Mmmm...Hair.

Dog hair, specifically. Nora can't get enough of the stuff. She goes on hourly hunts for dog hair that she can stuff in her mouth and savor. She's getting smart enough to realize that she can also just go up to Spencer, grab a fistful of hair, pull, and enjoy. It's like her own little drive-thru window. I should open up a restaurant for babies. I think it'd be a huge success.

"For our soup tonight we have a lovely diaper rash cream or a swirl of water from the dog bowl. The pasta tonight is day-old penne with strands of hair retrieved from inside a T-shirt. And dessert is a choice of icing licked from a cupcake, or a cough drop found on the driveway."

"Thank you, I'll stick with my butter wrapper for now, and perhaps you could just pour some apple juice down my pants."

I can't believe no one's thought of this yet. I'm gonna be rich.

In other news, Christmas was fairly uneventful. None of the shenanigans of years past, such as Eric locking our car keys in the trunk when we were 180 miles away from where we needed to be; me spilling coffee all over my white cashmere maternity sweater on Christmas morning, somehow getting it clean and then having Tate yarf all over it a couple hours later; me getting so sick while pregnant with Nora that everytime she kicked or moved I thought I was going to die; Eric breaking the window of the bedroom we were staying in (and slicing up his wrist in the process) when it was -10 degrees outside...all that good stuff.

No, the only annoying part of our travels was staying in hotels. The first night, Tate woke up from a restful slumber and decided that The Country Inn and Suites was actually The Inn of Terror and started screaming to go home. Listening to your kid yell "I wanna go hoooooome!" for literally two hours while frantically trying to shush him just a little bit so he doesn't wake the baby up is not the best way to get yourself in the holiday spirit. I bet the people in the rooms around us weren't exactly feeling goodwill towards us at that point either. The next night was better but he still tried to pull the "I'm so homesick I'm going to die" card, although that was quickly thwarted by a dip in the hotel pool and a baggie of Goldfish.

Now we have so many toys we can't fit them all in our family room. What was once our playroom is now our formal dining room (aren't WE grown up) so we have to stuff all our toys in our family room and with the tree still being up, there just ain't room to rearrange stuff or walk or stand on more than one foot at a time. I keep expecting to walk in the room and hear faint cries from Nora being buried under a mountain of Little People and Thomas the Trains. The basement WILL be getting done soon, and I'm not kidding this time. Really.

All in all, I'm glad Christmas went by smoothly. We weren't able to get home to the Twin Cities, which was a massive bummer, but we'll be back there soon. And then eventually we'll move there and I'll finally be living where I want to, after 7 years of living in places I don't particularly enjoy. And then I'll have nothing to complain about, ever.