Christmas and home again

Well, the presents are all unwrapped, it's bare under the tree once again, and Eleanor's new toys are strewn everywhere. It seems like Christmas was just yesterday, but no, it was in fact 5 days ago, and we celebrated several states to the east with my family in New Hampshire. We're just too lazy to put all these new toys away...even though I did manage to fill a whole laundry bag up with "old" toys and bring it up to the attic to make room for the new ones. We might be seeing a toy chest in our future.

All in all, we had a great holiday week with our family, filled with lots of our favorite things: cut-out cookies (a Ben favorite), downhill skiing (Heather), LOTS of dogs (Ellie), fondue (Heather), doing computer things for my dad (...Ben?), eating out and eating often (all of us), AWESOME PRESENTS, and seeing all of our big family!

The only hitch in the entire wonderful week were the two crumby 14.5- and 15.5-hour drives that bookended our vacation. The first drive we left around Ellie's bedtime and hoped to simply drive through the night, baby sleeping soundly; however, she did not understand this and took 2 hours to go to sleep, and then proceeded to wake up and cry at every toll booth and gas stop we made along the way. The result: thanks to a borrowed car DVD player, we were all enjoying Sesame Street videos at 1am. That and a wrong turn that we didn't know about until 40 miles later which forced us to take an impromtu alternate route left the first journey less than easy. On the return trip, we tried a different method of leaving at around 1pm in the afternoon, hoping to arrive in Ann Arbor around 2am. The baby aspect of this drive went incredibly well, she was very good and watched a lot of Sesame Street videos (Thomas the Train proved too boring). The unexpected aspects were having to take 2 45-minute breaks during the day for Eleanor to get some energy out at rest stops, and then a surprise snow storm outside of Cleveland that turned a simple 100-mile drive into a 3 hour white-knuckled experience where we passed several cars that had spun off the road into ditches. After checking the weather radar via my dad on the cell phone, we decided to hold strong and drive it out, but I was close to calling it a night and pulling over to a Motel 6. We pulled in our driveway around 4:40am, and fell into our beds, exhausted. Eleanor surprised us both by sleeping in until close to 10am, so we did get some sleep before Ben headed off to work for a half-day. I get tired just remembering this trip!

Now we are all home again, but our poor house isn't quite in tip-top shape yet. We are almost all unpacked, but still have loads of laundry to do and boxes to put away and new toys to find storage spaces for. We are having 2 families from our baby play group over tomorrow for dinner (since none of us can really go out for actual New Years with our dear babies in tow), so I am going to "dream the impossible dream" and plan on all this junk being picked up and food being cooked and ready by 6pm tomorrow, just in time for Ben and all our guests to walk in the door.

My musical rehearsals for NINE are back in full swing- we thankfully get tomorrow and the weekend off, but our show opens up in 2 weeks from tomorrow, so we're really trying to polish things up and get ready!

We forgot to bring our camera to New Hampshire (and amazingly that's the only thing we forgot), so no pics to post yet...


HAPPY NEW YEAR, FRIENDS and FAMILY!

Ellie's 18-month check up

Hi friends and family,
Today Ellie went to her 18-month check up and she's right on track!
Her stats:
35 3/4 inches tall, 100% percentile (she's been 100% in height since 2 months old)
29.06 lbs, 95% percentile (actually this is the lowest percentile she's been since she was a week old)

She's the height and weight of a 50% percentile 2 1/2 year-old, and she's 1 1/2 years old ;)
So yes, she's a big little girl, but as the doctor points out, she's simply following the growth curve (side track-- just got to clean up Italian dressing off the carpet. She's curious too, ps.), her growth curve just started out higher than most babies and continues to be high.

Eleanor also got her second H1N1 booster shot, so she is all immunized. I just heard today from the nurse that the H1N1 vaccines are now available for the general public, so hopefully I can get one sometime soon.

A funny side note- while waiting to see the doctor, we found out there was another little girl (maybe 4?) named Eleanor there as well. The confusion arose when the nurse called for "Eleanor" and we both stood up ;)

Eleanor now recognized the song "Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer" when she hears it on the radio, and will point to her nose. We've been watching a few holiday clips on the computer, and she knew Frosty was a snowman when we first saw him (we have many snowman ornaments on our Christmas tree that she can locate if you ask her, too).

Excited to see some of you soon!