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Phew, the craziness of Christmas is finally over! Okay, it wasn’t that bad, just exhausting. Christmas Eve we went to the Family Service at church. It was really well done and really included the little ones. I think that’ll have to be a tradition we continue from year to year. Christmas morning we dragged little D out of bed around 8:30 jingling bells and telling him that Santa had been there and that he had presents to open. He replied by saying “under my tree?”. Not really grasping the concept of Christmas he quickly became distracted and much to my husband’s dismay I called a halt to the proceedings with unopened gifts still under the tree. I mean there’s hardly any point in rushing the kid through opening his gifts when he’d much rather throw the paper over his head. Besides, we had to be in the car by 10:30 to get over to my Aunt’s house for 1:00 for my family’s gathering. It was really nice getting together as we don’t get much of a chance to see everyone (Aunt, Uncle, 3 cousins, Gran, Mum, Dad, Brother & his wife) and certainly not all at once. We are generally a loud boisterous family and this gathering was no exception. I miss it, and wish we could all get together more often. I made my big announcement (the pregnancy) via little D‘s shirt: “I’m going to be a big brother”. I’m all about the theatrics. We were going out for dinner this year (we used to go out years ago but have stayed home with turkey for the last say 20 years) instead of having my Gran cook for everyone. I liked this idea since my Gran always gets a bit frantic before hand and is constantly checking her watch worried about getting the food ready on time. It’s just not very relaxed, so I think going out was a much better choice. I mean she is 88, she should enjoy Christmas and not be worried about feeding everyone. At dinner everyone was super impressed at how well behaved little D was. I think I sometimes take that for-granted. He just is like that all the time. It really hit home when a kid much older than mine was shrieking at the top of his lungs about something and for a good 5-10 minutes before his parents bothered to do anything!
On to day two of our Christmas traveling. This time we were off to see his family. I sort of dread going up to see them only because it is so opposite of my family. Most of the time with my family you can’t get a word in edgewise and there is certainly never a dull moment. With his family there is only his Mom, sister and niece and certainly they are not even close to rowdy like my family can be. Even just visiting my Mum, we are constantly talking. Being around his family I feel this uncomfortable need to fill the silence, but I’m just not that social, so it’s just uncomfortable. This was no exception, and when you considered that we got there around 1:00 and didn’t go out to eat until 5:30 it made for a long day. When we got to the restaurant for our buffet dinner, we were told that they weren’t running the buffet that night. We were all pretty ticked off since the reservation had been made with that stipulation. We ended up getting 10% off our meals if we stayed and ordered from the menu, so that was at least something. I was starting to think I was on an episode of Hell’s Kitchen seeing as our meals took about 40 minutes to arrive. By the time we finished dinner and made the long drive home it was 9:30. I told hubby that next time we have to insist on an earlier dinner for little D‘s sake. Even though he sleeps all the way home in the car, it’s still a really long day.
Today was a total veg day. I really wanted to take little D to see a movie, but hubby didn’t want to go today “it’ll be too busy, you know how I hate crowds…”. Though I could have taken him myself, I thought it would be a nice family outing, so hopefully we’ll be going tomorrow. Although…part of me is thinking I should be trying to potty train starting tomorrow. Little D is going to be 3 in April, and I think it’s time, despite hubby thinking he’s too young. Anyone have any thought, comments, suggestions on the subject? Possibly like a shmuck I bought one of those potty-training guides off the Internet which make me believe that I can have him totally trained in 3 days or less. Am I kidding myself? I’m actually kind of nervous about it. What if he’s totally defiant about the whole thing? The guide says that once you start you should not stop or it’ll just confuse the kid and make it that much harder when you go to try again later. Isn’t there some potty-training school I could just send him off too, like doggy obedience school or something?

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