Christmas 2021
Christmas morning started with a bang - well a few of them actually. I was so busy I hadn’t looked out the window to notice all the ice that had accumulated overnight. We live on a pretty steep hill, so when my attention was finally pulled outside, there were two cars off in front of our house and a few more at the bottom of the hill.
Our neighbors were already out trying to help, but they couldn’t even stay on their feet on the road. I sent Tom out with some salt to see if it would help. For the next hour, the kids and I got to watch everything from people skating down the hill to the backhoe pulling cars out of the ditch - really if you’re going to get in an accident, this isn’t the worst place to do it! On that vein, it also helps that our neighbor’s son works for the next town over and was out salting the roads. Since our town wasn’t doing much, my neighbor got her son to do a quick detour and get our street salted.
Thankfully no one was hurt and all were able to get to their celebrations eventually. It was a fun distraction that slowed down the opening of presents. We did our normal opening of stockings with a break for breakfast before opening the big presents under the tree. It helps that the stockings had a large amount of candy (if you remember that was all E wanted for Christmas) and that took them a while to consume. It was certainly more popular than the cinnamon buns we made.
Overall it was a week of high emotions, of course. Holidays are tough for kids - on top of schedule changes, there’s a lot going on, and emotions stay just at the surface. Excitement over Christmas and the anticipation of presents, plus the added highs and lows that go along with a pre-Christmas visit from family, just meant it was a week of barely controlled chaos.
Sometimes it manifested as jumping up and down with glee, but sometimes it was random tears. It meant that our kids who usually do fine with goodbyes were instead hiding in the bathroom crying. A while later I thought we’d gotten over that emotional hurdle and had decided to do a nice calm activity, so we were cuddled up on a couch together to watch a Christmas movie. Halfway through I noticed something was off, so I asked E if he was okay. He turned to me with tears running down his cheeks “Why won’t the tears go away??”
The week messed with baby F too. Babies love schedules even more than preschoolers, so after one super exciting day where a lot of naps were skipped or shortened it all came out at once when we were trying to put her to sleep for the night. She was hungry and overtired and gassy and screaming, which wasn’t helping any of it. All of the usual tricks weren’t working. I reassured myself by reminding myself that all crying babies will eventually tire themselves out and pass out… except an hour into the screaming, it wasn’t happening. We’d swaddled, we’d tried a dark room with white noise. Handing her off to different people - she was not calming down.
I ended up feeding her over my mom’s shoulder while she bounced her up and down and sang “Three Little Birds” to her before she eventually calmed down and went to sleep. After that we spent a little bit more time making sure she stuck to her schedule, so thankfully that was the worst day for her.
When it came time to actually open presents on Christamas morning, we got all kinds of reactions. One child’s reaction to his presents was: “No. This is not fun! I don’t like all my presents. None of my presents I like!” The other child’s reaction was “This is so big!! This is my whole life! Wow! What is this!? What is it??” Both children have since been playing with their toys equally, and I know better than to judge things off the in the moment reactions.
That same day the same child said both “Mama is so bad! She doesn’t let us do everything we want!” and “I love you mama. Know why? Because you’re nice.” It’s a pretty good summary of the whole week - just complete emotional whiplash. It’s exhausting for me, but also exhausting for them - at least there were some awesome naps as a result.
I’m not recapping this all to say the week was bad - it was actually exactly what I expected with three small children, and I loved watching them experience it all. Christmas was a ton of fun, and most of these memories make me smile.