Month: December 2010

The days are long, but the years are short. We made it through another year!

Because we are sans babysitter for a few weeks, we are juggling schedules and Jeremy and his mom were able to take Edda to occupational therapy last week and so I can post some photos of Edda having a pretty good session. Right now, Edda is getting only one private session of therapy a week which is with Deb, our favorite OT. We have no regular private PT or private speech. This past year, I decided to keep only therapies that Edda seemed to enjoy. We do have hippotherapy, although I don’t really consider it therapy because I don’t think it really does that much for Edda physically, rather I think of it as something like Hip-Hop Dance for Vince, something fun for Edda to do.

Deb and Edda spent the hour laughing and looking at each other and doing some pretty hard things for Edda to do. It always reminds us that we could do the same thing with Edda at home, but I have to admit, we don’t often work with Edda in the same way!

It’s a little dog-crazy in the house as we are dog sitting our cousin’s two pugs.
Four doggies in the house! It’s a lot more leashes to keep untangled on the walks around the neighborhood.

Here’s Josie:

Izzy:

Maxi (who was just chewing a bar of soap this afternoon):

and of course, Ruby.

Our Christmas Eve walk on the C and O canal…

Maxi found the squeeze-tube frosting on the bottom shelf of the pantry and managed to drag the tubes to the living room where she pierced it with her sharp little teeth and was rewarded with an artificially-dyed sugar high. So then when we went to use it to decorate cookies, the frosting oozed out from the toothy holes in the center of the tube and covered all little children from head-to-toe with frosting.

The table got covered with frosting.

Plates got covered with fingerprints!

Final products!

Eliana, our au pair for the past 18 months, flew home to Columbia this morning. We will miss her a lot, Edda the most! Jeremy and I could not manage our schedules without our wonderful childcare providers. We went out for lunch at the Silver Diner yesterday to thank her for everything she’s done for us. Jeremy and Eliana left for the airport at 4:30 this morning and Edda was awake and perky at that early hour after her nightly seizure – so she got to give an actual good-bye hug to Eliana as she left the house.

Vince and Edda were in their first Christmas pageant. Vince had a speaking role, he was cast as the innkeeper, with a wife and a daughter (both were older and taller than he was). He had the famous line – “I’m sorry, there is no room at the inn…” As we were driving to church this morning, he admitted that it was hard to have a wife. Why? I dunno. Here he is considering the strawberry cream cheese he put on his bagel.

Edda was a sheep in the stable. I’m not sure how excited she was about being a sheep, but I was pretty excited that I got to play her shepherd which is, of course, a metaphor of our roles in real life. Edda can be pretty loud sometimes, especially when everyone else is being quiet, so I was half hoping that she would be asleep during the play, but perhaps some holy spirit was watching out for us as she made it through the 30 minutes that she was on stage wide awake (not entirely thrilled) and hardly a peep (or a Baaaaa!)

These are photos from rehearsal yesterday, I wanted to share a photo of Mary being a little bit silly!

I am so lucky! I get to babysit these beauties during the Xmas holidays. I think it will be fun having 4 dogs, 2 kids and 2 in-laws, 1 husband and 1 tadpole in the house.

Last night we bundled up and headed out to downtown DC for Jeremy’s office Xmas party. In past years, it had been kind of a casual affair, good food, but usually 5-10 kids milling around. This time, it was in some sort of fancy – Dupont Circle restaurant. It was so fancy it had a tree with tea lights inside the restaurant.

And as it turned out that Vince and Edda were the only children in attendance. And I might have been the only one wearing a T-shirt with an astronaut on the front. Oh well. I had a good time (one glass of free wine and I’m automatically having a good time), and the restaurant entertained the kids with cookies that they could decorate with sprinkles prior to baking.

Edda said hello to a bunch of Jeremy’s coworkers who haven’t seen her since the last Xmas party and they all marveled how much taller she’s gotten (one person even said that she’s almost as tall as me! Yipes!)