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Our River To Skate Away On

The month of December is traditionally very, very busy for our family and even with me being home with Maggie it hasn’t slowed down. Don’t misunderstand me, it is a month full of fun events with friends and family that we care deeply for; however, usually by the time we greet the new year, Barry and I both feel like we haven’t had a chance to really connect or even relax. For years and years we’ve talked of getting away for a weekend and it just has never really happened for whatever reason and we get through the busy time and promise the next year will be different.

This year we made sure that we carved out a time for our family to relax and unwind before the whirlwind really begins. This past weekend we went and stayed in a fancy-pants hotel for a couple nights and soaked up life away from home….even though we were less than 30 minutes away from home sweet home. Sydney got to guard from our hotel window, Maggie got to carry the ice bucket from floor to floor, Barry got to practice jumping on the bed and I got to wear the hotel robe as if it were a princess dress. It was ALL good.

We tend to thrive on being together and this weekend was no exception. Being home is just that….HOME, but being away sometimes has its perks. We’ve been blasting Angus Stone’s version of Joni Mitchell’s “River” in anticipation of this exciting time and I feel like we’re ready to go now that we’ve had a bit of reprieve from the coming events.

 

 

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Spitfire

 

Today is one of those days that I feel really lucky to be a mom….or really, really lucky to be Maggie’s mom. Last week I spent most of the time obsessing over her temperature, fluids and food intake. We didn’t really leave our house and it was pretty pitiful and sad. There really isn’t anything worse than having a sick child.

But she’s back. In full force and it seems that while on the upswing, she picked up a little bit more feistiness and spitfire. I’m drinking it up because having her flop on me and do nothing just wasn’t right. So today when I thought she was flouncing on the bed getting ready to fall asleep, as I’d left her 15 minutes before,  and I found her trying to get her boots on in the front room to come outside and hang Christmas lights with Izak and Me, I had to laugh.

I also found that she’d pulled off four or five of the ornaments off our tree and was piling them up sing-songing, “ball, ball, ball!”

We’ve been working on just smelling the tree, but last night after she got her HO, HO, HO jammies on, we asked her if we could take her picture in front of the tree and she nearly knocked it over because she was as close to “in front of the tree” as she could be without knocking it over.

Without trying to fall over ourselves from laughing at her, we gently reminded her that the tree is for smelling or looking at, not for hugging. We were able to distract her with some books and she worked for a really, really long time to get her boots on.

The girl loves boots and we’re entering into a very independent stage right now because she’ll work for a long time trying to put on shoes, coats and even pants. Sometimes I admire her perseverance and desire to do it alone, but sometimes I know that if she’d just let us help, we’d be on our merry way much sooner.

But life isn’t really about going along the merry way sooner, I believe it is more about stopping and smelling the roses ~ or in our case the Christmas tree.

I’ve still got last week’s sicky feeling imprinted in my brain and our inablility to do much other than be home, so I’m fine if we’re taking a bit longer go zip up our coats or squeeze our feet into boots because it sure beats sicky-poo baby any old day.

Little Miss I Can Do It Myself & Mama