Christmas aftermath

As requested, Beth got her kitchen. Sarah got her dolly and a cute little bed for the dolly to sleep in. Thanks to grandparents, a whole mess of aunts and uncles, neighbors who for some reason love our kids, and the fact that I'd been saving things back for a few months ("Sure, they need hats and mittens. Let's give 'em to them for Christmas!"), there were a LOT of presents under the tree. We'd consciously tried to keep the craziness to a minimum, but we and Santa were greatly outnumbered by everyone else who loves us. (Hooray!)

This was our second Christmas at home — so relaxing — I highly, highly recommend it. Now that we're that much farther away from family and have to pay for three seats on the plane, it's getting less and less practical to travel. We warned our families that we aren't traveling for major holidays any more, and instead of spending Christmas with my parents we went out for a week and a half in mid-January — just in time for Sarah's first birthday!

So I guess the real story here is Sarah and her ceremonial destruction of a Mrs. Backer's cupcake (yum, frosting!). Cute kid! She dug right into it, spread frosting and white cake everywhere — in her hair, on my parents' dining room carpet, all over the antique high chair, and definitely all over herself. (This was quite unlike her big sister, who daintily picked frosting polka dots off her first-birthday cupcake, plucked off the rest of the frosting with her thumb and first finger, and then declared herself done.)

Sarah's vocabulary now includes a back-of-the-throat "She she!" that either refers to her Aunt Gigi or to any photo pasted to the fridge (we're not sure which, because my mom was pointing to pictures of Gigi on the fridge at the time). And just as we got home last week she started saying "Mama!" She reaches out her arms and curls her fingers in over and over when she wants us to pick her up. She's almost, almost walking — just needs a finger or a wall or an edge to hang onto — and she still grins like a maniac and lights up when anyone pays any attention to her. (She got a lot of that at Grandma's house, and is letting us know how much she misses it now that she's back home.)

We also got to see a ton of friends and relatives, some of whom we haven't seen since our wedding six and a half years ago. (And then there was the girls' cousin Chloe, whom we haven't seen since April, but those nine months are a big chunk of the girls' lifespans. Beth kept commenting that Chloe is now a "big girl" because she can walk. Is that all it takes?)

Sarah went for her birthday checkup this week, and the news is fantastic. At her previous visit three weeks ago she'd gained two pounds and an inch in five weeks — out of the underweight danger zone — and now she's gained another pound, putting her squarely in the 15th percentile for weight (whew!) and around the 45th for height. She's learned when to stop eating when she's full, too, which means fewer throwing-up incidents: good news for all!