Family
While it seems a bit strange to by typing this, my brother and his band are gracing the pages of GQ this month. Yes. My brother. My baby brother is in GQ.
INSANITY if you ask me.
The other day Lucas asked me to look at the pic of uncle Lew in the magazine. Upon inspecting the picture, he looks up at me and asks, in a seriousness "Is Uncle Lew in the Jonas Brothers?"
It's amazing the reach that Disney has into the minds of our youth..
We are in recovery mode here. It's 5:20 PM and Lucas is still in his PJs (his choice, he wouldn't let me change him. And as part of my fave parental motto of "pick your battles", I didn't fight him on it) and we are surrounded by a mess of some kind or another.
We spent 4 days with my parent in LA and it was wonderful. I can't tell you how nice it was to have 2 extra people to entertain Lucas or hold the crying baby or cook us breakfast, lunch and dinner. Jason and I even escaped to a movie. It was like a vacation. I'm telling you, people are quick to bring dinner over the week you get home from the hospital with the baby - I say wait. Wait until the baby is 6-7 weeks old and the parents are really frazzled and sleep deprived. Because having someone else worry about one thing (like nutrition) for a few days, was heavenly.
We finally went to get our Santa pics taken. We went to the Grove mall in LA and waited for an embarrassing long 1 hour and 45 minutes to see the man with the bag, got to the front of the line to learn that their camera was broken. THANK the lord we had our camera with us. And yes, that is Zoë "the tiny-nosed reindeer.."
Christmas eve was my parent's annual rocking Xmas eve celebration. We drank and ate.. well, others ate and drank. I nursed. Most of the night. I'm glad my outfit matched my "hooter hider" since that was my main accessory of the evening. Oh, that and spit up. And baby, that was the cutest accessory of the night in my opinion.
Lucas awoke on Christmas morning to a tree flooded in a lake of presents. Since I can't seem to find the time to eat or even pee these days, I'm FOREVER grateful that they took on "Santa duties" or Lucas would have had a pad of paper and a half eaten apple to open on Xmas morning. But instead he had a spectacular array of plastic and color in various shapes like spaceship, balls and cars. The highlight of the morning was when Lucas noticed the large brightly colored stuffed dragon (since named "Furfee") nestled amongst the brightly wrapped presents. He ran over to the dragon, hugged it tight then ran to the window, waved to the sky and screamed "Oh, THANK YOU Santa Claus! Thank you!"
And then, we were spent..
In celebration of her first Christmas, Zoë 
was lucky enough to receive her very first "blue box" from my godmother, Liz. Something that she SHOULD have been way more excited about, but instead it appears that she looks down at her Tiffany box.. from the look on her face it seems that she is horrified that we would be excited by that box and that she wants to scream "MOM! Do you KNOW about the blood diamond controversy in Africa?!" Upon second glance, she also appears to look at bit like Clare Danes in the "My so called life" days.
And just because I never pass up the chance for a good photo opp:
P.S. - if you didn't get enough of your Zoe and Lucas picture fix, there are way more here..
As a parent around the holidays, you want to do all these things to create fabulous memories of the season for your kids. In 20 years I want to show them pictures and videos of when they were little and the beginnings of all the wonderful holiday traditions you still force upon them to that day. One of those perfect Hallmark commercial traditions I insist on forcing BECAUSE ITS FUN DAMN IT is cookie making. What could be more fun for a 3 1/2 year old than rolling and cutting out candy cane, gingerbread men and star shapes in the soft cookie dough? Oh, I don't know.. maybe EATING the raw cookie dough? Or throwing it? Or rolling it, throwing it and then eating it?
As we were frosting the cookies I laid the ground rules. NO EATING the cookies or the frosting. I turn around for one minute to shift through the cabinet for more food coloring and when I turn back, Lucas is literally spooning the sugar frosting into his mouth.
Hhhhmmm.. what do you think happens when your already hyper preschooler consumes about a cup of sugar frosting?
So happy that my baby is a girl.. a sweet, calm baby girl..