Quick 5

Having a Christmas tree in my living room makes me happy.

1.  To counteract a couple of the more unfortunate aspects of pregnancy, I've been eating some hard-core fiber cereal.  The cereal boasts 40% of your daily fiber intake in each serving, along with only 1g of sugar, so you can imagine how it tastes.  It's not so bad after I add another tablespoon or so of sugar to it.  Anyway, it's made from wheat berry flakes and straight up flax seed.  The problem is we're still having trouble with a certain brazen rodent, and the flax seed bears an uncanny resemblance to mouse scat.  I literally have to tell myself with each bite that I am NOT eating mouse poop. 

2.  Speaking of our unwanted house guest, that little booger is getting super brave.  We're starting to see him most days, shortly after the girls are both in bed.  He boldly trolls around under our dining room table, which is in full view of our living room where we are sitting each night.  Apparently he does not care that we can see him.  And it vexes us.

3.  Poor little Joya.  She woke up at midnight on Monday (Tuesday?) and puked in her bed.  She ran a fever all day Tuesday and part of Wednesday.  Then the stomach bug moved into her lower intestines and have been causing her MUCH discomfort ever since.  We even ended up at the doctor's office yesterday evening because she was crying so much about it.  I was pretty concerned about it being a UTI or something, but I'm more convinced that it is just related to the stomach bug and is truly in her intestines.  We spent an hour at the doctor's office trying to get a sample to test for a UTI, but the girl would not pee on command.  So I brought her home with the supplies and she STILL wouldn't give me anything.  I'll see what the doc says about it, but I'm starting to think if she has this much control over it, then maybe she's ready to potty train.  Anyway, she's mostly her normal, cheerful self and that's good news. 

4.  We don't do Santa around here.  It's really just a non-issue.  We've never told her that Santa comes, but we've never made a huge deal about him not being real either.  I suppose he's just a part of Christmas decorations to the girls.  But Aunt Mindy gave them an Elf on the Shelf book last year, so I brought it out this year.  We read the story and named the elf (Jingles.)  And then I started moving him around each night.  And Alaina is simply baffled at how he gets in his new spot each day.  I guess you don't have to make a big deal about magic for kids to latch on and believe. 

5.  We've lived in our house for six months now.  There are still a few boxes to be unpacked, and much decorating to do, which I am aware is very lame.  I've been threatening to just take the unpacked boxes to the Salvation Army.  We haven't needed any of that stuff for six months, so surely we won't be sad to live without it.  Maybe my New Year's resolution will be to follow through on that.  Anyway, our walls are still fairly bare, and it's made decorating for Christmas difficult.  I have plenty of stuff on hang on the walls, and I'd usually just put it where something else belongs.  But I don't want to create new holes in the walls just to hang Christmas stuff, without a plan to replace it with something in January.  So I had to put away most of our stuff this year.  Our living room is nice and festive, and the rest of the house looks like it always does: bare and sad.

And that's all she wrote.  Merry Christmas!