Do you know how excited I am about this?!?

Baby's first Christmas!! It's going to be the utmost of adorableness, even though Holden will probably just be really confused. And while I'm late to the game on getting personalized Etsy awesomeness I was planning on for Christmas gifts ("no longer accepting holiday orders"...oops, I should have started these projects before Thanksgiving), I was totally on the ball with ordering Holden a really cute first Christmas ornament. Now it just needs the perfect spot on the tree.

My little helper

It can be a bit of a juggling act to get everything in the door each night...diaper bag from daycare, pump bag, purse, mail, phone, random assorted crap that often includes a travel mug (source of that much needed morning coffee boost)...oh yeah, and the baby! Don't forget the baby! So tonight Holden was my little helper and held onto the travel mug for me as I hauled us all inside. According to the grin below, it was a really awesome and exciting adventure.

Thank you, my little helper. No, you don't yet get an allowance for helping out. I fully expect you to carry the travel mug in every day now.

Also, my baby is currently rocking some highwater pants because he has crazy long legs (that I swear grow another inch overnight) and is also kinda skinny, which makes it a little tricky to find pants that are long enough but don't slide off. Baby leggings for the win! Obviously those are all dirty, which is why his baby sweatpants have inched up to his knees. At least his socks are still on - minor victory.

Real food? What is this?

We started cereal with Holden a few weeks ago, and while he was a little hesitant at first ("ummm, excuse me, but WHAT is this stuff??")...we now have quite the cereal expert on our hands. Definitely a learning curve for both of us in the best methods for successfully navigating food to his mouth and actually into his tummy, and sometimes I really think his favorite part of "mealtime" is banging on the highchair tray with his extra "play" spoon (strategically used for distraction and the "oh look, here's your spoon...fake out, here's Mommy's spoon with cereal, yum yum yum!").

Time to move on to fruits and veggies! We'll see if I'm motivated to whip up homemade batches of baby deliciousness on the weekends...hmmm...

Thankful

Come Thanksgiving you used to find me taking pictures of pies. Now I pretty much just take pictures of my baby (it can't be helped, his adorableness attracts the camera!), so I really don't have any Thanksgiving shots to share with you that don't feature Holden in some form or fashion. Oh, but rest assured there were pies. This time only three for the six (and a half) of us, an extremely reasonable ratio.

As we scarfed down turkey and cornbread dressing and allll the other good stuff last Thursday, I paused for a moment and felt especially thankful for my amazing parents this year. I'm also really thankful for pie, but having a baby is kinda a big deal...and while coconut cream pie would have helped, I don't really know if I would have survived those first couple of weeks without my mom and dad by my side. Maybe more details on the survival of the early days will be provided a little later, and maybe not - I got a little teary just thinking about it now, so apparently six months later the waves of exhaustion and newborn terror are still palpable. So for now I'll continue to pause briefly and say thank to my parents. For everything. Absolutely everything.

Holden enjoying some naptime with Grandpa over Thanksgiving weekend...

...and doing the same thing six months ago when he was almost a week old.

Can you believe how much he's grown and changed?!? Me either.

So, I disappeared...

...into a world of busy season and baby and LIFE and heeeere I am, alive and well!! And in the spirit of playing catch up, I'm going to try to blog every day in December. Just putting that out there while I'm feeling a small burst of optimism and motivation. So it may not actually happen, but I'm going to try. Some days it may just be a picture of Holden, which is probably all you really want anyway.

And in the interest of not trying too hard right off the bat and hurting myself, we're going to start on a light note with some silly faces. I like to call this Holden's "little old man lips" look; he's been sporting it quite a bit these days, probably as a side effect of figuring out these two teeth he has. He's entirely too much fun and giggly and happy, so I try to soak up as much of it as I possibly can. Rock on, little old man lips - I love you.