Holiday Hits and Misses

We are home (and have been for a few days....it just has taken me awhile to clear a track to the computer through all of the presents, Christmas do-dads, and discarded boxes)! Here are some Hits and Misses from our holidays:

1. Out of four flights, Isaac only melted-down on the final five minutes of the very last flight. Why does five minutes of your baby crying bloody-murder feel like five hours? Besides that tiny episode of tears, Isaac was a perfect traveler....even on the day we had to get him up at 4:15am to catch a flight. (Near Miss)

2.The two trauma-provoking toys of Christmas 2006 are a stuffed giraffe backpack (which I love) and the Fisher Price Learning Puppy. Isaac cowers in fear at the sight of both toys......we really aren't sure why. Yes, the learning Puppy sings songs in a strange voice which could explain some hesitancy, but the giraffe backpack simply sits there harmlessly waiting to be loved. Oh well. He was afraid of a train he got for his birthday for about three months and now he loves it. (Miss...but sure to be a hit soon)

3. Our crawler is officially a walker. Yeah! The walking is going great and we are so glad this child will not one day crawl into kindergarten. His new thing is to come up to me and either grab my finger or open and shut his hand rapidly until I place my finger inside of his hand so that he can lead me somewhere important. He still reverts to crawling at times, but we can remind him to walk somewhere and he will. (BIG Hit!)

4.By our fifth Christmas celebration, Isaac finally understood the concept of unwrapping gifts. This lack of desire for tearing paper off of packages really worked to our advantage this holiday season....not once did Isaac bother the Christmas tree or presents stashed underneath. (Hit)

5.We can now open a Fisher Price Little People Museum in our home. After Isaac opened all of his Christmas presents, we can set up our own Little People town for hours of enjoyment. I don't know who is more excited....Isaac or me! (Hit)

6. The crud. Isaac's nose started running on Wednesday night and is getting ickier by the day. Currently he is hacking up a lung while he naps next door in the nursery. It hasn't seemed to slow him down and we keep up the medicine at regular intervals. We hope to avoid anything major this time (Potential miss....stay tuned!)

7. Sleeping. Isaac did great sleeping on all of our travels. When he was quite small we put him on a very good and consistent schedule for eating and sleeping and have stuck with it. This has turned someone who was not a good sleeper as a newborn into an excellent sleeper by month four of life. The boy giggles when you put him to bed out of sheer joy. A few weeks before we set out on our holiday travels I had Isaac practice resting on my chest (with blankie and giraffe) before I would place him into bed. Sometimes he would even fall asleep this way. I did this so that if he wasn't sleeping well while traveling (and for one leg of a flight when we needed him to nap) I could get him to go to sleep with a bit of help. The plan worked and came in quite handy in the middle of one night when he could not get comfortable and was a bit distraught. He and I ended up sharing a bed and he slept peacefully the rest of the night with his face inches from mine (I did not sleep peacefully in fear that I would smush him in the middle of the night or mistake him for an extra pillow). We don't cosleep here at casa de Phillips so this was a rare treat for him (Tobe takes his life in his hands each night while sharing a bed with me---i am a horrible sleeper---so I think CPS would be called out if we ever let young children share our bed). (Hit)

8. As always, Tobe managed to find creative and thoughtful Christmas presents for me despite the fact that I could not think of one thing I wanted for Christmas. Two of these presents came from James Avery...yippee! (Big, Big HIT!)

9. The biggest HIT of our Christmas season is that on December 22 we found out that Phillips' baby number 2 is a GIRL!!! Our ever-thoughtful OBGYN rescheduled our sonogram for before Christmas rather than the originally planned after-Christmas date so that we could know what this baby is in time for the holiday season. We are thrilled!!!!! Although I have not officially discussed the sonogram with my doctor, everything looks good with this baby and she is growing right on schedule. We are about 99.9% sure of a name.....Evelyn Kathleen. Because no one knew that we had this sonogram scheduled, we gave our parents a Christmas present revealing the gender of our unborn child. It was a pre-packaged present that I picked up at a local boutique which contained a pink onesie reading, "Little Sis + Big Brother =Heart" and a t-shirt that reads "Big Brother + Little Sis = Heart." Cute, huh? Well two of our parents both originally thought we were having twins. Nooooo.... I believe that shirt would read "Three children under the age of two + One stay at home mom = Looney Bin." (MAJOR Hit!)

Hope everyone had a peaceful Christmas and a happy New Year. Christmas pictures to come as soon as we download them from our camera!