I’m going to go ahead and stop making excuses for my lack of blog updates. You should just accept them at this frequency. I’d upload photos more often but Blogger’s image uploading is painfully slow. If it was more like Facebook’s they’d be posted weekly for sure.

I’ve always loved the Christmas season, but it’s a whole different ball game when you’re no longer a student and when you have offspring. When you’re a student you’ve got a good 2-week chunk of time where you have no responsibilities outside of buying and receiving gifts. You’re between semesters, so no pesky studying or papers (unless you’re in a cursed year-long course) and you spend so much time with family that you don’t really need to worry about feeding yourself. This comes to an end once entering the real world (although you still get some time off) but then you have a kid and it gets better in some ways and worse in others. Having a kid around Christmas is great because you can spoil them and they get excited about everything. They don’t know why there’s a tree in the middle of your living room or why they have to sit on some creepy fat guy’s knee, but there’s tons of cookies and free stuff so they love it. Financially you can’t really splurge on your friends and family anymore, but you don’t have to feel bad because (hopefully) they’ll stop splurging on you to splurge on your kid. Christmas Day is very complicated with all the people you want to see and who want to see you. After the rather rushed and tiring first Christmas with Elodie we are now stipulating that anyone who wants to see her is coming to us. Maybe a little selfish, but it’s our sanity at stake here.

When I was in University one of my greatest joys of the holidays was having the opportunity to finally read for enjoyment (yay, fiction!). Typically I’d hunker down and read some of my favourite kids novels like the Harry Potter, the Hobbit, and the Chronicles of Narnia. Since I’m no longer in school I can actually read for fun all year long, but I’ve started re-reading the Harry Potter books so that I can read them all back-to-back for the first time. I also really enjoy getting time to play video games, so I plan to find the last few stars in Mario Galaxy and then maybe go back and finish Halo 3 & Metroid Prime 3. I’ve also rented a few Wii games for my new Wii Zapper (thanks Kayla!) and I’ve got some classic games on Virtual Console I want to play. This is far too much to accomplish in one week (especially since Elodie is at home the whole time), but I’ll do my best. :)

Happy Holidays everyone!