Dreaming of a Kid Christmas

Remember the days when Christmas was nothing but presents, family, parties, and sleigh bells? I do. Vividly. This year, I realized just how different the holiday season is for adults. Although I still absolutely love this season, it's just not the same. Some parts are even better: like seeing our boys get excited about every little thing that the season has to offer. But other parts are so very different. This is the first time in my life, that I'm not particularly excited about Christmas day. I am for the boys, but not personally excited.

Since Liam was born, Joe and I have made every Christmas about him. The focus of the holiday has changed from gifts and parties, to visits with Santa, letter writing, baking, and decorating as a family. These are the new parts that I adore. This is Nolan's first Christmas, and I was raring to go, to make this year as special for him, as it has been for his brother. Then life happened.

We are still working to make this the best Christmas we can. We are trying to keep our stress under-wraps, so that the boys will have similar memories to mine. I don't know how my parents pulled it off every year. Making us think that everything came together perfectly without effort or frustration, and filling our home with the Christmas spirit, even when I'm sure there were moments of craziness. Joe and I are trying.

Hopefully, a magical Christmas memory

In the past few days things have gone off the deep end. We finished all of our shopping early, and had all the supplies needed for the gifts we would be making, but actually making the gifts, and wrapping other packages has proven to be much more work than we seem to have the energy for. It didn't help that we put everything off until Friday. Now we are overwhelmed. Saturday, things got more complicated, when Joe noticed a huge gash on one of our cat's back. When he rushed her to the emergency vet, they said that she was dehydrated, her levels were far from normal, and that the gash would require surgery. Awesome!

He picked her up from the emergency vet late last night, then took her to our regular vet today, who told us that there isn't enough skin left to surgically repair the gash, so we have to let it heal naturally. Not a horrible thing, except she has to stay away from kids and other pets, and be calm for 2-3 weeks for it to heal correctly. Double awesome! I'm not even going to get into the amount of money we had to shell out (of course, well worth it).......perfect timing.

On top of our cat-astrophy, the stress of scheduling Christmas with three families, while trying to keep Christmas day low-key for the boys, wrapping, baking, cleaning, shopping (the usual holiday chores), Liam is now sick. He has been coughing non-stop since yesterday afternoon. All he wants to do is lay around and snuggle, and for anyone who knows him, they know that's not abnormal. I hope that Liam and Nolan don't see our frustration; I hope that they will remember a magical Christmas full of love and fun. I hope that we are as good at shielding them from our adult-issues, as my parents were for me.