happy december! (otherwise titled '24 days to go!')

it's december! hooray!

i celebrated by having a bagel instead of my normal raisin bran. it's a yummy cranberry bagel, ones that only come out at christmas time. delicious :)

elisha's first tooth is ready to pop through any time. it's weird to see a teeny baby chewing on her hands, usually at this age they're just discovering they HAVE hands and watching them quietly or sometimes sucking a finger when it gets too close to their mouth. but elisha is cramming her whole fist in her mouth. we have pictures but they're on my husbands camera and i have no clue where the cord is to upload the evidence. so you'll have to wait.

she's also gotten a her first cold. it's a real 'juicy' one, lots of mucas and congestion. so we're using the snot-sucker as needed, and we even have one upstairs and one downstairs for our own convenience. reese brought this cold home from school about 3 weeks ago and it's taking forever to get over...averaging about a week per child, but they all still have a nasty sounding cough. so i just give them some more orange juice and hope it goes away soon. i'm sure it will, just in time for the next round of sickies.

i think i'm passing on the flu shot for the kids this year. according to our pediatrician, we SHOULD get it, since elisha is so tiny but we've gotten the flu shot every year since we started having babies in the house and i think it's just useless. after joining a parenting board, i'm more worried than ever about vaccines and their side effects. i think it's absurd that the chicken pox vaccine (varicella) is required for entrance into preschool or kindergarten. unfortunately, for reese to attend preschool, she had to have it; seems that the school district is telling ME how to care for my child's health. since cade is not in daycare, he won't have it until he has to enter school...same with elisha. i just don't see what is the benefit of the varicella vaccine....is it just so kids won't miss a week or more of classes with chicken pox? so it won't wipe out a whole class for a week or more?

i had the pox (how medieval sounding!) when i was a baby, under 2 years of age. i frightened my mom with my high fever and febrile seizures, but i think that's pretty uncommon to have with the chicken pox. i don't remember any of it. i think the vaccine needs to be studied more before it becomes school policy. too late for many districts though.

we're heading to iowa for christmas. this is really turning into a national lampoon's road trip. 3 kids and a dog in a minivan....add in a dad that stops for every starbucks and a mom that continually tells the dad to slow down and that would be us. how, in 5 short years, did i go from newlywed to mother of 3? from 0 to frumpy in 5 years flat. speaking of, this month marks when elisha was conceived (i think pearl harbor day was the big day...let's just say our sex life is pretty easy to track) and december 30th marks when i found out i was pregnant with her. the last year has just ZOOMED past. how does time go so fast???

when it comes to christmas music, i'm pretty traditional. i found a double cd set in bath & body works that i bought on a whim (for $10, and a $1 of that goes to a charity of some sort...i figured what the heck). it's a pretty good album with some big names (they could have left off the pussycat dolls...do they belong on a christmas album? no.). for some non-traditional christmas music, i recommend it.