It is almost unreal when a day that required so much preparation has come and gone in the blink of an eye. This year it really hit me that these Christmas times when everything is special and magic are a fleeting thing. It was worse than getting kicked in the gut, or turning 34. One day I too will have a living room filled with self-entitled teenagers who literally expect nothing less than the latest 400.00 portable video game player that does your homework and picks up hot chicks for you.

This year the big demand was for a 30.00 RC Spiderman plane and a Weeble tree house. As usual Hipster D and I went a little crazy buying everything we saw that we would have wanted if we were an almost 4 year old and 1 and 1/2 respectively. My house looks like the bowels of Toys R Us cracked open and showered down a teeming hell rain of plastic, battery eating objects.
This will go down as a Christmas to remember for several reasons. The first of which, we stayed at home the entire day. We were about 5 minutes from out the door when we received a phone call that my niece was sick and they were on their way to the emergency room. Of course since she is 21 and was complaining of a stiff neck, meningitis was mentioned. Needless to say, we decided to kick it at the crib. Five hours later it was decided that it was merely a bad sinus infection and oh how we all laughed (bullshit!). We had spent the entire morning baking cookies and making yummy garlic mashed potatoes for jack. No, no one in our family is named Jack.

After living like I had a clean up staff all morning, we discovered we mysteriously had no hot water. What we didn’t immediately realize was that we had no heat either. Thank god it has been unusually warm the past few days, but no heat sucks anytime it isn’t August. Several days of boiling wash water “Little House on the Prairie” style we are finally back on dishwasher mode.

It’s hard when you put so much in these “magical” Christmases, wanting everything to be special and memorable. You never know what these kids are going to come up with in therapy one day. This Christmas wasn’t anymore especially horrible than any other day where a smattering of things go wrong. It was just more noticeable because with small children, you spend the entire year dreaming of how perfect it will be for them. It’s like how girls dream of their wedding day, go nuts planning it, and then you finally find out that when you are actually marrying the right person, it’s so huge the entire day is like a dream. Hipster D still has to ask me whether or not certain people were at our wedding because you really just don’t remember all the little details. I guess the kids won’t remember any of the little things either, and when you take out those, this Chrsitmas rocked!

Everyone with a kid, or who has ever known a kid for that matter knows this, kids = germs (isn’t that a Lysol commercial?). Everyone in this entire house has been sick in one form or another since about mid-December. Blogging and taking care of sick peanuts doesn’t necessarily mix, so I apologize for the vast expanse between posts. Not only that, I feel like I am as behind as I have ever been as far as my holiday tasks are concerned. So without further ado, I shall start off with my list to Santa…

Dear Santa,

This year I would like to ask if you could possibly hook me up with a series of no less than 30 seconds where I do not have to think about anything. No planning Christmas parties, birthday festivities, making doctor appointments, or wiping butts, no holiday shopping, weight gain or loss, or what the hell the baby is currently chewing on, climbing up, or spitting out.

Admittedly I have a couple of 30 second stretches every day, but I have to use those to pee so I don’t think they count. And don’t try to be smart and give me some meditation books or classes, because then I will have to think about how not to think and that is even more of a pain in the ass than thinking in the first place.

Also, world peace.

Thanks,
T

How could you not love a kid who wants Santa to bring him these?

At-man will be four in January. Every year I promise I will get it together and plan out his birthday party months in advance, and every year it still sneaks up on me. This year is especially difficult because not only am I knee deep in yuletide festivities, but At-man has demanded to have a say in his party for the first time and he wants Spiderman all the way. I have always favored more open-ended themes, 1 was bubbles, 2 we had stars, and for 3 we had a fire truck cake and a trip to the fire station with all his friends. Since swinging from building to building on a spider web shot from your own wrist is completely out of the question for a 4 year old, I’m sort of stumped. Not that Spiderman isn’t cool, I’m sure he’s a great guy. He just doesn’t exactly bring out the Martha in me.

I can’t believe how much you can miss about someone who is not quite four years old. I have said all along and still believe that every year older he becomes is my new favorite age. He has gone from being a baby to being more like a friend. A friend that cares entirely nothing about anything I say, but hey, don’t we all have a few friends like that?

I think the thing I am going to miss most as he grows is the little At-isims he uses to replace any word he can’t pronounce. All kids have these and no two are the same. At-man started with Ya-yo, his term for yellow. I always thought it was so cute, and then one day it was gone, replaced by plain old yellow. I still miss it. One we only recently lost was yo-grit. It was his favorite food for a while so it came up often. Now that the holidays are upon us, we have been watching the Snoofie Christmas Special. I think the P sound must take a while to get down. At the ripe age of three and 11/12ths he has all ready decided that when he gets out of college he is going to be either an aster-not, or a science-tist. He’s not sure. Even now, as I sit here writing this I have been informed that Em is playing with leck-tris-ty (yes I stepped away from the computer for that one). I think the reason I miss and will miss these sayings so much is that they are so few and far between. This kid could correctly say Constantinople, and sarcophagus at 2 years old.

You know how whenever you get together with a bunch of elderly family members they all have these little incomplete snippets of you childhood to share? I just can’t bare the idea of losing the memory of ya-yo. Hopefully now that I’ve gotten this out of my system I can focus on Spidey a bit better.

Running shoe cake

I believe deep down inside every hipster is the heart of a great big geek. My not so cool side shines through whenever I start talking about cakes. While I am proud of my self for so far managing to avoid the resurgence of gauchos (I don’t care how hot, thin or tall you are - everyone looks four feet tall and four feet wide in these things, yes, even that chick from the Black-eyed Peas looks wrong in them), I’m even prouder of my cakes. I know they aren’t anything for the Food Network or a large scale celebrity wedding, but they make my kids happy.

Anyway, aside from the turcupcakens, here is my first gratuitous cake shot. It’s a cake I made a couple of weeks ago for my friend Nicole’s 40th birthday. She is a tri-athlete, hence the running shoe.

Thanks for humoring me while I display my inner geek.