the underwear drawer

it's beginning to look a lot like

When I'm not at work or busy searching eBay for used bulk lego blocks by the pound (I know, used toys, they could be tubercular, but I got a whole shitload of used Duplo bricks off eBay a few years and it was the best thirty-something bucks plus shipping I ever spent), sometimes I like to interact with my kids. Here are a few pictures from this weekend, in which everyone has recovered from their various maladies and Mack proves that his eyebrows do occasionally point in a direction other than down:






Anyway, not to belabor the point (Kids. Cute. Done.) but I do love that last one wherein Mack is busting a tiny little move. (He's Stirring the Pot of Love, of course.) Also, yes, it has warmed up here since last weekend.


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I am basically trying to forget that Thanksgiving is coming up, because I am on call for Thanksgiving weekend (all four days--but just the day parts of the days, someone else is covering the nights) and if I can forget that it's a holiday instead of a regular call weekend it'll be far less depressing. Now that we don't live near family Thanksgiving has been generally depressing for the last two years anyway--our first year in Atlanta we tried to fend for ourselves (the less said about the cooking of our Thanksgiving dinner, the better) and last year we very kindly got invited to one of my co-worker's homes for Thanksgiving lunch, which was very nice not to mention very tasty--but just served to remind us that we were these sort of pathetically unmoored figures that require taking in, like The Old Lady At Church Whose Husband Is Dead, or That Guy Who Hangs Out In The Periodicals Section Of The Library But Is Basically Harmless. This year, I figure I'll just skip over the Thanksgiving part of things altogether (except for the giving thanks part--very thankful for many things, of course) and go straight to the Christmas preparation, which, to be perfectly honest, is something that I've been desperately waiting for since before last year's Christmas tree came down.

I like Christmas is all.

I'm trying to emphasize to Cal, as I do every year, that the importance of the holiday (at least in the secular way that we celebrate the Christmas) is family and togetherness and blah blah blah Gift of the Magi, but he's reached the age now where the mere smell of pine is enough to trigger a Pavlovian response of OMG SANTA CANDY CANES PRESENTS!!! Still, I don't want to be a total killjoy about the thing and it's not like he's overly materialistic or anything so what the hell, just let him enjoy the freaking presents.

Mack didn't have a very good Christmas last year--he had a cold going into it and got his flu shot two days before Christmas Eve, and while I don't blame the flu shot for his illness, the combination of these two events (something something cytokines?) made him a febrile, snotty, miserable mess who alternately sobbed and slept through the entire holiday. I am determined to make it up to him this year (not like it was my fault or anything, but he was still very little and I felt bad) but the problem with Mack is that all he generally requires to be happy is a fistful of pretzels and a stool to climb up on in order to reach the knife block, and these are difficult to incorporate into our holiday celebration.

Actually, the real problem is that he's the second child, the second boy child, and anything we could possibly think of to get him (trains, little cars, grating Wiggles DVDs) we already accrued for Cal the first time around. So we're kind of at a loss when it comes to what to get him. Again, not that the holidays are about PRESENTS and GETTING STUFF and the most pleasant part of my Christmas is sitting around in my pajamas watching my kids not kill each other--but I do want to be able to get him something special aside from, of course, my undying love, especially since meanwhile Cal is going to be building some kind of Lego Universe with the spoils of his holiday gift bounty.

Anyone else have second child syndrome when it comes to gift giving? I know that gifts aren't important and that kids don't really know the difference and this is all very First World Problems, but...I just like to watch their faces when they open the presents, you know? That's my Christmas present. And I'm not particular, I'll wrap anything to put under the tree. One year I wrapped a pack of Raisinettes.