festive weekend

Eddie had a festive weekend despite his continual runny nose - he was congested shortly after Thanksgiving and the nose started running last Wednesday and is still going. Snotty face and sticky hands; this was my other idea for a blog entry since it seems like every kid right now has a cold. We have taught Eddie how to blow his nose, which is good, but he often runs away from me when I pull the tissue out. I apologize for the lack of focus, the lack of blog entries lately. But Eddie is now primarily only taking one nap which means I have even less time to myself to attack the computer - we cannot use the computer, or our cell phones, in Eddie's presence otherwise he pounces on the technology and throws a fit if we take it away from him.

Anyway, back to our weekend. In my family we celebrated St. Nicholas' Day, which is December 6th. St. Nicholas was believed to be the original 'Santa Claus' in the sense that he was the first to drop gifts down a chimney. The legend goes that a poor man's daughters did not have money for a dowry and one night St. Nick came and dropped gold coins down their chimney and the money landed in stockings they had left hung by the fire to dry. So on St. Nick's Eve we put out stockings and they get filled with little goodies by the morning. Eddie didn't put out a stocking per se, but I did let him pick out a stocking from the several we had. And it was filled with some new tinker toys and books that seemed to excited and overwhelm him. He was taken by the first item, a book, and didn't even think that there may be more in the stocking. So precious. He also attended a very festive holiday party on Saturday hosted by my husband's boss. We walked to the party, as they live only a few blocks away, and they even had a stroller valet...that was just the beginning of the extreme organization, thoughtfulness and over-the-topness of this party. Needless to say Eddie was mesmerized by all the commotion and as we were leaving squirmed away and ran back into the party; he is quite the social butterfly. On Sunday we had our friends Bryce & Hilary over with their baby Mack who is 11 weeks. And we walked down the street to Roscoe where they were having various holiday events and promotions at the stores. One store hosted Santa and so we took Eddie and baby Mack. We knew that Eddie would do one of three things, either stare intensely at him, smile at him or cry. I don't want to give away his reaction entirely because it will be a component of our Christmas card this year, but let's just say I don't think we adequately prepared him for what we were doing.



On Monday it snowed! The first snow of the year always makes me happy because it feels more genuinely like the Christmas season. I put on Eddie's new boots and he ran around in the snow giggling. Today it snowed more and I showed him how to make a snowball. Wow. That was really cool to him and he tried to replicate it.