily eat the orange offered to me and continue my unloading.

Imagine my surprise when Leina appears again by my knee offering up yet another orange. I eat this one as well. A bit slower mind you. But it’s still tasty. Now the third orange, not so tasty. And the fourth? I think that day I ending up eating six Satsumas and poor Kevin got tackled with another four when he came home. It appears our eldest loves to peel the Satsumas. She has no interest in eating more than a nibble or two. Oh no, she saves the eating part for her poor parents. I think the box came with about 30 oranges on Monday.

We have 8 left.

If I have to take another bite of orange I may lose mind. Even Kevin looked a little green this morning after Leina fed him a few more for breakfast. I’m thinking we may have to retire the Satsuma tradition this year ’cause if I see another orange wedge, I may run for my life with Kevin close at my heels.