The One with The Catch Up on Life Lately

Holy Lord, it's been forever since I've blogged.  Gotta blame that baby Jesus and His birthday...it's been flippin' nonstop over here since the beginning of December.

I'm pulling out the bullet points for this post.  More to come on most of the subjects but here's a rundown...

• Little Mr. Man is growing like a weed.  Up to 22 pounds, 6 ounces at his flu shot appointment earlier this month.  9 month clothes are becoming a thing of the past and he is in constant motion.

• 48 hours before the aforementioned baby Jesus' birthday, the stomach bug descended upon this house.  The jury is still out as to whether this was a case of food poisoning or whether it was a virus going around, but at least a dozen of the people we were with the Saturday before Christmas at a party ended up very sick by late Sunday afternoon.  At this point, we think it may have somehow been passed to everyone through a sick employee at the restaurant who ruined everyone's food with his/her throw-up germs.  As a result of us being sick, many of the people who we were with on Christmas Eve then ended up sick.  It was one ugly germ-spreading holiday.

• Remember the puke and pee incident from last spring?  Well apparently that is not just something that happens to me when pregnant.  It's my new thing I guess because it happened again when I got sick last week.

• We thought Liam avoided the grossness until the overabundance of explosive diapers began on Christmas Eve.  Thankfully, we are down to only one or two a day now.  A drastic improvement from the dozen or so on Christmas Day.

• As a result of Christmas Puke-Fest 2013, our Christmas Day was pretty quiet.  Liam got a ton of presents, Hubs' parents visited for a while, and I somehow managed to get dinner on the table for Hubs and I in between changing diapers and doing a ridiculous amount of laundry.

 This wonderful little man stayed happy, despite not feeling great.

This was outfit #3 of the day.

• The crib transition began over a week ago.  It has been relatively painless thus far.  We had two real incidents of crying it out (CIO) Ferber-style.  I have kinda modified Ferber's methods to fit our needs (and the amount of time I can listen to my baby cry), but things have been going well for us.

• Baby-led weaning has been a lot of fun so far.  Liam has definitely become more interested in food and has tried a few more things.  Right now, he loves apples, pears, yogurt, and blueberries (although he hasn't had much food this week because of the stomach fiasco).

• Liam met Santa two weeks ago at our big family Christmas party.  My dad flew up from Florida for the weekend and dressed up as Santa as a surprise.  It was great to have L's first experience with Santa be with his Gramps.

He looks a little unsure here, but he was pretty unfazed by the whole thing.

• This vacation has been very quiet and not all that productive.  The sickness was a big part of the unproductive-ness, but it is certainly way harder to get anything done with an almost 8-month old rolling around and needing amusement (I know this is only going to get worse once he really starts moving!).

• I did the 24 books of Christmas with Liam this year.  Each night, I read him a new Christmas book before bed.  This is definitely a tradition I will continue with him.  In the future, I plan to wrap each book up for him to open before bed.  This year, they were just displayed on his bookshelves.

• I scaled it way down this year with the cookies.  Remember last year when I baked 28 dozen cookies at 20+ weeks pregnant and kinda hated my life a little?  Well, this year I only did like 16 dozen and it was still quite the challenge.  I had plans to make more, but then the vomit came and I decided that was a sign to quit while I was ahead.

• We also started a new Christmas pajama tradition this year.  We each got new Christmas jammies (have you seen the Christmas Jammies video?) and the plan was to wear them to bed on Christmas Eve and have our big Christmas morning breakfast wearing them.  No surprise things didn't go according to plan.  Hubs' jammies didn't arrive on time (thanks FedEx) and no one wanted a big breakfast after being sick.  So we celebrated with our jammies and breakfast last night and this morning.

I won't even tell you how many times we set the timer on the camera to get a half-way decent picture.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and enjoyed time with family and friends.  We are looking forward to an exciting 2014 continuing to watch our little guy grow.