Normally, we get Christmas decorations down about a week or so after the New Year, allowing trees to stay up with a Super Bowl deadline. We're jolly people and all that crap.
This year, within 48 hours of Santa's departure, all of his baubles were gone, too.
I'm dead serious when I state that the husband and I haven't had Christmas trees down before February in, oh, the near decade we've been together. They're just so pretty and twinkly...and time consuming and depressing to take down! So the Big Game has become our end-point, if only because we really needed to give ourselves one.
But shit's about to get real here. Christmas Day also happened to coincide with gestation week #37. Yup, a holiday baby. I'd ask what we were thinking, but honestly, we weren't when we were just trying to get and stay pregnant, dammit!
Timing wasn't a consideration. And in true V-family fashion, this kid ruined Christmas.
My nesting kicked in 3rd trimester, which in my case means cooking and Excel spreadsheets. Lots of baking and to-do lists as long as I am tall (which, in my defense, isn't THAT tall...). Unfortunately, my husband's nesting instincts didn't kick in until, oh, December 15th. So all hell broke loose when he finally realized, um, we're about to have a demanding, smelly, albeit adorable new person shacking up with us.
Shopping barely got done because hauling my massive self around Pittsburgh has become exhausting. (Dear Amazon. THANK YOU.) I couldn't have cared less if the inside decorations were put up as long as the outside was festive enough to compete with the neighbors (we lucked out in that, of the two closest, one was having roof construction and the other had a death in the family...so standards were lower than usual). The stupid shelf elf wound up doing a lot of boring stuff, if he remembered to move at all. And both real trees kept falling down. That was fun. But we had 85+ dozen cookies toshare with friends and family eat all by ourselves! I have my priorities perfectly straight.
Anyway. Christmas fell way down the list. We pulled it off enough to not scar the kids with memories of "The Darkest Holiday Season," but the two of us were completely over it by 12/26. Probably before that, but we're great actors.
And now we wait. Because everyone forgets how miserable these last few weeks are, between the anticipation and the planning and the uncertainty of when the little one is going to grace us with its presence. But Mama has had it, and so has her bladder. I've never in my life looked forward to February, but this just might be the year that Christmas was cut short AND the ugliest month of the year was celebrated.
This year, within 48 hours of Santa's departure, all of his baubles were gone, too.
I'm dead serious when I state that the husband and I haven't had Christmas trees down before February in, oh, the near decade we've been together. They're just so pretty and twinkly...and time consuming and depressing to take down! So the Big Game has become our end-point, if only because we really needed to give ourselves one.
But shit's about to get real here. Christmas Day also happened to coincide with gestation week #37. Yup, a holiday baby. I'd ask what we were thinking, but honestly, we weren't when we were just trying to get and stay pregnant, dammit!
Timing wasn't a consideration. And in true V-family fashion, this kid ruined Christmas.
My nesting kicked in 3rd trimester, which in my case means cooking and Excel spreadsheets. Lots of baking and to-do lists as long as I am tall (which, in my defense, isn't THAT tall...). Unfortunately, my husband's nesting instincts didn't kick in until, oh, December 15th. So all hell broke loose when he finally realized, um, we're about to have a demanding, smelly, albeit adorable new person shacking up with us.
Shopping barely got done because hauling my massive self around Pittsburgh has become exhausting. (Dear Amazon. THANK YOU.) I couldn't have cared less if the inside decorations were put up as long as the outside was festive enough to compete with the neighbors (we lucked out in that, of the two closest, one was having roof construction and the other had a death in the family...so standards were lower than usual). The stupid shelf elf wound up doing a lot of boring stuff, if he remembered to move at all. And both real trees kept falling down. That was fun. But we had 85+ dozen cookies to
Anyway. Christmas fell way down the list. We pulled it off enough to not scar the kids with memories of "The Darkest Holiday Season," but the two of us were completely over it by 12/26. Probably before that, but we're great actors.
And now we wait. Because everyone forgets how miserable these last few weeks are, between the anticipation and the planning and the uncertainty of when the little one is going to grace us with its presence. But Mama has had it, and so has her bladder. I've never in my life looked forward to February, but this just might be the year that Christmas was cut short AND the ugliest month of the year was celebrated.
