Hi all-
I don’t know if anyone else is crazy enough to do this, but I feel like every Christmas holiday we are running a marathon. I mean, that's what the holidays are about, right? Seeing everyone you love? And it IS tons of fun. But it involves different people in different cities and lots and lots of driving. This year was no exception. We clocked in at 21 hours of driving, 6 bathroom breaks, 5 movies, 4 drive-thru windows, 2 stops at Cracker Barrel, 1 600 page book read by me while Peter drove, and thousands of calories consumed by eating candy to stave off the boredom in the car. It’s always 100% worth it when we get there but I always feel like we’ve been on tour or something. By the end I am having physical cravings for my own bed in my own house with my own family. Not that I don’t have a ton of fun along the way but home is gooood. Let me rephrase- not having to sleep in the same room as your kids is good. What is it with the noises that they make in the middle of the night? Whoever came up with the whole ‘sleep like a baby thing’ obviously didn’t have a baby. Or maybe they were just trying to mess with the rest of us.
This holiday was a little weird though. It was our first Christmas without Big Pete but it was our first Christmas with our sweet Aibek so it was sadness and happiness flip-flopping back and forth the whole time. There was one particularly psychotic episode on my part when Peter was gone and I was taking out Christmas stuff for Rin. I couldn’t get this bear that Pete had given us who reads The Night Before Christmas to read the frigging story for Aibek and I flipped out and pretty much took the thing apart trying to make it work. I stopped when I realized that both of my kids were sitting there looking at me like I had lost my mind. I guess I might have gone crazy for just a short minute. It just seems to hit at unexpected times when I have my guard down and comes out of nowhere to smack me around for a bit and the retreats again. But I digress.
As I mentioned before, it took me a little while to get into the spirit at all. It wasn’t until I got harassed by our little RinCakes who was drilling me relentlessly about when exactly we were going to get our tree and how long until Santa came and if the reindeer would come in the house too on and on and on and we finally gave in and went to get a tree and it finally hit me that this was all new to our little Bekerpies. And from then on I decided to be excited for his sake (and Rin’s) no matter how I was feeling myself. And with each stocking that we hung and each little Christmas tchotchke that Rin found a place for in our new house I felt myself getting more and more excited about it. Rin was an old hat at the whole thing but for Bek it was an entirely new experience and it was fun to be there for his first one. He was excited about the tree, the decorating, the train ride, the random fun stuff placed around the house, and even a little bit about Santa even though you’d never know it.
We had our fancy Christmas Eve dinner as our family of four (first one!), we left cookies for Santa, and then it was time for our little men to rest their sleepy heads. And finally after a month of Rin asking "How many more days?", we got to the big day when the kids get to rush downstairs to see what Santa brought them. I thought Rin's head was going to explode with excitement about the whole thing. It’s only this year that he’s started to care about getting stuff. It’s always been fun but it was sort of a surprise when people gave him things before. This is the first year that he expected it. And it did not necessarily lead to the best behavior. No worries, I’m working on it. It doesn’t help that there is not just Christmas but also both his AND Bek’s birthdays during our holiday tour. It’s a gift-getting extravaganza with three times the amount of toys.
But I have to say that Rin was exceedingly patient on Christmas morning and waited a whole 10 minutes after waking us up to absolutely insist that it was time to wake Bek up and go downstairs. How could I resist my sweet excited little boy? His excitement was the best Christmas gift I got this year (last year, just for the record, it was Bek. Bek is the best gift of all time). Rin raced downstairs and was in a gift opening frenzy. He got more and more excited with each gift that he tore into. He did however slow down enough to make sure everyone had something to open before he began and he was incredibly patient with confused little Bek who spent most of the morning trying to figure out what in the world was going on. Sweet big brother Rin showed him how to rip the paper off and get at the good stuff and it was pretty much the only time he sat still all morning. And once he was done opening the gifts under the tree, he asked, “Alright, when are we going to see GigiMar?” And it was off to pack and hop in the car to head a few hours down south to see the fam. And thus started the East Coast Christmas Tour.
More to come. Love to all, -m
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